Black Swan Green

by David Mitchell

  Any duh-brain could work that out, so I put up my hand. Miss Throckmorton said, ‘Yes, Jason?’ and that was when my life divided itself into Before Hangman and After Hangman. The word ‘nightingale’ kaboomed in my skull but it just wouldn’t come out. The ‘N’ got out okay, but the harder I forced the rest, the tighter the noose got. I remember Lucy Sneads whispering to Angela Bullock, stifling giggles. I remember Robin South staring at this bizarre sight. I’d’ve done the same if it hadn’t been me. When a stammerer stammers their eyeballs pop out, they go trembly-red like an evenly matched arm wrestler and their mouth guppergupperguppers like a fish in a net. It must be quite a funny sight.

  It wasn’t funny for me, though. Miss Throckmorton was waiting. Every kid in the classroom was waiting. Every crow and every spider in Black Swan Green was waiting. Every cloud, every car on every motorway, even Mrs Thatcher in the House of Commons’d frozen, listening, watching, thinking, What’s wrong with Jason Taylor?

  But no matter how shocked, scared, breathless, ashamed I was, no matter how much of a total flid I looked, no matter how much I hated myself for not being able to say a simple word in my own language, I couldn’t say ‘nightingale’. In the end I had to say, ‘I’m not sure, miss,’ and Miss Throckmorton said, ‘I see.’ She did see, too. She phoned my mum that evening and one week later I was taken to see Mrs de Roo, the speech therapist at Malvern Link Clinic. That was five years ago.

  It must’ve been around then (maybe that same afternoon) that my stammer took on the appearance of a hangman. Pike lips, broken nose, rhino cheeks, red eyes ’cause he never sleeps. I imagine him in the baby room at Preston Hospital playing Eeny-meeny-miny-mo. I imagine him tapping my koochy lips, murmuring down at me, Mine. But it’s his hands, not his face, that I really feel him by. His snaky fingers that sink inside my tongue and squeeze my windpipe so nothing’ll work. Words beginning with ‘N’ have always been one of Hangman’s favourites. When I was nine I dreaded people asking me ‘How old are you?’ In the end I’d hold up nine fingers like I was being dead witty but I know the other person’d be thinking, Why didn’t he just tell me, the twat? Hangman used to like Y-words, too, but lately he’s eased off those and has moved to S-words. This is bad news. Look at any dictionary and see which section’s the thickest: it’s S. Twenty million words begin with N or S. Apart from the Russians starting a nuclear war, my biggest fear is if Hangman gets interested in J-words, ’cause then I won’t even be able to say my own name. I’d have to change my name by deed-poll, but Dad’d never let me.

  The only way to outfox Hangman is to think one sentence ahead, and if you see a stammer-word coming up, alter your sentence so you won’t need to use it. Of course, you have to do this without the person you’re talking to catching on. Reading dictionaries like I do helps you do these ducks and dives, but you have to remember who you’re talking to. (If I was speaking to another thirteen-year-old and said the word ‘melancholy’ to avoid stammering on ‘sad’, for example, I’d be a laughing stock, ’cause kids aren’t s’posed to use adult words like ‘melancholy’. Not at Upton upon Severn Comprehensive, anyway.) Another strategy is to buy time by saying ‘Er…’ in the hope that Hangman’s concentration’ll lapse and you can sneak the word out. But if you say ‘er…’ too much you come across as a right dimmer. Lastly, if a teacher asks you a question directly and the answer’s a stammer-word, it’s best to pretend you don’t know. I couldn’t count how often I’ve done this. Sometimes teachers lose their rag (specially if they’ve just spent half a lesson explaining something) but anything’s better than getting labelled ‘School Stutterboy’.

  That’s something I’ve always just about avoided, but tomorrow morning at five minutes past nine this is going to happen. I’m going to have to stand up in front of Gary Drake and Neal Brose and my entire class to read from Mr Kempsey’s book, Plain Prayers for a Complicated World. There will be dozens of stammer-words in that reading which I can’t substitute and I can’t pretend not to know because there they are, printed there. Hangman’ll skip ahead as I read, underlining all his favourite N and S words, murmuring in my ear, ‘Here, Taylor, try and spit this one out!’ I know, with Gary Drake and Neal Brose and everyone watching, Hangman’ll crush my throat and mangle my tongue and scrunch my face up. Worse than Joey Deacon’s. I’m going to stammer worse than I’ve ever stammered in my life. By 9.15 my secret’ll be spreading round the school like a poison gas attack. By the end of first break my life won’t be worth living.

