When George was born his mother gave him a handful of words. She counted them as she slapped his voice into existence and then stoppered the howl with a teat. The words his mother gave George were short to match his life – yes, no, now, later, baby. ‘Oh baby,’ she said as she patted the downy depression of incompleteness at the crown of his head.
As four of the words belonged to her, he kept baby as his own. It was a soft word with fat fingers and folds. A round word. George learned to make other sounds that may have been words, but he kept baby in his head and looked at the sound in the dark.
‘Look, Father’, his mother said, tiptoeing out of the bedroom, ‘he’s just lying in the dark … not a sound. It’s not normal.’
His mother still used baby though. Sometimes she possessed it: ‘My baby’, ‘This is my baby’, ‘My baby wouldn’t do that, oh no, not my baby’. Other times it was an accusation: ‘What a baby’, ‘Don’t be such a baby’. And in the dark it was a term of endearment – ‘baby, oh baby, sweet baby’ – although she might having been talking to someone else.
The other words she seemed to only use with him.
George learnt that the shortest of the words his mother gave him lasted the longest. No was a down-turned mouth and encircling completeness. Sometimes no was over quickly, and while it didn’t leave even the tiniest scratch, it was like he had lost a limb. No could be as hot as boiling water, or as cold as sleet and southerlies and shame. Sometimes his mother used nowithout even saying a word, her lips closed like a drawstring.
George watched and listened to other people say no. No was like a line on the ground, and people stepped across it and stepped back and waited to see what happened. In his house, no was a word that lodged inside him, a growth upon which thin layers of impossibility built up until no was a large lump in a small place, and other words got stuck behind it.
Yes was different. Yes slid away. When his mother said yes, her tongue sounded like a snake. Her lips had wiggly ends that curled up and hissed. As George watched, yes slithered into a crevice, and he found it later basking in the sun, rattling when he came near. Somehow yes was always a warning – perhaps it was the curved letter that doubled back on itself, or the one where the line split into two and went off in different directions, and he never knew which one to follow.
Other times, yes was a smiley word that opened doors to sunny days and outside and sweet treats and surprises. George saw yes settle and spread out, and after a glance up at his mother’s eyes to check for a reptilian glint, he ran for the door and was off. Yes played tag and hide-and-seek and go-home-stay-home and candlestick, and it lay on the grass in the sun with the white-petalled summer around him and only came home when it got dark. George went to bed and said yes to himself until, like the shush shush shush of the sea, yes lulled him to sleep.
Sometimes when George said yes the sound had the curve of a question. For George, yes was too short, like yes had got wet and shrunk and had to be made bigger again. But for all the stretching, as soon as George let the word go, the edges of yes had to be pulled down, and he resigned himself to its ill-fitting shape in his voice. As a consequence George always said yes with a quick look behind him, a glance backwards before taking a step, and a glance backwards as he said yes, to see if had left any of himself uncovered.
Later was different again. Later was always waiting. Always waiting and standing next to the kitchen bench looking up. Laterwas like lying down. It was like being flat. Like being flat and waiting; a hesitation at the end of the word, because who knew when later really was. George got so tired of waiting he lay down in the hallway, kicking the skirting board with one foot and driving a car back and forth within the reach of his arm. When he couldn’t wait any more – that was later. By then he’d forgotten what he wanted in the first place.
Mostly later seemed to be saved up for things that were inconvenient and that required more than one person. George stood with a pack of cards, table-tennis bats, a story with long words, an empty hand or a request for ice cream. His mother would glance over her shoulder from whatever she was doing, smooth her mouth into a smile and say ‘That’s nice dear, later.’ And hours followed until the five-lettered possibility shrunk to the certainty of the shortest word.
George always thought that given the drawn out laaaayteeer, now would bring all those good things oh-so-much quicker. Now had only three letters and two of them were exciting, as in WOW! He should have recognised that two of the letters were borrowed from the shortest word. Now was abrupt and admonishing. Now (full stop). Now compelled his legs to go down the hallway to his room and pick up the clothes off the floor before dinner. Now meant eating silverbeet. Now meant soap and hot water and scrubbed red hands.
