The Voice of the Xenolith (6 page)

Then she took out some coloured markers and paper and asked if I wanted to draw, but I didn’t want to draw.

I remember how quiet her house was, and I remember a very specific clear, sharp, sweet smell. I found out years later that she used candles with a fragrance which I still love: wild honeysuckle. You can buy them at the shop at Kew Gardens.

I remember she took down, from the top shelf, a big flat plastic box, with a handle. It was the kind of tool box you can get in hardware shops. I knew those boxes because my dad sometimes kept his stone samples in them. The boxes are divided into lots of small sections so you can keep each thing separate.

These days I have several of those boxes, and I keep my fossils in them. I like to keep them separate, so they don’t get mixed up, and each one is in its own space. I write little labels which say what kind of creature or plant it was, and I also write down where I found it and what the date was when I found it.

Most people prefer to note the date when the fossil lived – or rather the period: like Jurassic, or Devonian. But these time periods which lasted millions of years are not something I can relate to. Numbers that big are not something I can visualise or imagine. So I prefer to write the date on which I found the fossil, because that way I can show that I respect the thing it was before it died: it is in a way like a tombstone, with a name and a date on it. This is an example of
The World of ‘re’
: I rescue the fossil and remember when I found it.

Anyway, when I saw that Mrs. E. had the same kind of toolbox my dad had, I kind of relaxed and stopped worrying. The way she had arranged her box was that each compartment contained a different miniature toy. There was a tiny porcelain egg, a model car, a beautiful wooden chair. There were little people, and little animals and even little monsters. All the toys were beautiful, and interesting, and there were so many different things to look at. So I picked one up and held it and then I put it back.

She took out an empty box, just a plain cardboard box with a good lid, and said, “This one will be for you. We can write your name on it. Every time you come here, you can choose from the toys in this big tool box, the ones you really like, and keep them in your box. Your box stays here with me, you can’t take it home, but it will be here for you to play with each time you come and see me.”

So I chose a few of the miniatures which I really liked, and I put them in my box, and she took a sticky label and stuck it on the box and I wrote my name on it, and she showed me where she would keep it, in a special cupboard, so it would be safe until I came again. She said that I would always know where to find it, because it would always be in the same place, and nobody else except me could open it, and nobody except me would be allowed to play with those toys.

Then the session was finished and we went home.

When I was still a selective mute I went to the speech therapist once a week, every week, for a really long time. It must have been for more than a year, because when I started going, I was five, and I remember it was winter, and I was still going to her after the summer holidays, after I had turned six. And the next winter, when it snowed, and she left her kitchen window open by mistake and the snow was all over her floor, was when I stopped going to her.

I remember something beautiful from my visits to Mrs. E. in those days. She had an unusual kind of doll’s house, which didn’t look anything like a typical English house with a pitched roof. It was a very special kind of house: a tree house.

And when I say ‘tree house’ I don’t mean a little house inside a tree; I mean that the house itself was a tree. It was made of branches and logs and it looked like a fantasy house for gnomes living in a forest. Each floor of the house was made of a slice of wood, lying horizontally, with its bark still around the edges, and instead of walls holding the next floor up, it had little logs, and little branches, with the bark still on them, and they held up each floor. There were wooden steps and rope ladders made of sticks and string, leading from one floor to the next, and right at the top was a wooden balcony perched on top of a branch: a lookout post, with rope around it so people wouldn’t fall off.

Even the furniture was made of logs: a small log with a niche carved into it made a bed; two little bits of a branch were stuck together to make chairs or sofas; the little tables were made up of circular slices of logs, with a central leg made of a tiny twig.

Mrs. E. had attached three little doorbells, wired up to tiny batteries, so that the house had a different doorbell at each level. At first, when she showed me where to press the button to ring the doorbells, I was entranced. Real doorbells on a doll’s house! But it took me a while before I felt ready to ring the bells on my own because they were quite loud, and when they rang I thought people might hear it and come and see who was ringing and then I would be expected to talk. In those days I not only didn’t talk, I didn’t make a sound if I could help it.

In those days I hated people looking at me. Being looked at was almost as bad as being expected to talk, and by being very silent and still I could make sure nobody would even know I was there.

But there was nobody there to look at me except the dolls, and Mrs. E. of course, who didn’t ever stare at me or try to make eye contact, which some teachers thought was so important. So one day, very slowly, I reached out one finger and gingerly touched the bell without ringing it, and then I touched it softly again, and again, and then I took a big breath and I pressed the button and I rang the bell.

It was quite loud. I felt alarmed and looked quickly at Mrs. E., but she didn’t seem to notice; she was having a sip of water, and my mother was in the other room reading, and so I rang that doorbell again, and listened to that one, and then I tried the other two, with their different rings, and somehow it felt alright, making a bit of noise in that room. I guess that would have been considered progress, even though I was still not speaking at all outside our own house.

