Read The Voice of the Xenolith Online

Authors: Cynthia Pelman

The Voice of the Xenolith (2 page)

My dictionary is not in strictly alphabetical order. It is organized by topic. I group together words which have some similarity, either in their structure or their meaning. For example, I have a list of words which all start with the prefix
‘re’
. In my dictionary they are listed under the heading
The World of ‘re’
. This is a group of words which describe what it is that I will do when I finally finish school (let it be soon) and start working in my chosen profession of palaeontology or detective work. The ‘re’ words are:

retrieve, rescue, recover, restore, retain, remember, reclaim.

These words describe what I am interested in doing: I want to spend my life searching for things that are hidden or lost. I sometimes think I am not interested in anything else.

Sometimes I enter words in my dictionary simply because I like the sound of them. Like the word
‘thrive’
(see below). I also have a separate topic for Geology words, and a section titled Fossils, because I like collecting fossils and whenever I find a good one I look up its real name and write it down.

Even when I didn’t speak to anyone outside our family, I used to collect words. I am not like some kids in my class who don’t care how they speak and who use any old word to say things. They use verbs as if they were nouns; the other day someone in class said, “That is a big ask.” And they use new slang words each week.

Words are important to me. I like to get them right and to know exactly what they mean. Even if maybe hardly anybody will ever hear me saying them.

The reason I like the word
‘thrive’
is this: There was a writer by the name of Maya Angelou. She wrote books and poems and plays, and she died recently. She once said something important:

“It is important not merely to survive but to thrive.
To thrive with some passion, compassion, humour and style.”

That is why I like the word ‘thrive’.

Maya Angelou was raped when she was seven and she didn’t speak for years after that, but then she became a writer and a poet and she spoke up for Black people in America who were discriminated against. So not speaking doesn’t mean you have nothing to say. Maya Angelou had plenty to say and she said it loud and clear. She said it when she was ready to.

I wasn’t raped, nothing like that happened to me, but I also didn’t speak for a while, and now I do.

3
Amethysts and other minerals

At the beginning of last school year, when I was twelve and a half, we moved house, to another city, and I had to change schools.

I had already transferred to High School when I was eleven, but the High School I went to before we moved was near my old Junior School, and so I started High School with all the kids I had known for years, and the change wasn’t that bad. It is true that High School can be scary, because suddenly instead of having one class teacher who comes to your classroom, you have to carry your bag of books and go to each teacher’s room; you have a different teacher for each subject and you go to a different room for every lesson. So that meant lots of change, and lots of complicated timetables, and lots of talk.

I think my parents were a bit nervous when I left Junior School; maybe they were worried that this kind of change would set me back a bit, with my history of selective mutism. Not that my parents talked much about that, and they certainly didn’t call it that by name. The exact name for my problem is something I found out on my own, when I was about eleven and started to read online about speech therapy. When I asked my parents if that was what I had had, they looked a bit unsure of what to say, but they are scientists, and they like to be accurate and precise in what they say, so they said yes, and that my speech therapist, Mrs. Edelstein, who knew how to work with all kinds of speech and language problems, had helped me get over it.

So whatever it was then that made me silent, I was now officially not a selective mute person. Not any more.

But now, moving to a new city where I had no friends, and didn’t know what the teachers would be like, was not a good change. And on my first day I made a bad start, because the geography teacher asked me a question and I hadn’t been listening to what he was saying; I was planning a new topic for my dictionary, so instead of asking him to say it again, I just ignored him and stared at him and didn’t say anything. I didn’t actually mean to be rude, not then, on that first day, although since then I have developed a few rudeness strategies which I use quite often. But on that first day, he thought I was being rude, and he called me ‘insolent’ which I thought was rather a good word to put in my dictionary, along with some other
‘in’
and
‘im’
words:

insolent, impertinent, insulting, impatient,
impossible, in-educable.

He and I didn’t get on from that day.

I had problems with other teachers at my new school too. I won’t mention their names, but there were two teachers, in subjects which are quite important, and they started complaining about my not participating enough in class. They would call on me to answer questions, and sometimes, even though I knew the answer, I would get cross because I knew they were calling on me just to make me participate, so I pretended I didn’t know. And they probably suspected that I did actually know the answer, so they were frustrated, and I was angry, and it wasn’t going well.

The problems I was having with teachers reminded me of my first days in school, when I was five. I had never been to nursery or to playschool, in fact I had never been anywhere without my parents. My father’s geology work meant he had to travel a lot, to many different countries, and when I was little my mother and I went with him wherever he went. So I never went to a child minder or to playgroup until that day, when I was five, and I had to start school.

Even though my parents had told me I would be going to school, and we had gone shopping together to buy a school uniform and a school bag and pencils, and they had driven past the school so I would know where it was, I didn’t really know what was in store for me. I certainly didn’t understand that once I had been there, on that first day, I would have to carry on going there forever. Day after day after day. And that our travels with my dad, going with him on his work trips, were now over.

I remember that very first day at school, even though it was eight years ago, when I was driven to school, and my parents suddenly drove off in their black car, my mother waving to me out of the window, and my new baby brother strapped in his car seat in the back, and they left me there. I didn’t know what I had to do or why they had gone. Or when they would come back. Then a teacher came up to me and bent down low, and put her face next to my face and she spoke in a booming voice and she smiled so wide and looked at me so hard that I had to look down to get away from her eyes. So I suppose that’s when it started, that’s when I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t look at the teachers and I didn’t want them to look at me.

