Flawless has a new green Saab. It gleams in our driveway, making Dad’s ute look extra dirty. I bite my lip as I edge past it. I’m glad that the boys will be here, but with Flawless and Mum around, the interrogation will be planned and there’ll be no escape.
I put down my school bag. I need a minute to prepare for their onslaught.
I can see them through the kitchen window. They make a great team. Flawless always agrees with Mum, and Mum loves to be agreed with. I am the perfect subject for them, and the way Flawless is nodding as she chops vegetables makes me think that I’m being discussed right now.
Flawless was twelve when I was born. She wasn’t Flawless to me back then. She was Felicity, and I adored her. I was heartbroken whenever she went to stay with her own mum, and was always rapt when she came home. I loved it when people said we both looked like Dad. That she was a fair version, and I was the dark one. I copied the way she dressed and the way she spoke. I followed her around everywhere.
I was only eight when she met Ryan. They were both at uni, both studying law. Ryan was a few years older.He already had his own house and car. I could see why my sister fell for him. He was a handsome mature-age student.Except that he wasn’t very mature – he was really funny.He would put a pillow up the back of his T-shirt and pretend to be the hunchback of Notre Dame. He used to lope around chasing me until I squealed for Felicity to come and rescue me.
Felicity didn’t finish her law degree. She got pregnant and had Harry instead.
I loved being a nine-year-old auntie. And back then Felicity was still fun. Ryan was pretty successful by the time they had Oscar. But it was like the richer they got, the more boring Felicity became. She stopped being funny and got all serious, all mature and sensible and perfect. It was in high school that Nadia and I started secretly calling her Flawless, and it was so right it just stuck.
These days it’s like all she cares about, other than the boys, is her perfect house and going to the gym and getting her hair done and agreeing with Mum.
I pick up my bag again. It feels heavier than before. I let myself in and head to the lounge room.
Harry and Oscar have used their unsupervised playtime excellently. Their faces are both covered in black texta.Harry is just about to add some more art to Oscar’s nose when he sees me.
‘Hello,’ he signs, lifting his hand and my spirits. His smile is missing two front teeth.
Oscar lies back on the carpet like an upturned bug. It’s my signal to tickle. So I kneel next to him and go for it. I wish I could hear him laugh. He’s three now. He was only one when I went deaf. His laugh has probably changed. But I do see how his eyes squint as his chubby cheeks take over his face.
His little legs are cycling in the air, and I turn to avoid getting a knee in the face. Felicity is standing in the doorway.I don’t know how long she’s been there. She is wearing a pink Ralph Lauren polo, collar upturned, and perfectly white jeans.
‘Harry! Oscar! Bathroom!’ She wouldn’t be yelling; that would look like she’d lost control. But she quickly gets hold of Harry’s hand and then pulls Oscar out of his dead-bug position, ready for the drag to the bathroom.
‘Hi, Demi,’ she says, as the boys squirm on either side of her. ‘I can’t wait to hear about your day.’
I lean against the couch. Flawless exits and Mum enters.
They should have a baton.
‘Long day?’ Mum asks in sign, and the fact that she doesn’t say it too, like she would normally, is a warning to me.
It’s designed to remind me that she is pretty good at sign language – that we have already made adjustments in our house to cope with my deafness. So this new adjustment, this new school, is unnecessary.
She’s wearing her concerned look. It says, ‘don’t worry, we will be here for you when you change your mind and make the right decision’ more clearly than any sign could.
‘No, it wasn’t a long day. It was good,’ I say. I don’t sign it at all.
If there’s a kind of scoring system going on with her signing and me voicing then I think we’re about even.
‘Great,’ Mum signs. ‘Tell us at dinner.’
It feels like a threat.
Felicity sits with a straight back. Her gym-toned arm reaches for the salt and moves it out of Harry’s reach. Mum nods her approval.
‘Jim?’ Mum says, frowning.
Dad is eating with his left hand and writing in his notepad with his right.
‘Where’s Ryan?’ I ask with my voice.
Dad sneaks me a wink. He and I do this for each other.We change the subject if Mum’s about to go into nag mode.
Felicity places her hands on the table. Her fingers are splayed, showing off the white tips of her French manicure like they’re some kind of achievement.
I fold my hands, hiding my short, bitten nails under the table.
‘Ryan’s working on a …’ Felicity turns sideways towards Mum so I don’t catch the rest of the sentence. She does that quite often, even though she says she understands how important it is not to. I can generally fill in the gaps though.Most likely, he’s working on a case.
‘So Demi, how was it?’ Felicity asks, turning to face me again. Even though it’s easy to lip-read her now, she adds some signing for effect.
‘Yes Demi, how was it?’ Mum says, like an echo.
Mum reverts to her concerned look. I suspect she’s hoping it didn’t go so well and that I’ll have changed my mind.
‘It was good,’ I say with my voice.
I don’t worry too much about how I sound. Not with my family. But even after all this time it still feels like I’ve got headphones on, and I have to trust that the vibrations in my throat will guide me to keep my voice somewhere between a whisper and a scream.
‘The class sizes are really small. There are only eight kids in my class. Well, nine actually, but one girl wasn’t there.And you know how I used to miss stuff when Jules wasn’t there to interpret for me? Well, the notes from every class are put up on the school intranet.’
