12
I opened my eyes; bright light was squeezing about the edges of the drawn blind. The digits on my alarm-clock had jumped forward in time to 12.00.
A phone was ringing somewhere. The door to my bedroom opened; the noise increased, painfully. My mother’s silhouette appeared; the red light of the phone-cum-fax flashing in the hall beyond her.
‘Phone,’ she signed, a simple representation using the Ambivalent Hand: half Good Hand, half Bad.
I struggled from bed to find Stella’s husky contralto at the other end of the line.
‘How are you this morning, J.J.?’
‘Fine,’ I lied.
‘I thought you might be a little worse for wear.’
‘A little, but thank you. Both of you. I had a good time.’
‘So did we. But we feel guilty: I plied you with alcohol, Clive bullied you into abandoning your car. We thought—I might drive down and pick you up later. You could stay for dinner—then drive yourself home.’
‘I wouldn’t want to put you out.’
‘No trouble at all. I’ll be down in the city anyway. A small detour. See you at eight?’
The phone rang again as soon as I had hung off; second thoughts, perhaps, or a change of time.
‘Stella?’ I said.
‘Are you aware of the time, John?’
Jill’s tone was mild, but the formality of my given name, seldom used, jarred. Years of marriage had accustomed me to a range of tender nicknames, or nicknames which had once been tender, and later, at worst, were a comfortable habit. J.J. itself, of course—used also by the rest of the world for as long as I can remember. Sweet-Tooth. And once, a long time ago, sweetheart.
‘Your daughter’s been sitting on the front doorstep since breakfast, John.’
The name sounded like she was handling me with tweezers.
‘I’m sorry, Jill. I must have slept in.’
‘I had plans.’
‘I’ll be right over.’
‘I can’t really see the point.’
‘I thought you said you had plans.’
‘I’ve had to cancel those.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Sign has countless shapes for ‘sorry’, far more shapes than there are words of apology in English. Perhaps the Deaf apologise more often than the hearing. The Flat Hand placed over the heart is simplest, a James family sign, but there was no way of transmitting its meaning, its force, through a phone line. Disembodied, stripped of the support of gesture, my voice had no chance.
Not that Jill sounded angry. Her tone, as always, remained calm; if pressed she would claim that she was merely stating facts.
‘Is being sorry enough, do you think? Isn’t saying you’re sorry a little too easy? It doesn’t seem to stop it happening again.’
This kind of sweetly reasoned rebuke had always produced an immense rage in me towards the end of our marriage; more distanced now, I managed to bite my tongue.
‘I can only try. I’ll be there as soon as I can.’
I hung up, then remembered the obvious: I had no means of transport.
‘Shit!’ I shouted, loudly.
My mother continued clearing breakfast things, unperturbed. I waved my hands to get her attention; she turned.
‘Me borrow car?’
‘Your car where?’
‘Broken down,’ I signed, a blend of the head-on smash of ‘accident’ and the collapse of ‘wear out’.
She eyed me suspiciously; it might not be impossible to lie in Sign, but it can be difficult.
‘Please?’
‘Ask,’ she signed, and nodded in the direction of my father’s workshop.
I could see no point in that. He would tell me to walk, tell me that I needed the exercise.
I signed: ‘He needs car—not. Urgent. Rosie waiting…Please.’
The appeal to grandmotherly instinct met with more success. She held out the keys to me, dangled them reluctantly for a moment, mid-air, as if having second thoughts, then dropped them into my cupped palm.
13
‘You’re late, John.’
Rosie was sitting on the front fence. I’m not allowed inside the house; she always waits outside.
I leant across and opened the door. ‘Sorry, sweetheart. I slept in.’
She nodded—sleeping-in seemed a perfectly plausible excuse, probably the only permissible excuse—and slid off the fence. She was wearing a tank-top and baggy jeans, her thick hair was stuffed beneath a baseball cap. As she climbed into the car I saw that her lips were painted purple, horror-movie purple.
‘Does your mother know you’re wearing lipstick?’
