The Voice of the Xenolith (13 page)

Like ruby. Or diamond. Or Amethyst.

I was surprised that this had never occurred to me before. Even though I had by now known Mrs. E. for many years, and even though I love to find the origin of words, I had never thought about what her name might mean.

We were all, all three of us, named after precious stones and minerals.

And that meant that there was a connection between us, between me and Mrs. E. and Ignace Edelstein, and maybe for that reason we could all be in some way guardians of each other, and we had a responsibility to each other.

I thought about what Mrs. E.’s responsibility to me might be. That was easy. Mrs. E.’s responsibility was to be my speech therapist. When I was five, she was the person who helped me get rid of the Heart Attacker, and she was the guardian of my silence and my speaking. And now that I am thirteen, she is the guardian of my classroom participation and of my learning how not to infuriate my teachers. Maybe to get them to stop irritating me too.

I remember that when I was still a selective mute, after a few months of going to speech therapy with Mrs. E., we started playing games where I had to say a few more words. I guess by then Mrs. E. must have felt that I would agree to play games where I would be talking to her just a little. And it did feel okay to me; maybe it’s just that I was used to her by then, and also I knew she wouldn’t make me do anything I didn’t want to. She always warned me before any new game; if it was a game that included talking, she would say something like, let’s see how the game goes, and if you don’t like it we can choose something else.

I actually liked some of those word games, even though I did have to talk, because as I already told you, I do like words, and even when I wasn’t talking at school I still knew how to read and spell lots of words and had started writing my own dictionary.

Mrs. E. and I used to play a memory game with pairs of identical multicoloured pictures. You have to place them upside down on the table, all mixed up, and then turning over two at a time you try to find two identical pictures; if they don’t match, you put them back, upside down, and the next person has a turn. The talking part involved saying the name of the picture you had turned over. We had a similar game at home, with much more boring pictures, and Jasper used to win this game every time. I could see he had a strategy but he refused to tell me what it was. So at that stage I still couldn’t find a way to remember the exact position of the pictures that we had seen and replaced. Then one night, before I went to sleep, when I was re-arranging my fossils in their compartments, I had an idea: to organise the pictures like the little tool boxes, in lines, so each picture would be in its own position in the line; you could remember the place and that would help you remember the picture.

I didn’t know how to tell Mrs. E. about my idea. I didn’t know the words to use and I didn’t want to say so many words to her, but I wanted her to know my new strategy. So at the next speech therapy session I tried to tell her about my strategy, but I felt myself starting to breathe too fast and it felt bad, like the Heart Attacker was squashing my chest.

So what I did was, I put my hand up, like a stop sign, so she would know that I wanted to stop playing and needed a break. And she said, “Oh, I understand, you want to stop playing”, but I shook my head ‘no’ because I didn’t want to stop playing and I didn’t want her to go and make tea. I wanted to tell her my idea but I couldn’t get my mouth to open and I couldn’t find the right words. So I started to silently arrange the pictures in rows and columns.

Now I know that the words I needed were ‘rows and columns’ or even the word ‘grid’, but then, I was only five, and it was easy to show her but not easy to tell her.

Mrs. E. waited, saying nothing.

This is what I mean about her being my guardian. She always knew when she should stop speaking. Some adults used to think that if I didn’t speak, they should speak more and more until I joined in. But the very opposite would happen: the more they talked the more I wanted to get away from them.

Anyway she sat silently while I arranged all the pictures in rows and columns, and then I showed her, by picking one up and putting it back carefully in exactly the same position, how having a special place for each card could help us remember where it was.

I knew she was impressed because she had a huge smile on her face, a real smile, with the skin on the side of her eyes all crinkly. And she said the words that showed me that she understood; she gave me the words I was looking for but which I didn’t know. She said, “Oh, I see, it helps us to find the pictures if they are organised in rows and columns! You have made a grid.”

And I was so pleased that she understood, and that she thought it was a good idea, that I also spoke then, and I said, “It is like a tool box. Each toy in a special place. Each picture in a special place.”

And I told her that my dad kept his stone collections in the same kind of toolbox.

