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Authors: Cynthia Pelman

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BOOK: The Voice of the Xenolith
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Well she was right about one thing, I am writing this book. But I can’t see how she could be shy, because shyness is something I am an expert in. And the way she talks in front of the whole class, and the way I have heard her talking to other teachers at break, well, I don’t think she could be a shy person.

Although you never know. Because as I have said, some things are hidden and need to be discovered, and maybe she has kept her shyness hidden because she wanted to be a teacher and you can’t be a teacher if you are shy.

Anyway I will respect her wishes and I won’t put her name in this book, but it is a pity, because she is a good teacher and she deserves to have her name written down somewhere.

Names are important. You have to treat them with respect.

6
The perfection of places

So that was how my English teacher and I made a bargain, and I stuck to my side of it. Each week I wrote a paper on a topic of my choice, and I gave it to her to mark. And don’t think it was just for show, because she marked my papers quite strictly, and she made comments about style and about choice of vocabulary, and I had to revise some papers a few times before she was satisfied.

And it wasn’t that she let me off the other work either: I had to write the same papers as the rest of the class, for English.

But she and I got on well and I actually enjoyed her classes and I felt I was learning a lot, and I stopped wishing I could be home-educated, at least in her classes. Perhaps she knew my history, maybe she knew that I had selective mutism when I was five, and perhaps she understood what it had been like. Or maybe she was just a good teacher.

The rest of my school life was not going well. I was spending most of my school day counting the hours and dreaming about our next holiday on the island: one of the most perfect places I have ever been to.

Nearly every year, for the summer school holidays, we, my mother and father and Jasper and I, go to a little island in the Aegean Sea which is in Greece. This summer holiday tradition started long ago, even before I was born, because my mom and dad liked to go there. He remembered it from when he was a child, and then it became a family tradition. We stay in the same house each year, which we rent for the whole holiday. Sometimes my grandmother comes with us, and sometimes other family or friends join us for a while.

It is a beautiful place. Above the town, the hills are still wild and covered in trees. The houses are mostly built lower down, near the sea and the port. Most of the houses are painted white, with blue shutters and doors. The climate on the island is quite dry most of the year, and besides the old pines, the one plant which seems to thrive there is bougainvillea. Most people have chosen a bright fuchsia-coloured bougainvillea. The plants creep up the sides of houses and over the gates and their pink and purple colour is so intense against the blue sky that you can’t believe what you are seeing, especially when you have just arrived from a grey and dull England.

I like that colour fuchsia, and I love the word ‘fuchsia’ too. The name for the colour is derived from the name of the fuchsia plant, which was in turn named after a botanist called Fuchs who lived in Germany and published a book in 1542, in Latin. The book had accurate and detailed drawings of about 500 plants. That is one book I would love to have.

Of course the warm sun, and the clear turquoise sea, and the colours of the flowers and the blue sky are what make the island totally different from England and make it feel like a holiday place. But it is more than that. When we go there, my parents are relaxed, not working, and nobody has to rush anywhere or do anything at any specific time of day. One of us walks to the grocer across the road every morning to choose food for that day. Sometimes the neighbour who has a fishing boat brings us something he has caught for our lunch. Jasper and I can ride around on our bikes, because there are hardly any cars on the island, only horse-drawn carriages and motorbikes.

Early every morning, before it gets too hot, we go and swim, and the water is so warm and so clear, like pale green liquid glass, that you can see right down to the sea floor and watch little fish swimming about.

In the late afternoon, when it gets cooler, we ride our bikes or walk to the port, and my mom and dad meet their friends at one of the cafes next to the port. Jasper and I ride around the square on our bikes or have ice cream and watch the big yachts going in and out, and then we go and have dinner at one of the restaurants where you sit right on the beach, and the tide sometimes comes in and little warm waves splash on your feet while you are having your dinner. One restaurant has its own little flock of ducks which play around in the shallow water. Jasper and I always watch carefully, each year, to see if we can recognise them from last year, or if perhaps those ducks had been eaten for dinner one night and this is a new flock, but we can never be sure.

And of course there are the wild cats on the island, not really wild but feral, and sometimes they have the most beautiful little kittens who come down to the beach looking for scraps of food.

On the island, kids stay up late, and in the evenings even after it gets dark, the square in front of the big old hotel is lit up and all the kids hang out in groups, and sometimes I meet some people of my age and we stand near the sea and talk to each other and walk around till late.

Opposite our favourite beach on the island is a huge old school, which was once full of children but has now closed down. It is still sometimes used for conferences. Each year someone organises a ‘Children’s Olympics’ in the sports grounds behind the school. The grounds are still looked after, and have lovely green grass and are surrounded by old pine trees. The fields are huge; much bigger than the sports fields we have in my school back in London.

