Clothes, toiletries, packets of vegetable seed, lentils and my book from Dad. I put it all in a bag and then take it all out again. The order feels wrong or the uncertainty about going to live with the silents is behaving like referred pain. Should I rather put the book at the bottom of the bag or in a separate pocket? I’m not going anywhere without it, but what if they want to take it away from me? The lentils and seeds are gifts anyway; Oona said they would be appreciated. And they can cut up my clothes and share out my toiletries, I don’t care. Just not the book. I rest my hands on Eda-Lyn and press my fingers in circles over her skin to reassure her, as the woman Gudrun did to me.
Since joining the mutes, I haven’t had You sneak through the cat flap in my head for a week now. That’s the longest I’ve been free of your visitations since I came of haemorrh-age. Now that your crowding presence is gone, my thoughts are skittish and agoraphobic. But the quiet is already padding the walls. I have joined Poppy in patch-making, where the buds of my fingers taste different fabrics. It’s also one of the only jobs in the community that has a residual attachment to language. I enjoy subvertising the logos – with a nip and a tuck turning Prince coffee into Price coffee. Most of the clothes come from landfill. I asked Mother about it once, and she said it was to ‘preserve brand integrity’. Donating unworn Frisson Froufrou lingerie to charity stores or organisations damages its upscale image, so instead new bras and knickers are defaced and dumped if unsold.
Oona checks in on me at least once a day. She revises what she calls ‘hand words’ with me. Of course, they aren’t words at all; they can’t do what words do – fracture the light of meaning through a crystal lattice to reveal its component colours. They are restricted to the dull grind of manual labour – mimic an action, signify an action. There are only about 70 of them and I already know them. Palms together making a pillow for the head means ‘sleep, asleep, go to sleep, sleeping’, the fingertips of one hand pressed together and held up to the mouth signals ‘food, eat, hungry’. They are the high wall around an abstinent life.
For those who must go as far as to speak, a flat hand at the side of the mouth indicates that a teller – one of the unbled – should be called. This starts a game of charades with the kids guessing at the meaning. The success rate isn’t good.
Mainly, it’s the younger ones, whose haemorrhages are recent, that ask for a teller. The older silents hardly ever use this last retort. Maybe they’re tired of the indignity of playing the fool, or maybe they don’t have anything they really want to say any more. Is it possible to no longer want to trace out the topography of language? I can’t imagine that. As much as I despised LipService, with its trompe-l’oeil ceiling of airbrushed angelic aspirations, I feel the flatness of my scratchings in the dirt here.
The thread running through my patch-making day is the possibility of adding to the hand words. I think of it as my gift to the mutes – a word in repayment for the generosity of these people’s touch. Like the head of a tick still attached to my skin even after the body has been pulled off, the itch of your mouthparts says that this is no kindness – I want more hand words. I don’t listen.
When everyone gathers for dinner in the parking garage, announcements are made. A mute will stand and perform a few hand words. The scrape of the tin drum that is my seat against the concrete floor turns a glitter of gazes on to me. I point to myself to indicate ‘I’; next comes my new hand word – I rub my left patchwork sleeve between the opposite thumb and forefinger to represent ‘feel’. Heads swivel: there are no hand words for sensation or emotion, which is strange for a culture that prizes touch. It’s what makes the sign seem so necessary to me. I finish with the left hand over my heart for gratitude, thanks and respect. Gudrun rises and slowly turns her back to me, and to the table, before sitting down again on her metal drum, facing the exit. The true silents clustered around her follow suit. And eventually so does everyone else at the table. Poppy is one of the last to rise. She looks at me as if I were the monkey who won’t release the word candies and so can’t get its closed fist out of the narrow neck of the jar. She makes one furtive sign, ‘school’. Normally, the sign would mean the community’s school on the property but I’m sure she means the one we attended, where we created new words. Then she also scold-shoulders me. I’m left standing. She thinks I’m refusing to learn.
Oona comes and leads me out of the parking garage.
‘You’ve been given a warning. No one is allowed to make new hand signs.’
I make a mute point of shrugging and facial confusion. There’s no hand sign for ‘why’ either.
‘It’s got to do with the talking labels and brands.’ She says the last word as if sliding a hand into a dark burrow in the ground. ‘And the way they make feelings and wanting go bad. Some things must be shown by our actions not our words.’
I nod. She leaves me sitting watching the cabbages grow obediently in the last of the day’s light.
I stick to the hand signs, but knowing that I can’t add to them is starting to make me resent them almost as much as the patch. Oona still makes me practise the signs. I think she’s worried. Only I can’t tell about what. Whether I’ve accepted that I can’t invent new ones? Whether I’m adjusting or have already been too damaged by the ‘talking label’?
One day, instead of asking for the next hand word, Oona says, ‘Did you know Avery?’
I can’t think who she’s talking about so give a slow half shake of the head.
‘Avery was my best friend. I knew his touch on my back without seeing him. Poppy went to find him when he didn’t come back from the hospital. We’re not supposed to look for the ones that don’t come back. But Avery was like me. He was born here and he told me he was coming back. He promised to bring me sweets. Poppy says he’s dead.’
The carton that Poppy collected. That was Avery. For a moment, I feel like a gravedigger who is caught lifting coffin lids. But she can’t know. Lost Property can’t be explained in mute point, can it?
