The Voice of the Xenolith (11 page)

I kind of saw, somewhere far away, that she was trying to show me something, but I couldn’t see what it was. I couldn’t get my eye in yet.

There is something you need to do if you are searching for a thing which is not immediately visible. I call it ‘getting your eye in’ and what I mean by that is a specific state of mind; it is not just something you do with your eyes.

Once you get your mind into a ‘search state’, your eyes start to work in a new way, and they see things you couldn’t see before; they see patterns and regularities and sometimes, suddenly, something new.

Since I was really young, I have been trained by my parents in how to look at details. My dad was always teaching me about the rocks and their layers; if you look really carefully you find clues to how old they are and their chemical properties. He showed me how layers of sand get compressed to make sandstone, and how the layers remain visible, and how some rocks turn red because of iron. You look at the layers, their regularity, their thickness, their colour; you keep looking and looking until you can make sense of what happened to those rocks.

Sand needs to be looked at even more carefully. Sand is not the same wherever you go. My dad taught me that if you study sand in detail, microscopically, you can understand how it is that giant dunes can keep their shape without collapsing, even though a handful of sand collapses onto a table and doesn’t keep a shape. He showed me the differences between types of sand, and how that affects the way sand moves, and it explains why you find only certain kinds of sand in sandstorms, while other kinds of sand are found in different places on the earth. And he showed me how it is that you can mix two different kinds of sand, and when you pour them out onto a surface, they separate themselves into their different grain sizes. You can try it out: mix some sugar with fine beach sand, shake it up, and then pour it slowly into a pile on a table.

My mom taught me to look carefully too: she was always telling me to look around, when we were travelling, and to notice the different kinds of plants growing in each area, and the different kinds of clouds. When she was at university she studied botany. She would tell me about the people who lived in the country we were visiting, and show me what crops they grew and what they liked to eat, and we would walk in the markets and see what they were selling.

My mom loves to buy pieces of printed fabric and woven cloth from each place we visit, and she has a collection which she uses as tablecloths or curtains or pillowcases or just to look at and touch. She can tell you what kind of weaving it is, and what kind of dye was used to make the colours, and what kind of plant was used to make the threads to weave the material. She would go to the weavers’ houses and watch them weave, and look at the warp and weft with a magnifying glass to try to see more clearly, to see the type of thread and which pattern they were using, and she would help me to see how each one was very subtly different from the others, and sometimes you could identify the style of the maker, as individual and unique as a fingerprint.

This was another time when I realized how important names are. Before I knew about warp and weft, I just saw a piece of cloth. After my mom taught me those names, I started to see things I simply hadn’t seen before: how the different arrangements of warp and weft can make different patterns, like herringbone or checks. It was the names that helped me to see them. Looking is not just about eyes; it is about naming and then looking again when you know what you are looking for.

At our next session, Mrs. E. went back to my paper on granite. She pointed to the place where I wrote about how I like to find the origin of words and where I explain the origin of the word ‘granite.’

“I wonder…” she started off, as usual, with her pondering look.

I already knew I had better sit up and listen because when Mrs. E. does that you know something is about to come at you. Something you never thought about before: a new idea.

“I wonder,” she continued, “Could it be that finding the origin of a word is a bit like finding a fossil? Something that was lost, that you manage to retrieve? Or recover?”

I looked hard at her. For a moment I couldn’t breathe. Other than that first paper I wrote for the English teacher, I had never talked to anyone about my feelings about finding things that were lost. I had certainly never talked to anyone about my list of ‘
re’
words. To find out that Mrs. E. knew those things about me was a surprise, because I haven’t really met any adults who actually understood that about me. So I told her about my dictionary. I told her I like to know where words come from because the more you know about the word, the more perfectly you can use the word. And I told her the subtitle of my dictionary, which is
The Perfection of Words.
Once you find the right word for a thing, once you have named it, and once you have found out the origin of the word, you know a lot about it, and it is like having a treasure you have found and can keep safe.

She wanted to know more about words, and what you can do with them once you know a lot about their origin and what they mean. She asked me for an example of an interesting discovery about a word, so I used as an example the kind of notebooks she always used when she was making notes during our sessions: ‘Foolscap.’

When I first saw the word ‘Foolscap’ printed on the outside of her notepads, it was a new word for me. I looked it up and found out that it was the name given, a few hundred years ago, to a kind of paper which had a watermark on it, and the picture on the watermark was a cap of a court jester: a fool’s cap. So I wrote ‘foolscap’ in my dictionary because it is a word I like and I told Mrs. E. that that is the kind of interesting discovery you can make when you really look carefully at the origin of a word.

