Louder Than Words (2 page)

One of the girls shuddered. ‘Yeah, your topless photo on the internet is not something you’d ever want your dad to know about.’

‘Oh, our stop!’ Silas got up and I shuffled out behind him. ‘See you!’

As they said goodbye to us, I gave them a quick smile without directing it at any face in particular and we hopped off the bus at the corner of Edgecombe Road.

Edgecombe is a long, broad residential road on the outskirts of our town that leads down to a footpath out into open countryside. It’s tree-lined on both sides and the houses are mostly large Victorian or Edwardian villas, often behind heavy laurel hedges and tall gates. There’s the odd new-build where someone has sold off part of their garden, but even Mum acknowledges they’ve been designed to tie in with the surrounding houses – she tends to get on her artistic high horse over things like that.

We set off down the street – our house is right at the bottom backing on to the fields – but we’d only gone a couple of houses when Silas nudged me and nodded towards a figure standing ahead of us on the pavement, dressed in the green uniform of the church high school on the other side of town.

I looked up at him questioningly.

‘I don’t know – didn’t a new family move into the Claxtons’ old house?’

I frowned and nodded – I thought so.

‘Maybe she’s one of them. Doesn’t look very happy, does she?’

This was a definite understatement. As we got closer it was clear the girl was in tears, and not just a few, but great big heaving sobs. She’d dropped her school bag by her feet and covered her face with her hands, and now she stood there, shaking and sobbing.

I shrugged at my brother. What did we do? We couldn’t just walk past and leave her there.

Silas looked like most seventeen-year-old boys would if faced with a crying stranger. Or he did for about five seconds, then he squared his shoulders. ‘Come on, we’d better see what’s up.’

This is one of the reasons why I love my brother. He won’t walk past on the other side of the road. Even when that leads him places he doesn’t want to go. Sometimes I wonder in retrospect whether I wish he had ignored her that day, despite what it would have cost me if he had, but then if he had he wouldn’t be Silas.

I trailed after him, determined to be supportive.

‘Excuse me, are you OK?’ He stood a careful distance from the girl. She started at the sound of his voice and looked up, her face streaming with tears that she just couldn’t stem.

‘Are you OK?’ he repeated while I smiled what I hoped was a comforting smile. I was quite amazed at myself for being so brave.

‘What are you laughing at?’ she snapped through the sobbing. ‘Get lost. Leave me alone!’

‘She’s not laughing at you,’ Silas said gently. ‘She’s trying to be nice. She can’t speak.’

‘Oh!’ The girl stopped as she was halfway through turning away from us. She looked at me and I dredged up the remains of my shattered courage to smile again. ‘S-s-sorry.’ She took a big sniff and scrubbed her hand over her face to dash away as many of the free-flowing tears as she could.

‘Look,’ said Silas, ‘you’re obviously not all right and I don’t want to interfere, but . . .’

‘I’ll be fine,’ the girl said quickly, rubbing her hands over her face again. I ferreted inside my bag for a tissue because her nose was streaming too. I felt for her, confronted by a strange boy with snot and tears all over her face. ‘Thank you.’ She took the tissue from me. ‘I’m sorry I was nasty. I’ve . . . I’ve just had a bit too much today of people laughing at me.’ Her eyes began to water again.

I nudged Silas. ‘Oh, don’t worry. She hasn’t taken offence,’ he said on my behalf. ‘She’s more concerned about whether you’re going to be OK.’

The girl blew her nose hard. ‘I’ll be fine. I had a bad day.’

Silas smiled at her as she bit down on her bottom lip to stop it shaking. ‘Must have really sucked.’

She managed a weak laugh. ‘Yeah, it really did.’

‘I’m Silas and this is my little sister, Rafaela, but we all call her Rafi. We live down there in the house round the bend. Are you from The Poplars?’

‘Yes, we moved in a couple of weeks ago. Um, is your sister deaf ?’

‘No, she can hear perfectly well. She’s mute – she used to talk, but she stopped when she was little. Why is quite complicated, but basically she doesn’t speak at all now.’

You could see the girl didn’t know what to say. People never do. In the end she probably got it as right as anyone can, by just saying, ‘Oh, OK then . . . hi, Rafi, I’m Josie.’