After a while I suppose I got used to being at school, and I didn’t feel so confused each morning, and I knew what I had to do each day, but I still didn’t speak. My parents would drive me to school, and leave me there, and I had to sit through hours and hours of boredom until they came to fetch me, and in the meantime I didn’t speak to anyone, and I would listen to the other children trying to learn their letters and sounds and I just couldn’t understand why I had to be there. I already knew all the letters, in fact I could read when I was four, so it all seemed pretty weird.

My first class teacher in Year One thought I was just shy, so she left me pretty much alone and didn’t try to make me talk. But she left shortly afterwards and we had someone new. This one was probably not cut out to be a teacher. Or maybe she just didn’t know what to do with me.

I know what a real smile looks like. My mother has a real smile and though she sometimes looks in the mirror at the wrinkles at the side of her eyes and tries to smooth them out, I think her smile wrinkles are beautiful. Actually in our family we call them crinkles, not wrinkles, because they look a bit like crinkle paper.

But this teacher I am telling you about had neither wrinkles nor crinkles and I could see she was not happy with me for not talking when she wanted me to talk. She smiled at me with her lips but her teeth were clamped closed. Her teeth never smiled. And her eyes didn’t smile either. She was not smiling all the way through.

But my name is Amethyst and I am named after a mineral and nobody can make me talk if I don’t want to. A rock can contain different kinds of minerals, but a mineral is a mineral all the way through. I was stronger and harder than she was. So I didn’t speak at school for the whole year.

And now that I am thirteen I do speak, but I prefer to speak only when I have something to say, and I prefer to say only what I mean. I speak when I need to, for example if I want to get information, or when I need to tell someone something important, and otherwise I don’t say much.

4
Sand

Now that I think about it, I suppose it is not surprising that my geography teacher and I did not get on. He was a useless teacher because I knew more than he did. Once when he told us something, I put my hand up and told him that he was wrong. So it is not surprising that he hated me after that. But I couldn’t just let it go; he was talking about deserts and that is my father’s area of expertise and I knew he had made a mistake.

It is important to be accurate in science, and geography is a science, not a matter of opinion or style. So even though this teacher thought I knew nothing about geography because I don’t ever do geography homework, I actually do know something about deserts.

The reason I know geography is because my father’s work involves travelling all over the world, digging and exploring deserts and analysing sand. Sometimes when we went on a work trip with my dad we would stay in one place for months. When I started school I could have pointed out to you, on the globe which I still have in my room, every country we had been to, and I could tell you what language they spoke in each place, and what they liked to eat, and if that country had lots of rain or lots of drought. I knew which insects I was likely to meet and which animals might be dangerous, and I knew the names of the rivers and mountains in each place. So I probably knew more about geography and about languages when I was four than most kids know when they are my age now.

When I was small, before I started school, my mother and I would go with him wherever he went, and I had my own passport. I still have that original one even though it has expired. I keep it in a box in my room where I keep my important documents and papers.

If you look at that passport now you will see stamps from all over the world. We have been to lots of deserts: the Karoo in South Africa, and the Negev desert in Israel, and the Sonoran desert in Arizona. I remember the Panalu’u black beach in Hawaii, because I have never seen such black sand before or since. I remember the orange sand dunes in the Namib desert, bigger than buildings, with their sharp curved edges shaped like the wings of giant birds, and the black shadows cast by the dunes in the baking sun making curved lines which echoed the lines of the dunes, but not exactly; the shadow curves were somehow different, softer than the sand curves.

We used to go to all those countries because they have lots of sand and that is what my father studies for his work. He is an expert in sand. You may wonder what is so special about sand and why a person like my father, a clever person, could spend his whole life learning about and exploring sand.

My dad says that each tiny grain of sand can tell you a story, just like a book. And each story is completely different from any other story that sand can tell.

If you know how to read sand, what each sand grain is made of, and the size and the shape of the grains, you can find out about the geological history of a place. Sand travels around the world in ways people can’t travel: it is pushed by wind or by ice or water, it moves huge distances across the earth and can tell us things about the world and how it was millions of years ago. My dad could tell you how each different type of sand moves and travels. Some sand grains roll, and some bounce, and knowing how sand travels or clumps or slides, he can advise farmers and miners and builders about the physical conditions in which they are working. My dad tracks sand like a hunter tracks an animal.

I learned about tracking when we were with my dad on his trip to the Kalahari desert. We had the help of a man who was from one of the hunter-gatherer tribes still living there. This man was an expert tracker and he showed my dad how to do basic animal tracking, and when he had some free time he showed me how to track people’s footprints in the soft sand of the desert. Some things are obvious, like noticing in which direction the tracks are facing, but some are harder to read, like looking at the depth of the footprint to estimate how big or heavy the person was, if he was a child or a grown-up. You can tell if a person was walking or running, by the tracks their feet make in the soft sand. Even on grassy ground, you can tell which way a person was heading from the direction in which the grass was bent when a person walked over it.

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