like this: here – comes – the – can – dle – to – take – you – to – bed, – here – comes – the – chop – per – to – chop – off – your – head. Today we read a stack of N-words from the dictionary, one by one. The Metro Gnome does make speaking easy, as easy as singing, but I can hardly carry one around with me, can I? Kids like Ross Wilcox’d say, ‘What’s this, then, Taylor?’, snap off its pendulum in a nanosecond, and say, ‘Shoddy workmanship, that.’
After the Metro Gnome I read aloud from a book Mrs de Roo keeps for me called Z for Zachariah. Z for Zachariah’s about a girl called Anne who lives in a valley with its own freak weather system that protects it after a nuclear war’s poisoned the rest of the country and killed everyone else off. For all Anne knows she’s the only person alive in the British Isles. As a book it’s utterly brill but a bit bleak. Maybe Mrs de Roo suggested I read this to make me feel luckier than Anne despite my stammer. I got a bit stuck on a couple of words but you’d not’ve noticed if you weren’t looking. I know Mrs de Roo was saying, See, you can read aloud without stammering. But there’s stuff not even speech therapists understand. Quite often, even in bad spells, Hangman’ll let me say whatever I want, even words beginning with dangerous letters. This (a) gives me hope I’m cured which Hangman can enjoy destroying later and (b) let’s me con other kids into thinking I’m normal while keeping alive and well the fear that my secret’ll be discovered.
There’s more. I once wrote Hangman’s Four Commandments.
When the session was over, Mrs de Roo asked me if I felt any more confident about my form assembly. She’d’ve liked me to say ‘Sure!’ but only if I meant it. I said, ‘Not a lot, to be honest.’ Then I asked if stammers’re like zits that you grow out of, or if kids with stammers’re more like toys that’re wired wrong at the factory and stay busted all their lives. (You get stammering adults too. There’s one on a BBC1 sitcom called Open All Hours on Sunday evenings where Ronnie Barker plays a shopkeeper who stutters so badly, so hilariously, that the audience pisses itself laughing. Even knowing about Open All Hours makes me shrivel up like a plastic wrapper in a fire.)
‘Yis,’ said Mrs de Roo. ‘That’s the question. My answer is, it depends. Speech therapy is as imperfect a science, Jason, as speaking is a complex one. There are seventy-two muscles involved in the production of human speech. The neural connections my brain is employing now, to say this sentence to you, number in the tens of millions. Little wonder one study put the percentage of people with some kind of speech disorder at twelve per cent. Don’t put your faith in a miracle cure. In the vast majority of cases, progress doesn’t come from trying to kill a speech defect. Try to will it out of existence, it’ll just will itself back stronger. Right? No, it’s a question – and this might sound nutty – of understanding it, of coming to a working accommodation with it, of respecting it, of not fearing it. Yis, it’ll flare up from time to time, but if you know why it flares, you’ll know how to douse what makes it flare up. Back in Durban I had a friend who’d once been an alcoholic. One day I asked him how he’d cured himself. My friend said he’d done no such thing. I said, “What do you mean? You haven’t touched a drop in three years!” He said all he’d done was become a teetotal alcoholic. That’s my goal. To help people change from being stammering stammerers into non-stammering stammerers.’
Mrs de Roo’s no fool and all that makes sense.
But it’s sod-all help for 2KM’s form assembly tomorrow morning.
Dinner was steak-and-kidney pie. The steak bits’re okay, but kidney makes me reach for the vomit bucket. I have to try to swallow the kidney bits whole. Smuggling bits into my pocket is too risky since Julia spotted me last time and grassed on me. Dad was telling Mum about a new trainee salesman called Danny Lawlor at the new Greenland superstore in Reading. ‘Fresh from some management course, and he’s Irish as Hurricane Higgins, but my word,