I’m convincing myself as I go. I am trying to modulate my voice with ups and downs to convince them at the same time. If I’m not careful, Mum will sniff out the doubt.I’m about to tell her about the fortnightly elective speech therapy sessions when Mum makes the sign for me to lower my volume. Two hands pushing downwards.
I hate that sign. I really do. It means that I’m not getting it right. Again. Like I got it wrong at speech night. The thought makes me shudder, makes me cast my eyes downwards.
Mum reaches over, gently tapping the table in front of me to get my attention.
‘Do you sign or voice in your English class?’ she asks with her mouth, and she looks a bit impatient, like she might be asking for a second time.
‘We mostly signed today, but the teacher’s hearing so he can obviously speak,’ I reply. ‘I think we’ll do a bit of both.And my homeroom teacher does both too.’
‘… not right’, Mum is saying, and I get straight away that she’s choosing to focus on the signing in today’s class and nothing else. It’s annoying that she hasn’t even acknowledged the small class sizes. ‘It’s really important … speak so you can operate … hearing world, don’t you think?’
Normally I get pretty much everything Mum says, but she’s now addressing everyone at the table, so her head is swivelling, challenging each of us in turn. As she finishes, she looks straight at me, but she doesn’t mean it as a question, so I don’t bother to answer. I don’t remind her that most English assessments are written anyway, or that the students are all deaf, so of course the teacher needs to sign.
She just makes me more determined to pick out the bits from my day that I want to tell. If Mum can flick away the information she wants to flick away, then so can I.
I breathe. I don’t feel like talking anymore, and I can see Mum getting fidgety, patting her left hand with her right as though she’s counting how long I’m being silent. It stresses Mum out to think that I might forget how to speak. It totally freaked her out when I stopped talking for a whole week.When I wouldn’t go to school, wouldn’t leave the house, didn’t want to see anyone.
After Northfield. That horrible day.
I wouldn’t tell Mum what happened. Couldn’t tell anyone.But even though I couldn’t share it, I played what had happened over and over in my mind, as though going over it might let me change it somehow. Or at least wear out the memory so it no longer bothered me.
The thing is, Mum wasn’t the only one freaking out.I freaked myself out, too. I’m pretty sure that week took its toll on my speech, though of course it’s impossible for me to tell. I wanted to be able to keep speaking. But I just shut down after Northfield.
Dad’s hand pats the table in front of me. It’s a save. Well, an attempted save.
‘… it interesting?’ he says with a wink.
Dad’s trimmed his handlebar moustache so I can see his mouth better, but I still find myself watching the hair on his upper lip bounce up and down, not catching very much of what he’s saying. I told him the trim worked fine because I knew he didn’t want to shave it all off, and anyway, it’s kind of comforting. I don’t want him to change. I want him to stay the way he’s always been.
‘… other classes – ’
I can tell Mum has cut him off by the way he’s stopped talking. His eyes swerve towards her and she’s off again.
‘I spoke to Jules today,’ she says, her attention fully aimed towards me now. ‘He thinks there’s a chance we could get more funding. It’s possible he could be there full time instead of three days. If we ever wanted to go back to your old school.’
It’s unbelievable. She still thinks that getting a sign teacher and interpreter to be with me full time, rather than just three days, might convince me to go back to my normal school. She’s been playing around with this idea for ages but there’s never been enough funding. A while ago I would have agreed that it would make all the difference. I would have loved having Jules there every day.
But it wouldn’t help now. It’s too late, too much has happened. And I am not sure I even want it anymore. I always dread seeing Jules now, after what I did.
‘Mum,’ I say firmly, ‘we understood everything the teachers said today. Not like at my old school.’
I’ve tried to put a sarcastic slant on the ‘we’. But I can’t be sure of that sort of effect anymore, and it still shits me. I was the queen of sarcasm before I went deaf.
‘I understood what everyone was on about.’ I say it straight this time.
Mum nods. Her face has relaxed a bit, now I’ve spoken again. She pauses, as if she’s gathering her thoughts. But we all know her well enough to know that they’re already gathered. She’s just figuring out her delivery.
‘That’s great, Demi,’ she says. ‘It’s just an option.’
Flawless is sitting next to Mum. Her mouth is moving, but her eyes are on Harry. He’s pushing peas under a mound of mashed potatoes. It’s pretty funny, but of course Felicity is not amused. She leans across to him and pulls them out with her fork, one by one. I presume she’s giving Harry a lecture. When he glances at me, I give him a wink like the one Dad gave me.
I feel Felicity’s eyes on me. I look at her properly for the first time that night. She looks as perfect as ever, but still I notice there’s something different. She looks tired, her eyes somehow duller.
‘See? Mum’s right,’ she’s saying. I realise that she’s at the end of her little speech, and that it was aimed at me and not at Harry and his pea mutiny. ‘… nice to have options like Jules.’
I zone out. Felicity has swallowed Mum’s philosophies as a pre-dinner snack. It’s quite a skill that she is able to regurgitate them whole.
‘Anyway, just a thought,’ Mum says with a shrug suggesting it’s all very casual.
It’s a thought that surrounds me. A thought that seeps into every nook and cranny of my life.