Louder Than Words (16 page)

‘Because he was a shit to her and he deserved taking down. Because I knew how to do it. Because nobody else was looking out for her. Because I thought, and I still think, it was the right thing to do. Because sometimes you have to stand up for people when they can’t fight back.’

She leaned over and kissed me softly on the cheek. ‘Yeah, you do.’

And after that I was flying, Dad. Totally flying. No drug could take you where I was.

As we were leaving after we’d eaten, the woman Lara had been talking to asked, ‘How are you getting home?’

‘I called my dad for a lift,’ Lara said without a blink. ‘He’s picking us up by the station.’

‘Why did you say that?’ I asked her when we got outside.

‘Because she’d have felt obliged to offer us a bed or find someone with a spare room otherwise.’

‘Oh.’

So why hadn’t she wanted that? Because we might have been put in the same room, or because she didn’t want to feel obliged to them? Or did she really prefer to spend the night on a hard, cold train platform?

‘How do you know that? It would never have occurred to me.’

‘I grew up in a place a lot like this. That’s how the people are.’

Now I didn’t expect that, Dad. Not at all. My picture of her childhood is in some cool urban environment. It’s impossible to tell where she’s from by the way she speaks, but I’d never imagined it was some isolated rural spot.

We walked back to the station in silence. It was fully dark but Lara seemed comfortable to pick her way back down the lane by moonlight alone. The station was in darkness too, but the day’s heat still lingered in the air and so I had some hope we wouldn’t be miserably cold overnight.

Lara sat down under the shelter, leaning her back against the perspex wall and wriggling around, trying it out for comfort. ‘No,’ she said finally, ‘I think sleeping on the ground will be more comfortable.’ She scooted down and curled up on the tarmac floor with her head resting in the crook of her arm.

I didn’t know where to position myself. Eventually I leaned back against the shelter. As she’d said, it wasn’t comfortable, but it was much safer for the moment until I worked out exactly how to act around her right now.

My heart beat with a racing rhythm that said sleep was a long, long way away.

‘So, Demo Virgin, what did you think of today?’ said Lara through the darkness.

I rehearsed lots of explanations in my head before I realised that ultimately it was very simple.

‘I get it,’ I said. ‘I get why you do it.’

There was a long, achingly long pause. And then, ‘Why did you have to be the way you are?’ She said it in the smallest voice I’ve ever heard her use, and there was something so sad in her tone. I didn’t understand it.

‘You don’t like the way I am?’ So hard to get those words out because I was so afraid of the answer.

She sighed heavily. ‘I like the way you are. You shouldn’t change.’ And she turned over so she had her back to me and curled into a tighter ball. She didn’t say goodnight, but I’d been dismissed from the conversation.

I crashed back down to earth with a bang.

I wish you could tell me what you think of it all. I really wish that badly. Never mind, it helps just to tell you.

Love, Silas

CHAPTER 29

I’d thought that I was feeling calmer about the whole speech therapist thing – until I was actually in the waiting room for my second appointment. She had given me a false sense of confidence last time for a little while, but of course I was still myself and the feeling of choking that I was so used to began to grow again in my throat as I waited. What if she tried to get me to speak today?

Silas was staring blankly at the wall in front, his phone in his hand. Obviously waiting for a message of some sort. He carried on staring at the wall and trying to pretend he wasn’t checking his phone messages every few minutes until we were called through by Andrea.

‘So how has it been since last time? Any thoughts you want to share?’ She had the paper and pen at the ready for me this time.

I shook my head immediately, a reflex action. The relative easiness of our last session had disappeared and we were back to square one, except this time for some reason I felt even less like sharing. I shut down, like a hedgehog curling into a protective ball.

Nothing.

I had nothing to give.

‘Did you manage to come up with more positive ideas about what you can do once you start to talk again?’

There was no ‘if’ with Andrea. Last time I’d liked that. Today it felt like immeasurable pressure.

Still, I had to give her a crumb.

‘Baby steps,’ Silas urged, seeing my face.

Will be able to get a job
, I wrote.

‘Do you know what job you’d like to do when you’re older?’ Andrea asked.

Shake of the head. Not ready to share that. She might ask to see something I’d written and there was no way I could show her. Probably not ever.

I saw Silas cast me a sidelong glance, but he stayed silent. He knew about my writing, but as I wouldn’t even show him he’d know I couldn’t share it with Andrea.

‘Thinking about some possibilities might be a good way forward then,’ Andrea said.

I shook my head again.

She paused and examined my face, trying to read something there.

‘OK, let’s go back to the beginning and look at how this started for you again,’ she said after a moment. ‘I’d like you to tell me if there were times after you stopped talking when you wanted to try to speak and you couldn’t.’

Nod.

‘How exactly did that feel?’

I thought about it. Could I answer this? My pulse went up a bit, but nothing too bad. No, I didn’t feel threatened by this question. She probably knew how it felt if she’d been mute too.

I wrote:
Tight in my throat and sick in my tummy.

‘And did you ever get pains in your tummy when you thought you might have to speak?’

Nod.
Used to.

‘But not now? What does it feel like now if you want to try to speak?’

Choking. Feel faint if it gets really bad.

‘She stopped breathing once,’ Silas said. ‘It was at school when a new teacher tried to make her speak. The teacher kept shouting at her and she stopped breathing. She only started again when she passed out.’

Andrea compressed her lips. ‘That must have been very frightening for you.’

It was. I thought I was going to die. I tried to forget about that incident and Silas knew it so he must have thought it was important to bring it up. I didn’t listen to Silas explain what happened as Andrea prompted him for more information. I didn’t need to listen – I remembered it all too well.

