A Quiet Kind of Thunder(9)

‘What?’ He’s still all smiles, and I hate to do this to him.

‘Three, Dad. The three of us.’

There’s a silence. We both look at each other. I see his smile fade and pain sweep across his face.

Dad clears his throat. ‘Right. Yes. Three of us. Maybe the three of us could learn together.’ He turns away from me and picks up an envelope from the post pile. ‘I ordered pizza for us. It should be here in twenty minutes. I got you the Garden Supreme.’

‘Great,’ I say. ‘Call me when it arrives, OK?’

It’s been three years since my stepbrother died, but somehow this still happens. It’s been three years, but I still don’t know how to make it OK.

At dinnertime, Dad and I eat and talk as if nothing happened. He doesn’t ask me any more questions about making new friends and I feel guilty, but also relieved. My stepmother, Lucy, comes downstairs to sit with us and talk about sixth form, but she doesn’t ask me whether I spoke or not. She isn’t wearing any make-up and she looks tired.

I mentally run through any possible Clark-related anniversaries that I may have forgotten, but I don’t land on any. It won’t be four years since he died until next June and his birthday was in January. I decide this is just A Bad Day. We all get them, because grief doesn’t care how many years it’s been. Before Clark died, Lucy was the kind of well-kept, together person who wore make-up just to sit at the dinner table with her family, but that poise is gone now, maybe even forever. It’s like when death took Clark he took a big part of Lucy too.

In my dad’s family – just the three of us now, a tiny, slightly wobbly unit – we talk about mental health, which is why I know that Lucy is depressed, that it’s a particular kind of depression they call ‘complicated grief disorder’. It’s strange; for all the focus there is on understanding the ‘cause’ of a mental health issue (people always seemed to talk as if my selective mutism could be totally cured if only they knew what caused it) in Lucy’s case, when the cause is so clear, knowing what it is doesn’t actually help. Lucy’s sadness was so total, and she was so lost in it, that it didn’t matter that we all knew why it had happened. Knowing the cause didn’t give us a cure. Lucy had to rely on what she calls the three Ts: tears, time and talk. (‘The only things that really help, in the end.’)

The irony is that people I meet now always think that my anxiety and communication difficulties were caused by Clark’s death, as if I were diagnosed at fourteen instead of five. And part of me always wants to say, Would that make it better? Would that make it easier, if I could point to something as obvious as that to explain myself? Would you be more sympathetic if it was tied to something as seismic as death?

Clark’s death was the worst thing that ever happened to me, but I was a selective mute long before it. It may have changed some of the specifics of my anxiety – I worry a lot more about cars now, and death in general – but it didn’t create it. Sometimes things, like car accidents and the weather, just happen. And maybe that’s the scariest thing of all.

BSL signs it’s handy to know

Hello/Please/Thank you

The essential basics. Hello, like a wave. Please and thank you are the same – the prime hand held upright and flat, fingers touching the chin, move hand down and away. Mouth the word for clarity.

The alphabet

If you can fingerspell, you can say anything. Just . . . well, slowly.

Mum/Dad

The fingerspelling for M (as in mother) and F (as in father)respectively, tapped twice.

Brother

Two fists moving up and down, side by side with knuckles facing each other.

Sister

Index finger on the prime hand curled forward, held up to the nose and tapped twice.

Step (as in stepbrother, stepmother, etc.)

Interlock the two little fingers (fingerspelling S), then follow it with the sign for brother, mother, etc.

Half- (as in half-sister)

Prime hand held out flat, the other hand makes a motion as if it were cutting it in half. Follow this with the sign for sister.

Sit (useful if you have a dog)

Each hand held out in a fist. Move both fists down in one motion.

I love you

Point to yourself. Put your two hands on your heart. Point to the person you love.





On Wednesday I get my first glimpse of what Maths is like in the sixth form, which is basically that emoji that looks like The Scream, and also my first class with Rhys. He sits next to me without asking, smiling at me as he does so.

Good morning, he says on arrival.

A woman I’ve never seen before stands at the front of the room, just to the side of the teacher, Mr Al-Hafi. I realize that she is Rhys’s communication support worker as soon as Mr Al-Hafi begins to speak and her hands and face spring into action, turning his words into signs. Everyone around me gawps at her until Mr Al-Hafi loses his patience and tells them to ‘at least not be so obvious about it’.

The downside of all this interesting stuff going on is that I get to the end of the lesson and realize I’ve only taken in about thirty per cent of it, and have made even fewer notes.

As everyone starts gathering up their stuff at the sound of the bell, Rhys touches my shoulder. Not many notes? he signs when I look at him. He smiles. You must have a good memory.

He has definitely simplified his BSL for me since we last spoke, which I love, because last night I spent a good hour or so with one of my old BSL books, sitting in front of my mirror, signing to myself.