Louder Than Words (24 page)

Tyler was wildly excited about this attack. Dillon, when he came in, was jittery with anticipation too. I was as calm as a general orchestrating his umpteenth battle.

I nodded at them as they sat round in a circle to watch the opening of what they all hoped would be a legendary assault. And then I hit the keys.

I was barely conscious of time passing . . .

. . . the others came and went . . .

. . . coffee and food appeared at my elbow and I hardly noticed them go down . . .

. . . Lara went off to sleep for a while at some point and returned, her hair mussed up, yawning hugely . . .

Finally I rolled my chair back and turned to them. ‘It’s done.’

Tyler pushed past me and opened the web browser. He typed rapidly for a moment and then . . .

‘Oh my God! You did it!’

They crowded round. The UK Parliament website was now a black screen with a message in red letters stamped across it:

ACTIONX EXPOSES THE UK GOVERNMENT

20% of the world’s population live in extreme poverty. Our government makes noise to say they want to end this, but 1 in 10 British-registered FTSE 100 multinationals fails to disclose tax havens. Poor countries lose more money to tax havens in a year than they receive in aid. Tax havens are one of the biggest barriers to ending global poverty.

AND THE UK GOVERNMENT REFUSES TO ENFORCE TAX HAVEN TRANSPARENCY LAWS FOR ITS BIG COMPANIES. THEY PROMISE TO TACKLE THIS IN THE G8 THEN BREAK THEIR PROMISE AT HOME. LIARS!!!

This information was brought to you by ActionX – fighting for a world free from poverty and corruption.

Dillon clapped his hands. ‘Well done, my friend.’

Tyler surfed frantically around the net, pulling up page after page of government websites, all bearing the same message.

I pushed him aside gently and logged into the Ministry of Defence’s internal network. The same message came up.

Dillon whistled. ‘TOTAL Denial of Service!’

Tyler’s mouth hung open. ‘This is the biggest thing I’ve ever seen. Dude, you are a genius. You, like, pwned the whole government.’

Lara just smiled at me. But that smile said everything I had ever dreamed it would say.

Love, Silas

CHAPTER 45

‘Progress is progress,’ said Andrea, smiling hugely at our next appointment, with Josie nodding vigorously in agreement.

I was less sure.

‘It doesn’t matter that it’s not the sound I asked you to make,’ said Andrea firmly, correctly interpreting my expression. ‘What matters is that for the first time in years you’ve been able to make some sounds in front of someone else. And you’ve been able to do it several times.’

It hadn’t always worked. On some days after my initial success, I’d tried for an hour and still not been able to make anything come out, but on other days, yes, I had. Still no humming though. It was as if my brain resisted that because it was the noise I’d been set. Did that mean that there was something wrong with me? Was my mother right and I was just oppositional by nature?

No, I hated being shouted at so that couldn’t be it.

Unless I
was
oppositional, but didn’t have the courage to do it properly so this was my weak attempt at it, not talking.

Very brave. What an amazing specimen I was.

‘What are you thinking now?’ Andrea asked sharply. More sharply than I’d heard her speak before.

Must have given away more than I intended. I shrugged, but she wasn’t fooled.

‘It’s important we’re honest with each other,’ she said, holding my gaze. ‘And I’m going to be honest with you. I think you are having some very negative thoughts at this moment. Is that true?’

Were they negative if they were correct?

‘Rafi, are you having thoughts about yourself that I wouldn’t want you to have?’ she persisted.

Shamefaced, I nodded slowly. Josie moved to the chair next to me and held my hand.

‘I want you to tell me what those thoughts are,’ Andrea said. ‘I know you don’t want to, but I also know you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t want to get better so you’re going to have to trust me on this one.’ She pushed the pen and pad towards me.

I picked them up reluctantly and then hesitated. I couldn’t do this.

‘Go on,’ Josie urged.

So I wrote down what I was thinking.

Andrea read it without comment and then got up and walked over to the window. She looked out at the street below for a long minute.

