The Visitors (28 page)

It is the first day of September 1903. I am twenty years of age. At home, it is nearly time for hop picking. The plants tended, pests killed and diseases controlled, the year-round care of Golding Hop Farm’s men for our crop results in dozens of strong green bines laden with delicate cones. In Whitstable it is Partridge Day, the traditional moment when the Oyster Company ends the close period, when oysters spawn and the men can harvest. The oyster, soft, cold-blooded mollusc with no foot to move itself, began its journey within the confetti cloud of spawn, to float down to the bottom of the sea and anchor itself to some shell or other hard habitat. It can easily be suffocated by sand or destroyed by rough seas, and if it comes to rest on mud or weed it will die at once. If it survives, it grows, grey as the sea about it. The Crowes and their fellow dredgers tend these infants with daily care, from spawn, to brood, half-ware and mature oyster. Thus man tends his land, his flock and the resolve of these plants, these creatures, against all that would destroy them, is aided by the diligence of their farmers, but something in these beings – the hop seed, the oyster spawn – is determined to survive. I respect the hop, the oyster, for their tenacity.

The Dutch went to Africa. They fought with the natives and dug in, held on fast to the land they claimed as an oyster to its cultch. They built their farms and made a new world for themselves and their progeny. The land brought forth gold and the British came. It was only natural that the land would then be fought for. The black Africans, observing these two nations clubbing each other’s heads over the red soil, chose sides and fought too, or starved with the others as the land was ruined. The war is over now, as the Treaty of Vereeniging was signed on the 31st day of May last year. The British had won, and now they own the colonies. Tens of thousands of Boers, black Africans and British died from combat, disease and starvation. South Africa is scarred by war, the farms burned, the fields salted, the people scorched by loss and grief. Some left, preferring exile. Some remained, like Maria and her Caleb, to rebuild a life. They have a child, a little girl called Elizabeth, and they work hard to bring forth fruits from the dry soil to tend her. The odds are against them, but they persevere.

Once I was an animal, human in body, feral of mind. Charlotte found me and held out her hand to me, grasped mine and pulled me free, spent countless hours conversing with me, laying aside her own needs, wants, space and time. Together we forged ahead with shapes, signs, letters and words, to sculpt from that beast a person who could name herself. My nature was cultivated, the weeds of my empty mind cleared and in that clean frame seeds of language grew and flowered. I loved this woman, my father, my mother; and I loved a man. He loved me, in his way. Love can be a kind of possession, a desire to occupy another person’s body and soul, welcome if requited, an invasion if not. I saved his life and he made a life with another, a woman who had struggled against the pests and diseases of war, through great loss and suffering, yet survive she did and now their sweet child lives on. My learning, my love and my family have grown me into the literate, educated, adult woman who stands today at the prow of this great ship, the salty air cooling as we cross the Atlantic, the wind in my hair like frigid fingers.

Lottie and I are aboard the RMS
Carpathia
, a beautiful, brand-new ship with four towering masts and bright white lifeboats stacked neatly. The service is superb, the crew starched and courteous, the food tasty and economical. We are bound for Boston, the home of the Perkins Institute for the Blind. This was the place the Crowes’ kindly vicar-tutor visited all those years past and brought back finger spelling. He gave it to Constance; and, through her sister, to me. I have been in correspondence with the school for some time. Though only the blind are named in its title, revealing its inception, it caters too for the deaf and the deaf-blind. Hearing the history of Lottie’s education of me – first deaf-blind with the manual alphabet, later deaf with visual signing – the tutors at Perkins are most interested to meet us and employ us for a time as tutors to their pupils, be they without sight or hearing or both. I hope to improve my writing and read widely. One day I wish to study for a degree. I look forward to meeting others like me – the deaf – and those who once I was – the deaf-blind. I believe I can aid these young people and that somehow, being with others like me will smooth some of the strangeness of my upbringing.