‘In the box that Poppy brought back were sweets. I know they were sweets because the packet said: “Pop mothballs in, and forget the gnawing worries.” Poppy won’t let us have them. But I want to eat those sweets and remember Avery.’
Oona’s words remind me of the cause of death on Avery’s box: ‘Fatal haemolytic anaemia due to naphthalene/dichlorobenzene poisoning resulting from ingestion of mothballs.’ I had thought it was suicide but Avery was poisoned with words.
‘What?’ says Oona.
It’s impossible to share ideas with people here, but they notice the most infinitesimal muscular twitch of emotion. I ape putting something in my mouth and then keel over cartoonishly. The shame of explaining a death with such buffoonery is horrible.
‘The sweets killed him?’
I try again, following the eating gesture with a waggling finger to show that mothballs aren’t food, but she thinks I’m forbidding her sweets. Only when I pretend to take a bite out of the end of a candle does she understand.
‘So why does the packet use those words?’
With effort, I pull my shoulders back from the defeatism of shrugging. I don’t know how to explain the metaphorical mid-air twisting of words that land catlike on another level of meaning. I remember how Dad died writing an echo, burnt by the flame of language. Avery died, a clothes moth drawn to the wordless darkness in a dumb fog of naphthalene. Poor Avery in fool’s mothley. His end is as nonsensical as Dad’s.
Oona reads my face and says, ‘You’ll find a way to explain it.’
The next day, while I’m cutting and sewing, cutting and sewing, my mind, too, is stuck on a loop until I imagine my hands as Dad’s and guess the meaning of my own mute point – the cutting and rebinding of the stories between Eda-Lyn’s skin. The book. With the book I can show Oona the shifty character of words.
There’s a riddle that Dad and I loved, which is perfect. And Oona already knows about guessing games – she has to solve the silents’ body-twisters all the time. The thing about riddles is that they’re like a weather vane – it’s not the compass point, which the arrow indicates, but its opposite that is the answer. And this one’s easy enough, if you know about books. I can already hear it in my head:
Musty moth made a meal of words.
More’s the marvel that in the murk,
While munching worm’s mouth does work,
It robs the writer of his riddle
And relishes rare rhetoric,
Yet retires still unrefined in matters politic.
For Dad and me, the solution (bookworm or booklouse) was itself a metaphor that hatches out of the original riddle as a LipService larva and eats all the books and everyone’s speech, only leaving us droppings. For all the words it has consumed and all the words it makes us spout – because more is never enough – they’re still just the waste of our thoughts. So am I better off now without the worm and entirely without words? Avery has made me uncertain. What if the mutes’ silence is a great unlearning? With every generation, more of them will come of haemorrh-age only to eat mothballs and stick their fingers in electric sockets when forced to step out into the consumerist world. Perhaps the doctors and copywriters are counting on that, together with untreated second haemorrhages and disease.
Aside from me, no one but Dad has ever seen the book. By showing it to Oona I risk losing it. I risk everything.
In the evening, we go up onto the roof with a vegetable oil lamp. We sit on the concrete parapet and I take the book out from under my shirt. Once again, I have pressed Eda-Lyn’s skin to my own in a pact sealed in salty squid ink, to protect our hides and the stories concealed beneath them from the doctors and word-eating copywriters. Now I am extending that protection to Oona.
‘What is that?’ asks Oona.
She pauses as she skates her fingers over the paper of the open page with insect-like delicacy. Eda-Lyn bends her pages in acknowledgement of such a touch.
‘Is it a book?’
I incline my head.
‘An unbled boy came here with his mother when I was younger. He was looking for books. I didn’t understand most of what he talked about. He didn’t come back from the hospital. I don’t think he liked it here.’
I point to the riddle and she haltingly reads it out loud. Her face has the expression of someone chasing peas around a plate in polite company – afraid to give up the fork but becoming increasingly convinced it’s the wrong shape. She rereads the riddle, whispering the words to herself. Then she feels the page again between thumb and forefinger.
‘What is it made of?’
I point to the plume rising from the vent above the underground kitchen.
‘Smoke? Fire? Wood? It’s made of wood.’
I smile, place a fingernail beneath the words ‘moth’ and ‘worm’s mouth’, before making the eating sign and pointing back to the smoke.
‘Insects eat wood. And books,’ she says slowly. ‘When they eat the books, they also eat the writing.’
I take a large square of fabric from my pocket and watch as she stitches the riddle onto it.
Three days later, Oona haemorrhages. From the patchworking office, I see someone being pushed in a wheelbarrow. I don’t realise then that it’s Oona. Later, three unbled teens come for me. Angry, they wave the stitched riddle at me, shouting that Oona isn’t yet eighteen. My head-hurting words made her bleed early.
I look at Poppy. She knows the basic science of an aneurysm as well as I do. No one can predict the precise moment when the artery wall will fail. Ruptures before eighteen are not unheard of, and to think that any collection of words can increase the pressure is superstition. This isn’t like Dad fighting the transdermal to write his echo. Poppy doesn’t look up or meet my eyes; she keeps sewing. Out of the window I see Gudrun approaching across the factory floor with two more kids.
Eda-Lyn is at my back. Since showing the book to Oona, I’ve been carrying it around with me under my shirt. It’s just something I have done without defining whether I’m afraid of a backlash or whether I just want to hold the words close, press them through my skin so that, like tattoo ink, they can’t be erased. How do I defend my actions without language? Can I rely on these kids who are prejaundiced against speech to communicate for me any more than You?
I run.