The only sport in this Children’s Olympics is running. Each age group has a race, even the little kids. Jasper’s first race was when he was three and I thought he wouldn’t know what a race was. But he got the hang of it: just run! And he ran half way around the field before the race even started and all the dads had to run after him to catch him and show him that you have to wait for the whistle to blow before you run. It was hilarious: all the mothers sitting up on the grandstand were in fits of laughter watching all those dads, some of them a bit fat and unfit, running after a little wiry boy.

Well, as you can imagine, I had always been a quiet person there. I did take part in the running sometimes but I didn’t enjoy having everyone watching me. But that year, when Jasper ran and the dads ran after him, I had already finished going to speech therapy, and I didn’t have selective mutism anymore, so I cheered as loud as any of the parents.

By that time I was seven and a half. My mother sometimes tells me the story when I ask her to remind me what happened to me. She says, you didn’t speak at school at first, but by the time you were seven, you spoke in front of everyone, and you spoke whenever you needed to and whenever you wanted to.

That year I found a wonderful piece of fossilised coral, right there on the beach. I asked my father to help me look it up so I could label it properly, and we found out it is called a tabulate coral, and it is really beautiful because it has lots of little sections called corallites, which are polygon-shaped. My parents suggested that I should take it back to school after the holidays and do a show-and-tell on corals.

That was how much I had changed. I took part in the Children’s Olympics, I helped organise the race for the younger kids, I cheered and gave instructions and took part in the race for my age group like everyone else. And after the holiday I did that show-and-tell in class without anyone helping me; I prepared a slide show, and I explained what corals are and how they can be living or fossilized, and I spoke in front of the class and had no fear.

My grandmother would sometimes come to stay with us at our house when my father went away for his work. It was always easy to speak to her, and she always knew what I would be interested in, and every time she came she had something special hidden in her pocket or her bag.

Once it was a tiny little box with a little lid, made of wood, and inside was a smaller box with its own lid, and inside that one, one even smaller. The whole thing could fit in the palm of my hand.

I think it was from that day that I started to love boxes, containers, places where you can hide and keep small things. I love boxes which have compartments, like tool boxes, and I love those antique wooden stationery boxes in which people used to keep their equipment for writing letters, when letters were still written by hand, before the age of computers or even typewriters. These stationery boxes often have inlaid wood decoration and little compartments for stamps and paper clips and envelopes. I think these are even better when they have a label on each section, saying what is inside each compartment. That way things don’t get mixed up and don’t get lost, and you always know where to find something.

I even love those Russian dolls made of painted wood, those matryoshka nesting dolls, which fit one inside the other, because even though they are not strictly speaking boxes, by which I mean they are not shaped like a cube or rectangle, they still contain things, in order of size, and when the one fits inside the next you know you have got them in their right order, each one fitting perfectly in its place.

So maybe when I talk about how I love boxes, what I really mean is, I like to be able to sort things into their places and categories, and to label them. But the box itself is also important: it has to be well-made, either of wood or high-quality plastic, and if it is made of wood, I like it to be wood which has been beautifully polished or decorated. It is what I call
The Perfection of Spaces
: each thing is in its own place and you know where to find things, and the container itself is as lovely as what is inside.

I have one box which I use to keep my collection of fossilized sharks’ teeth. It is from Egypt, made of sandalwood, with a hinged lid. The box and the lid are inlaid with hundreds of tiny pieces of shell. The design is made up of perfect, tiny triangles, set in a pattern which is repeated over and over, and is called arabesque.

My uncle once bought an antique desk and at the back of the top drawer he found a false panel and in the little space behind it were some receipts that had been written when the desk was made, over a hundred years ago. They were the actual receipts for the making of the desk, signed by the carpenter who made it. I suppose the person who bought the desk put them there, maybe to remember how much he paid, or to remember the person who had made such a beautiful desk. Or perhaps the carpenter himself put them there.

It’s not the false panel that I am interested in, because Anne Frank and her family had to hide behind a false panel in a wall, and that makes me feel sick, because of what happened to them in the end, and because of how it must feel to be suffocated behind a false panel. When I think of what happened to those people, I can’t breathe.

It is the use of small containers to hide precious things, not people, that I am interested in.
The Perfection of Spaces
helps you to see more clearly, to find what you need to see. There is nothing confusing, nothing mixed up with anything else. Each thing is labeled and kept safe, perfectly in its place, and it can be found whenever you want to look at it.

BOOK: The Voice of the Xenolith
11.53Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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