‘Being mute is not defiance,’ she said. ‘I’ve never believed that for a second. I know that’s what the professionals used to think, but in none of the numerous cases I’ve seen, selective and progressive mutes, have I ever come across one who’s been doing it out of defiance. And I certainly don’t think that of you. You’re reacting to the pressure of expectation. That’s why you can’t make the sound that I set you. It’s a classic response.’

Andrea wouldn’t lie to me about that, which left two possibilities: a) she was right about me, or b) she had it totally wrong and I was the exception to the rule.

And it all came down to this: I wasn’t exceptional in anything, was I? So that meant she had to be right.

I slumped back in the chair and sobbed while Josie hugged me and clucked over me and tried to mop my eyes with a tissue.

‘One thing I don’t understand,’ Josie said, ‘is how she can write so well, but not talk.’

‘It’s hard to come to terms with when you first come across someone with selective mutism, but it’s like this: Rafi isn’t bad at communicating; she afraid of it. And, specifically for Rafi, it seems she’s afraid of being bad at it. With writing, there’s less pressure. Fewer people will wait for her to write something down – only the people who really care what she’s saying. So that takes the pressure off her.’

‘So she wants to express herself,’ Josie said slowly, ‘but she kind of freezes up when she tries to speak?’

I nodded as Andrea said simultaneously, ‘Yes, that’s it exactly. One thing we do with our younger patients is to get them to draw how they feel, or use plastic letters to spell out words that are important to them, to encourage them to keep communicating in other ways. Your mum said they tried that with you, Rafi.’

Yes, they’d done a lot of that in school when it first started. But I didn’t like the attention.

‘She said it didn’t work, that you seemed to shut down even more. One thing I’ve found with those little ones is not to look at them too much, not to put them under any pressure to answer.’ She smiled at me. ‘I call them my most delicate flowers – they wilt from too much time in direct sunlight. They need a little shade to flourish.’

I looked at her with my mouth open, really made eye contact in a way I seldom wanted to do. If she’d been my therapist when I was that young . . .

I burst into tears again.

‘Sometimes,’ Andrea said, taking my hand, ‘the hardest thing to face in life is yourself.’

And even through my tears, I recognised that as a truth I had to collect.

Josie and I spent some time just chilling together in my room that evening. Silas was out. Mum stayed in. When we got home, she’d handed me some cold cucumber slices from the fridge for my tear-swollen eyes, but she’d made no comment. She was different though – she made me and Josie dinner. It wasn’t great – her cooking never was – but it was one of those small Mum-things that she never normally did.

And it’s the small things that matter most. At least it is to me. I’d told Josie about the ActionX article already and she’d said she’d do some digging around.

‘I came up with something, but I didn’t want to tell you until after the session with Andrea,’ she said. ‘There’s some major stuff going on with this ActionX at the moment.’ She got me to log on to my laptop. ‘Have you seen all the stuff in the news about this cyber-attack on the government?’

I’d vaguely heard something, but hadn’t paid any attention to it because it didn’t interest me.

Josie opened up the BBC news website. ‘Read that. It was ActionX.’

Love is too young to know what conscience is.

(William Shakespeare)

CHAPTER 46

Dear Dad,

They’d come after me, I knew that. But I’d covered my tracks. I was confident. And I might have been in and out of their systems at home for weeks while I prepared the attack, but when it came to the hit I’d done it from Dillon’s place. They’d find it harder to trace it back to me that way.

It took them a full day to get everything back to normal, which was frankly incompetence. In that time, millions had seen the ActionX message. It had been blasted all over the TV and radio. Irate government representatives – blustering ones, and the genuinely clueless – all had been dragged out and paraded in front of a media dying to know how and why this had happened.

I watched it all with a smile. ActionX threw a party at Dillon’s and the lesser ranks spoke to me in the reverential tones they used to Dillon, like I was a god. But I didn’t care about any of that. I cared that Lara led me upstairs, away from all the noise, and told me she loved me.

She loves me. The world began and ended with that moment.

