lapse and you can sneak the word out. But if you say ‘er…’ too much you come across as a right dimmer. Lastly, if a teacher asks you a question directly and the answer’s a stammer-word, it’s best to pretend you don’t know. I couldn’t count how often I’ve done this. Sometimes teachers lose their rag (specially if they’ve just spent half a lesson explaining something) but anything’s better than getting labelled ‘School Stutterboy’.
That’s something I’ve always just about avoided, but tomorrow morning at five minutes past nine this is going to happen. I’m going to have to stand up in front of Gary Drake and Neal Brose and my entire class to read from Mr Kempsey’s book, Plain Prayers for a Complicated World. There will be dozens of stammer-words in that reading which I can’t substitute and I can’t pretend not to know because there they are, printed there. Hangman’ll skip ahead as I read, underlining all his favourite N and S words, murmuring in my ear, ‘Here, Taylor, try and spit this one out!’ I know, with Gary Drake and Neal Brose and everyone watching, Hangman’ll crush my throat and mangle my tongue and scrunch my face up. Worse than Joey Deacon’s. I’m going to stammer worse than I’ve ever stammered in my life. By 9.15 my secret’ll be spreading round the school like a poison gas attack. By the end of first break my life won’t be worth living.
The grotesquest thing I ever heard was this. Pete Redmarley swore on his nan’s grave it’s true so I s’pose it must be. This boy in the sixth form was sitting his A-levels. He had these parents from hell who’d put him under massive pressure to get a whole raft of ‘A’ grades and when the exam came this kid just cracked and couldn’t even understand the questions. So what he did was get two Bic Biros from his pencil case, hold the pointy ends against his eyes, stand up and head-butt the desk. Right there, in the exam hall. The pens skewered his eyeballs so deep that only an inch was left sticking out of his drippy sockets. Mr Nixon the headmaster hushed everything up so it didn’t get in the papers or anything. It’s a sick and horrible story but right now I’d rather kill Hangman that way than let him kill me tomorrow morning.
I mean that.
Mrs de Roo’s shoes clop so you know it’s her coming to fetch you. She’s forty or maybe even older, and has fat silver brooches, wispy bronze hair and flowery clothes. She gave a folder to the pretty receptionist, tutted at the rain and said, ‘My, my, monsoon season’s come to darkest Worcestershire!’ I agreed it was chucking it down, and left with her quick. In case the other patients worked out why I was there. Down the corridor we went, past the signpost full of words like PAEDIATRICS and ULTRASCANS. (No ultranscan’d read my brain. I’d beat it by remembering every satellite in the solar system.) ‘February’s so gloomy in this part of the world,’ said Mrs de Roo, ‘don’t you think? It’s not so much a month as a twenty-eight-day-long Monday morning. You leave home in the dark and go home in the dark. On wet days like these, it’s like living in a cave, behind a waterfall.’
I told Mrs de Roo how I’d heard Eskimo kids spend time under artificial sun-lamps to stop them getting scurvy, ’cause at the North Pole winter lasts for most of the year. I suggested Mrs de Roo should think about getting a sunbed.
Mrs de Roo answered, ‘I shall think on.’
We passed a room where a howling baby’d just had an injection. In the next room a freckly girl Julia’s age sat in a wheelchair. One of her legs wasn’t there. She’d probably love to have my stammer if she could have her leg back, and I wondered if being happy’s about other people’s misery. That cuts both ways, mind. People’ll look at me after tomorrow morning and think, Well, my life may be a swamp of shit but at least I’m not in Jason Taylor’s shoes. At least I can talk.
February’s Hangman’s favourite month. Come summer he gets dozy and hibernates through to autumn, and I can speak a bit better. In fact after my first run of visits to Mrs de Roo five years ago, by the time my hayfever began everyone thought my stammer was cured. But come November Hangman