Free Mouthing the Words by Camilla Gibb Page A

variety, the variety that I realize now speaks loudly to sensitive teachers, social workers and psychiatrists of something being decidedly wrong.
    I used to think it was because we were English and that English people didn’t feel a need to resort to such perverse and primitive forms of communication as touch. I didn’t respond very well to tactile gestures. I remember sleeping over next door one night and waking up in terror because Anika was rubbing Vick’s Vapo-Rub on my chest while I slept. My heart nearly stopped beating. I swallowed all my limbs until I had turned myself into a brick.
    I was getting good at this—I could transform into stone with minimum effort. At other times I heard a word, or breathed a smell, or saw the sun disappear in winter or nothing happened whatsoever and I turned hard, cold, without knowing, without feeling.

Dog Days and Ice
    DADDY HAS COME home. I am nearly fourteen. Daddy’s home! Daddy’s home? But we’ve been doing OK without him. Daddy’s home? Oh God, I remember what it’s like when Daddy’s home. Corinna gets even more angry, Willy gets even more scared and I am no longer nearly fourteen anymore, I am a baby again, an insect sometimes, and in my newest incarnation, an icicle.
    Why is Daddy home? Maybe Mum thinks it is better to be angry all the time than to cry all the time as she has since Suresh left, a long time ago now it seems. “Your brother’s going astray,” my mother explains. “He needs a father, a male role model. I cannot cope on my own. I just cannot cope,” she repeats.
    It was true there had been a couple of minor run-ins with the law, one involving a tape deck stolen from Radio Shack, and another a hockey shirt from Eddie Bauer . The only difference between us was that Willy had been caught whereas I never had. I didn’t think of myself as a criminal, or that my petty pilfering was leading me along the road to a life of crime: I simply thought I must stop this before my sixteenth birthday, at which point any juvenile delinquencies would be erased from my record. So because of some peculiar legality, Willy was a criminal and I was not. He needed a father, whereas I did not. As always happened in my family, something became a problem necessitating action only once the public became involved, so there were many more things housed between walls which never became problems in the same way.
    —
    I am fourteen and apparently becoming a “sullen and uncommunicative teenager”, about which my mother said, “Hardly surprising. I could have predicted this. You look like you’re back in your element. I’ll talk to you when you decide to emerge from adolescence and be a human.” But what she doesn’t know is that have I resolved never to emerge, never to relinquish this new-found insulation, never to grow human.
    —
    At school we can get out of gym class by writing M beside our names on the class attendance list. It’s easy. You just write a big M beside your name and you can sit out on the sidelines with all the other M signers. I hate having to take my clothes off and get into my bathing suit, so for the six weeks of swimming I write M beside my name. The gym teacher, flaming red-haired, black leather-skirted Bunni Lambert, gripped her long, hard nails into my shoulder and said, “My dear. If you really have been menstruating for six weeks, I suggest you go and see a doctor.”
    Menstruating. I went home and asked my mother what it meant. My mother said with some perverse glee, “Oh, Thelma. It means you’re a woman!” A woman? I think. How could that have happened? I’ve never wanted to be a woman. I am quite sure that I am still only a girl, a very little girl.
    “Aren’t you lucky you have me for a mother,” Corinna chirped. “My mother told me it was a dirty little secret that one had to keep to oneself. I remember she told me the blood was a sign that my body had started to produce eggs. Of course, I didn’t believe her. I mean, I thought