The Voice of the Xenolith (15 page)

While Mrs. E. read my speech, I used her computer to look online for some information about Auschwitz, where Ignace Edelstein had died. So when she spoke to me it took me by surprise, because I was so immersed in what I was reading. She said she liked what I had written about the Karoo, and she suggested a few changes in the order of the paragraphs, and asked a few questions about the topic to make sure I hadn’t left out anything important.

Then she said, “This is a good paper. Now comes the next task: to decide whether you are going to read it to the class, or whether you want to make a speech, without notes, or with very few notes, like politicians do when they are speaking in parliament.”

I wasn’t sure how I wanted to do it, so we looked on YouTube, and we watched some parliamentary debates which are broadcast on TV, and we looked at some TED talks online, where you can watch and listen to famous scientists talking about their work.

I decided that reading the speech would be dead boring. It would be no different from just handing out a typed sheet to everyone in the class and telling them to read it. What I wanted to do was to talk without notes, like a politician, like one of those scientists on TED; to have a point of view and to be convincing, so my class (and that teacher!) would sit up and listen.

It took a long time before I was ready to do it, because I didn’t know the techniques. We worked on my posture: we looked at the speakers on YouTube who looked powerful, and who looked lively and interesting, and Mrs. E. showed me how they used their posture to show confidence, and also how they used movement as a strategy: walking towards the audience sometimes, and then stepping back. And how they used hand gestures, to look convincing and get people looking as well as listening.

We worked on where I should look while I talked, because it is not just about the talking but about the looking as well. That was a difficult one for me. I still hated having people stare at me, though I knew how to use staring as one of my rudeness strategies. But the kind of eye contact she wanted me to use in my speech was moving my gaze from one listener to the next, very, very slowly, not making any fast movements with my eyes which, she said, can make a person look nervous and unsure of himself.

I never knew there could be so many strategies for giving a speech.

We practiced different levels of loudness, because she wanted to be sure that I would speak loudly enough for the kids at the back of the class to hear me, but not so loud that it sounded stupid. I felt really stupid, talking loudly when it was just the two of us in a room, but she got me to go into the next room, her waiting room, and give the speech from there, and when she couldn’t hear me she called from her room to tell me.

Of course being Mrs. E. she didn’t do it in the way any normal adult would; she didn’t say ‘I can’t hear you’, and she didn’t say ‘talk louder’; she just sang the ‘Fifteen Animals’ song, and the minute my voice was louder than hers she fell silent and listened to me, and when I was talking too quietly she started to sing again. It was totally weird, in fact I would have been embarrassed for her if anyone had heard her doing this, and suddenly I felt in some way protective towards her. But her strategy worked, and I got used to projecting my voice.

So that is how I learned the techniques of public speaking: loudness, posture, pacing and pausing, making eye contact with the audience, the whole thing. Don’t think it was quick and easy; it took four weeks, and four sessions with Mrs. E., but I did it.

On the day of the speech it was like a successful stage performance: I did it, and it went well. The geography teacher was pleased and even smiled at me. But the next day my life had not changed; everything was the same, school was boring, I hated P.E. and I spent my time planning my next English paper and my next birthday trip.

After that presentation, Mrs. E. wanted to know how things were going in class, now that I had managed to give a talk to the whole class and had done it well and confidently. Maybe she expected my life would have changed and I would have been transformed into a person who talked all day and spent her life texting and doing P.E. with a bunch of other girls.

“It’s the same, nothing new. I am still not participating, if that’s what you are asking.”

To be fair, to give her her due, she told me she didn’t want me to think that she was suggesting I should participate; she was just curious to know if I might consider ever doing it, and what I imagined it might feel like for me, if I ever did it.

I told her that if I spoke in class I was not going to just say what everyone was saying, or what the teacher wanted to hear. I refuse to do that, it is too boring. If I did speak, I would have to give my own opinions, and those are sometimes different from what other people think, and then I would have to explain why I think that, and sometimes I can’t put it into words the way I can think it in my head, and then they don’t get it and I have to explain again, in different words, and by then nobody is listening. And anyway the teachers have to get through their lesson and there is no time for discussions like that, for people to go into detail about their ideas so that other people can understand and consider what they have heard.

