The Island of Missing Trees(8)
Steering a zigzag course, the butterfly settled on the teacher’s shoulder and hopped on to one of her dangling silver earrings, shaped like chandeliers. Just as quickly, it took off and wheeled towards Jason, alighting on his slim shoulders, wriggling under his shirt. Now Ada could picture in her mind’s eye the bruises hidden beneath Jason’s vest, most of them old and faded, but one fairly large and fresh. A glaring colour – raw purple. This boy, who was always cracking jokes and oozing confidence at school, was beaten by his own father at home. She gasped. Pain, there was so much pain everywhere and in everyone. The only difference was between those who managed to hide it and those who no longer could.
‘Ada?’ Mrs Walcott said, louder.
‘Maybe she’s deaf!’ one of the students quipped.
‘Or retarded!’
‘We do not use such words in the classroom,’ Mrs Walcott said, without convincing anyone. Her gaze focused back on Ada, confusion and concern passing in turn across her broad face. ‘Is something wrong?’
Rooted to the spot, Ada did not say a word.
‘If there is something you want to tell me, you can do that after class. Why don’t we talk later?’
Still Ada did not comply. Her limbs, acting of their own volition, refused to respond. She remembered her father telling her that in extremely cold temperatures some birds, like the black-capped chickadee, entered short periods of torpor just so they could save energy for the worst weather. That’s exactly how she felt right now, collapsed into some kind of inertia so that she could brace herself for what was coming.
Sit down, you idiot, you’re embarrassing yourself!
Was it another student who had whispered these words or a spiteful voice inside her own head? She would never know. Her mouth drawn into a tight line, her jaw clenched, she clutched the edge of her desk, desperate to hold on to something, worried that if she let go she might lose her balance and fall down. With each inhale, panic churned and rolled in her lungs, seeped into her every nerve and cell, and no sooner did she open her mouth again than it spilled out and gushed forth, an underground stream eager to break loose from its confines. A sound both familiar and too strange to be her own surged from somewhere inside her – loud, hoarse, raw, wrong.
She screamed.
So unpredicted and forceful and impossibly high-pitched was her voice that the other students fell quiet. Mrs Walcott stood still, her hands pressed to her chest, the creases around her eyes deepening. In all her years of teaching she had never seen anything like this.
Four seconds passed, eight, ten, twelve … The clock on the wall inched its way forward painfully slowly. Time warped and leaned into itself, like dry, charred timber.
Now Mrs Walcott was by her side, trying to talk to her. Ada could feel her teacher’s fingers on her arm and knew the woman was saying something but she could not make out the words as she kept screaming. Fifteen seconds passed. Eighteen, twenty, twenty-three …
Her voice was a flying carpet that lifted her up and carried her against her will. She had the sense that she was floating, observing everything from a lamp in the ceiling, except it didn’t feel like she was high above, more like she was outside, a sense of falling out of herself, not part of this moment, nor of this world.
She recalled a sermon she had once listened to, maybe in a church, maybe in a mosque, for at different stages of her childhood she had visited both, though not for long. When the soul departs the body, it ascends towards the firmament, and on its way there it stops to watch all that lies below, unaffected, unmoved, untouched by pain. Was it Bishop Vasilios who said that or Imam Mahmoud? Silver icons, beeswax candles, paintings with faces of the saints and apostles, the angel Gabriel with one wing open and the other folded, a worn copy of the Orthodox Bible, the pages thumbed, the spine strained … silk prayer mats, amber rosaries, a book of hadiths, a weathered volume of Islamic Interpretation of Dreams, consulted after each dream and each nightmare … Both men had tried to persuade Ada to choose their religion, take their side. It seemed to her, more and more, that in the end she had chosen emptiness. Nothingness. A weightless shell that still hedged her in, kept her apart from others. Yet as she went on screaming in the last hour of the last day of school, she felt something almost transcendental, as if she were not, and had never been, confined to the limits of her body.
Thirty seconds passed. An eternity.
Her voice cracked but persisted. There was something profoundly humiliating yet equally electrifying about hearing yourself scream – breaking off, breaking away, uncontrolled, unfettered, without knowing how far it would carry you, this untamed force that rose from inside. It was an animal thing. A wilderness thing. Nothing about her belonged to her previous self in that moment. Above all her voice. This could have been the high shriek of a hawk, the soul-haunting howl of a wolf, the rasping cry of a red fox at midnight. It could have been any of them, but not the scream of a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl.
The other students, eyes widened in astonishment and disbelief, stared at Ada, spellbound by this display of insanity. Some of them had cocked their heads to the side as if trying to fathom how such an unsettling shriek could ever have come from so timid a girl. Ada sensed their fear and, for once, it felt good not to be the one who was frightened. At the blurred edge of her vision they all gathered, indistinguishable with their baffled faces and matching gestures, a paper chain of identical bodies. She was no part of this chain. She was no part of anything. In her unbroken loneliness, she was complete. Never had she felt so exposed, yet so powerful.