The Voice of the Xenolith (8 page)

I think I am getting old myself, because I am trying to write about Mrs. E. and what kind of person she is, and I keep getting sidetracked. Let me try to describe what she looks like.

She has grey hair, which even my grandmother doesn’t have. My gran does not have grey hair because she goes to the hairdresser every month and has her roots touched up. Mrs. E.’s hair is grey and shortish, and smooth, and she has a floppy fringe which gets in her eyes so she has to brush it to the side all the time.

She wears glasses. She must have about five different pairs, and that’s another thing about her: she keeps losing them and finding another pair so you never know which one she will be wearing. She keeps taking them off and putting them on; sometimes she uses them on top of her head to hold her floppy fringe back, and then she will leave them on top of her head and start looking for her glasses. Once she was wearing two pairs of glasses at the same time: she had one on her nose and another pair on top of her head, and for a while she didn’t notice.

Maybe it’s because she is old that she forgets not just where she put things, but also what we are meant to be doing in our sessions. When I went back to see her, after the teachers complained to my parents, she wrote down some targets for our work together, like working on public speaking and confidence, and ‘managing conversational flow’ (that was her idea of course) but I usually manage to get her sidetracked by other things so we often don’t work on our targets at all.

Or maybe she is just very sharp, because I have noticed that even when we are not working on our targets, but just talking about all kinds of things, just chatting really, and she is being curious and wondering about things and saying ‘Hmm…’ a lot, she is looking at me out of the corner of her eye. And maybe she thinks I don’t notice, but every conversation we have ends up with me talking and talking, and telling her ideas I didn’t even know I had until we got into that conversation. Considering that I am accused of being a non-participator in class, I seem to be able to talk a lot, and I sometimes surprise myself how much I talk when I am in Mrs. E.’s office.

In my first session with Mrs. E. after my mother arranged for me to see her to keep the teachers happy, she asked me what was going on at school, and why I had come to see her.

I told her it wasn’t my idea, but then I thought that sounded rude, because she would think I didn’t want to be there, and actually I didn’t mind going to see her. At least it got my parents off my back. So I told her about the teachers who were complaining about me, about my Attitude and that I was sullen and I didn’t participate and didn’t have team spirit.

She asked if it was only the teachers complaining, and I told her that my mom and dad weren’t exactly complaining but they were looking at me in that worried way they have which I hate.

Actually I was furious that my parents were worried I wouldn’t do well at school and I wouldn’t get high enough marks to go to a good university, because I know I can do it and I don’t believe you have to do homework to get good marks in the final exams, and I thought they would have known I am capable of doing well. I was starting to wonder if they too had doubts about my ability.

I didn’t know how to explain it to Mrs. E. so she would know how stupid this whole thing was, how it had been blown up into a big problem, when actually there wasn’t a problem because school is supposed to be where you learn certain things and pass your exams, and I was doing all of that.

I knew that the whole fuss was actually about what teachers expect you to be: just like everyone else. And I was not going to try to be like all those kids, who speak in half-sentences and pretend to be oh-so-sociable in class, always answering the teacher’s questions in just the way that makes a teacher happy, but in the meantime they spend all their hours outside school with their heads bent over their phones, texting, tweeting, and not talking to anyone. And definitely not talking to me, the class weirdo.

My silence, the fact that I don’t talk much to other people, is actually no different from theirs in quantity, but very different in quality. Mine is a silence which is thought-out, a silence by preference. Theirs is just because they are too busy texting to talk.

But Mrs. E. was not interested in the other kids. She wanted to know more about the main complaint against me, about not participating.

“So some of your teachers complained to your parents that you don’t participate in class. Can you tell me a bit about this participation, so I know what it is?”

I told her it is the kind of behaviour you have to show in the classroom: putting your hand up and saying things when the teacher asks you to, but not speaking when the teacher doesn’t want anyone to talk, even if you have a good point to make. The teachers are always asking questions in class, and the kids who are good participators always put their hands up and have something to say to answer a question. I think participation is more about pleasing the teacher, complying with what the teacher wants, than about learning or thinking about new ideas.

“And is it that you don’t put your hand up, you don’t participate, because you don’t have an answer to those questions the teachers ask?”

“Of course I do! I know exactly what the teachers are asking! I just think it is stupid to answer because the teacher doesn’t want us to really have a conversation, she just wants us to say what is already in her own head so that she can get on with the lesson.”

“So these teachers, they ask a question and they already know the answer?”

“Usually. I sometimes think, why don’t they just set us a test, then we can all write down our answers to the questions, and it will be over, and nobody will have to talk, and even better, nobody will have to listen to other kids saying the same thing over and over. It is completely boring, and if that’s what they want me to participate in, well I am not going to.”

By this time I was furious, just thinking about the whole thing and the fuss everyone was making about nothing.

“Hmm… I wonder…” said Mrs. E., her head tilted to the side, looking up at the ceiling.

It is a good thing that Mrs. E. likes to take a few minutes to think, to be quiet, because it gave me a few minutes to calm down. I was so irritated by this whole stupid panic about the teachers’ stupid complaints that I couldn’t think straight.

Mrs. E. finished thinking and wanted to know more. “So am I right,” says Mrs. E., “that participating means having boring talk, saying things over and over, and listening to people saying what was already said?”