“It sounds to me like you have done it once or twice and it felt very uncomfortable? And maybe people were not listening, and the teacher was moving on so he could finish the lesson in time; am I right? Did it happen a few times?”

Well, that Mrs. E., she reads minds, as I may have mentioned once or twice already.

So yes, it did happen a few times and I had already decided I was never going to go through that again, and if Mrs. E. even tried to persuade me to give it another try I was going to walk out of her room right then and never come back. A prepared oral speech is one thing; talking every day, joining in all the time, just casually without preparation, is another.

I think keeping things separate is important. I don’t mix up the topics in my notebooks, and I don’t keep my archaeology finds with my fossils. In palaeontology you have to know how to carefully separate the fossil from its bedrock, so that you can see it more clearly. And I suppose I choose to keep myself separate from the kids in the class, and even if I didn’t, they would make sure I am separate from them because I am the weirdest kid in the class.

Thinking about things being separate or together made me remember an activity I used to do with Mrs. E. in speech therapy, when I was just starting to be able to speak to her, all those years ago.

She could see that I was more comfortable if she didn’t sit quite so close to me and if she didn’t look too directly at me. So she used to sit at the side of the table where we were playing, not directly opposite me, and she was careful to look at the toys and not at me. But one day she took out two puppets and a toy table and chairs, and put the puppets around the table, just the way she and I were sitting. She acted out this scene: the puppets were talking to each other, and slowly one puppet moved closer to the other, until they were face to face. Then the other puppet said, “That’s a bit too close!” so the first puppet moved a little further away. Mrs. E. explained to me that I could use these puppets whenever I wanted to, and if she was sitting too close, I could move the puppets apart and she would know she must move, but if I felt okay with it, I could leave them there, or even put the puppets a little closer.

Now I know that what she was doing with that particular strategy of hers was letting me be in control of the amount of separation I needed from her, to slowly learn to feel more comfortable being near her and even talking while she was near.

She had another strategy which had something to do with separation. As I have told you, one of the two ‘staircase’ strategies was to help me get my voice out of Mrs. E.’s room into the outside world, because it is all very well to be able to speak in speech therapy, during the session, but the real aim was to help me speak in other places, at school and at the shops and in the park.

The game was really simple: I had to choose four toys and put them on the table, and then Mrs. E. would go out of the room and I had to say the name of one toy, loudly enough for her to hear me while she wasn’t in the room. Then she would come in and pick up the toy whose name she had heard me say.

It seems like a silly game, and it sounds easy, but it wasn’t, because of my fear of talking aloud, and of having anyone outside my own house or, now, outside her room, hearing me speak. So she would ask me to practice saying the words quietly, to myself, while I was alone in her room, and then, when I was ready, I had to say it loudly. And once I could do that, she would move further and further away from the speech therapy room and I had to be even louder. It meant I had to be braver, and louder, the further she moved away, otherwise she wouldn’t have known which toys I had named.

Now I am thirteen, I sometimes think about that time, and I suppose if I had to name that strategy, I would call it the S
trategy of Separation.
It helped me to move from saying one quiet word, to saying whole sentences, in a loud voice, with Mrs. E. outside the room. So I was speaking while she was in a separate space. And it helped me separate myself from fear: the fear of people hearing me talk.

Mrs. E. was still harping on the same theme, over and over. She wanted to know if I could remember any other times in the past when I
did
speak up, when I didn’t let Silence stop me from speaking, and if I could remember a time, in the past, when people listened to me. Could I remember a time, any time, not just at school, but anywhere, when I spoke in public, when I did manage to tell someone my idea? She kept on saying to me that she wasn’t trying to get me to do anything different in class; she was just interested to know if I had, in the past, ever done it, if I could remember one time when I didn’t give up and kept on trying to get people to understand, and in the end they listened.

I told her that maybe I had done it a few times in my previous school, but since moving to the new school I definitely didn’t get anyone to listen to my ideas, and I didn’t even try. But when she asked me to remember an example from my previous school, I couldn’t remember anything specific.

She kept on asking me. Maybe last year, when you were twelve? Maybe when you were eleven? Maybe when you were on one of the birthday trips overseas? Maybe when you were on one of your summer holidays in Greece, on the island?