Meeting anyone else’s eyes is still too hard to manage. I fix my gaze on a gilded teapot no doubt worth more than Alice’s entire collection. “The doctors said the fracture led to the brain compression that caused my aphasia.”
Dair asks, “Aphasia?”
Staring dead ahead doesn’t stop me from hearing his next halting question.
“D-doesn’t that affect speech?” He lets go of my hand. I guess he does that to touch the logo on his jacket because he says, “It’s on the care plans for some of my residents. The ones who had strokes and who can’t speak so well. But you don’t have any trouble talking.”
I’d tell him that isn’t always the case. How every single seat aboard my struggle bus is taken by words that refuse to get off at the right stop. I can’t verbalise that right now. Can’t shape those sounds or hustle them out fast enough, like everyone else in this room could if they wanted.
Adey waits a beat before saying, “It’s an umbrella term. The effects are different for each person living with it.” He pausesuntil I do meet his eyes, and I got no problem reading this silent question.
Want me to go on?
That pause for my permission makes all the difference.
Thank fuck that Adey is here. He gets it. Understands that this silence is me overwhelmed in a way Kev never, ever wants me to have to deal with.
My chest heats, my throat on fire, but I nod, and Adey continues. “Some of my toughest kids were so gobby, you’d never guess they couldn’t write their own names. Others can read full sentences but can’t explain what they mean. Or they can verbalise an essay from start to finish but can’t recognise a single letter on a keyboard to type it out. Aphasia is complex. And it’s simple, because it had the same impact on every student I taught who had it. Get them outside a classroom, and they all told me the same thing about how it left them feeling.”
I fully expect him to saystupid.
I’ve felt that descriptor plenty. Lived it each time I’ve held a menu with no idea what’s written on it. Died a little inside and dodged telling anyone who wasn’t family, all to avoid that stupid label.
Only Adey doesn’t say that S-word.
He chooses another.
“They told me they felt silenced.”
That describes my school days. Describes too why my aunt turned as feral as Kitty each time a stand-in teacher dished out detentions.
They just saw someone refusing to try. Right now, the only refusing I do is to meet Dair’s gaze. I can’t look at him, so I do what I’ve done at the foot of so many tower blocks—I shoulder my load and keep going.
“Silenced sounds about right.” I make Adey my focus, already regretting spilling what no one could ever see as a strength, butI did that spilling for a reason. “So hear this, yeah? I don’t know why you stopped teaching. It’s none of my business. There’s nothing wrong with being a barista, but if you stopped even a single kid from feeling as dumb as I do on the daily, you did them a fucking favour.”
“Dumb?” Dair almost shouts that, and I stop studying anything but him.
Don’t ask me why he’s suddenly the easiest thing in this whole building to look at. The prettiest too in a room already full of beauty most people would describe as fragile. Every piece of china here is in one piece. Has stood the test of time and has lasted, so much stronger than it looks at first glance.
Dair fits that description.
He proves it by squaring up, feisty on my behalf. “Who called you that?”
He’s as furious as Kev and Stacey combined.
All I see is care, and fuck me, I’m a sucker for that.
I also spy fire, which has nothing to do with his hair colour. It spits from someplace deeper. “Because that’s the last way I’d describe you.” Behind him, a row of Exes nod, and Dair spits more sparks for me. “Seriously, Vincent. Anyone who spends more than five minutes with you would say the same thing.” His brow concertinas and his voice lowers. “You really can’t read or write at all? Not even a little?”
I shake my head. “Not even my own name. Can’t write it. Don’t recognise it even if I see it.” Then I shrug. “I could before this happened.” I push aside the swoop of hair Marilyn takes care to cut just like Stacey used to so it covers the slightest of forehead depressions. I run a fingertip across what my hair usually hides. “Then this happened, and I couldn’t. All I can recognise are numbers.”
An Ex clears his throat, perhaps about to ask what left a dent in my head. Or who. Just like that, I’m back in a shadowed alley.
I saw your old man while I was away. Paid him back too, for you.
Dair speaks up while I can’t. “Well, you got no problem communicating. Not with me. Not with anybody.”
I find my voice. “That’s talking.” I must have shoved my hands into my pockets. My fingers find a fountain pen I’ll never be able to write with, like I’ll never be able to read the name engraved in gold on it. “I couldn’t talk my way through my exams.”