‘She borrows it from me, Pop.’
Amused condescension is my daughter’s preferred mode of relating to me, and to her mother. Even that ‘Pop’ has an ironic, distancing effect that I can’t quite put my finger on. She never apportioned blame for the divorce; condescension was surely a safer outlet, a way of avoiding blame and the need to choose sides. We have both been deemed, even-handedly, too silly, too eccentric to blame.
‘What’s on the agenda today, Pop?’
‘The zoo?’
‘Gee, that sounds like fun.’
Eleven, going on nineteen—theatrical, precocious, and very demanding. She twiddled with the radio tuner; rap music suddenly filled the small car. We’ve both spoilt her terribly—the usual overcompensations, the usual displacements of divorce-guilt. Even though we understand the process, it doesn’t seem to keep it from happening. Knowledge, even self-knowledge, doesn’t help us change.
‘What did I just say, Dad?’
‘Um…Something about your violin teacher?’
She likes to test me, keep me on the alert with little comprehension tests, impromptu oral exams, from time to time.
‘You weren’t listening, Pop.’
‘I was looking for a parking space.’
I parked; we climbed out and passed through the zoo turnstiles. I bought two double ice-creams from the zoo kiosk; we visited the big cats. Rosie humoured me by demonstrating the hand-shape for tiger: a pair of paws. We moved on to the next cage, she shaped a lion’s mane. The leopards: a blend of paws and spots. Then she found an ocelot in a nearby cage, and turned towards me, smirking, arms on hips: a what’s-this-then? challenge.
‘Little-spotted-paws,’ I signed, smoothly.
Another round of ice-creams, the giraffes, the polar bears. The feeding of the seals. A ride along the river on paddle-boats, a late afternoon visit to Hungry Jack’s for burgers. We sat opposite each other in a small bright booth. She ate steadily through large fries and two cheese-burgers; I sipped a coffee.
‘Can I be frank, Dad?’
‘Of course.’
‘You won’t be hurt?’
Our day together always softens her attitude towards me. ‘Dad’ slowly replaces ‘Pop’, affection displaces condescension, by evening she occasionally even takes it upon herself to offer snippets of advice, little prescriptions for my self-improvement. Dietary recommendations are frequent, grooming suggestions, guidance on my choice of clothes. Once, memorably, there had even been a small homily on Personal Freshness. I prefer to take these words of wisdom as signs of love but remembering my own adolescence, they might equally be signs of embarrassment.
‘As long as it’s not about my weight.’
She smiled and shook her head, sucked briefly and noisily at her Coke, then turned to me, suddenly serious: ‘I think I’m getting a little old for the zoo.’
‘You’re only eleven.’
‘Nearly twelve. I’m very mature for my age.’
As if to prove the point, she took a motherly interest in my lack of appetite: ‘You’re not hungry, Dad?’
‘I’m meeting some friends for dinner.’
‘Do I know them?’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said, and glanced at my watch. ‘Better bring the rest of your meal with you, sweetheart.’
A younger girl, with simpler needs, peeped o
ut, briefly from beneath the purple lipstick: ‘Dad! I wanted a thick shake!’
‘You can have two next week.’
‘You are in a hurry. Is she someone special?’
Is television to blame for such precocity: the mannerisms, the adult-speak, the innuendo? How much does she understand and how much of it is merely the parroting of style? I drove her home—to her mother’s home, my former home, a neat bluestone cottage in a leafy Norwood side street.
‘Wait here, Dad. Mum wants a conference about the holidays.’
Jill and I always talk sitting in the car, in the street. I haven’t been permitted back in the house since the day I left. I can’t recall the cause of our final argument that day—a cause that was quickly swamped by effects. I remember waving my hands about. I remember Jill, as always, reasoning quietly. That sweet reasonableness was the final straw. I packed a suitcase after she had left for work and loaded my Fiat with a few precious possessions. I tried to write a farewell note, tried to get my anger down in words; words failed me. Still seething, I fed the garden hose through the window of our bedroom, set the lawn sprinkler in the middle of the bed, turned the tap on full, and drove away.