She asked me if I had other strategies like
The Perfection of Words
, so I told her about how I keep my ideas organised. I told her about
The Perfection of Spaces
, which helps me to keep things in the right place, and to know what belongs in which space; how nothing gets mixed up. This is a strategy I use for my fossil collection.

“So I can see that perfection is also something you know quite a lot about,” said Mrs. E. “Could you tell me some more about that? I know you have been to so many different countries. I wonder if you might tell me about some of the places you have been to, which are perfect?”

I thought for a while, and I told her about the perfection of the sea and the bougainvillea and the sun on the Greek island.

I also told her about the perfection of an ammonite fossil: its curves, its chambers, and how they are still there, millions of years later.

She asked me to tell her about other perfect things; things that I have found, or seen. I told her about the perfection of the stripes on a zebra, how the black and the white contrast so perfectly, and how each zebra has its own perfect pattern, unique to each animal. I told her about the perfection of the blue feathers of a jay, and the surprise of the black and white stripes on the jay’s flight feathers: stripes which are hidden when the wings are folded and which you suddenly see only when the bird flies away. If you are looking carefully.

“I can just picture that,” said Mrs. E., “I can see how beautiful these things must be, and how perfect.” And she asked me to bring to the next session a few of my most perfect fossils, and also some photos from the island, to show her.

I remembered that when I still had selective mutism, and I was still going to her every week for speech therapy, she once showed me something about perfection. I was about to have my sixth birthday, and she suggested that I sing a song to myself for my birthday.

I thought it was weird, because I wasn’t speaking much then, so singing seemed a totally crazy idea, and anyway who would sing a song to themselves on their own birthday? But as usual I remained silent because in those days I was silent most of the time.

Maybe I was waiting for her to explain, or maybe I hoped she would forget about this idea and we could play another game.

She taught me a song called ‘Fifteen Animals’, and she even had a book to go with it. I loved that book. It is about someone who has lots of pets, fifteen of them in fact, and all the pets in the book, and even the children of those pets, are called Bob.

So even though there are fifteen animals, they are all called Bob.

Mrs. E. said, “This is a perfect song for you, because all the words are the same: ‘bob, bob, bob,’ you don’t have to use lots of words for that song.” So she would sing the song, and each time the name ‘Bob’ came up, she would be silent and I had to do something to fill in the gap. Before I was willing to speak, she suggested that I could just ‘bob’ my knees and that would stand for the word ‘Bob’; later when I started to speak in her sessions, I would say ‘Bob’ each time she left a pause in a line, and it wasn’t too hard because when you only have to say one word, and it is the same word each time, you get used to it and it isn’t anything special. So that was when I discovered that a song can be perfect.

By the time I finished speech therapy, about a year later, I could sing the whole song and lots more, and I spoke at school like anyone else. But at the time when she taught it to me, that song was perfect. The right amount of funny, the right amount of talking (very little) and just cute.

Now I think about it, I must have been a funny-looking kid in those days, with funny habits and funny fears, but not funny in a ha-ha way, if you know what I mean.

I have an old photograph, a picture of me in my first year at school. I don’t know why I keep it; my mother says she loves it, but I look at it and see a frightened child, hair badly cut, spikes all over the place, and huge staring eyes. I don’t remember having that photo taken; it is a school photo, with the name of the school written on the back, so it must have been taken at one of those annual photo sessions they used to have. I have seen that look in the eyes of a tiny wild buck, a
dassie
, caught by a hunter somewhere in Africa and kept in a cage in the market.

So just in case you are thinking that our time together in speech therapy when I was a selective mute was fun and jokes and songs and games, you are wrong. Most of the time it was hard for me. Maybe it was also hard for Mrs. E. too, I don’t know, but that was her job and she must have liked it, otherwise she would have gone and done some other job.

“So now I am thinking about things being perfect,” said Mrs. E. “What if you see something perfect, maybe a perfect fossil, somewhere in a cliff, high up, and you can’t get to it?”

“Then it’s lost.”

“So a fossil can be lost, and I suppose all those which are still buried in the cliffs and under the earth are still lost, at least until someone finds them.”

Then she said, “I am interested in what other kinds of things can be lost. Can the word ‘lost’ be used to describe something else, something that is not an object? Something that is precious, maybe a time you remember, or a special feeling, that can get lost?”