wakes up again, sort of like John Barleycorn in reverse. By January he’s his old self again, so back I come to Mrs de Roo. This year Hangman’s worse than ever. Aunt Alice stayed with us two weeks ago and one night I was crossing the landing and I heard her say to Mum, ‘Honestly, Helena, when are you going to do something about his stutter? It’s social suicide! I never know whether to finish the sentence for him or just leave the poor boy dangling on the end of his rope.’ (Eavesdropping’s sort of thrilling ’cause you learn what people really think, but eavesdropping makes you miserable for exactly the same reason.) After Aunt Alice’d gone back to Richmond, Mum sat me down and said it mightn’t do any harm to visit Mrs de Roo again. I said okay, ’cause actually I’d wanted to but I hadn’t asked ’cause I was ashamed, and ’cause mentioning my stammer makes it realer.
Mrs de Roo’s office smells of Nescafé. She drinks Nescafé Gold Blend non-stop. There’re two ratty sofas, one yolky rug, a dragon’s-egg paperweight, a Fisher-Price toy multi-storey car park and a giant Zulu mask from South Africa. Mrs de Roo was born in South Africa but one day she was told by the government to leave the country in twenty-four hours or she’d be thrown into prison. Not ’cause she’d done anything wrong, but because they do that in South Africa if you don’t agree coloured people should be kept herded off in mud-and-straw huts in big reservations with no schools, no hospitals and no jobs. Julia says the police in South Africa don’t always bother with prisons, and that often they throw you off a tall building and say you tried to escape. Mrs de Roo and her husband (who’s an Indian brain surgeon) escaped to Rhodesia in a jeep but had to leave everything they owned behind. The government took the lot. (The Malvern Gazetteer interviewed her, that’s how I know most of this.) South Africa’s summer is our winter so their February is lovely and hot. Mrs de Roo’s still got a slightly funny accent. Her ‘yes’ is a ‘yis’ and her ‘get’ is a ‘git’.
‘So, Jason,’ she began today. ‘How are things?’
Most people only want a ‘Fine, thanks’ when they ask a kid that, but Mrs de Roo actually means it. So I confessed to her about tomorrow’s form assembly. Talking ’bout my stammer’s nearly as embarrassing as stammering itself, but it’s okay with her. Hangman knows he mustn’t mess with Mrs de Roo so he acts like he’s not there. Which is good, ’cause it proves I can speak like a normal person, but bad, ’cause how can Mrs de Roo ever defeat Hangman if she never even sees him properly?
Mrs de Roo asked if I’d spoken to Mr Kempsey about excusing me for a few weeks. I already had done, I told her, and this is what he’d said. ‘We must all face our demons one day, Taylor, and for you, that time is nigh.’ Form assemblies’re read by students in alphabetical order. We’ve got to ‘T’ for ‘Taylor’ and as far as Mr Kempsey’s concerned that’s that.
Mrs de Roo made an I see noise.
Neither of us said anything for a moment.
‘Any headway with your diary, Jason?’
The diary’s a new idea prompted by Dad. Dad phoned Mrs de Roo to say that given my ‘annual tendency to relapse’, he thought extra ‘homework’ was appropriate. So Mrs de Roo suggested that I keep a diary. Just a line or two every day, where I write when, where and what word I stammered on, and how I felt. Week One looks like this:
‘More of a chart, then,’ Mrs de Roo said, ‘than a diary in the classical mode, as such?’ (Actually I wrote it last night. It’s not lies or anything, just truths I made up. If I wrote every time I had to dodge Hangman, the diary’d be as thick as the Yellow Pages.) ‘Most informative. Very neatly ruled, too.’ I asked if I should carry on with the diary next week. Mrs de Roo said she thought my father’d be disappointed if I didn’t, so maybe I should.
Then Mrs de Roo got out her Metro Gnome. Metro Gnomes’re upside-down pendulums without the clock part. They tock rhythms. They’re small, which could be why they’re called gnomes. Music students normally use them but speech therapists do too. You read aloud in time with its tocks,