I surprised myself far more than Jill. She certainly forgave me more quickly than I forgave myself. Perhaps she read such actions as merely a more expressive form of Sign, not so much body language as thing language—bed, sprinkler and water droplets become temporary body parts or at the least, exclamation marks. The injunction, she explained pleasantly, was as much for my protection as for hers—to protect me against myself. To prevent it happening again.
I said to Rosie: ‘Tell Mum I’ll call her. I haven’t time to talk today. See you next Sunday, sweetheart.’
‘Don’t be late next week, Pop,’ she said, and thumped the door shut and ran up the drive without looking back.
The afternoon’s concentrated fathering had exhausted me, but it was a delicious exhaustion, eased also by the promise of a reviving dip in the ocean before my evening out. I had been out of water, my natural element, too long; as I turned into the esplanade I could think of nothing else.
Stella’s battered jeep was parked in my parents’ drive. So much for swimming. I found her holding court in the lounge with my parents, an empty sherry glass dangling from her hand. Binky was lying on the carpet, a puddle of spreading black dog flesh, her chin resting on Stella’s right foot.
‘Sorry, J.J. Mea culpa. I’m early. But I’ve been practising my signing.’
She turned to my mother. ‘Good teacher,’ she signed, and pointed back at me.
My mother nodded, a little fixedly, and bent and stroked the dog. A frustrated dog person, she clearly found it easier to relate to Binky than to her owner. My father is neither a cat person nor a dog person—nor, for that matter, much of a person person. His disapproval was clearly written on his face, although Stella hadn’t noticed, shaping her crude beginner-signs as though she were doing her reluctant hosts a grand personal favour.
The sherry glass was still dangling from her fingers, getting in the way. My father refilled it from a decanter, if only to silence her hands, then signed rapidly to me, deliberately too fast for our guest to follow:
‘Already mother cook dinner—you tell not you eat with friends tonight.’
Among my answering apologies I covered my heart with my open palm, a meaning that even Stella comprehended.
‘Am I in the way?’ she asked, in English.
‘No problem,’ I said. ‘I just forgot to report all my movements to Headquarters.’
14
Stella drove her jeep staccato fashion; jerky, impatient gear changes, frequent braking, fast cornering. Binky, standing on the seat between us, front paws on the dash, lifting her head into the rush of air above the windscreen, somehow maintained her footing. I didn’t find it so easy, tossed side to side, swaying back and forth.
‘I read your poems last night,’ I said, trying to distract Stella. ‘I couldn’t put them down. They were wonderful.’
‘Thank you.’
‘The animal voices were totally convincing.’
‘Of course Clive doesn’t fully approve,’ she said.
I waited; she elaborated: ‘I commit the sin of anthropomorphism. His Holiness feels it’s wrong to give animals human thoughts. Like dressing them up in human clothes—it’s undignified.’
‘But they’re not human thoughts, they’re animal thoughts. The way an animal would see the world exactly.’
‘Maybe not exactly, J.J. They are written in a human language.’
‘But those words are only symbols. Translations. The perceptions are animal perceptions. I think they’re wonderful.’
‘Light me a coffin nail, will you?’ she said, weary of my repetitive praise.
I pulled a cigarette from the pack on the dash, lighting it with some difficulty as she swerved between lanes, impatient with the sluggish flow of traffic. I removed the cigarette from between my lips and jammed it gently between hers.
‘Well lit,’ she said, inhaling gratefully. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever tasted a cigarette that was better lit.’
This small fix of nicotine seemed to calm her; the car slowed, just a little.
She said: ‘I like to think the best of my poems are close—or as close as we can get in words—to how an animal might think, or at least perceive the world.’
She stopped abruptly at a red light, and sat tapping her fingers against the wheel.
‘What’s the sign for red?’ she said.
I shaped my lips into an O, and traced their outline with the Point Hand.