I saw my brother stiffen slightly out of the corner of my eye at the exact same time I froze my face so the girl – Josie – couldn’t read it. Because right then we both knew why she was crying. It couldn’t be a coincidence. Josie wasn’t that common a name. And she was about the right age – sixteen – and from that school . . .

‘Some days do stink more than you think possible,’ Silas said lightly, nodding in the direction we’d been walking.

She fell in beside us. ‘Yup.’

‘Rafi says – oh, not in words,’ he added when he saw Josie’s look of confusion. ‘Rafi tells you what she means in other ways . . . that on a day that stinks the answer is always chocolate. Don’t you, Raf?’

Josie smiled at me. ‘Lucky there’s some in my fridge, then.’

She was prettier than I’d first thought, though it’s hard to say when someone’s cried as much as she had. Her brown eyes were still raw-rimmed and her face was blotchy, marring what looked like very clear and soft skin, the colour of milky coffee under normal circumstances. Her crinkly black hair was twisted up into a knot on the top of her head – the severity would have looked terrible on me, but she had a softness around her cheekbones that could take it. Yes, a pretty girl. Not stunning, not breathtaking, but a girl a lot of boys would look twice at.

We stopped when we reached her house.

‘I hope you are all right,’ Silas said, looking completely unconvinced.

‘I will be,’ Josie said with a sad twist to her mouth that I doubt she knew was there.

‘You should come round and talk to Rafi if you’re not. She’s a good listener,’ he said. I practically dropped dead there on the spot, but the girl was looking at me so I faked it and nodded as enthusiastically as I could given I’d nearly expired with shock and the need to freak out. Had my brother gone mad? Come round and talk to
me
!

Josie looked genuinely pleased. ‘Oh, thank you,’ she said directly to me. ‘That’s so nice of you.’

I rummaged in my bag again for a Twix I’d had there since break and not got round to eating yet. I put it in her hand with trepidation.

She managed a little laugh. ‘You’re great, you know that?’

‘If you do come round, the name of the house is Elands. So you know you’ve got the right one.’ Silas gave her a last smile and she slipped inside the heavy gate with a final thanks and a little wave.

‘That was so weird,’ he said, once we were out of hearing. ‘Toby tells us about this girl and then . . .’ He looked down at me. ‘I feel so sorry for her. She’s in bits.’

And that’s my brother again. He doesn’t care if he’s supposed to feel sorry for her, whether that’s a ‘boy’ thing to do. He just does, so that’s it. All the same I glared at him for that trick of inviting her round.

‘Don’t look at me like that. I hope she does come round to see you. From what Toby said nobody in her school is speaking to her any more, especially the other girls. You know how mean girls can be about things like that and she looks like she could use a friend.’

He didn’t add that I could too.

Back at home, my mother was nowhere in sight and there was a note on the fridge. ‘Back at seven. Make food. Seeing a gallery about a sculpture.’

Silas sighed and opened the fridge. ‘What do you fancy for dinner? I could do pasta and meatballs. Needs to be something quick – I’ve got an essay to write for tomorrow.’

That was fine with me so he whipped up some food while I sat at the dining table and got my homework out of my bag. It was typical of Mum to disappear off to London without telling us this morning. She was quite capable of simply forgetting to communicate things like that.

Silas threw a quick bowl of salad together as well as the pasta and sat down with me to eat while he read through the text he had to write the essay on. He had a frown crease between his eyes so I left him to get on with it and flicked through a magazine while I ate. The food tasted good – he wasn’t a bad cook when it came to simple stuff. Much better than me anyway. And better than Mum.

Sitting round this table, that was my first real memory of my family. I must have been about three because Silas looks around six in my mind. We were all sitting down for Sunday lunch. The others were still at home then: my oldest sister Carys, who played the flute so well that she’d be off to a specialist music academy soon and then on to a glittering international career as a soloist; Gideon, who inherited Mum’s artistic talent and had already had his first exhibition, aged twelve; Kerensa, who did her maths A level before she was ten; and Silas, who was flicking peas at me when Mum wasn’t looking.

