I’m watching the kids get ready for a new round of Celebrity Heads. A boy with tightly wound curls is up. On his rather large forehead is the label ‘Oprah’. It could be a good one, but Stella has my hand and she’s pulling me outside.
There are four teenagers in a courtyard outside, sitting on a wooden bench beside a fire pit. Two boys, two girls.They jump a bit when the door slides open. There’s a scramble to hide their drinks in the bushes.
When they see who it is, the drinks are rescued.
‘You scared the crap out of us, Star,’ one of the boys signs, grinning. He is short and buff, like he works out a lot.
Smoke from the fire makes my eyes water and explains why everyone is on the far side of the flames. Stella introduces us. Short and Buff hands us a drink each.
So P-a-u-l, you got suspended?’ Stella signs to him.
Paul shakes his head, laughing. ‘See?’ he tells the others.‘There’s more Chinese whispers in the deaf community than in the hearing.’
The others smile as Paul gets ready to fill us in. I get the impression that they’ve already been through this.
‘I got a detention, not suspended,’ Paul explains.
‘What happened?’ Stella asks.
Paul stands up, though the standing up version of him isn’t much taller than the sitting one.
‘Well,’ he signs, looking around to check his audience is being attentive, ‘you know how there are different types of farts? My specialties are the atom bomb and the silent-but-deadly’. ‘He can clear a room in seconds,’ one of the girls signs to me with a smile. I grin back at her. I am loving this. Paul’s a really good storyteller. His hands are flying, but I’m getting everything, not just bits here and there that need piecing together.
‘Normally, I know which type of fart I’m letting out,’ he continues, ‘but this day, there were complications. Baked beans.’
Paul has to wait for everyone to compose themselves before he continues. I laugh too, but there’s a particular look on his face now. It might just be the flicker of the fire, but I think I see something else. He takes a deep breath and continues.
‘So, there I was in class. History of the Roman Empire.And I thought I was letting out a couple of SBDs. But the kids who can hear said I was actually letting go of atom bombs. The teacher was not impressed, which is silly because I’m sure the ancient Romans would have worshipped the atom bomb. Worshipped.’
The sign for ‘worship’ is the hands in prayer position and a couple of downward strokes. Paul holds his hands together after he’s finished signing. I catch his eye, and he looks away.I can’t help wondering if he’s turning the story into a joke when it was really embarrassing at the time.
I glance at Stella. She’s smiling, but there’s something else in her expression too. I get the feeling that she’s had the same thought as me.
‘I got in trouble last week too.’ It’s the other girl signing now, the one who hasn’t said anything yet. She has beautiful red-orange hair that matches the fire.
‘What happened, L-o-u?’ Stella asks.
‘My PE teacher is really hard to lip-read. She’s a mumbler.She hardly moves her mouth. You know the type?’
Five heads nod, unanimous.
‘Well, she said she reminded me three times to bring my netball skirt. I thought she was just reminding me to bring my shirt, because I forget it all the time. So I remembered my shirt, but when I came out of the change room in my shorts, she went off.’
Lou’s signing just tells the facts, but her face fills in the emotion. Her forehead is creased with a frown and her eyes are sad.
‘She sent me to the principal’s office,’ Lou continues.
‘I had to wait outside, on the bench, so everyone who walked past knew I was in trouble. When he called me in, he told me that the PE teacher thinks I disobey her on purpose.That now I have a cochlear implant, I should be able to hear her.’
Lou’s eyes are welling up. Stella sits down next to her.
‘It’s not true,’ Lou signs. ‘My hearing’s not that much better, even with the cochlear. I haven’t had it for very long, so I haven’t really learnt how to interpret sounds properly yet. Sometimes it makes it harder to figure out what’s going on. But she says I’m just making up excuses.’
Lou has turned to Stella, as though Stella is the one she really wants to talk to. I understand why. Stella is weirdly perceptive sometimes. She gets stuff like that. It makes me think of the way she got why I sit close to the door all the time.
Stella puts her arms around Lou’s shoulder.
‘They’re not excuses,’ Stella signs. ‘They’re reasons.’
She looks over to me, her eyebrows raised, and I get that she’s asking me to understand that her politics come from personal experiences like these – not just the big issues like having proper access to emergency services.
The others have some creative ideas about what they’d like to do to Lou’s PE teacher. I watch them, but I’m not really concentrating on what they’re saying. I’m thinking about the hearing people in my life.
Ethan doesn’t want to be seen with me in public.My mum and my sister are too wrapped up in their own petty problems to bother with me anymore. And Nadia thinks she has to take care of me. It’s made our friendship lopsided and I don’t know if we can get back to the way we were before. It’s all left a hole inside me.
It’s weird that even though I’m mostly in the company of strangers, it doesn’t feel that way. It’s not that I really feel like I belong here; it’s more like maybe I could belong here, in time.Especially if I started to think a bit more like Stella does. She seems to take on everyone’s experiences of being deaf and merge them together so they become kind of communal.And then they make her strong. I admire that strength.
Lou is still crying. I know this stuff can really hurt. It’s not so different to what happened to me at the pool that time when the woman was yelling at me. But at least Lou can talk about it with friends who understand. I wish I’d had that at my old school, rather than having everything fester inside me. It’s not just about having friends who sign, it’s about having friends who know the things that happen when you’re deaf – and how they can make you feel.
Paul is talking the others through a torture chamber, some sharp bamboo sticks and the PE teacher’s fingernails.
It’s got nothing to do with torturing Lou’s teacher, but I suddenly feel my own horror story surfacing. I want to tell Stella what happened at Northfield. It’s a shock to suddenly want to tell someone, but I think she’ll understand, and I need to let it go.
And I also want Stella to know that I do get it, even though I haven’t been deaf for very long. That bad things have happened to me, too.
I wait until the others are about to go inside, and I ask Stella to stay.