84
Once we were driving home from school listening to the local news on the radio. There was a story about a woman who jumped from the viaduct in Chester-le-Street with her autistic son, killing them both. My mother pulled over on the hard shoulder. Her mascara leaked.
‘What’s wrong, Mam?’ I asked, not daring to touch her.
‘I don’t know,’ she cried. ‘I can’t explain.’ She couldn’t form the words to tell me she knew exactly why that woman had jumped. She felt the weight of the hopelessness that had overwhelmed her. I tensed as lorries rattled by us on the motorway, threatening to topple in the wind.
85
So many words. To be pursed on my lips or shaped with my fingers. I am choking on syllables. Some are harder to swallow than others. We learn new ways to hold the smell of strawberry laces and dirt in the garden. Teddy-bear fuzz all skin and fluff. Lamp-posts and cul-de-sacs. Clouds low and saggy. Dirty caravans in driveways. The snooker hall in the rain. The saccharine shiver of the ice cream man all skipping rope smack and disco dancing. You trace your fingers around his knuckles with your face all yellow. We three bound together in a place more deep than where words can reach.
86
I think that one of the reasons I am calmer here is the power to choose my own words. In London, I was constantly bombarded by adverts on the tube and billboards and posters and music and announcements and snippets of other people’s conversations. Here there are fewer words. There are no advertisements at all. I cannot absorb any news by osmosis. I have to actively seek the rest of the world out in order to remember that it exists at all. I have autonomy to choose which kinds of words go into my head. There is less extraneous noise.
I am thinking about insidious words; the way that branding and packaging get inside of our brains without permission and make up our psychologies accidentally, like second-hand smoke. I am interested in images and patterns and the way that sometimes when I go to sleep at night I see logos flash behind my eyelids; fluorescent kebab shop signs and teabag boxes. In the city everything jangles and my nerves are wrought by caffeine and clouded in overheard phone calls. It is difficult to concentrate on anything at all.
87
There is silver in the back of your eyes. Glinting, dangerous. A hard, tinny feeling you do not want me to know. You hide it during Coco Pops and on the walk to school but later when you are alone and staring at the window it leaks out. I want to feel everything you do. I want to know the silver too but you draw me close and squeeze me tight and I can’t make the words come. The metal lurks between us, cold and dazzling.
88
During the days when I was at school and Josh was asleep, my mother cleaned the house frantically. She polished the wooden fireplace with her tongue between her teeth and scrubbed the windows with balls of newspaper. When I came home I walked my feet along the lines left in the carpet by the Hoover, as though it was a lawn that had been freshly mowed.
‘Get out of the kitchen!’ she shouted, as I attempted to dart across the damp floor in my red tights to the biscuit barrel. ‘This room is closed!’ She slammed doors and turned off lights determinedly, reducing our lives to the rectangles of our bedrooms so that we couldn’t fingerprint the ornaments and spoil the shiny chemical perfection of her afternoons.
We learned sign language. My mother pulled out her heavy Kodak camera and took pictures of everything. Tiny pairs of baby shoes and bottles filled with formula. Plates of breadcrumbed dinosaurs and tins of beans. Her red Panda parked on the street corner. The ivy that grew up the front of my nan’s house. Josh learned very quickly. My mam took photos of everyone we knew and stuck them to the kitchen wall, so Josh could learn the signs that meant their names.
My dad’s picture was taken in the porch when he came home from the sweet factory where he worked as an electrician. His eyes were lined and his T-shirt hung too-big from his shoulders. He seemed distracted, as though he was thinking of something else. He was so afraid of permanence.
I loved the sting of oil and metal on his skin when he came home from work, kicking off his boots in the hallway and scrubbing the oil from his hands in the bathroom. Sometimes his toolbox was stuffed full of cracked Caramac bars and we plunged our hands in with shiny faces. I soared when he came home in a good mood, singing songs at the top of his voice and dancing loops round my mother as she tried to make the tea. She sighed and elbowed him out of the way. She was left to tie our shoelaces and wash our dirty clothes, while he drifted in and out on the wind.
