Camilla Way - Little Bird

As Elodie eats she takes in the man’s thick wrists, the heavy features of his face, the incongruously small chin. She watches the way he drinks with large rapid gulps, the way he bites at his bread; how when he finishes his meal he drops his cutlery with a clatter, stretches and gives a loud, satisfied sigh. She feels a nip of disappointment when he takes his plate to the sink and then, with a brief word to Ingrid and a smile and a wave to her, takes his suitcase and disappears up the stairs. Left alone Elodie ponders this surprising turn of events. She had thought that only she and Ingrid lived in this large, many roomed house, and is intrigued to discover her mistake.

It’s some time before she sees Robert again. Every day he leaves early in the morning, often not returning until after she’s in bed. At the weekends he keeps to his study and the only sign of him is the faint rumble of the radio or television seeping from under his door. Often he will disappear with his big suitcase for weeks at a time. And mostly she and Ingrid keep to the top floor of High Barn, in the little room full of mysterious equipment that she will one day refer to as ‘the schoolroom’. Sometimes a whole month can pass where she doesn’t see Robert at all.

On the rare occasions that the three of them do eat together, Elodie begins to sense something in the air between Ingrid and Robert that troubles her. Although their voices are calm and quiet when they speak, there is nevertheless a strange, shivery tension that hovers in the gaps between their words. Sometimes Elodie will wake in the night and hear angry, raised voices, the slamming of doors. Gradually she begins to sense that the raw tenderness of Ingrid, the sadness she sometimes sees in her is somehow worse when Robert is at home, and that there’s a subtle loosening of tension when they hear his car disappearing down the long, gravel drive each morning.

But she has little time to dwell on it. Her new life is too full of new experiences, too overwhelming and all-consuming for Robert to feature very heavily in her thoughts.

‘Cat.’ ‘Sky.’ ‘House.’ ‘Tree.’ Elodie understands that everything in the world has a corresponding sound, and that everything she and Ingrid do together is with the aim of helping her decipher them. The instinctive hunger that had begun to take root in her at the hospital returns and gathers strength, and it’s Ingrid, she understands, who holds the key. Wherever they go, whatever they do, whatever they see, everything is labelled for her. ‘Chair.’ ‘Window.’ ‘Elodie.’ ‘Ingrid.’ ‘Bowl.’ A constant stream of words accompanies their daily walks together. ‘Car.’ ‘Tree.’ ‘House.’ ‘Man.’ ‘Cat.’ She understands that the games they play in the room next to her bedroom – the picture cards, the puzzles, the books – are all somehow linked to this endeavour. And she sees, too, that Ingrid’s determination to teach her is as intense as her own desire to learn.

‘Eeeee.’ ‘Ooooo.’ ‘Essssss.’ ‘Tuh.’ ‘Puh-puh-puh.’. Over and over she tries to mimic the shapes Ingrid makes with her mouth, to produce the same sounds that come from her teacher’s throat. Over and over she fails.

At night in her dreams the silent man waves to her from the window of his rusty blue pick-up truck, before slowly driving away, disappearing between the trees. Sometimes she half-wakes in the darkness and believes for a moment that she’s back there, in the cottage in the woods. For a moment she hears the sound of the wind in the trees outside, the man’s low snores. In her half slumber she smiles and thinks how, in a moment, she will rise and go to listen to the birds’ dawn song. And then she wakes and even as the stone walls of the cottage melt away, she’s reaching for the little wooden bird, clasping it tightly in her fist as if to squeeze what comfort she can from it.

Occasionally Ingrid will take Elodie with her on her errands to the nearby town. On their first visit to the food store while Ingrid pays at the checkout Elodie slips away to wander alone through the aisles, stopping now and then to marvel at the neat, colourful rows of boxes and tins. At the fruit counter she picks up a banana, biting into the hard, rubbery skin before throwing it to the floor with a grimace. Next she trails a bunch of grapes across her face, first sniffing and then nibbling at the little purple fruits, rolling her eyes at the sweet explosions on her tongue. She spies an elderly man staring at her, amazed, across the aisle and going to him she circles her arms around his waist and rests her head upon his belly. Moments later she finds herself being pulled gently away, and while a dozen astonished customers look on, Ingrid leads her quickly out of the store.

Every week Ingrid takes Elodie in the car to the big, red-bricked building in the middle of the city. As they drive she stares out of the window and marvels at what she sees. What shocks her most about this new world is all the people in it. There seem to be as many people as there are blades of grass or stars. Everywhere she looks, there they are: smiling and talking and frowning and laughing, and each of them, somehow, connected, connecting.

Inside, the red-bricked building is exactly like the hospital she left behind in France and sometimes they spend the whole morning there. Often she must lie perfectly still while a white dome glides noiselessly over her head. She notices that the men and women who lead her down the long white corridors to this room and that, and who put her on this bed or that chair, who shine lights in her eyes and stare and point things out to each other on the flickering screens, all share the way in which they behave towards Ingrid. She sees how keenly they listen to her when she speaks, how careful they are to do as she asks. She sees that they are a little afraid of her. And a part of her recognises this nervousness, this fear of displeasing, of disappointing, of provoking that brief, flash of impatience in those pink-rimed eyes.

She has been at High Barn three weeks when Colin and Yaya arrive. Two strangers who walk into the schoolroom next to her bedroom one morning while she and Ingrid are looking at a picture book together. Later, she will understand that they are graduate students, handpicked by Ingrid to assist her in her work, to make the endless reports on her progress over the coming months. But on that morning she knows only that from the moment they arrive, with the smell of the wind on their coats, their arms full of boxes and files and their faces lit with curious, excited smiles, that they bring a sudden warmth and light to High Barn that hadn’t been there before.

The man, Colin, is quiet and always busy setting up cameras or writing things down or fiddling with the tape recorder or laying out the games and books and cards, but he smiles at her a lot and pulls faces to make her laugh. It’s Yaya she loves the most. Yaya with her soft, tinkling voice like rain on the river, her glowing, dark-brown skin the colour of the earth, her long skirts and the rainbow scarves wrapped around and around her head, her bracelet of little silver bells that jingle when she walks, the warm, natural ease of her. When Elodie makes a mistake Yaya smiles and says, ‘Never mind, little one. Never mind.’ And even before Elodie knows what these words mean, she understands the kindness of them.

Over the following weeks the four of them settle into a routine. Every day, after breakfast, Elodie watches eagerly from the schoolroom window while Ingrid sets up the equipment for the day. She notices that whatever they do is led, always, by Ingrid, and that Colin and Yaya treat her with the same careful respect as the people in the hospital.

The days pass, and then the weeks, the months. She has got better at mimicking the sounds the others make, of pushing her lips into the correct shapes. She understands that this is a picture of a cat, this is a bed, and that a chair. She understands, but still the words will not come. The sounds she offers are not right, she can tell by the almost imperceptible tightening of Ingrid’s lips, the increasing disappointment in her eyes.