The Voice of the Xenolith (21 page)

She kind of understood what I was saying. She asked me to imagine something: If Silence is in charge on one side, and on the other side parents and teachers are also trying to take charge, because they are worried about you, how does it feel? When there are these forces on both sides of you, what is it like to sit between these two sides?

I thought that I didn’t want to be caught like that. It felt suffocating, like I was caught between two big boulders.

But that made me suddenly think of my being a xenolith, a rock caught inside a rock of a completely different kind. And it was strange, because I have always loved the idea of being a xenolith, but now suddenly I thought that maybe the stone inside the rock is not there by choice but has been caught, and it can’t get away, and maybe it feels suffocated.

I got a bit upset then, in fact I just wanted to cry, because all this time I had been thinking what a good thing it was to be a xenolith, how special it made me, and that idea really kept me going through all the mean comments from other girls in my class, and the trouble I was in with my teachers. And now I could see that maybe being a xenolith was the opposite of what I really wanted. I wanted to be free; free of all those people telling me how I should be, free of school and the teachers and the other kids in the class telling me I was weird to go on fossil-hunting holidays.

I wanted to get out of that rock that was holding me and not letting me go and was suffocating me.

I know that feeling of being suffocated: you can’t breathe, your parents think you have asthma, and it is the Heart Attacker all over again.

I thought now that maybe I had been wrong all along about Michelangelo’s Slave statues, and that unfinished obelisk in the quarry at Aswan. Maybe they were tragedies of unfinished work. Maybe Michelangelo had wanted to complete the statues and could not work out how to get them to emerge from the stone undamaged; maybe the quarry workers were devastated, or even punished, for allowing the obelisk to crack while they were excavating it. Maybe these works are suffocating inside their rock, never to emerge.

Mrs. E. could see I was upset. She waited a bit and then said something about how she was sorry she had upset me. So I had to tell her. I told her what a xenolith is (she had never heard that word; I suppose only a person who has a geologist in her family would ever know a word like that) and how the stone inside the rock is a singular thing on its own, and how I saw that as the way I am, different from the people who are around me, surrounded by something other than myself. We looked at pictures of xenoliths online so she could see what a xenolith looks like. I told her the Greek origin of the word and I could see she was interested.

“It seems to me,” she said, “that you are right about that. It is a good metaphor to use for a person who is not like everyone else, who has original ideas, who can think for herself. But could it be, is it possible, that in the same way that we found the meaning of granite to have more than one way it can be used as a metaphor for people, this word, the xenolith, also has some different possibilities? Not instead of that meaning, but in addition to that meaning?”

I couldn’t think of anything except how dumb I had been, pretending to be something special all this time when actually I was just weird, odd, a misfit, just like some people in my class had been saying.

It reminded me of a game I used to play with Mrs. E. when I was still going to her for speech therapy because I was a selective mute. It was called ‘Odd One Out.’ The game is made up of lots of small cards; each card has four pictures on it. Three of the four pictures would be pictures of things that belong in one group, for example three kinds of fruit, and one of the pictures on the card would be something from a completely different category, for example a type of clothing, perhaps a shirt, or socks. What we had to do, in turn, was to pick a card, and say which picture of the four didn’t fit into the group, and explain why it didn’t fit.

Most of the cards were quite easy, even for a five-year-old, like the fruit and clothes, but some were a bit harder; one card had three things you wear in winter (a coat, a scarf and boots) and the fourth picture, the odd one out, was a T-shirt which is something you wear in summer.

There was one card I especially liked, because it had only flowers on it, so at first it seemed that all four pictures belonged to the same group, and there was no odd one out, but when you looked carefully you saw that one of the flowers, the rose, was the only flower with thorns.

I suppose I was good at that game because I was the odd one out: the xenolith, the one who is different from the others. Who doesn’t fit into any group.

But in those days, when we used to play ‘Odd One Out,’ I didn’t feel left out, or weird. It was actually fun. Mrs. E. and I would take turns, so that it wasn’t me doing all the talking. And Mrs. E. would make little jokes. At the beginning, when I first started to go to speech therapy, we never had jokes and nothing was very funny. But later she started to make jokes; she would act silly, as if she didn’t know the answer to a question. In this game she liked to pretend that she couldn’t see which one was the odd one out, and she would give me all kinds of silly reasons why something didn’t fit into the group.

So when we looked at the card with the flowers, which I knew, having looked at it carefully for a while, was about the one flower which had thorns, she thought for a while and then she looked at me and I could just see she was going to make a joke. I know that face that grown-ups make: it is a kind of upside-down smile, where they make the corners of their lips go down instead of up but their eyes are crinkling with a smile anyway. She pointed to the picture of the daisy, and said, “That’s the odd one out, because a daisy is cold, and the others are flowers which are hot.”

She knew as well as I did that it was nonsense, but she looked so funny with her silly smile, that I didn’t mind speaking, and I said to her, “No, it’s the rose, because a rose has thorns.”

I think that was the first time I managed to say a whole sentence in front of Mrs. E., all those words, without even noticing at the time that I had done it and without noticing that I had felt no fear.

When I think of that sentence, it was probably also the first time I had disagreed with an adult who was not someone in my family. So I think that was a big step for me in my
bravery strategies
. Saying something that was different, not what was expected, something that would make someone sit up and listen. When all I had always really wanted was
not
to be listened to.

