The Voice of the Xenolith (5 page)

But it is also about finding out something we didn’t know, like finding out who made that antique desk, even though that person must have died over a hundred years ago. The receipt, signed with someone’s actual name, put my uncle in touch with that carpenter; he could get to know him in some way.

When my dad told me about the desk and how my uncle found the hidden receipt, at first I wondered why anyone would want to hide a receipt. It isn’t something that you would normally keep secret, and it isn’t something particularly precious, in itself. But now I think I do understand what that person was doing when he or she hid it: perhaps it was the idea that one day, someone like my uncle, or even me, would find it and know who made the desk and how much it cost to make. It would be a way for that person, from years and years ago, to talk to someone living today. Things from the past can sometimes talk to you and you don’t need words for that kind of talk, and you don’t need to use your voice or have anyone listening to you talking aloud. It is a kind of silent message.

That is what I like about archaeology, and also about finding fossils which no human person has ever seen until you, the finder, dig them up: you can find things from long ago and recover them, and you receive a silent message that perhaps nobody else knows about.

Maybe it sounds to you like I am contradicting myself, because I said that I love to search for things which are hidden, and then I said that I like things to be organised and labelled and not hidden. But it is not a contradiction. I search for things so that I can find them, and once I find them I can know them, and I can keep them safe. But the search comes first.

The
Perfection of Spaces
isn’t only about keeping things in their correct place; it is also about being accurate when you are talking about spaces and places, and when the geography teacher said things that were not accurate I spoke up and said so.

For once, I wasn’t keeping quiet, even though the main complaint about me at the new school was that I was too quiet. So I was getting into all kinds of trouble at school; sometimes for speaking, and sometimes for not speaking.

‘Sullen’ is what one of the teachers called me when she spoke to me one day after a lesson. “You have an Attitude, you are Sullen, and it won’t do you any good in this school my girl, so better snap out if it right now, and then we will get on just fine.”

Well I didn’t want to get on with her. I didn’t like the way she taught and I didn’t like her or her personality. Or her Attitude.

And the P.E. teacher also picked me out, in class, in front of everyone, for having a ‘half-hearted attitude’ and for having ‘no team spirit’ because I only like to do sports or activities which are solitary. Well that is true; what I like to do in P.E. is the fitness work. Fitness is something that is important to me, because if you are fit you can get out and go on long hikes to different fossil sites. It takes a lot of energy to keep going for hours, bending down, digging, and checking the tide is not coming in and that the cliff is not going to fall on you while you are digging.

In the school Mission Statement – I looked it up online – it says that they aim to give their students ‘a balanced life’, with academic fitness and physical fitness, and nowhere does it say that you can only get physically fit if you play team sports.

I am not a team player and never will be. I am not interested in belonging to a team and having us all win together, and I am not interested in getting a ball into a net or a goal or anywhere. I know I have to be fit to be healthy, but I can get fit by working out by myself in my room with weights, or by running on a beach, which I love doing. So why would I want to be part of the basketball team?

The thing I hate most about working in a team is that not everyone makes an effort. At school we are sometimes given projects to do in a small group. Usually it is left to me, because I hate it when people produce work that has mistakes or is half-finished, so in the end it always comes down to me taking it all home and fixing it up so that the presentation is correct, without mistakes, and looks good. So team work actually means, for me, that I have to do twice the work of everyone else. I suppose that is my fault, I asked for it, because I would rather turn in nothing than turn in something that isn’t accurate.

If you do something it should be done well. Or not at all. And for some teachers, I choose not at all.

So I suppose I was the least favourite student of a whole bunch of teachers at my new High School. Well, that was something I could share with them: the feeling was mutual; we were the least favourite of each other. I certainly won’t put their names in my book because that would make them famous and I am not going to help them be famous.

It was no surprise when the first parent-teacher meeting of the year ended with my parents coming home that evening looking serious and asking me to sit down with them to have a discussion.

I think that my dad was secretly a bit pleased with me when I told him the geography teacher had made mistakes and I had corrected him, but they didn’t like it that I had no team spirit and that I was sullen and had an Attitude. And that I didn’t do homework for certain teachers.

On the other hand my parents were not terribly upset because they had got such a glowing report from the English teacher about me and my work and my ‘intellectual level’ and my ‘originality of thought’ that it kind of offset the other complaints.

My mother said to me straight out, “Well, what do you think? Do you want to do anything about this? Or should we just leave it? Is it a big deal?” and my dad made some comments about getting a good track record in high school so I could go to a good university.

