A Quiet Kind of Thunder(15)

So what happened?

I had to see doctors and speech therapists. I saw them for years, actually. We got loads of written materials about selective mutism. What my parents should expect. They had to get two copies of everything because they weren’t exactly on great terms at the time. They divorced when I was three.

Maybe you were trying to bring them together by not talking?

Look, I’ll answer any question you ask but don’t try and psychoanaylse me, OK? I’ve heard it all a hundred times.

Sorry.

It makes me really mad.

Sorry.

People always want to have the answer. Even now, after all these years. It’s like, don’t you think that we’ve all thought of every possible option already? We stopped waiting for a light-bulb moment a long time ago. It’s never going to come. Sometimes things just happen.

I won’t do it again.

So anyway. I was meant to be getting help but it was all a bit patchy, to be honest. I lived mostly with Mum at the time and I saw Dad at weekends. They didn’t agree how to ‘handle me’, or whatever. Dad wanted to follow what the guides said, like, to the letter, but Mum didn’t really have much patience for it.

What do you mean?

I don’t think she really believed that it was something that was happening to me instead of something I was doing. She thought I was doing it on purpose. Trying to make things difficult. I know it must have been frustrating, but she used to shout at me. She couldn’t take it when I wouldn’t talk to the rest of our family. Like my gran. Mum would be, like, ‘Are you trying to punish me?’ and then she’d cry.

What about in school?

I was meant to get one-on-one help, but my school was quite understaffed and underfunded – it’s actually been closed down since I left – and so I was just included in the SEN group.

SEN?

Special Educational Needs.

Oh. Did it help?

Well, it’s not like anyone was UNhelpful, but none of it helped. I just didn’t talk, but because I did all the work I think they decided it was easier to let me get on with it. They did try some of the things the guides suggested – there’s this technique called ‘sliding in’ – but it wasn’t getting results fast enough so they kind of gave up. I don’t want to make them sound bad, because everyone was so nice to me, and they really tried to make me feel like it was OK to just be, you know?

And I had Tem.

Your best friend?

Yeah. We’ve been best friends since we were tiny. There was a time when I couldn’t talk to her either, but that only lasted a few months. Literally. But Tem doesn’t care whether I talk or not, so there was never any pressure. And she NEVER looked surprised if I did talk. Everyone else used to watch me so closely . . . and if I did say anything they’d always make this shocked face that made me feel so . . . exposed. But with Tem it always felt normal. After a while she could read me so well she used to talk for me at school, like she was my interpreter. And that made things easier for everyone. By Year 2 I could whisper to Tem in school, and then over the next few years I could talk to her, then whisper to other kids, and then by the time I got to Year 6 I was almost normal. Very shy, but I could talk.

Where does BSL come in?

Oh that . . .

I’ve been dying to ask. I assumed it was school.

No, it actually wasn’t. My uncle – my dad’s brother-in-law after he married my stepmother when I was five (stop me if this gets confusing) – is a teacher in a deaf school. He suggested that I learn BSL when it started to look like I wouldn’t be able to communicate at all. He said it might help with my confidence.

Not SSE?

Sign-supported English?

Yeah. Wouldn’t that have made more sense?

It would have made more sense, yeah, but I think Geoff loved the idea of being able to teach me this whole new language so much that he just went right for the big guns. He doesn’t do things by halves. And Dad thought it was brilliant, like a family project. He loved this idea of his new family having their own way of communicating. We all learned together – me, my stepmother, him and Clark.

Who’s Clark?

?

He was my stepbrother. He’s dead.

Oh shit. Sorry.

I can’t talk about him right now.

That’s OK. We can stick with the speech thing. Did you use BSL at school?

Not really. My teachers knew what the basic stuff meant – like can I go to the toilet and yes and no, please and thank you, whatever – but no one could hold a conversation in it. It was just a way to get by.

What happened when you got to secondary school?

Everything went to shit.

Oh.

Yeah. The thing is, everyone at my primary school knew me, and they were used to the problems I had. So they stopped being surprised if I talked or not, and a lot of them could actually talk for me by the end – not even just Tem.

So you were comfortable there.

Yeah, exactly. It was so safe. But then secondary school was this new environment, and it was big and loud and full of strangers. I couldn’t deal with it.

You went mute again?

Basically, yeah. But it was so much worse this time because I understood so much more, like what’s expected of you not just by teachers but other kids, as well. I was the weird kid who didn’t speak. The teachers knew about it – they must have been briefed or something – so it was OK from that side of things, but you know that secondary school is about twenty per cent learning and eighty per cent social. You have to talk to other kids. You just have to. And I couldn’t.