I suppose, looking back on that day now, that it was those games we played which helped me to learn how to use my voice and to speak to people who were not my family. But it wasn’t just the games, because those games were really simple, and we played them at home too. It was Mrs. E., how she let me trust her and how she smiled with the crinkles next to her eyes. Most of all it was how she knew when to speak and when to be silent, and not to push me to do anything that would stop my breathing. How she never let me feel like I was the Odd One Out when I was with her. How she used the strategy of small steps to take me very, very slowly, out of the land of the Heart Attacker into a new landscape where people could talk if they felt like it. And how she used her own silence to help me feel comfortable with silence.

And now here we were again, years later, still talking about Silence.

“I wonder…” said Mrs. E., “I wonder if perhaps I made a mistake when I thought that Silence comes back to mess things up for you. I think I was wrong, because now I think, could it be that Silence comes along as a helper?”

She was doing it again, talking about Silence like it was a live thing, something that comes along and does things.

She went on, “It seems to me that maybe Silence helps you to protect your ideas, to keep them from getting messed up, or mixed up, to keep them perfect. Could it be that the way Silence helps you to protect your ideas is the same as the way the rock protects the xenolith inside it?”

I thought about the things I protect. My notebooks with all my ideas, and my dictionary with its different groups of words, and my fossils categorised and labelled in my tool boxes. All the things and the ideas that are precious to me are kept in their places, protected in my room at home, organised, arranged, perfect. Nobody in my family touches my stuff or rearranges it or even dusts it; I look after it myself.

I am like a curator of a museum, protecting my finds. I look after my books and my fossils and my ideas, the things I know. All those things that other kids don’t know, about other countries and languages and about geology and sand: I protect my thoughts and my ideas.

I said nothing. I was thinking.

Mrs. E. was silent too, for a long time. Then she said, “Maybe in the classroom, Silence comes along when you need a helper, when you need to protect your ideas, to keep them clear and perfect by keeping them to yourself, by not diluting them with explanations and trying to get people to listen. But when you needed to protect your parents and help them to find Jasper, Silence knew that it wasn’t needed at that time, that something else was needed, so did it bow out at that time? Or did you feel that you would rather be silent when that thing was happening?”

Well obviously, I didn’t stay silent that time, I shouted until someone listened to me. Mrs. E. kept going. “Do you remember we talked about how you use your strength to protect things? To protect your fossils, and your ideas, and your brother? Can you see how these things are linked?”

I couldn’t see what she was on about. I was not getting my eye in, I didn’t know what she was talking about, and everything just seemed wrong to me. I just wanted to go home.

She went on. “It seems to me that these things are linked. What if the rock around the stone, which is holding that stone tight, is trying to protect it, not to suffocate it? I wonder if that rock has protected the xenolith from being crushed by other rocks, from being weathered, from being picked up and taken by a collector? Perhaps they have a relationship of protection?”

“Well if that is the case, it is over-protection,” I said. “Because the stone can’t ever get away, the rock is stronger than the stone.”

She sat, silent. I also had nothing to say so I sat and thought about all this stuff about rocks, and holding, and suffocating.

And then I got it. It wasn’t one thing or the other; it was a bit of both. With a real xenolith, that stone is forever trapped inside the rock. But for me, well, I may be different from all the other kids, I may be the Odd One Out, but actually I can get out of my rock: I can do it whenever I want to. I can go travelling; I can get a holiday job and earn money; I can give a talk in front of the whole class.

And when I want to, I can get back into the shelter of my rock and be safe. I will still be different from other people, I will still be the amethyst in that rock, and what is precious to me will still be protected: my ideas and my interests.

She said, “I wonder if your name, Amethyst, is something to think about, because it is a word for a precious stone, and a precious stone reflects light. Or maybe it lets light shine through it. So even if it is inside a rock, even if it is a xenolith, it shines out of the rock.”

I didn’t know what she was talking about and I couldn’t think straight by then, but luckily it was time to go home, because the session was over.

I wrote this paper for the English teacher just before the end of the school year, in July.

Learning to count

By Amethyst Simons

The number of Jews deported from France to concentration camps, from the first roundup in May 1941 until the last one in August 1944, was 75,721. That is the number in the Klarsfeld lists, although some history books say it was more like 76,000. And of all those deported, only about 2,500 were alive after the war. So about 73,221 Jews from France were killed.

When the Germans invaded France, in 1940, there were about 300,000 Jews living in France.

That means about 25% of all the Jews living in France at the time were murdered. About a quarter.

I am trying to understand what the numbers mean, because numbers that big don’t mean anything. You can’t picture them, you can’t imagine them or understand them.

Perhaps I can try to find an analogy.

‘Analogy’: a word derived from the Greek ‘analogia’ which means proportions, or ratio. Made up of two words: ‘ana’ which means upon, or according to, and ‘logos’ which means word, or speech, or reckoning.

So here is one kind of analogy. The London borough of Southwark has 288,700 people. That is nearly 300,000. Imagine if a quarter of those people were murdered.

I don’t think I can picture it.

Maybe I can change the landscape, and instead of using a suburb of a huge city as an analogy, I can use a smaller city.