Since joining the mutes, I haven’t had You sneak through the cat flap in my head for a week now. That’s the longest I’ve been free of your visitations since I came of haemorrh-age. Now that your crowding presence is gone, my thoughts are skittish and agoraphobic. But the quiet is already padding the walls. I have joined Poppy in patch-making, where the buds of my fingers taste different fabrics. It’s also one of the only jobs in the community that has a residual attachment to language. I enjoy subvertising the logos – with a nip and a tuck turning Prince coffee into Price coffee. Most of the clothes come from landfill. I asked Mother about it once, and she said it was to ‘preserve brand integrity’. Donating unworn Frisson Froufrou lingerie to charity stores or organisations damages its upscale image, so instead new bras and knickers are defaced and dumped if unsold.
Oona checks in on me at least once a day. She revises what she calls ‘hand words’ with me. Of course, they aren’t words at all; they can’t do what words do – fracture the light of meaning through a crystal lattice to reveal its component colours. They are restricted to the dull grind of manual labour – mimic an action, signify an action. There are only about 70 of them and I already know them. Palms together making a pillow for the head means ‘sleep, asleep, go to sleep, sleeping’, the fingertips of one hand pressed together and held up to the mouth signals ‘food, eat, hungry’. They are the high wall around an abstinent life.
For those who must go as far as to speak, a flat hand at the side of the mouth indicates that a teller – one of the unbled – should be called. This starts a game of charades with the kids guessing at the meaning. The success rate isn’t good.
Mainly, it’s the younger ones, whose haemorrhages are recent, that ask for a teller. The older silents hardly ever use this last retort. Maybe they’re tired of the indignity of playing the fool, or maybe they don’t have anything they really want to say any more. Is it possible to no longer want to trace out the topography of language? I can’t imagine that. As much as I despised LipService, with its trompe-l’oeil ceiling of airbrushed angelic aspirations, I feel the flatness of my scratchings in the dirt here.
The thread running through my patch-making day is the possibility of adding to the hand words. I think of it as my gift to the mutes – a word in repayment for the generosity of these people’s touch. Like the head of a tick still attached to my skin even after the body has been pulled off, the itch of your mouthparts says that this is no kindness – I want more hand words. I don’t listen.
When everyone gathers for dinner in the parking garage, announcements are made. A mute will stand and perform a few hand words. The scrape of the tin drum that is my seat against the concrete floor turns a glitter of gazes on to me. I point to myself to indicate ‘I’; next comes my new hand word – I rub my left patchwork sleeve between the opposite thumb and forefinger to represent ‘feel’. Heads swiveclass="underline" there are no hand words for sensation or emotion, which is strange for a culture that prizes touch. It’s what makes the sign seem so necessary to me. I finish with the left hand over my heart for gratitude, thanks and respect. Gudrun rises and slowly turns her back to me, and to the table, before sitting down again on her metal drum, facing the exit. The true silents clustered around her follow suit. And eventually so does everyone else at the table. Poppy is one of the last to rise. She looks at me as if I were the monkey who won’t release the word candies and so can’t get its closed fist out of the narrow neck of the jar. She makes one furtive sign, ‘school’. Normally, the sign would mean the community’s school on the property but I’m sure she means the one we attended, where we created new words. Then she also scold-shoulders me. I’m left standing. She thinks I’m refusing to learn.
Oona comes and leads me out of the parking garage.
‘You’ve been given a warning. No one is allowed to make new hand signs.’
I make a mute point of shrugging and facial confusion. There’s no hand sign for ‘why’ either.
‘It’s got to do with the talking labels and brands.’ She says the last word as if sliding a hand into a dark burrow in the ground. ‘And the way they make feelings and wanting go bad. Some things must be shown by our actions not our words.’
I nod. She leaves me sitting watching the cabbages grow obediently in the last of the day’s light.
I stick to the hand signs, but knowing that I can’t add to them is starting to make me resent them almost as much as the patch. Oona still makes me practise the signs. I think she’s worried. Only I can’t tell about what. Whether I’ve accepted that I can’t invent new ones? Whether I’m adjusting or have already been too damaged by the ‘talking label’?
One day, instead of asking for the next hand word, Oona says, ‘Did you know Avery?’
I can’t think who she’s talking about so give a slow half shake of the head.
‘Avery was my best friend. I knew his touch on my back without seeing him. Poppy went to find him when he didn’t come back from the hospital. We’re not supposed to look for the ones that don’t come back. But Avery was like me. He was born here and he told me he was coming back. He promised to bring me sweets. Poppy says he’s dead.’
The carton that Poppy collected. That was Avery. For a moment, I feel like a gravedigger who is caught lifting coffin lids. But she can’t know. Lost Property can’t be explained in mute point, can it?
‘In the box that Poppy brought back were sweets. I know they were sweets because the packet said: “Pop mothballs in, and forget the gnawing worries.” Poppy won’t let us have them. But I want to eat those sweets and remember Avery.’
Oona’s words remind me of the cause of death on Avery’s box: ‘Fatal haemolytic anaemia due to naphthalene/dichlorobenzene poisoning resulting from ingestion of mothballs.’ I had thought it was suicide but Avery was poisoned with words.
‘What?’ says Oona.
It’s impossible to share ideas with people here, but they notice the most infinitesimal muscular twitch of emotion. I ape putting something in my mouth and then keel over cartoonishly. The shame of explaining a death with such buffoonery is horrible.
‘The sweets killed him?’
I try again, following the eating gesture with a waggling finger to show that mothballs aren’t food, but she thinks I’m forbidding her sweets. Only when I pretend to take a bite out of the end of a candle does she understand.
‘So why does the packet use those words?’
With effort, I pull my shoulders back from the defeatism of shrugging. I don’t know how to explain the metaphorical mid-air twisting of words that land catlike on another level of meaning. I remember how Dad died writing an echo, burnt by the flame of language. Avery died, a clothes moth drawn to the wordless darkness in a dumb fog of naphthalene. Poor Avery in fool’s mothley. His end is as nonsensical as Dad’s.
Oona reads my face and says, ‘You’ll find a way to explain it.’
The next day, while I’m cutting and sewing, cutting and sewing, my mind, too, is stuck on a loop until I imagine my hands as Dad’s and guess the meaning of my own mute point – the cutting and rebinding of the stories between Eda-Lyn’s skin. The book. With the book I can show Oona the shifty character of words.