  The grotesquest thing I ever heard was this. Pete Redmarley swore on his nan’s grave it’s true so I s’pose it must be. This boy in the sixth form was sitting his A-levels. He had these parents from hell who’d put him under massive pressure to get a whole raft of ‘A’ grades and when the exam came this kid just cracked and couldn’t even understand the questions. So what he did was get two Bic Biros from his pencil case, hold the pointy ends against his eyes, stand up and head-butt the desk. Right there, in the exam hall. The pens skewered his eyeballs so deep that only an inch was left sticking out of his drippy sockets. Mr Nixon the headmaster hushed everything up so it didn’t get in the papers or anything. It’s a sick and horrible story but right now I’d rather kill Hangman that way than let him kill me tomorrow morning.

  I mean that.

  Mrs de Roo’s shoes clop so you know it’s her coming to fetch you. She’s forty or maybe even older, and has fat silver brooches, wispy bronze hair and flowery clothes. She gave a folder to the pretty receptionist, tutted at the rain and said, ‘My, my, monsoon season’s come to darkest Worcestershire!’ I agreed it was chucking it down, and left with her quick. In case the other patients worked out why I was there. Down the corridor we went, past the signpost full of words like PAEDIATRICS and ULTRASCANS. (No ultranscan’d read my brain. I’d beat it by remembering every satellite in the solar system.) ‘February’s so gloomy in this part of the world,’ said Mrs de Roo, ‘don’t you think? It’s not so much a month as a twenty-eight-day-long Monday morning. You leave home in the dark and go home in the dark. On wet days like these, it’s like living in a cave, behind a waterfall.’

  I told Mrs de Roo how I’d heard Eskimo kids spend time under artificial sun-lamps to stop them getting scurvy, ’cause at the North Pole winter lasts for most of the year. I suggested Mrs de Roo should think about getting a sunbed.

  Mrs de Roo answered, ‘I shall think on.’

  We passed a room where a howling baby’d just had an injection. In the next room a freckly girl Julia’s age sat in a wheelchair. One of her legs wasn’t there. She’d probably love to have my stammer if she could have her leg back, and I wondered if being happy’s about other people’s misery. That cuts both ways, mind. People’ll look at me after tomorrow morning and think, Well, my life may be a swamp of shit but at least I’m not in Jason Taylor’s shoes. At least I can talk.

  February’s Hangman’s favourite month. Come summer he gets dozy and hibernates through to autumn, and I can speak a bit better. In fact after my first run of visits to Mrs de Roo five years ago, by the time my hayfever began everyone thought my stammer was cured. But come November Hangman wakes up again, sort of like John Barleycorn in reverse. By January he’s his old self again, so back I come to Mrs de Roo. This year Hangman’s worse than ever. Aunt Alice stayed with us two weeks ago and one night I was crossing the landing and I heard her say to Mum, ‘Honestly, Helena, when are you going to do something about his stutter? It’s social suicide! I never know whether to finish the sentence for him or just leave the poor boy dangling on the end of his rope.’ (Eavesdropping’s sort of thrilling ’cause you learn what people really think, but eavesdropping makes you miserable for exactly the same reason.) After Aunt Alice’d gone back to Richmond, Mum sat me down and said it mightn’t do any harm to visit Mrs de Roo again. I said okay, ’cause actually I’d wanted to but I hadn’t asked ’cause I was ashamed, and ’cause mentioning my stammer makes it realer.

  Mrs de Roo’s office smells of Nescafé. She drin
ks Nescafé Gold Blend non-stop. There’re two ratty sofas, one yolky rug, a dragon’s-egg paperweight, a Fisher-Price toy multi-storey car park and a giant Zulu mask from South Africa. Mrs de Roo was born in South Africa but one day she was told by the government to leave the country in twenty-four hours or she’d be thrown into prison. Not ’cause she’d done anything wrong, but because they do that in South Africa if you don’t agree coloured people should be kept herded off in mud-and-straw huts in big reservations with no schools, no hospitals and no jobs. Julia says the police in South Africa don’t always bother with prisons, and that often they throw you off a tall building and say you tried to escape. Mrs de Roo and her husband (who’s an Indian brain surgeon) escaped to Rhodesia in a jeep but had to leave everything they owned behind. The government took the lot. (The Malvern Gazetteer interviewed her, that’s how I know most of this.) South Africa’s summer is our winter so their February is lovely and hot. Mrs de Roo’s still got a slightly funny accent. Her ‘yes’ is a ‘yis’ and her ‘get’ is a ‘git’.