I was ten. We’d just got a new class teacher because our old one had left to go to another school halfway through the year. I wasn’t sure what went wrong at the time, whether the teacher hadn’t been told about my condition or if she just didn’t believe in it. It turned out later that it was the latter, but we only found that out after Silas told my mum what had happened and she stormed into the school and went off like a nuclear bomb. I was mad with Silas for telling, but at least it meant I didn’t have to be in the woman’s class any more.

She’d looked annoyed when she read out the names from the register and I didn’t answer but raised my hand instead. I cringed inside at her expression. I knew she was thinking what a nuisance I was. They all secretly thought that, even my last teacher who’d been one of the nicer ones. I was more work for them than the others. She didn’t make any comment in registration though. It was later at reading time that the trouble began.

She was going round the class, telling people to read a page each from our books. I still remember the book: it was
Charlotte’s Web
, which I loved up until then, but I’ve never been able to touch it since. She started with the person straight in front of her and then went down each row of desks and back up again. I must have had some sense of what was brewing because I recall that as it got closer and closer to what would have been my turn, I started to get a tummy ache. It wasn’t that unusual for this to happen. I often got mild anxiety that a teacher would forget and try to make me read whenever we did this kind of thing, but this time it was bad. I held my stomach and tried to rub it without anyone noticing. Still, the moment she said, ‘Rafaela, your turn,’ it took me a second to process that my worst fear was really happening. It was so often a nightmare for me that I thought for a moment I was in a dream and tried to wake up.

Her voice came again, sharper this time. ‘Rafaela! Stop daydreaming. Your turn to read!’

I stared at her helplessly.

‘Don’t look at me in that vacant way, child!’ she snapped. ‘Pay attention. Page 83, begin at the top.’

Another girl put her hand up, looking at me nervously. She was ignored as the teacher got up and began to come over.

‘Please, Miss,’ the girl said hesitantly, ‘Rafi can’t talk.’

The teacher whirled round. ‘And who asked for your opinion, young lady?’

The girl fell silent and put her head down.

My throat was tightening painfully, a tightness that was spreading down into my chest as the woman got closer.

I remember her shoes: black patent court shoes with a scuff on one toe. I remember I focused on the scuff as I tried to breathe.
One in, one out
, I told myself, attempting to count so I didn’t forget how to do it.
One in, one out
.

She stabbed her finger at the page. ‘From here! Now read!’

One in, one out.

She bent over me. ‘I will not tolerate this nonsense. Begin reading now!’

One in . . .

But the breath wouldn’t come in. My chest was too tight.

She was angry. Her face was reddening as her frustration with me built.

I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t.

I shook my head.

And that was when she really exploded.

‘How DARE you shake your head at me?’ she shouted. ‘I don’t know who you think you are, young lady, but I do not accept behaviour like that from anyone in my class. Now, I have given you an instruction and you had better do as you are told.’

Silas said to me after that she’d probably gone so far by this point that she couldn’t have backed down even if she could see it wasn’t working or she’d lose face in front of the other kids.

‘You WILL do as you are told,’ she yelled as I still didn’t begin reading.

I couldn’t breathe in or out by this time. I heard the other kids talking about it the following week when I returned to school and apparently I went purple.

‘If you don’t do as you are told, we will all sit here until you do read. And if this whole class has to miss their break and playtime at lunch because you won’t do as you are told, then it will be very much the worse for you, madam, won’t it?’

My stomach cramped so badly that I fell forward on to the desk.

‘READ!’

I couldn’t hear her any more. The ringing in my ears got too loud. They said I fainted and fell to the floor. They said she thought I was faking it at first and carried on shouting at me to get up and stop being so silly, but then a teacher came in from another class to see what all the fuss was about. She called for the Headmistress, who had me taken to the sickroom where they kept me for the rest of the day. The school nurse stayed with me, but nobody called my mum. Silas said with disgust that they were probably hoping to cover it up. After all,
I
wouldn’t talk. But one of the little girls in my class, I think the one who had tried to speak up, went over to the netting that separated the prep department from the senior school and got someone to find Silas. She told him what had happened.

When I look back on that now, she could have become a friend, if I’d had the courage to realise it. It wasn’t until I made friends with Josie that I began to recognise signs of friendship, but that girl did two nice things for me that day. If I’d tried to be friends with her after that, maybe my time in the prep would have been different.

Andrea stood up. ‘I think I’ll make us a drink and get the biscuits out,’ she said. Her cheeks were flushed.

‘It’s OK,’ Silas whispered as she switched the kettle on and rummaged in a drawer. ‘She’s not mad with you, just with that stupid woman.’

Andrea made us tea and handed the biscuits round. There were chocolate digestives. She smiled as I took one. ‘If I was on a desert island,’ she said, ‘and could take only one kind of biscuit, I’d take chocolate digestives.’

I frowned and grabbed the writing pad.
They’d melt.

Andrea laughed. ‘You are far too sharp not to speak, Rafi, and too funny.’

Nice try, Andrea, but that wasn’t how I saw it.

‘So that was a very negative memory associated with not speaking,’ she said as I munched my way through biscuit number two. ‘Can you think of any more positives to balance that out?’

To be honest, right at that point my view on co-operation changed. I might have felt like shutting down at the start of the session, but now I genuinely did want to think of some positives because that memory was just so depressing.

Make more friends.

Because, you know, perhaps I could. If I was a braver, speaking person, I could talk to Rachel. She was Silas’s friend, but I liked her and she was interesting. I would like to be able to tell her that.

In another world, on another planet, I might talk again. In this one, right now, I couldn’t really see it happening.

‘You seem to have lost some confidence since last time we met,’ Andrea said, proffering the biscuits again. ‘That’s a shame because you need to stay focused if we’re going to do this and that means you need to keep believing you
can
. Because you can, you know. There’s no physical reason for not speaking so that means it
is
possible, no matter how hard it may seem to you at the moment.’