Silas at six was beautiful. So much so that people stopped Mum in the street to tell her. He had dark hair that waved a little, but was cropped short enough so that no one mistook him for a girl, eyes the blue of the Mediterranean Sea when it’s painted by the light of a summer sky – a colour I would kill to have – with curling black eyelashes so long they looked as if they’d rest on his cheeks when he was asleep. I don’t of course remember these details from when I was three. I’ve seen the photos and at seventeen he’s sickeningly unchanged. I do look a little like him, people say, but what they mean is, if he’s a painting, I look like a practice version that’s had water spilled on it and is left washed out and smudged.

But I didn’t know any of this in the memory. What I knew then was that Silas had just hit me in the face with a pea and it was funny. About two seconds later, when Mum noticed the gravy stain on my clean T-shirt, she found it less funny and exploded into one of her legendary rants. The family stopped eating and winced, and Silas burst into tears.

I didn’t like the shouting and the big, fat, salty drops rolling down my brother’s cheeks so I started to cry too. Dad stormed from the table, shouting, ‘Is there never any peace in this wretched house?’ and another Ramsey family lunch was ruined.

Mum didn’t have any more babies after me because not long after that Sunday lunch, Dad left us. He ran away with an ordinary woman who didn’t stress about gravy stains on a child’s T-shirt and he didn’t see us any more. Silas told me he’d wanted to, but Mum wouldn’t let him so that was that. Dad didn’t fight for us, but then Mum says he never fought for anything except to get away from her.

I wonder if I’d have become mute if he’d still been around. Probably. I don’t think him abandoning us had too much to do with it. Except he was more ordinary than the rest, like me, so maybe it would have been easier for me if he’d stayed – that would have made two of us the boring ones among the exceptional Ramseys.

CHAPTER 2

It could all have ended there, with a girl we met on the street, crying because of a stupid Facebook prank, and I suppose it would have done if Josie hadn’t come round to our house. But Silas had invited her and that set in motion the whole chain of events leading to now.

She didn’t come over that evening or the next day or even the one after that. But on Saturday morning the bell on our front gates rang shortly after breakfast and Mum answered.

‘Hello?’

‘Hi, um, this is Josie. I live down the street. I’ve come to see Rafi.’

There was a stunned pause. My mother raised an eyebrow at the intercom receiver in her hand and then she buzzed Josie in. She turned to find me standing in the kitchen doorway. ‘Apparently it’s for you.’

I nodded, faking nonchalance. Suddenly I was a whirl of nerves inside. Josie had come to see me, but how would I communicate with her? This was why I didn’t have friends. Without Silas as my interpreter, how could I make myself heard? Nobody but Silas understood me.

‘Well, this should be interesting,’ my mother remarked tartly as she sat down at the kitchen table and began flipping through the culture supplement in the newspaper.

I could feel my hands begin to tremble and my throat tightened.

‘You should let her in,’ my mother added and I heard the exasperation in her voice.

Of course I should. Josie must be at the door by now and wondering whether to ring the bell there too. How stupid of me. I hurried to the front door and wrenched it open just as Josie’s hand hovered over the brass bell button.

‘Ah, hi!’ she said, and to my surprise she looked as nervous as I felt. ‘Hope you don’t mind me coming over. I wasn’t sure if you really meant it when you invited me, but then I thought if you did it would be so rude if I didn’t after you guys were nice to me when I was upset and –’ She paused to gulp in a breath. ‘I should shut up. I talk too much.’

And me not enough
, I thought. I smiled uselessly and shook my head to say I didn’t think so. She looked confused for a moment and then I think she figured out what that meant because she nodded and said, ‘That’s kind of you, but I know I do really. Sometimes I should just, you know, stop babbling on.’

I stood aside and beckoned her in. There wasn’t a day that went by when my lack of words didn’t make me feel stupid at some time or other, but I rarely felt the loss as acutely as I did at this precise moment. And my throat felt more closed than ever.

‘Thanks.’ She looked around our hall with interest. ‘Wow, I’ve never seen so many paintings.’

Like every room in the house, the walls were lined with pictures. None of them were my mother’s – she wasn’t that vain – but all of them were chosen by her. Some were free, from artist friends, others she’d bought over the years and several were Gideon’s. Probably even Gideon’s finger paintings when he was two were special. Unlike other mothers, she’d never put any of her other children’s attempts up – Silas’s and my portraits of cats and houses and Christmas trees had never defaced the kitchen cupboards. Gideon’s efforts had earned their place through merit alone.