‘Lipstick,’ she said, pleased. ‘I like it!’
She ground the remnants of her cigarette into the ashtray and turned to me with a wicked glint in her eye.
‘What’s brown, then?’ she asked, and shifting her weight onto one buttock, reached her own Point Hand beneath the lifted cheek, circling the approximate region of her anus.
She hooted with laughter, highly amused; once again I didn’t know where to look. I had blamed the excesses of the previous night on alcohol, but today? After two sherries? I began to dread what she might have said—signed—to my parents.
‘I do believe you’re blushing, J.J. Or are you trying to show me another version of the colour red?’
The light changed; she accelerated across the intersection, still chuckling.
‘You can only blame yourself, J.J.—you’ve been very remiss in your duties as a teacher. You haven’t taught us any of the colours. Not even black and white.’
An opportunity to restore equilibrium; I shaped the sign for white, an opaque shape, a variation played on the Okay Hand; she peered sideways at my hand, puzzled.
‘I don’t see it.’
‘Look at the road,’ I said.
‘But I don’t see any connection with the colour white.’
‘You don’t have to see it. It’s an opaque shape. It doesn’t mimic the colour white—it is the colour white.’
‘I prefer shapes with a bit of poetry, like red. I like to see their origins. Light me another coffin nail, will you?’
I was beginning to enjoy lighting her cigarettes, there was an intimacy in the gesture, a kind of proxy kiss. I felt a thrill, a turbulence in my veins, as I jammed that second glowing cigarette between her lips.
‘You give good cigarette, J.J.’ she said, teasingly, aware, surely, of the effect on me.
‘I try to please.’
The easy glibness of the phrase—something a movie character might say—surprised me. It was uncharacteristic, I had no idea where it had come from.
Stella returned to her theme: ‘Surely your white shape represented something, some time. It must have had some natural connection to its colour.’
‘Why should it? Spoken words have no natural connection with the thing they represent,’ I said.
‘Moo,’ she lowed.
‘Except for the occasional onomatopoeia.’
Unconvinced, she steered
with one hand, shaping the Okay Hand with her other, turning it this way and that, glancing at it from time to time, puzzled:
‘Maybe the number zero,’ she mumbled through smoke. ‘Zero colour.’
‘Possibly. I did read somewhere that it had to do with pallor—the pale face of illness. As in, are you okay, or are you ill?’
She laughed: ‘That’s a long shot. Show me some other colours.’
‘You’ll like blue. The sign is more see-through—blue veins on the back of the hand…’
15
Her other two dogs were waiting, sharp-eared, at the second gate. I climbed out and pushed it open, Stella drove through into the trees. The dogs pressed about the jeep as it stopped, their rear ends wagging. Stella’s short walk from shed to house was slow, retarded by mutual displays of affection. We found Clive kneeling in the lounge, twiddling knobs on a small portable television set that squatted on a video recorder in a corner of the room.
Eliza was still nowhere in sight.
Stella bent and kissed him on the toupée, a perfunctory greeting which struck me as being at odds with the affection she had shown her dogs.
‘Did you tape the interview?’
‘Got most of it.’
‘Eliza in bed?’
He nodded, still preoccupied. ‘I’ll go up and say goodnight,’ she said.
‘Shall I come?’ I asked.
‘I’ll check first if she’s awake.’
She lifted a key hanging from a hook in the kitchen and headed for the stairs. I watched, startled. Did they lock their mute foster-child in her room at night? It didn’t seem polite to ask—yet.
Clive fiddled with the tracking control of the video recorder; I sat on the sofa and watched the screen swim in and out of focus. The soundtrack at least was coherent, a discussion of the fertility of great apes in captivity.
Stella descended the stairs. ‘She’s asleep. Sorry, J.J.’
I wasn’t surprised, but the absences and evasions on the subject of Eliza were beginning to irritate. I could smell something in those gaps: something freshly bricked behind a wall of excuses. She tapped two glasses of red wine from a cask and handed one to me.
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