Free A Man Melting by Craig Cliff Page A

Marcus, and one even offered him some Rashuns. It was like he was a celebrity. I thought maybe it was because a lot of the other kids in the choir looked like losers and nerds while Marcus looked normal, he just had trouble speaking. He even got to stand in the middle of the back row when we sang. Mrs Green told me to stand on the end of the second row. We started off singing ‘Where The Streets Have No Name’ and I had to look at the overhead projector to read the lyrics so I couldn’t watch Marcus to see if he was stuttering. In the middle of the song, Mrs Green lowered her hands to herknees and everyone else started humming, and Marcus sang by himself about burning down love.
    He was so good at singing it made everyone smile, which made it hard to keep humming.
    After choir I said, ‘You don’t stutter when you sing!’
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘That’s so cool.’
    ‘I wish I didn’t stutter at all.’
    ‘You should live in a musical,’ I said, and thought of my grandfather. Moving to New Zealand would have been like coming to live in a musical for him. Except he was sad and quiet. I thought, what’s the point in moving somewhere you can talk without stuttering if you aren’t going to talk?
    Just me and Dad went to Baba and Dedo’s again that Saturday. I forgot to even ask why Mum wasn’t coming.
    When Dad was out inspecting Baba’s herb garden, I asked Dedo, ‘Do you stutter when you sing?’
    ‘I don’t sing,’ he said.
    ‘What about when you had to sing at school, like for Christmas assemblies?’
    ‘We didn’t sing at school.’
    That seemed weird to me.
    ‘I made friends with this kid at school who stutters but he can sing like an angel. No stutters!’
    My grandfather nodded.
    When we got in the car to go home, I asked my dad, ‘Do you think Dedo regrets leaving Yugoslavia?’
    ‘He didn’t have a lot of choice.’
    ‘Was his stutter really that bad?’
    ‘What stutter?’
    ‘When he spoke Serbian.’
    ‘Dedo doesn’t stutter when he speaks Serbian. He speaks it fluently.’
    ‘What does that mean?’
    ‘It means he speaks it like I speak English. It’s his first language.’
    ‘Yeah, but English is Marcus Collins’s first language and he stutters, but he can sing like an angel.’
    ‘Dedo doesn’t stutter. He speaks to Baba all the time in Serbian. He spoke Serbian at home when I was a child.’
    ‘But Dedo said he left Yugoslavia because he stuttered so much.’
    ‘Oh,’ Dad said.
    ‘Oh, what?’
    Dad flicked on the indicators to turn left out of Baba and Dedo’s street, and we waited there for ages, even though there were no cars coming. Finally we pulled onto Ruahine Street and he said, ‘Dedo had to leave Yugoslavia because of the Ustaše.’
    ‘The what?’
    ‘The people that wanted to kill Serbs like Dedo. During World War Two.’
    ‘But why would anyone want to kill Dedo?’
    Dad took a deep breath, and said, ‘I don’t really understand.’
    ‘So Dedo doesn’t stutter?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Why did he lie to me?’
    ‘He doesn’t talk about his life back then with anyone, not like Baba does.’
    ‘Does she?’
    ‘Sure, ask her about the spring dances she went to as a girl, or the way her mother plaited her hair, and she’ll talk for hours. But Dedo,’ he said and took off his glasses even though we were still driving, just passing the hospital, ‘he’s my dad and he doesn’t even talk to me about the past, y’know?’
    ‘But why did Dedo lie?’
    Dad sighed and put his glasses back on and I sat with my arms crossed the rest of the way home.
    When we arrived, Mum was sitting at the kitchen table flicking through a recipe book. I asked if Daniel was asleep and she said yes.
    ‘Can I sit beside his cot and wait until he wakes up?’
    ‘What are you up to, mister?’ Mum asked.
    ‘Nothing,’ I said.
    Mum looked at Dad, who said, ‘It’s okay, Anne,’ but there was a tiny stutter in his voice, like my mother’s name was made of corrugated iron. He swept me