They went to the local college together to sign up for sign language classes, but my dad enrolled on a computer course instead. He didn’t learn the colour of my raincoat, or the sign that shaped my little brother’s name. My mother and I spoke in symbols. With a fluid twist of her fingers she warned me whether it was safe to trail around him in the kitchen and pester him to take me out on my rollerblades, or whether I had to leave him be and let him crawl into bed with a stink in his hair.
‘Stop talking about me,’ he snapped, as we weaved an invisible world above him, one that he couldn’t understand.
89
When he was old enough, my brother was given a cochlear implant. The doctors sliced open his scalp and put a computer part inside of it that would allow him to hear. He had to wear a little belt with another computer on it and a wire that connected the exterior part of the hearing aid to a magnet under his skin. The operation was four hours long. There was no guarantee that it would work.
He was a small, golden person with sticky-out teeth and a shrill and lovely laugh. I marvelled at his tiny fingernails, unable to comprehend how they could possibly grow to match the size of my own. He wore stripy T-shirts and shorts, his pockets stuffed full of plastic cars.
My mother sat in the hospital with her eyes closed, praying to an uncertain god. I watched the clock slip through Literacy, Numeracy and RE, picturing the surgeon’s gloves as they peeled my brother’s skin from his skull, his blood stinging with surprise beneath the operating lights.
We expected a slow and sorrowful recovery. I begrudgingly filled his cot with plastic cats and Barbie dolls, sulking at the mound of gifts from well-wishers piled at the foot of his hospital bed. The day after the operation, he was up on his feet running around the hospital and screaming, his head all wrapped in bandages, like a drawing of a sick person in a children’s book. He was the hundredth person in the country ever to have a cochlear implant and a newspaper came to do a feature on him. He posed in the hospital bed with an angelic smile, white-blond curls matted in iodine.
My mother collected me from school a few days later and winced as he raced around the schoolyard as though nothing had happened.
‘He looks like Frankenstein,’ I said, eyeballing the staples in his scalp from the back seat of the car, afraid to touch something that could so easily be broken.
My mother tried to make up for the years my brother couldn’t hear by building a kingdom of sounds and vibrations. He had toy fire engines that wailed, a Tickle-Me Elmo that laughed maniacally, a set of drums, a yellow maraca and a doorbell that made all of the lights in the house flash when it rang. My favourite was the rainmaker. It was a cylinder filled with tiny shards of plastic that sounded like rain falling on a roof when you moved it up and down. I sat for hours with my ear pressed against it, watching the beads rise and fall with the tides of our days.
90
I didn’t know you could cut open heads and put things inside of them. There are staples and bandages and hard, horrible things that aren’t supposed to be inside of babies. He was inside you and now he is not. Is there a space in you where he was? Is there a space in you where I was? The hospital chairs stick to the backs of my thighs and I slot my feet into the squares on the floor and kick stamp clatter. There is sick in both of us but he comes out living. He is a miracle running and screaming. He can hear now. It must be magic, or maybe god. Is there magic? Is there god?
91
Most nights after dinner I go to the s
ea. I like walking across the fields in the dark without a torch, invisible in my black jumper. The anxieties that swell beneath my skin during the day seem less significant when I look out at the water, brown and sticky like Coca-Cola.
When the mist moves across the sea, shrouding the mountains and obscuring the stars, it is easy to believe in a force that is bigger than myself. There are so many intricate ecosystems at work that I can understand why people believe in gods and enchantment.
I would like to have something to believe in, but it is difficult. Everything my generation was promised got blown away like clouds of smoke curling from the ends of cigarettes in the mouths of bankers and politicians. It is hard not to be cynical and critical of everything, and yet perhaps there is an opening, too. When the present begins to fracture, there is room for the future to be written.
