There’s a riddle that Dad and I loved, which is perfect. And Oona already knows about guessing games – she has to solve the silents’ body-twisters all the time. The thing about riddles is that they’re like a weather vane – it’s not the compass point, which the arrow indicates, but its opposite that is the answer. And this one’s easy enough, if you know about books. I can already hear it in my head:
For Dad and me, the solution (bookworm or booklouse) was itself a metaphor that hatches out of the original riddle as a LipService larva and eats all the books and everyone’s speech, only leaving us droppings. For all the words it has consumed and all the words it makes us spout – because more is never enough – they’re still just the waste of our thoughts. So am I better off now without the worm and entirely without words? Avery has made me uncertain. What if the mutes’ silence is a great unlearning? With every generation, more of them will come of haemorrh-age only to eat mothballs and stick their fingers in electric sockets when forced to step out into the consumerist world. Perhaps the doctors and copywriters are counting on that, together with untreated second haemorrhages and disease.
Aside from me, no one but Dad has ever seen the book. By showing it to Oona I risk losing it. I risk everything.
In the evening, we go up onto the roof with a vegetable oil lamp. We sit on the concrete parapet and I take the book out from under my shirt. Once again, I have pressed Eda-Lyn’s skin to my own in a pact sealed in salty squid ink, to protect our hides and the stories concealed beneath them from the doctors and word-eating copywriters. Now I am extending that protection to Oona.
‘What is that?’ asks Oona.
She pauses as she skates her fingers over the paper of the open page with insect-like delicacy. Eda-Lyn bends her pages in acknowledgement of such a touch.
‘Is it a book?’
I incline my head.
‘An unbled boy came here with his mother when I was younger. He was looking for books. I didn’t understand most of what he talked about. He didn’t come back from the hospital. I don’t think he liked it here.’
I point to the riddle and she haltingly reads it out loud. Her face has the expression of someone chasing peas around a plate in polite company – afraid to give up the fork but becoming increasingly convinced it’s the wrong shape. She rereads the riddle, whispering the words to herself. Then she feels the page again between thumb and forefinger.
‘What is it made of?’
I point to the plume rising from the vent above the underground kitchen.
‘Smoke? Fire? Wood? It’s made of wood.’
I smile, place a fingernail beneath the words ‘moth’ and ‘worm’s mouth’, before making the eating sign and pointing back to the smoke.
‘Insects eat wood. And books,’ she says slowly. ‘When they eat the books, they also eat the writing.’
I take a large square of fabric from my pocket and watch as she stitches the riddle onto it.
Three days later, Oona haemorrhages. From the patchworking office, I see someone being pushed in a wheelbarrow. I don’t realise then that it’s Oona. Later, three unbled teens come for me. Angry, they wave the stitched riddle at me, shouting that Oona isn’t yet eighteen. My head-hurting words made her bleed early.
I look at Poppy. She knows the basic science of an aneurysm as well as I do. No one can predict the precise moment when the artery wall will fail. Ruptures before eighteen are not unheard of, and to think that any collection of words can increase the pressure is superstition. This isn’t like Dad fighting the transdermal to write his echo. Poppy doesn’t look up or meet my eyes; she keeps sewing. Out of the window I see Gudrun approaching across the factory floor with two more kids.
Eda-Lyn is at my back. Since showing the book to Oona, I’ve been carrying it around with me under my shirt. It’s just something I have done without defining whether I’m afraid of a backlash or whether I just want to hold the words close, press them through my skin so that, like tattoo ink, they can’t be erased. How do I defend my actions without language? Can I rely on these kids who are prejaundiced against speech to communicate for me any more than You?
I run.
12
‘Eternal lame’ reads the logo on the patch in my hand. A long thread hangs from where the ‘f’ in ‘Flame’ has been darned over but the needle that was attached is lost. I realise that throughout my sprint across the factory floor, my scramble under the fence and out onto the road, I must have held onto the patch that I was working on when the kids came into the office. Earlier, when I arrived at the office and saw the tank top with the logo in the pile of clothes on the floor, I snatched it. After the disappointment with the Eternal Flame transdermal, a retaliatory gouging with a pair of scissors gave me a little flutter. The entrailing thread now dangles like gut at my wrist. But none of these patches ever really mend what’s broken.
Oona told me I had to choose, and, without really thinking about it, I did. I chose the LipService patch rather than the mute fabric one. When I consider that You are the price I’ll pay for that, I wonder if I made a mistake. Now I have to live with a squatter who destroys the furniture. Before I joined the silents, You were taking over more and more rooms, redecorating my thoughts with a hoarder’s accumulation of sales catalogues. I barely recognised the contents of my own head. Somehow I ended up paying You rent. I can’t go back to that. I can’t hear my thoughts spoken in your product hype. I can’t. Before I put a patch on again, I need a strategy, a defensive repositioning. Otherwise I can expect to be repossessed.
Soon, I will have to repatch in, go back to the Lost Property cubbyhole. The leave I took when I decided to join the silents is not quite over. No one will have missed me yet. I did wonder how long it would take anyone to notice that I wasn’t coming back. A few days? A week?
These last moments without You feel as if a camera has been turned on me. I’m hyperaware, a horrified observer, unable to act. Without your endless infomercial patter, I register the hustle of my exhalations, the soft suction pop of an eyeball rubbed in its socket and the swamp noises from my gut. Normally your television drone drowns out the burbling. But the truth is that You can’t escape my organic chemistry any more than I can. If I hold my breath, which of us will flake out first? And who will revive first? It’s a game of chicken. While You’re still scrabbling for air, I’ll lay out my letters on the triple word score and speak the things that You block with the clutter of your sloganeering. But before I patch back into LipService, I need to practise expelling You with the air in my lungs and calmly holding on to the emptiness.
I lie face down in the bath, imagining gelatine in the sweet rose water setting around me into a block of Turkish delight. Pink spongey lungs push against pink jelly as if fighting themselves. Calm, airless calm, I tell myself, but every alveolar sac is a throbbing bee abdomen, part of an angry hive in my chest. My head jerks up and the rush of air into my mouth disperses the swarm. The limb-thrashing desperation is not new. It’s what I feel every time I notice my thoughts slipping into yours and your yell and sell. So I keep practising until the bathwater is cold.