Other people owned now. Like his mother. He found that he couldn’t use it. ‘Now’, he said one day, quietly, into a room where his mother sat doing the crossword. And quicker than he could pick another word out of the four he had left in his hand, he found himself in his bedroom with the slidey click that meant no matter how much he turned the handle, the door would not open. He spent the afternoon shuffling his leftover words and wondering which one he could use to get out. Later (later, oh how slowly time passes!), George lay on the floor with big eyes and remembered baby in the dark.
When the door opened, George’s mother came in and he could see the word baby in her eyes, and even though she had given the word to him, George could see that she did not think baby was his anymore and would take it off him if she knew he still had it. She gave him a pair of new words – Big Boy – and even though they had more letters, they were a kind of no – ‘You are a big boy now’. So he kept quiet and felt the shape of the sound in his mouth.
Big Boy followed him around like a brother. Big Boy stood at his shoulder when he tried to write down the words the teacher taught him at school. Big Boy could always make the letters round and join them with a perfect slope and get a gold star. The teacher wrote words on George’s paper in red pen. George looked at the red words. There were lots of x’s. He thought that ‘x’ was just one of the letters in the alphabet, but it seemed to be wrong all the time. And the lots of x’s would be followed by cursive comments – ‘could try harder’, ‘could do better’, ‘should pay attention’. When he showed his mother the x’s, her forehead had a shape like a ‘w’, and she wanted to talk about it later when his father got home. His father and mother sat at the table and passed words to each other – could, should, must – and George watched and picked at the groove he had worn in the edge of the table with his nail, and waited for the words to stop so he could go to his room and repeat his own words.
The boys at school threw words at each other. There were words that felt nobbly and bounced back and forth – what are ya? what are ya? what are ya? (yeah, and what are you?). Easy enough to deflect but which kept coming back. Small words were thrown hard – sissy, sissy, sissy – and left round bruises that turned yellow after a few days but hurt for a long time. Other words sounded gentle but hurt when he caught them (baby – oh how did his word end up on the playing field with the stubbly grass which grazed his knees). The ends of his fingers stung, and he had to blow on them and stick them between his legs, watching the jeering pack of boys, jerseys tied around their middles, run off passing insults between them.
When George went to high school he found that words loomed over him. He stood outside Boys’ High with his cuffs turned up twice and chewed his nails. Garters left red marks on skin behind his knees as he hauled up his socks. He walked down the drive past the basalt of the headmaster’s gaze, hoisting his schoolbag onto his shoulder and leaned on the doors. An empty corridor lay before him. George was late. His footsteps rang louder than the bell.
George mumbled at a man in a gown, saw him frown (those double-yous again) and found himself steered through a sea of faces to a seat at the back, a text book opened to the wrong page in front of him. ‘Sum, es, est, sumus, estis, sunt.’ He collected the sounds but not the words, and the meaning rolled away, marbles under the teacher’s desk, and he knew he would not get the words back. The bell rang and George followed the shoulder-charging chatter out of the classroom and down several corridors to another room where he discovered that x equalled two and was not necessarily a version of no, as he had found out in earlier lessons.
George sat at the back of all his classes and filled his books with tidy columns of misunderstanding. One evening he sat outside the door and watched the double-you on his mother’s forehead as his teacher ran his finger down the columns where x did not equal two and shook his head. His mother nodded, her knuckles white in her lap, stood, walked to the door and strode ahead of George, her heels clicking on the linoleum, using words like you should, you must, do not, cannot, have to, never again, all of which he had heard before, and responsibility (a word broken into lots of pieces, re-spon-si-bil-it-y) and which was his fault somewhere in the middle.
At home, George’s mother opened a tin of soup, and he watched as she cut his toast into soldiers. While he ate, his mother watched him, her mouth like a line. She was still sitting there when he asked to be excused and stepped backwards away from the table, turned and went to his room. Later (always later), he heard his father come home and following a scuffle of words, silence. George sat staring at his reflection in the dark behind the window and waited for later to be now. His father came in and George pushed baby and Big Boy behind the curtain. His father stood with his hands behind his back and rocked heel-toe, heel-toe, heel-toe, and rolled out the platoons of in-my-day, when-I-was-a-boy, you-don’t-know-how-lucky-you-are Young Man, and the words slouched into ranks and marched off into the no-man’s-land of the future. His father stared into the distance, cleared his throat and turned on his heel. After George went to bed, the soldiers marched inside his head in the dark, trampling babyand Big Boy as they watched the parade.