I wonder how I will feel when I meet my first deaf-blind children. I have never spent time with anyone else of impaired senses. All my life I have been with the hearing and the sighted. I remember hotly how abashed I was of my cloudy eyes when blind, how concerned we were with my noises and grimaces when deaf-blind. When I see these deaf-blind children at Perkins, will I be embarrassed at how I used to be, full of pity? I am ashamed at this feeling. I recall worrying at how Caleb must have looked at me when I was like this. I worked hard to control my blindisms. Once sighted, I rejected my past self. It would be honest to say I sometimes pitied, sometimes hated the deaf-blind child I was. When I see these others, I hope I can reach inside myself and remember how it was to be that child, to be myself with no fear – running through the long grass, gulping down cocoa – that my lack of these two senses did not define my humanity. I hope that my understanding will make me want to reach out to these children and help them as Lottie did me. She was not driven away, did not recoil, yet instead embraced and saw me for the true person inside the oddity. This is what I hope I can do.

For many years, my deaf-blindness was like a monster from myth. My aim was to overcome it. Every monster has a weakness exploited by the hero to win the day. In my darkest memories, I see my early self as a blind monster crashing through the wilderness. But it was not my disability that kept me there. It was my ignorance. Once I found language, the spell was broken and I assumed human form. One does not need sight and hearing to be fully human, only communication. My lack of sight and hearing were not the enemies, only my lack of connection was my monster, my isolation. I was a fish out of water. The ordinary world surrounded me, yet it was not my home. I had to search for my medium. I found it through words. My mind was my true medium, as it is for you, for all of us.

In the Time Before, my mind was a bare house. The walls intact, the door open, but nothing within, no furniture or carpets, curtains or knick-knacks, no memories or images to suggest a life. The cold wind blew through it and its eye-windows stared blindly at nothing. It was a ruined Boer farm, the vacant shell of the Visitor. Only my Visitors haunted my empty house with their invisible, silent presence. Then Charlotte came to me and language filled that house with the stuff of life, as surely as Caleb and Maria fabricated their farm from the ground up. Just as they built upon the burned foundations of Mimosafontein as it once was, a family home rich with laughter before the catastrophe, I believe my mind retained the phantasmal voices of nearly two years of language heard and spoken before my own disastrous fever. When language came, my Visitors spoke to me, their words expressed by the ghosts of voices I had heard before my ears were spoiled. They say a man who loses a limb still feels an itch. So it is with my hearing. Something haunts it. It kept my sense of sound alive. When I gained my sight, I left behind the province of the deaf-blind and stepped into a colourful new land filled with treasures beyond imagining, the play of shape and light intoxicating, the new delight of ‘eye-music’, as Mr Wordsworth named it perfectly.

Yet I remain and will always be deaf. Deafness is my country, my home. Despite my accomplishments, I am aware that others who are unacquainted with my kind can look upon me as inadequate, assuming that my language of visual signs and spatial grammar is inherently inferior to spoken language, rudimentary, a pantomime. If I am given leave, I explain how much more it is than a sum of its parts, that each sign for each word is not frozen in time and meaning, yet the constant movement and holds of sign speech are closer to music than talking. And speech only has one dimension, that of its linear progress through time; yet sign works in four dimensions, three related to the signer’s body: hand shape, location and movement, as well as time. Signers know how complex is the use of the whole arm, the wrist, the fingers, as well as all the fine degrees of eye, face and head gestures and how distinctly these contribute to meaning. As for the misnamed art of lip-reading, few guess at the intricate skills deployed to observe and infer from face, eyes, tilt of head and crease of skin which I use when ‘listening’ to those who speak.