92
My life was cherry-flavoured. It was filled with red school ties and plastic kittens. I scribbled felt-tip flowers up the walls of my doll’s house, cutting my dolls’ petticoats with zigzag scissors so they could prance along the roof in miniskirts. I became an expert in imagination, but the purple tones in my parents’ voices gathered in clouds and fell into my dreams like rain.
I developed a new range of hearing that picked up on the low, tense voices that leaked under my bedroom door in the middle of the night. I squinted from my pillow as the chink of light flashed black and yellow. Shoes slid on and off and legs paced up and down, uncertain feet stuttering on the laminate floor. I became hypersensitive to the clatter of my mother’s heels in the hallway when she was on her way out and the thump of my father’s work boots in the porch. I could determine what kind of mood they were in by the weight of their steps.
My father decided to convert the loft in our bungalow into bedrooms for Josh and me. Josh had grown too big to sleep in his cot in their room, and the air in there was heavy and laced with something bitter. I balanced precariously on planks of wood, thrilling myself with the thought of my ankle breaking through the ceiling. I plunged my hands into clouds of fibreglass and cried when an itchy rash puckered my skin.
‘I did warn you, Lucy Lou,’ my father said. ‘That’s what happens when you don’t do what you’re told.’
I figured out how to balance the paint-stained ladder and pull myself through the hole in the roof. I found my dad up there one afternoon, crouched in the corner and shaking. His eyes were out of focus and he smelled of the wrong kind of sweetness, like rotting fruit.
He hammered so many nails into the walls that people joked our attic would withstand an earthquake.
‘Building a bunker, are you, kid?’ twinkled my uncle. ‘You never know, we might need it, like. Country’s going to the dogs.’ My dad smiled weakly and rattled a box of silver.
‘Well, you know,’ he mumbled, gazing up at the walls. ‘I don’t want it to fall down.’
93
Every now and then, when my dad was working away, my grandfather came over from Ireland to stay with us. He brought a black holdall containing his only suit, a clean shirt, some vests and underpants and a bottle of home-brewed poitín. My mother slept with me in my single bed, so my granddad could have her room.
‘I envy him, a bit, you know,’ she said to me, squashed against my army of teddy bears. ‘He moves through his life so lightly. Just packs a bag and goes, without thinking twice.’
94
And then more growing, into a different sort of body. I am a sister and he is a brother and he cannot touch me. People feel pain and he does not understand yet. He pokes his fingers in my ribs and kicks and slaps and I cry out. Where there were two bodies now there are four. Mine must be tucked neatly into school uniform to compare knees and sizes of feet in the playground. I am taller than everyone else and my best friend is small. I want to be small like her but you tell me tall is beautiful. She is Mary in the school play and I am the narrator. I have words to say and she does not. You tell me that is better but I’m not sure.
95
I build a shelf in the kitchen and feel proud of myself. I cut the wood to size with a rusty saw and I drill brackets into the walls, relishing the power of the tools in my hands. I put my smoked paprika on there, and a glass filled with fresh basil. I add my balsamic vinegar, sticky and acrid. I do not have many herbs or spices, but the ones I do are pungent and important. I step back to look at my work and am satisfied. Maybe I have everything I need.
96
Auntie Marie was married to a man who maintained weapons in the Royal Navy. He went to sea for weeks at a time then drove all the way up to Sunderland from Plymouth, where the ship docked. She began to spend weekends down there instead, and we went to stay in her flat.
‘I can’t bear it,’ my mother told my auntie over the phone. ‘He doesn’t give a toss.’ I glued sequins to pink bits of card in front of the telly and pretended I didn’t understand.
‘They’re your kids, too, Tom,’ I heard her sobbing late at night.
Josh and I pretended Auntie Marie’s scratchy blue sofa was a ship. We spent days pressed against the prow, fighting the pirates and sea monsters swimming through the carpet. My mother fretted around us, trying to puff a new kind of life for us into the polyester cushions.
Auntie Marie came back and we went home. The loft was finally finished and we dived into our new beds, smelling delicious like cheap wood and nylon carpet. I begged for a lime green bedroom and my mother spent days with a paintbrush and a home-made stencil, coaxing shy daisies across the walls.