When all the shoulds, coulds, musts, do nots, cannots and have tos replaced any other words George had learnt, he left school and got a job in a haberdashery (which he found out was a quick word for slow things). Each morning he said hello to Mrs Morris, who was counting embroidered handkerchiefs behind the counter, and hello to Mr Norris, who was calculating losses in the office, and went out the back into a room that had the intricate scent of lace and the muffled sound of wool. There were lists with ticks and crosses that meant that some things were there (three bolts of red flannel, knicker elastic) and some things weren’t there (black buttons, mattress needles, hooks and eyes).
Mr Norris always came in with a list of musts, and Mrs Morris would bring in a folded pile of when-you-have-time-could-you’s, and George would pick up his pencil and put it behind his ear and go through his lists until morning tea. Count cards of buttons until lunch. Unpack the orders and tick them off with red pen until afternoon tea. Sweep the floor and leave, waving good bye to Mr Norris in the office, and good bye to Mrs Morris folding tea towels, and catch the bus that went up the valley every 15 minutes until six o’clock, and hourly after that.
When George got home, his mother had lined up questions for him, each question pegged out: ‘How was your day? Did you eat lunch? Did you remember your jersey? Have you polished your shoes? Where’s that handkerchief?’ She followed him down the hallway while he took his coat to his room (‘Hang that coat on a hanger’). Questions without answers hung on the airer in the kitchen. He ate his tea. His mother’s mouth was still half full of words, but George said good night and went to his room and shut the door and dreamed of an empty house where all the doors were open.
When he could no longer stay, because the questions took up all the space, George left home. He found a bedsit in a row of flats crouched below the black bush on the dark side of the valley. Each flat had its three steps down to a concrete path to the letterbox. The flats had one street number and each tenant was allotted their own letter in the alphabet. George’s bedsit was at the beginning of the row and had the letter ‘A’ and an extra window because one side didn’t join onto anyone else’s. When he stood at the kitchen sink he could see his sofa bed in one room and the bathroom across the hall. Each evening, he unfolded night and smoothed the sheets and climbed into creaking springs, and each morning he folded up evening and concertinaed it inside the couch. George liked to put everything away and know it would all be waiting for him.
George used no quite a lot in his head at work. It echoed and banged in the words he didn’t say, but somehow the words always slid and hissed and forked, and the sound that came out was yyeess all doubled up. Mr Norris and Mrs Morris would take yyeess away with them tied in brown paper and string. When George appeared blinking in the shop looking for Mr Norris or Mrs Morris, and was caught instead by a list-wielding Mrs Maybe, Mrs Maybe would take yyeess away with her, all shiny like a new penny, leaving George standing empty-handed behind the counter, left with the round part of no (oh) rolling round in his mouth and a crease between his eyebrows. He tried to remember the shape of his mother’s mouth when she said no and practised making the same shape with his own mouth, but the ‘o!’ slid out and deflated into a hiss of yyesss.
Because all the words his mother gave him hissed and sagged, George began to build blocks of solid words: ‘Certainly-that-is-the-case Mrs Maybe; to-be-honest Mrs Might, I-have-always-found-that; it-must-be, Mrs White; obviously, Mrs Right.’ He pulled his chin in, cleared his throat and found himself behind a wall of words. He talked and talked.
At work only Ruth, who came in to clean on Fridays, listened to him. The other girl who came in on Mondays to do the invoices had added up all his subtotals, circled the deficit in red, the mint lick of stamps on her breath, and gone to the lounge bar for a shandy before she went to the pictures. Ruth, on the other hand, nodded and smiled as she swept around his feet, a scarf wrapped around her head, and a pinny over her frock. Her words scurried – ‘oh no, oh yes, if you say so’. The words scuttled into holes and looked out.