Yes, I continue to learn my languages and develop my skills. But even before I learned these tricks, I was a person. A human who felt and inclined, extant, surviving. I think back to the flying fish I saw on our way to Africa, the natives I observed but never spoke with, never attempted to divine what moved in their minds. My excuse was my inexperience of their type, their society, and my business elsewhere. Yet, those black Africans I ignored have been maligned through history by such as me, have been ignored and trampled and assumed to be idiots, as I once was – the deaf-blind beast, the idiot child, born a savage and always a savage. But they were wrong about me. We are all wrong about those we label others. I am lucky that it was a young woman who found me, not some cold-eyed scientist to keep me in a glass box – as the insect in the child’s jam jar – and study my condition, to affect and improve me for the greater good, as the native to the coloniser. Lottie loved me and wanted to reach me. That was all. Through reaching me, she also found her sister again. I saw my Visitors for the first time. Lottie translated messages from the hearing world for me and I brought news from the spirits to the land of the living. We move between worlds, my Lottie and me. Every human has the capacity for thought, for language, for mind. Every waking moment we negotiate the news from our senses with what sense our mind makes of it, moving effortlessly between the mind’s territory and outside. My footfall exploring this globe, my journeys across darkness and silence, and my dispatches from the spectrum of the Visitors – all these forms of time-travel have taught me never to presume, always to observe, to examine with compassion, to learn the oft-hidden nature of what makes us who we are.

The ship approaches the New World. I thrill at my first sight of brief islands of American land as they appear and dip, gathering to form a coastline. Lottie comes beside me, carrying my shawl to put about my shoulders. Our entrance to Boston harbour is an assault on the senses, as all ports are: thresholds between water and land, land and other lands, countries and cultures. Thronging the docks, as I have come to expect, are a host of new Visitors. One turns violet-white and curious, another, another. They await me. I do not pity them or find them tedious, I think only of how I can help them go quietly to their peace. Or if they obsess on business unfinished, what good I can do for the living by acting as their translator, their go-between to heal old hurts, solve old mysteries and put doubt and grief to rest. In the ancient stories, the hero moves between two worlds, the ordinary world of his home, to the special world of adventure. Only once he is the master of both has he earned his freedom to live.

Before I left home, I told Mother about the Visitors. She wanted to be kind, to believe. But she had to have it proven, like Lottie. There are not so many like Maria or Caleb, who accept it immediately, have been on the edge of knowing it all their lives. Mother is a cynic. I took her down to the hop garden and looked for Father there while Mother sat patiently, her eyes betraying her concern. Is my girl mad after all? He came, muttering amiably about the weather.

The wind in the west suits everyone best.

I turned to Mother and asked her to speak, to recite a poem, sing a song or tell a story – but it must be something that Father knew, something about him or a memory they shared. Her eyes were fearful. But she did it for me. I watched her mouth move. She was singing a song. It was unfamiliar to me. Its first lines spoke of sweethearts and flowers, girls meeting boys. I imagined Father and Mother, as they were a lifetime ago, before the babies and the blood, before me.

Father
, I said.
Listen. Listen.

He stopped, standing between two slanting rows of hop bines, the green leaves alive with fluttering. His arms hung loosely by his sides, his mobile face slackened. I had not seen him so at rest since the day he died. He could hear her, he was listening to Mother.

Evangeline?
he said.
Evangeline, my love?

She is here, Father. She is singing for you. What is the song she sings? What memories does it conjure for you, Father?

We are visiting the music hall. I took her there on our first meeting unchaperoned. She had never been, coming from far more well-to-do stock than me, the farmer’s son. But I had good prospects, you see. They said my grandfather would lose his shirt if he bought these hop lands, but he made it pay and my father was born wealthy, you too.

Tell me about Mother, about Evangeline, that night at the theatre.

She was the loveliest girl in the room. We sat in the grandest box, it cost me half a week’s allowance. Some of the songs were risqué. They made her blush.

Did you whisper to her, Father?

Oh, yes. I wanted to be close to her. I leaned across and told her I’d been inspired to read her namesake, the poem ‘Evangeline’ by Longfellow. I said to her, ‘Let us not wander the wilderness in search of love. We have found it here. We have found each other.’ That moment, the way her eyes brimmed with tears, how her hand sought mine and we kissed. We knew.

Thank you, Father. Thank you.

I told Mother his story. She cried, as Lottie did. She questioned me all afternoon, worried it over in her mind all night. By the next day, she had come to terms with it. We spoke of Father, of all the Visitors, of how they wander, and how I can help them find peace.