To be completely honest, there was more to it than that, though she had got it partly right. The thing is, that when the other kids say something, maybe I know more about the subject than they do (this happens in geography especially) or they are using exactly the same words the teacher used and they haven’t even thought how you can use words to say things which are nearly the same, but not exactly the same, and in the end I can’t stand it that they see it so narrowly, and that they speak so quickly, without taking time to think, and I have so much I could say … but I kind of freeze; I don’t think they will get it anyway if I tell them my ideas, and I am sure the teachers would hate it if I was always Miss Know-it-all.

Like that time when I corrected the geography teacher; he has never forgiven me for that. I know he hates me and it is completely mutual.

I told Mrs. E. that just sitting there in class, listening to questions and answers, questions and answers – that is what makes me wish I was somewhere else, maybe on the beach in Folkestone looking for fossils, or swimming in the sea around our Greek island. And that is when the teachers see that I am dreaming and not listening and that is when they call on me and I don’t know what they have been talking about and I just stare at them. And that is when they talk about my Sullen Attitude.

Mrs. E. couldn’t leave it alone. She asked me what I thought the teachers would want me to be doing, if I
was
actually ‘participating.’

“Those kids who do participate, what do they actually do in class so that the teacher knows they are participating? I don’t mean what they say, but what do they
do
?”

“They put their hands up, they give the right answers to the teacher’s questions.”

“And you…?”

“I know the answers, and I don’t put my hand up. I don’t see why I have to tell the teachers what they already know. If I fail an exam, if I write rubbish papers, then I can see that they have something to complain about.”

“So,” said Mrs. E., “You are sitting quietly, and this quietness, this silence of yours, is causing people to complain about you, to make your parents worry about your future.”

I felt bad because I wasn’t telling Mrs. E. the whole story, so then I told her that for some teachers, like the geography teacher, I don’t do the homework.

She didn’t seem to care about that. She wanted to talk some more about participation. She asked me, “So when you are not putting your hand up, and you are not giving the answers the teachers are waiting for, what are you actually doing at those times?”

“I am just sitting, doing nothing, maybe listening, maybe not, but I am not disturbing anyone.”

“So are you sitting, not disturbing, just being silent?”

She was really getting to me, asking the same thing over and over. This was getting boring.

“Yes, that’s what I said, I already told you, that’s what I’m doing, just being silent.”

And then Mrs. E. said, “Is being silent something you know a lot about?”

Well, that stopped me in my tracks. Because as I have told you, when I was five I didn’t speak outside our house; I was silent for more than a year. So silence is something I am expert at, I suppose.

I know I am a quiet person. I don’t do small talk, I don’t chat. But what about the right to remain silent? How many times do you hear that in police dramas on television? How come criminals have the right to be silent and teenagers don’t?

So I said nothing.

One of the things that people don’t know about selective mutism is about the fear. I suppose most people know that if you have selective mutism you actually can talk, but you choose to talk only with certain people and in certain places. But what I think most people don’t know about us is the fear that makes your heart beat very hard and very fast and everything goes black and you just want to disappear.

It’s not only about talking, it is about being looked at, having people listen to you talking and watching you while you talk.

The feeling I used to get, and I can still remember it, when I was expected to speak in front of people who were not my family, or in places where other people might overhear me, was like a big force, a monster, coming down and landing on my neck and grabbing me so I couldn’t get away, and squashing my chest down, and I would feel like I couldn’t breathe, and I had to close my eyes. I felt as if I could avoid it by not looking at it, and if I didn’t look at it, it wouldn’t be able to see me either.

My heart used to beat so fast that I thought I would die, because I had heard about heart attacks: my father’s father died from a heart attack when I was four, and I thought this feeling was a heart attack and the monster was called the Heart Attacker.

It is really embarrassing to talk about it now, but when I was small, sometimes the Heart Attacker would hide under my bed at night and I was scared to go to the toilet in case he grabbed my feet when I got out of bed.

And that is why I didn’t speak at school, because the Heart Attacker would grab hold of me and I couldn’t breathe. My parents thought I had asthma but in the end it wasn’t asthma or a heart attack, it was selective mutism, but we didn’t know it then.

I used to dream that I could fly. I don’t mean wishful thinking or daydreaming, I mean real dreams, the dreams you have when you are asleep. I would fly high above all the schools and all the teachers, and people would look up and say, “Look! There goes Amethyst!” And nobody would be able to tell me what to do, nobody could try to make me speak, because I would just fly away.

Selective mutism is a kind of phobia. You can’t explain it to someone who doesn’t feel it. My dad has no fear of spiders but my grandmother, his own mother, just can’t stand them. If she sees one in her flat she actually phones my dad to come over and get rid of it for her. I asked her how it felt to be scared of spiders, and she said, “It’s not that I am scared of them, they are just disgusting to me, I can’t explain it.” And she actually shuddered when she was telling me.

But I could see that her feeling about spiders is not a real phobia, because feeling really disgusted, even shuddering with revulsion, is not the same as the fear people feel if they have a phobia. She doesn’t feel terror, and she wouldn’t have known what I was talking about if I had told her about the Heart Attacker.

Mrs. E. was still talking about what was going on in school between me and my teachers.

“I wonder,” went on Mrs. E., with her pondering expression, hand on her chin, head tilted to the side, “I wonder why it is that after Silence left you alone for so many years, since you were about seven and you stopped coming to speech therapy, it is now trying to make a comeback? What is it that Silence has noticed in your life that makes it think it can come back again?”