  ‘So, Jason,’ she began today. ‘How are things?’

  Most people only want a ‘Fine, thanks’ when they ask a kid that, but Mrs de Roo actually means it. So I confessed to her about tomorrow’s form assembly. Talking ’bout my stammer’s nearly as embarrassing as stammering itself, but it’s okay with her. Hangman knows he mustn’t mess with Mrs de Roo so he acts like he’s not there. Which is good, ’cause it proves I can speak like a normal person, but bad, ’cause how can Mrs de Roo ever defeat Hangman if she never even sees him properly?

  Mrs de Roo asked if I’d spoken to Mr Kempsey about excusing me for a few weeks. I already had done, I told her, and this is what he’d said. ‘We must all face our demons one day, Taylor, and for you, that time is nigh.’ Form assemblies’re read by students in alphabetical order. We’ve got to ‘T’ for ‘Taylor’ and as far as Mr Kempsey’s concerned that’s that.

  Mrs de Roo made an I see noise.

  Neither of us said anything for a moment.

  ‘Any headway with your diary, Jason?’

  The diary’s a new idea prompted by Dad. Dad phoned Mrs de Roo to say that given my ‘annual tendency to relapse’, he thought extra ‘homework’ was appropriate. So Mrs de Roo suggested that I keep a diary. Just a line or two every day, where I write when, where and what word I stammered on, and how I felt. Week One looks like this:

  ‘More of a chart, then,’ Mrs de Roo said, ‘than a diary in the classical mode, as such?’ (Actually I wrote it last night. It’s not lies or anything, just truths I made up. If I wrote every time I had to dodge Hangman, the diary’d be as thick as the Yellow Pages.) ‘Most informative. Very neatly ruled, too.’ I asked if I should carry on with the diary next week. Mrs de Roo said she thought my father’d be disappointed if I didn’t, so maybe I should.

  Then Mrs de Roo got out her Metro Gnome. Metro Gnomes’re upside-down pendulums without the clock part. They tock rhythms. They’re small, which could be why they’re called gnomes. Music students normally use them but speech therapists do too. You read aloud in time with its tocks, like this: here – comes – the – can – dle – to – take – you – to – bed, – here – comes – the – chop – per – to – chop – off – your – head. Today we read a stack of N-words from the dictionary, one by one. The Metro Gnome does make speaking easy, as easy as singing, but I can hardly carry one around with me, can I? Kids like Ross Wilcox’d say, ‘What’s this, then, Taylor?’, snap off its pendulum in a nanosecond, and say, ‘Shoddy workmanship, that.’

  After the Metro Gnome I read aloud from a book Mrs de Roo keeps for me called Z for Zachariah. Z for Zachariah’s about a girl called Anne who lives in a valley with its own freak weather system that protects it after a nuclear war’s poisoned the rest of the country and killed everyone else off. For all Anne knows she’s the only person alive in the British Isles. As a book it’s utterly brill but a bit bleak. Maybe Mrs de Roo suggested I read this to make me feel luckier than Anne despite my stammer. I got a bit stuck on a couple of words but you’d not’ve noticed if you weren’t looking. I know Mrs de Roo was saying, See, you can read aloud without stammering. But there’s stuff not even speech therapists understand. Quite often, even in bad spells, Hangman’ll let me say whatever I want, even words beginning with dangerous letters. This (a) gives me hope I’m cured which Hangman can enjoy destroying later and (b) let’s me con other kids into thinking I’m normal while keeping alive and well the fear that my secret’ll be discovered.

  There’s more. I once wrote Hangman’s Four Commandments.

  When the session was over, Mrs de Roo asked me if I felt any more confident about my form assembly. She’d’ve liked me to say ‘Sure!’ but only if I meant it. I said, ‘Not a lot, to be honest.’ Then I asked if stammers’re like zits that you grow out of, or if kids with stammers’re more like toys that’re wired wrong at the factory and stay busted all their lives. (You get stammering adults too. There’s one on a BBC1 sitcom called Open All Hours on Sunday evenings where Ronnie Barker plays a shopkeeper who stutters so badly, so hilariously, that the audience pisses itself laughing. Even knowing about Open All Hours makes me shrivel up like a plastic wrapper in a fire.)