I’ve tried to come up with so many descriptions of how it feels: that it’s like being on another planet, just me and her, that we’re on an island bounded by sea that buffers us from the rest of the world, that everything and everyone in the world is silent and painted in black and white while we’re in stereo-sound Technicolor. But in the end there were no words for it. It was her, it was me and that was all.

We’d stood in Dillon’s cyber-base, surrounded by dirty coffee cups, and Lara had touched my face. A brush of her fingers down my cheek. A gesture of affection, unmistakable. ‘I love you,’ she whispered, her eyes locked with mine, and everything became worthwhile. All the time it had taken me to plan this, not seeing my friends for weeks, not even really seeing my sister . . . all worth it to hear those three words.

‘I love you,’ I said back, raw-voiced. I didn’t care how stupid I sounded. I wanted her to know she was everything. No games between us.

Kissing her was the most perfect chaos. I fell to pieces when her lips were on mine. I could spin away into a billion tiny shards scattered throughout the universe, every one engraved with her name.

I understand now why poets described love as akin to madness.

Love, Silas

CHAPTER 47

Andrea hadn’t set me any more homework after the last session. Josie had, in her bulldozering way, told her we’d keep trying with the humming until we really had nailed it.

And so that’s just what we did. We kept to the routine. Night after night I’d sit in her room and see what noises I could stand to make. Because that’s what it was. It was all about how much fear I felt when making them.

And then one day, out of nowhere, I did it. We weren’t officially practising. It was Saturday and we were relaxing in Josie’s garden while her dad was mowing the lawn. She had the radio on beside us and there was a song I really liked on the radio. Josie was singing along to it and then she suddenly froze and sat bolt upright, staring at me.

‘You did it!’ she exclaimed, but in a hushed voice.

Did what?

‘You hummed. Just then. You hummed along to the song.’

And I didn’t even know I’d done it. I’d hummed in my head, but it had leaked out. I wondered how many times that had happened before when there was nobody around to hear.

Maybe never. But maybe a few.

I could feel the fizzles of excitement building up inside me. I’d done something
right
.

Josie stopped looking stunned and leaped up, whooping. She pulled me to my feet. ‘Come on, we’re celebrating!’ and she danced me round and round the garden while her dad looked on indulgently, like he was used to two crazy girls prancing over his cut grass.

Was this the first and tiniest of steps on a long road to recovery? Or was it nothing but a fluke? I didn’t know either way, but it felt good to celebrate and be happy and have hope for once.

Silas brought Lara home again that evening. They hung out in front of the TV, wrapped in each other and round each other on the sofa. I noticed Toby texted him to see if he wanted to meet up, but Silas ignored it. And Lara said nothing about that at all. And I could not understand why he wanted to drop everyone for her. Even when they weren’t together, which they seemed to be much more lately, he didn’t see the others, but stayed burrowed upstairs, glued to his computer.

Lara acted like she loved him, but she’d said she didn’t. Had she changed her mind?

I wanted to leave the room really, leave them alone because they gave off exclusion vibes as strongly as a slap in the face. But I wouldn’t. I needed to see Lara with him. I needed to understand what this thing between them was.

What did she have that made him change so much? Made him perhaps commit the crime that the news agencies were still talking about. Because from the moment I’d seen that stuff about ActionX, there was no doubt in my mind – my brother was in on it. Maybe not on his own, maybe he had help, but he was involved.

It scared me to even think about what might happen if anyone found out. I wanted to talk to him about it, but for the first time with Silas, I didn’t know how to start when I had no voice.

I couldn’t sleep that night. The heat was oppressive and my bedroom stuffy even though I’d left the window wide open. There was no breeze to stir the curtains; the air was dead and heavy. I almost drifted off a dozen times, but then would wake, sweating and kicking around on the bed in a vain attempt to find a cooler spot.

In the end I got up and peeked out on to the landing. A chink of faint light shone from under Silas’s door – his computer screen. I debated going to see him, but in the end went and sat back on my bed, scared of what I might find him doing.