Louder Than Words
Authors: Laura Jarratt
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #General, #Social Issues, #Friendship
First published in paperback in Great Britain 2014
by Electric Monkey, an imprint of Egmont UK Limited
The Yellow Building, 1 Nicholas Road, London W11 4AN
Text copyright © 2014 Laura Jarratt
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First e-book edition 2014
ISBN 978 1 4052 6912 4
eISBN 978 1 7803 1427 3
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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EGMONT
Our story began over a century ago, when seventeen-year-old Egmont Harald Petersen found a coin in the street. He was on his way to buy a flyswatter, a small hand-operated printing machine that he then set up in his tiny apartment.
The coin brought him such good luck that today Egmont has offices in over 30 countries around the world. And that lucky coin is still kept at the company’s head offices in Denmark.
For Orlaith.
I wrote this while you were sleeping.
CONTENTS
When I grow up I’d like to be a writer. I guess a lot of people my age say that and I also guess they’re told that fourteen isn’t old enough to know what you want to do with your life. That might be correct for most people, but not for me – I do know and it’s a really important deal for me.
I love words. I love the patterns they form on a page, the rhythms, the way they dance into formation: a ballet in one book, hip hop in another, or tap, jazz, all different. I love finding new words. To find a word I didn’t know before, a word that perfectly describes something that I never even knew there was a word for, that gives me such a buzz.
Words on a page . . . they’re beautiful, powerful. They blow me away.
Words in my mouth . . . they don’t work. They’re the barrel of a gun, the point of a dagger held to my throat. They choke up inside me and won’t come out.
My pen has a freedom my mouth has never had.
Sometimes Silas sneaks into my room when I’m reading and I don’t hear him. I’m locked away in my own space in time. And he stands there watching me with what I call his big brother grin. When I finally feel his eyes on me and look up, I know he’s caught me mouthing words soundlessly to myself again.
‘One day, Rafi,’ he’ll say as he bounces on to the bed next to me and musses my hair. He never says more than that, but I know what he means all the same: one day he’ll walk in and hear me
say
the words, maybe only in a whisper, but he’ll really hear me say them.
I don’t know if that will ever happen. I don’t know if I’ll ever talk again, even in private. The worst part is I’m not sure any more that I want to.
Some days I do and I want to be just like everyone else at school – I can’t wait to get back after the weekend to trade gossip, chattering away, forgetting how loud I’m being. Maybe even squealing a bit like the other girls in my class do when they get overexcited, making the quiet boys who sit near the door wince when they hear them.
But when I think about all the nasty, aggressive stuff that people use their words for it makes me not want to speak at all. Ever.
It didn’t start that way. When it began I wanted to speak. I wanted it desperately. I just couldn’t. The very thought of forcing words out made the strangled feeling in my throat stronger so my vocal cords tightened over the sounds and nothing,
nothing
would come out.
The last person I spoke to was my brother Silas, and I was six. Even then I think it was only a whispered, ‘No.’ Since then, not a word.
Silas says he’d give anything to hear me speak again.
Strange now how I sit here and think the same thing about him.
I’ve gone on and on about me when really this story isn’t about me at all. It’s about Silas. I’m just the pen on the page telling his story now that he can’t speak either.
When I wiped Silas’s computer clean as he asked me to, I found some emails he’d saved in draft. He wrote them to Dad when I guess there were things he needed to say that he couldn’t say to me. Of course he couldn’t send them because he hasn’t got Dad’s contact details either. But those emails are important. I cried when I read them for they’re the only words he has.
This is my brother’s story and it might be the most important story I ever write.
It all started that Wednesday on the school bus, if you can ever pinpoint a moment when something like this begins.
We were on our way home. I was tucked next to the window beside Silas on the long back seat with a bunch of his sixth-form friends. Occasionally I listened to whatever they were talking about, but mostly I stared out of the window unless one of them spoke to me directly. Not that I wasn’t interested in what they were saying, but it wasn’t fair to my brother otherwise. His friends didn’t want to be stuck with a fourteen-year-old, but Silas wouldn’t leave me sitting on my own so this was my compromise – I sat with them, but didn’t bug them by listening in to conversations like I was part of their group. Silas said they wouldn’t mind if I did, but nobody else’s little sister sat back there with them and I didn’t want things to be different for him because of me.
For instance, today his friend Toby was spreading a rumour about a girl from another school and it was obvious I wasn’t supposed to hear any of it. It’s funny how being mute has that effect on some people – they behave as if you’re deaf, even when they know perfectly well that you’re not. I get that a lot. It isn’t really Toby’s fault – I can do such a good impersonation of being totally oblivious to everything around me that Silas’s friends sometimes forget that I can hear them.
‘So what Josie did, right, was to . . .’ Toby glanced over at me and then got his phone out to show them. ‘. . . totally strip off and beg Lloyd to take pictures of her. Look at her, she’s loving it. What a slut!’
‘OMG! She is such a tramp.’ The girl next to Silas sat back in disgust. My brother, I noticed, didn’t even look at the phone.
Another girl, Rachel, began arguing with Toby.
‘That’s so harsh,’ she said. ‘If those pictures had been of a guy then you’d be different about it, but because it’s a girl you’re being a sexist pig and calling her names.’
The other girls laughed. ‘Are you having one of your Feminazi moments again?’ her friend said to her.
Rachel wouldn’t back down though. ‘No, I am right about this. If a guy did that, waving his dick about and grinning, then they’d all be laughing with him and saying what a great lad he was. You know they would. But because she’s female, she’s a slut. It’s not fair.’
The other girls stopped giggling.
‘It’s such double standards. It doesn’t matter whether she should have posed for those pictures or not. What matters is that if it was a boy nobody would be bothered. They can do whatever they want, sleep around as much as they want, cheat, and nobody ever calls them out on it. I can’t believe we’re in the twenty-first century and we’ve got no further than when our grandparents were our age!’
There was a pause, followed by the girls collectively rounding on Toby.
‘Rachel’s right, Toby. You’re being so sexist and you know it.’
‘It’s not even like that girl did it herself. It was her ex who posted those pictures, wasn’t it?’
‘So what she’s actually guilty of is having bad taste in boys! What names are you going to call him now?’
‘Rach is totally right and you don’t want to admit it. You’re all so twentieth century in your attitudes towards women. Except Silas.’
‘Oh yeah, except Silas.’
The boys pulled faces. And whined, ‘Yeah, except Silas,’ in chorus.
My brother just grinned. If the other boys had a dig at him because of what the girls said, he never cared. I couldn’t imagine what it must feel like to be so self-assured and together that you weren’t bothered what others thought of you.
‘People make mistakes,’ he said easily. ‘And we don’t know both sides of the story.’
Even Toby shrugged, with a grin, and nodded. ‘Yeah, well, her boyfriend
is
a complete loser.’
‘How do you know this Josie?’ Silas asked.
‘I don’t
know
her. I’ve met her once for about five minutes. Her dad’s a mate of mine’s – both in the force.’
Silas raised his eyebrows. ‘So her loser ex decides to mess with a policeman’s kid? Is he dumb or what?’
Toby laughed. ‘Her dad’s an inspector, so yeah, he must be dumb. But then he probably knows she’d never tell her dad cos he’d go insane at her for letting Lloyd take those pictures in the first place.’