  ‘Yis,’ said Mrs de Roo. ‘That’s the question. My answer is, it depends. Speech therapy is as imperfect a science, Jason, as speaking is a complex one. There are seventy-two muscles involved in the production of human speech. The neural connections my brain is employing now, to say this sentence to you, number in the tens of millions. Little wonder one study put the percentage of people with some kind of speech disorder at twelve per cent. Don’t put your faith in a miracle cure. In the vast majority of cases, progress doesn’t come from trying to kill a speech defect. Try to will it out of existence, it’ll just will itself back stronger. Right? No, it’s a question – and this might sound nutty – of understanding it, of coming to a working accommodation with it, of respecting it, of not fearing it. Yis, it’ll flare up from time to time, but if you know why it flares, you’ll know how to douse what makes it flare up. Back in Durban I had a friend who’d once been an alcoholic. One day I asked him how he’d cured himself. My friend said he’d done no such thing. I said, “What do you mean? You haven’t touched a drop in three years!” He said all he’d done was become a teetotal alcoholic. That’s my goal. To help people change from being stammering stammerers into non-stammering stammerers.’

  Mrs de Roo’s no fool and all that makes sense.

  But it’s sod-all help for 2KM’s form assembly tomorrow morning.

  Dinner was steak-and-kidney pie. The steak bits’re okay, but kidney makes me reach for the vomit bucket. I have to try to swallow the kidney bits whole. Smuggling bits into my pocket is too risky since Julia spotted me last time and grassed on me. Dad was telling Mum about a new trainee salesman called Danny Lawlor at the new Greenland superstore in Reading. ‘Fresh from some management course, and he’s Irish as Hurricane Higgins, but my word, that lad hasn’t kissed the Blarney Stone, he’s bitten off chunks of it. Talk about the gift of the gab! Craig Salt dropped by while I was there to instil some God-fearing discipline into the troops, but Danny had him eating out of his hand in five minutes flat. Executive material, is that young man. When Craig Salt gives me nationwide sales next year, I’m fast-tracking Danny Lawlor and frankly I don’t care whose nose I put out of joint.’

  ‘The Irish’ve always had to live by their wits,’ said Mum.

  Dad didn’t remember it was Speech Therapy Day till Mum’d mentioned she’d written a ‘plumpish’ cheque for Lorenzo Hussingtree in Malvern Link. Dad asked what Mrs de Roo’d thought about his diary idea. Her comment that it was ‘most informative’ fuelled his good mood. ‘“Informative”? Indispensable, more like! Smart-think Management Principles are applicable across the board. Like I told Danny Lawlor, any operator is only as good as his data. Without data, you’re the Titanic, crossing an Atlantic chock full of icebergs without radar. Result? Collision, disaster, goo
dnight.’

  ‘Wasn’t radar invented in the Second World War?’ Julia forked a lump of steak. ‘And didn’t the Titanic sink before the First?’

  ‘The principle, o daughter of mine, is a universal constant. If you don’t keep records, you can’t make progress assessments. True for retailers, true for educators, true for the military, true for any systems operator. One bright day in your brilliant career at the Old Bailey you’ll learn this the hard way and think, If only I’d listened to my dear wise father. How right he was.’

  Julia snorted horsily, which she gets away with ’cause she’s Julia. I can never tell Dad what I really think like that. I can feel the stuff I don’t say rotting inside me like mildewy spuds in a sack. Stammerers can’t win arguments ’cause once you stammer, H-h-hey p-p-presto, you’ve l-l-lost, S-s-st-st-utterboy! If I stammer with Dad, he gets that face he had when he got his Black and Decker Workmate home and found it was minus a crucial packet of screws. Hangman just loves that face.

  After Julia and I’d done the washing up Mum and Dad sat in front of the telly watching a glittery new quiz show called Blankety Blank presented by Terry Wogan. Contestants have to guess a missing word from a sentence and if they guess the same as the panel of celebrities they win crap prizes like a mug tree with mugs.

  Up in my room I started my homework on the feudal system for Mrs Coscombe. But then I got sucked in by a poem about a skater on a frozen lake who wants to know what it’s like to be dead so much, he’s persuaded himself that a drowned kid’s talking to him. I typed it out on my Silver Reed Elan 20 Manual Typewriter. I love how it’s got no number 1 so you use the letter ‘l’.