Another morning helper was Damon, a slight, softly spoken man in his early twenties. He would shuffle off his boots the moment he entered the flat, as if he had spent time in Japan. In the corridor to the bathroom he had no wafting powers to compare with Nimat’s, but he spoke gently to Dad and persuaded him to co-operate pretty well. Most days he seemed not to have another job to go to, and I would happily squeeze oranges for him and brew coffee of quality.
One morning over the coffee and orange juice Damon asked me if I had noticed his speech impediment. It was a strange thing to ask, because yes, I had in fact noticed that he had a speech impediment, but only on the very day he had asked the question. Before then there had been no detectable lack of fluency.
He explained that on previous days he had been choosing his words carefully to avoid problem consonants, vigilantly manning the points (in effect) so as to send his sentences along stretches of track where there was nothing blocking the line. From today, though, he was putting into practice the principles of a radical speech-therapy method.
It seemed odd that the immediate effect of speech therapy was to impair the fluency of speech, but it didn’t seem helpful to point this out. I hoped it would work for him.
Over the next week or two the radical approach to speech therapy acquired a name — this was The McGuire Programme. Part of the technique seemed to be a matter of mastering the art of ‘costal breathing’ and part of it was clearly psychological. The system sounded so American that I was surprised to learn that the David McGuire who devised it was a Briton, a semi-professional tennis player who had drawn on his knowledge of sport for both aspects of the programme, the physical and psychological.
Damon was set targets for some exercises, such as ‘VS with walk-away’. VS is Voluntary Stuttering, and Voluntary Stuttering with walk-away meant that he should approach a stranger and initiate a conversation, but exaggerate his stuttering to the point where the other person, yes, walked away. He was supposed to achieve this, say, five times between one group meeting and the next. There was also the electronic equivalent, VS with hang-up I suppose, in which he would act out a similar level of blocked speech on the phone until the stranger on the other end of the line hung up. I remember Damon saying that to save money he would call free helplines. He didn’t need to have a question prepared for the relevant product or service because he wouldn’t be getting beyond the first syllable anyway.
This was fascinating and alarming. It made psychological sense for stutterers to take control in this way. If there is a link between shame and stuttering, what could be more empowering than seeking out the humiliation you have always feared? I don’t mean that shame is the origin of the behaviour but that it becomes an inextricable part of it. Having provoked rejection under controlled conditions, you can come to realize that it’s not so unbearable, and take some of the pressure off a self-reinforcing pattern.
On the other hand there were elements in the programme reminiscent of minority politics, of twelve-step groups, and, most obviously, of cults. To stop passing as fluent, to start insisting on your imperfect articulation, seemed to be some sort of speech-therapy equivalent of coming out of the closet. Yet the notion of the ‘recovering stutterer’, endorsed by McGuire, seemed to describe stuttering as an addiction. It was hard to see that a stutterer who ‘relapses’, when unable to consolidate the progress made with the group, was in the same existential boat as the alcoholic unable to stay sober without the safety net of the meetings and the emergency parachute of the sponsor. Did the stutterer have to accept the fact of helplessness as a precondition for recovery?
I even thought there was something rather ominous about the phrase ‘the road to freedom’ — it seemed to say there was only one. Still, I enjoyed having conversations on a subject so far outside my experience. Damon maintained direct eye contact while he spoke, which was particularly disconcerting when he was telling me about the unbroken eye contact which was a requirement of McGuire Programme meetings. It was only when I was tactless enough to ask if the sessions were expensive that he moved his gaze away.
One day he took a further step in his shy boldness, asking me if I could recommend a gay bar for him to visit, since he was ‘bi-curious’. Inevitably I had preened a bit about the way I could balance divergent impulses, filial, sexual, paternal, as if I was Blondin coolly cooking an omelette on a rope above the Niagara Falls, when my little balancing trick was only over the Serpentine. I pointed out that I wasn’t much of a bar-goer, and that he should consult a listings magazine, but he was very keen on a personal recommendation. What he wanted was a bar that was 100 per cent gay, so that everyone in the whole place except him had a fixed sexual identity. Only then could he satisfy his bi-curiosity in safety, conceivably even setting his feet on another road to freedom.
Almost from his first visit I had encouraged Damon not to be defined by the duties which brought him to the flat. I wanted to reward his excellence as a carer, but the result was that his excellence was eaten away by the rewards I devised for it.
There was the day when after Dad’s shower was finished Damon popped his head into the kitchen and asked, ‘Any chance of some fresh squeezed orange juice?’ There was every chance, as long as I got busy and squeezed some oranges. I might not have been made uneasy by the request for juice, but I certainly was by his stipulation of the process.
And there was the day when he popped into the kitchen to ask a personal question before finishing his tasks. After about a minute I became aware of the creaking noise as Dad shifted his weight on the Zimmer frame, and realized that Damon had left him in the corridor leading to the bathroom. Having no momentum of his own, Dad was waiting patiently for the resumption of cues. By this point the personal attention I had given to Damon had more or less destroyed his professional performance.
Luckily the agency that employed Damon lost its contract with Camden Council shortly afterwards, so I didn’t need to deal with the problem I had created.
One helper from the Care Alternatives roster who stayed on to look after Dad in the evenings even after the agency lost the council’s contract was Bamie. Bamie, from Sierra Leone, wasn’t tall but was certainly strongly built. Not only did he think the British had done Sierra Leone a power of good, he claimed that this was the general opinion of the inhabitants. Imperial guilt is such a reliable reflex, even in those born after the days of Empire, that I would have suspected a joke if Bamie hadn’t been so solemn and insistent. In some impossible way we were the good guys, and anything that had gone wrong since we left was a matter of local culpability casting no shadow on our collective honour. Whether he meant to do it or not, Bamie was chipping away at a fundamental part of modern British identity.
One thing about Bamie which took a little getting used to was that he called Dad ‘Dad’. At first it seemed possible that he had misunderstood and thought that this was his client’s name in the world, until he explained that in Sierra Leone it is the polite way of referring to an older male person.
Though in his North Wales childhood an awareness of racial diversity went no further than the admission that South Waleans might be human, Dad soon became used to Bamie. But the first time this muscular black man, not only black but somehow monumentally black, his skin tone very dark, his eyes flashing, used the form of address ‘Dad’ while tucking him into bed, Dad’s own eyes went very wide and he sent them wonderingly over towards me, seeming to signal Something I’ve forgotten? I was able to reassure him that his bloodline hadn’t taken a strange turn by saying, ‘Dad, you remember Bamie, he comes to look after you …’ Holly, though, never really got used to being referred to in his darkly growling voice as ‘Aunty Olly’, aunty being the respectful form of address in Sierra Leone for female persons of whatever age.