97
The seasons are shifting. The heathers burn orange and the clouds are singed brown, like the edges of an old book. Autumn always makes me think of the ex-boyfriend I left in London. He is an architect and in all of my memories of our relationship it is autumn, even though I know this cannot be the case. We always seemed to be walking around the city in the cold arm in arm, our breath silver in the sticky Chinatown air, buying beers from corner shops in the evenings and watching the sun bruise the sky.
I sit at the table one night, drinking wine and looking out of the window, at the bald patch in the garden where we had the bonfire, and the bath full of old saucepans and cracked china that we couldn’t burn and so don’t know how to get rid of. I think about our relationship, and the way that the city eroded our love. I send him an email, even though I know I shouldn’t. I write, ‘Autumn always makes me think of you, in your long, brown coat.’ In the morning I read his reply.
‘Sometimes it is nice to hold onto things, instead of letting them go. Isn’t it?’
98
The smell of fresh paint lingered in my bedroom. I woke in the middle of the night to my mother’s legs prickling against me. I wriggled in confusion and made a grumbling sound.
‘Shh,’ she whispered. ‘It’s okay. Can I sleep in your bed tonight?’
‘Go away,’ I mumbled through sleepy fog. ‘I’m trying to sleep.’
I found her in the morning curled up at the bottom of my brother’s single bed. He was wrapped up in the blanket. I dragged my duvet from my bed and laid it on top of her.
‘I love you,’ she murmured from beneath her dreams.
99
The National Deaf Children’s Society invited us on a Halloween weekend to Butlins. The morning we were set to leave we hovered around the front door, slurping cartons of orange juice.
‘Can we go, Mam?’ we whined, sticking our fingers into the keyhole and running our hands along the radiator. She looked at her mobile phone and her eye twitched.
‘Alright, then,’ she said. ‘Let’s get on the road.’ She fluffed up her hair and frowned at her reflection in the hallway mirror. ‘I don’t think he’s coming. But us three will have fun, won’t we?’ Josh and I nipped and shoved our way to the car, squabbling over booster seats and throwing our backpacks down at our feet.
‘Who’s not coming?’ Josh asked, fastening his seatbelt and rooting around in the glove compartment for his flashing police siren.
My mother feigned exci
tement as we arrived at Butlins and skipped through the site to find our cabin, enthralled by the trampolines and arcade games batting their eyelashes at us from every window. We twisted and whined our way to the restaurant where we met the other families, crowded in calm huddles and sharing margherita pizzas. Plastic seaweed hung from the ceiling and the tables were shaped like seashells. I chewed oily cheese while my brother ran from seat to seat, pinching chips from people’s plates and upending Cokes with his frantic elbows.
‘We’re all off to the Space Lounge tonight.’ One of the parents smiled. ‘There’s some kind of entertainment and a disco.’ My mother forced a spark into her tired eyes. ‘Oh, aye? It’s great for the kids, isn’t it?’
‘It’s just a massive playground. Drives you mad. There’s a bar at this space place though, so maybe we can have a glass of wine or three.’ The woman winked.
‘Come on then, you two.’ My mother grabbed Josh around the waist as he made a bid for the man dressed up as a cartoon cat making his way towards us. ‘Let’s pop back and get changed.’
‘It’s fancy dress!’ someone called after us. ‘There’s a prize for the best outfit.’
My mother collapsed onto the sofa in our cold little cabin, throwing cardboardy cushions to the floor. Josh wrestled a packet of face paint crayons from my backpack and started drawing blue squiggles up my arms.
‘Mam!’ I gasped. ‘Make him stop!’
‘Just give me a minute.’ She sighed, rubbing her hands over her face. ‘Please? I’m a bit tired after the drive. Let’s play the quiet game. Whoever can stay silent for the longest is the winner.’ We watched her from the floor as she rummaged through her suitcase.
Saltwater Page 6