I think if not for Mrs. E. and her strategies, I could have been fossilized too, and maybe I would never have spoken to anyone outside the family. When I got a bit older, and I could talk easily in class and to other people and in the shops, I had a secret idea that one day we would meet again, she and I, and I would say a big thank you to her for helping me get rid of the Heart Attacker who had hung around for such a long time and who messed things up for me so many times.

So you can see how she was a good guardian to me, but what could I possibly be the guardian of, for her? How could I be responsible for her?

It took me a few days to come up with this answer, which I haven’t told anyone; it is a private thought.

I think that my responsibility to her is to show people that she is the best teacher, so that even though she is semi-retired, and maybe not many people know who she is, one day, when I am much older, if anyone reads my book, they will hear about her and know what kind of person she was.

Then I thought, putting her in my book is not enough, because right now nobody is allowed to read my books. So in that case, I realised that what really counted was what I chose to do next: if I showed some team spirit at school, even occasionally, or at least participated in a few classroom discussions, the word would get around that it was Mrs. E. who had helped me to do this.

It’s not that I think she needs my help in making her famous; I think she is quite happy with her life as it is, but it is something I thought I would like to do. I want to make it clear that I don’t think team spirit and classroom participation are in any way important, or relevant, in fact I couldn’t care less about those things, but if that is what I had to do to be responsible for Mrs. E. then I would try to do it.

And I also thought, maybe there are other children who have selective mutism and who need help to get rid of their phobia. I read a wonderful book by a boy who had had a school phobia, and he wrote about how it felt and how he got over it, and I think that must have been so helpful to other children who had that problem. So maybe this was one time when I would need to write things down in a book which other people could read, because in a funny way maybe those other children needed me as their guardian, nearly as much as I needed Mrs. E.

But then I thought about Ignace Edelstein. Why would Ignace Edelstein need me to be his guardian? He already had a guardian: Mrs. E., and she is a person who takes things seriously, so I knew she would be a good guardian and would remember him. If anyone asked me to recommend a guardian I would choose Mrs. E., because when I was going to her for speech therapy she was one of the people I trusted most in the whole world.

There was one time, I have to be honest, when I thought she let me down. I must have been about six years old, and I was still going to her for speech therapy every week. It was always in her house. But one day my mother told me Mrs. E. would be coming to school that day, to my class, to see me in class and to visit my teacher.

I didn’t like that idea one bit. Mrs. E. was Mrs. E., my speech therapist, not a teacher. She had her office in her own house, she had toys I liked and we had a kind of unspoken agreement that she wouldn’t try to make me speak, and when I was with her I never felt that kind of panic, the fear that I felt at school whenever I was expected to talk.

I liked the idea of keeping Mrs. E. quite separate from school, just the way things are kept separate in their compartments in tool boxes and fossil collections. The perfection of places is important to me.

But nobody really asks children for their opinions about things, and even if they did they wouldn’t take a five-year-old child’s opinions into account, and maybe that’s a good thing. So a few days later she walked into the class during a lesson and I wanted to hide under my desk, but luckily she didn’t come over to me or even let the other kids in class notice that she knew me. She just sat quietly in a corner during a lesson and at first the teacher didn’t take much notice of her and after a while my heartbeat slowed down to normal and I started breathing again.

But then the teacher had to ruin it; she suddenly said, “Amethyst has got a visitor today! Do you want to introduce this lady to us, Amethyst?”

Everyone turned around to look at me, and this teacher was staring at me with her smile which was lips only, and I panicked, I couldn’t breathe, and they had to take me to the school nurse for my inhaler.

A little while ago, when I looked online about how speech therapists work with children with selective mutism, they said that it should be done in the school, not at home or in the speech therapist’s office, because it was better that way: you work on the person’s fear in the place where that fear lives, not in another, different, safe place, because then there is nothing to work with. But not everyone agrees; there are different methods and different ways to do speech therapy. So maybe she was doing it for a reason, and her visit to my class was not designed to make me lose trust in her, but to take me onto the next step. Though at the time it felt like it was designed to make me fall all the way down the stairs.