I have to tell you I felt very sullen in that conversation, and my Attitude was getting worse by the minute, because I hadn’t wanted to change schools and I didn’t like this new school or anything about it, but I knew he was right about university, so I tried to explain. I told them that I don’t mean to be like that, I am just different from the others. I am not interested in the things most people in my class are interested in, and I am not a team player and I don’t want to be. I just want to learn things that are interesting and to finish school as soon as I possibly can and go to university where I can study only the subjects I have chosen, and where nobody will care if I have team spirit or if I participate in group discussions.

But my parents being who they are, I wasn’t going to get away with it, because they don’t mind if I am not talkative or sociable but they do mind if I don’t do well at school. They want me to be able to choose any profession I want to. They kept telling me I would have to meet the requirements of the Universities Admissions Service and get good grades to get into a good university. Seeing as I was only twelve at the time I really thought they were over-reacting; I still have years to go before I leave school. Unfortunately.

The next day my mother said she had an idea. What if they contacted Mrs. Edelstein, the speech therapist I used to go to when I had selective mutism, and asked if she could see me once a week and maybe she could help?

“Help me to what? I don’t need her, I am not a selective mute any more.”

“I am not sure really,” said my mother, “but she knew you well, and I think you got on with her, so let’s talk to her and ask her what she thinks we should do.”

It turned out that since I had last seen Mrs. E. five or six years ago, she had done some extra studying herself, and she was now doing student counselling and coaching, as well as speech and language therapy. So that is how it happened that my parents arranged for me to go and see her once a week, for coaching.

I think they chose the word ‘coaching’ because they didn’t know what else to call it, and they were worried that I would refuse to go if it was something like speech therapy, which I certainly didn’t need any more. But when we talked about it, it didn’t sound so stupid, because the plan was that she would help me with any homework I was stuck on (or refusing to do), but she would also see if she could help me to participate in class by showing me some techniques for confident public speaking.

To tell the truth I didn’t mind going to see her. When I used to go and see her once a week, when I was still a selective mute, I had enjoyed our time together. And I thought, if it gets those teachers off my back I will agree to go and see her once a week.

And even though I had last seen her years ago, I remembered that she had never forced me to do anything I didn’t want to; she never once tried to make me talk when I wasn’t ready to, and she didn’t stare at me. She didn’t think I was stupid. She would explain why we were doing whatever it was we did in speech therapy, and how it would help me not to be so scared of speaking, so that I understood why I was there.

So that’s how I started to go to Mrs. E. again, once a week, just as I used to go to her when I was five and I had selective mutism.

When I first started going to speech therapy with Mrs. Edelstein at the age of five, a few months after I started school, it wasn’t because I couldn’t speak; I just didn’t want to. Well, not at school or outside the house.

At home I spoke to my father and mother, and I spoke to my grandmother. But because I was not speaking at school, or when I went with my mother to the shops, or in the park when other people were there, everyone got worried.

Anyway, it was to my grandmother that my parents turned for advice, all those years ago, when the school told them I wasn’t speaking, because she knew me so well. I know they asked her for advice, because I overheard them talking to her on the phone one evening. By then I must have been at school for about three months.

When they had that conversation, they thought I was sleeping but I was awake, sitting on my favourite step in our old house, the one we lived in before we moved. There was a special step, just where the staircase from the ground floor to the first floor turned a corner, and nobody could see you if they were downstairs, but you could hear everything the grownups were saying.

I used to like sitting on that step sometimes when I had to think about something, or even when I just wanted to read but didn’t feel like being in my room. Most people knew that if they were looking for me they might find me on that step; when I was little, if I wanted them to see me I would go down a few steps, but if I wanted to hide I would go back up to my special step. Sometimes my parents had visitors who stayed for hours, and they had no idea that I was sitting up there, listening to them, because they couldn’t see me if I chose not to let them see me.

So that evening, when I was five, when they phoned my grandmother, I could hear they were upset, but I couldn’t understand why they should be upset, because my parents knew I could talk, and my grandmother knew I could talk, and so did I. It’s just that at school I didn’t talk, and only the teachers were upset and why should my parents care about that?

And even though I knew people were worried, I didn’t see that there was anything to be done about it. But my parents wanted to do something about it, so they decided to send me to a speech therapist.

The first time I met Mrs. E. I remember that my parents didn’t tell me she was a speech therapist; they called her a teacher, but on her wall outside her house there was a sign saying ‘Speech and Language Therapy’ so I knew what I was there for.

Lots of people thought that because I didn’t speak I couldn’t read, but when I started to go to the speech therapist I had been reading for a whole year already. I could read before I was five, because my mother taught me.

I remember that I wasn’t happy when I saw the sign saying ‘Speech and Language Therapy’ because I was worried that she would try to make me speak. But she didn’t. After saying hello, she hardly even looked at me. She just opened her toy cupboard and it was packed with games. I had never seen so many games outside a toyshop. She said I could choose any game I wanted but I didn’t know what to choose so I didn’t choose anything.