One day, Mrs. E. asked me if I would mind if my mother came into the room to see how I had arranged the dolls and the furniture in the tree house, and of course I agreed (not by speaking but by nodding ‘yes’) because I didn’t mind talking in front of my mother. When my mother came in to the room, Mrs. E. tactfully went out of the room to get us all a glass of water, and in the meantime I was showing my mother everything: the doorbells, and the furniture, and the lookout post, and explaining why I had arranged things the way I did, and which doll lived on which level, and which doll rang which doorbell, and when Mrs. E. walked in with the water, I just carried on talking, for a few words anyway, until I realized she was listening.

And what I really liked about Mrs. E. was that when I did finally talk in front of her, she somehow showed me she was pleased, but in a quiet way: she didn’t make a fuss, there was no loud cheering or ‘well done’ or ‘good work’ like some teachers do, and thank goodness for that, because if my talking had led to her making a big excited bother I would have stopped talking instantly.

I remember playing with that tree house week after week. I would make up a family who lived in the tree house and sometimes the people in the tree house spoke to each other and I would sometimes let Mrs. E. hear what they were saying to each other. It wasn’t really me speaking; it was the family in the tree house. At least that is how it felt to me at the time.

And that is how Mrs. E. helped me to talk in front of her, because before that I had felt very happy going to play with her each week but I didn’t speak and only nodded or pointed when I wanted something. But from those times when my mother came into the room and Mrs. E. was going in and out quietly, getting water or tea or tissues, I started to speak, first in front of her and then, actually, to her.

Now that I am thirteen I can see how she did it. She had a
strategy
, just like my brother Jasper. He wants to be a magician when he grows up, but he will never tell us how he does his magic tricks; all he will say is “I have a strategy.” Mrs. E.’s strategy to help me to talk without fear was a
Strategy of Small Steps.

She would tell me that she knew it was sometimes hard for me to talk, but that there were things that could help, and coming to speech therapy was one of those things that helped. She talked a lot about ‘next steps’, and she often told me that we would only take tiny steps; we could stay on the same step for a long time, for as long as I wanted to, and we would only change one tiny thing each time, and if that was too much we could go back to the previous step.

And she said, over and over, that I would be the one to choose whether to take a next step or to wait a while on the same step. So she would never force me to do anything, and she always made me feel safe, like I was in control in some way.

I knew what she meant about steps, because I used to spend so much time on the steps of our old house, especially on my special step, just where the staircase turned a corner and people downstairs couldn’t see me.

When I think about it now, now that I am not a selective mute person any more, I think her strategy of small steps worked because it allowed me to get over my fears very, very slowly.

There were two main things we worked on, and she described them to me as if they were two separate staircases to climb. The first staircase was about people and the other one was about places.

The ‘
people staircase’
was about slowly adding to the number of people who would hear me speak. So I started off speaking only to my parents and my grandmother; then I spoke to Mrs. E. alone in the room, and then, after a really long time, I started to speak to one or two other carefully-chosen people. The aim was to help me to eventually be able to speak in front of anyone who happened to be there, and in front of the whole class.

The ‘
places staircase’
meant that I had to get used to talking in many different places, and not just at home. So in therapy I first learned to speak to Mrs. E. in her office, and then I had to extend it to other places: outside her room (for example in her kitchen) and later outside her house, and eventually in the playground, and finally in the classroom. One step at a time, one staircase at a time.

I sometimes think about that time. To this day I don’t know why it happened, why I didn’t speak. But I do know that there isn’t an easy answer, and it wasn’t one thing that set it off. It’s not like I had a trauma, or a bad childhood, or a life like Maya Angelou. I had a very nice life and I still have a nice life. But even now, now that I can talk at school, I still don’t really like to chat, and I don’t do small talk. It is just not me.

But what I do know is that Mrs. E.’s
Strategy of Small Steps
did help me get rid of my selective mutism.

Don’t think it is a magic cure. Don’t think that after I finished going to speech therapy I never felt the pull of silence.

And now I was back with Mrs. E. after all those years. Her house looked the same and I immediately noticed the same sharp, sweet wild honeysuckle smell. She had placed the perfumed candle on the windowsill, in exactly the same place she used to put it when I was little.

And there was something else which was entrancing, and I don’t know why I hadn’t remembered it from my visits to Mrs. E. all those years ago, because I recognised it immediately: she had a stained glass window panel in her front door, and when you walked into the house there were colours all over the wooden entrance hall floor. It felt like you could step into the pools of coloured light and disappear there if you wanted to.

What she said to me this time was, “I don’t know if I can help, I don’t even know if there is any problem to be solved here, but do you want to give it a go and see if we can find out together?”

To give her credit, Mrs. E. never said she knew something if she didn’t. She had this thing she would do, a mannerism which I always associate with her: she would put her hand to her chin and tilt her head to the side and look up, and she would say ‘I wonder…’ and suggest that we try to find out together whatever it was she was wondering about.