George began to long for Fridays. Ruth was usually there before him, vacuuming the shop and droning over the hum. He lingered between bolts of fabric and the notions and fancies, but Mrs Morris would walk in, shaking off her headscarf and unbuttoning her coat, talking 19 to the dozen to Ruth. Ruth would stop and stretch back with her hands on her hips and nod and smile, nod and smile, and Mrs Morris, still talking, hung her coat on the hook on the back of the door and eyed George while she emptied the float into the cash register. The vacuum cleaner droned again behind the mannequin. George went out the back.
When she had finished out the front (just a few trifles to tidy after the shop opened), Ruth came out the back to help sort the day’s deliveries. George didn’t say much, just looked at her from under his eyebrows and watched her words. Now Ruth’s words were like petticoats. They came in layers – ‘Oh yes? Do you think so? I thought I might, but mother says … The blue is nice, isn’t it … I wish (what?), oh never mind (no, what do you wish?). It’s just that … it doesn’t matter really (what?). I sometimes wonder (what?).’ Ruth’s eyes looked up at him and looked away like the shelves weren’t there. A bell rang in the shop. Ruth dropped her eyes, picked up the heavy scissors and cut the string on the brown paper packages that held no surprises, glancing at George, before picking up her broom and duster and going to clean the office while Mr Norris was at lunch. George recounted the cotton reels. Ruth had gone by the time he had finished.
George took the 5.15pm bus home. He waited at the stop outside the picture theatre and watched a couple look at movie posters, hands clasped, leaning close. The girl pointed and leant over, the boy behind her. She had a pony tail and looked up into the boy’s eyes. George looked at his feet and the lolly wrappers and the cigarette butts and raised his eyes and caught a glimpse of the kiosk, a packet of Snifters and two ice creams, chocolate-dipped-please, before the door swung closed.
The bus pulled up, sighed its door open, and George handed over the loose change for two sections and took the seat opposite the driver. The driver looked at the road. George looked out the window at the lull of the power lines pitching and rolling. He pulled the string at the stop past the Four Square, outside the Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and stepped down into the shadows. He walked up the right angle of nearly home, closed the door on today and locked out tomorrow for a few hours.
On Saturday morning George got up and put the kettle on, the gas hissing like the snakey yyeess. He ran the bath and took his tea and toast and wrote words in the condensation – yes? yes? … YES! George watched as the water droplets slid down the wall and crossed out his agreement. He got out and got dressed. ‘I’ll go out now’, he said, with a glance over his shoulder. ‘I will’, he said, ‘Now.’
On the way to the gardens, George passed Ruth’s house. She lived with her mother on a side street near the shops in a tiny cottage with a door flanked by sleepy windows. Once George had seen Ruth push the gate open and take the two steps to the door and slip sideways inside. After that George always walked slowly across the street, peering in the butcher’s window, looking out the corner of his eye, his elbow bent with a triangle of space to accommodate the small hand of hope.
George walked up the path to the top of the gardens to see the aviary. He stood outside the cage where the ringed-neck doves bowed and cooed, cheek-to-cheek, right next to the mesh. In the next cage, the peach-faced love birds preened each other and closed their eyes. As George stood and watched, he reached out for their softness, but his finger was too big for the mesh. A boy sidled round him; a lady scolded George like a starling until her husband guided her away by the elbow. The sun went behind a cloud and came out again. The southerly nipped George’s cheeks. The birds nestled closer. George shoved his hands in his pockets and shuffled down the path where the trees pushed and jostled. As he came down the hill, the Spaniards drew their swords, so he put his head down and made for the shops.
George was crossing the narrow street before he remembered where he was and glanced at the house. He was so intent on walking forwards and looking sideways that he collided with Ruth. Her head into his chest, her eyes startled, looking up into his face, his hand on hers as they both reached for the parcel that had landed in the gutter.
‘Oh!’ Ruth said, ‘Oh!’
And George managed to say, ‘S-s-s-orry.’
And they stood.
Rain spotted the footpath.
George said ‘Would you like to …?’
Ruth said ‘Oh’, which was a kind of yes that didn’t hiss or strike, and ‘Now?’ which was a question with a curly end that led to afternoon.
Later turned out to be a time that George hoped would take as long as possible, drawing the afternoon out like a thread. And the walk home stretched like shadows, Sand words danced like moths.
And yes was a kind of sigh.
George ran over his handful of words.
‘Oh baby’, said George, although, this time, he might have been talking to someone else.