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“That’s it Jon, nice and flat.”
There is flour under his fingernails and flour up his nose. There is not quite enough flour on the worktop, so his grandmother reaches around him and sprinkles a little more when the tacky dough clings to the rolling pin.
“Keep going. It needs to be nice and flat,” she repeats.
He nods, fingertips sticky.
“Look at you, finally earning your keep. Only took until your last night,” she half-teases half-means, smiling flatly. “Not so bad really, is it? At your age, anyway. Rolling shortcrust is no fun at all at my time of life.”
Jon mirrors the flat smile.
There had been no, “I’ll teach you.”
No, “It’ll be nice to do something together.”
No, “I used to make this with your father.”
She had, however, dusted off the scales. She had pre-heated the oven, and wiped down the surfaces, and she had leaned on the adjacent counter with her arms folded instead of leaving the room. She had smoothed down the pages of the recipe book, and let her fingertips linger over a cluster of three oval smudges, small and old.
Jon swallows.
He has become well-practiced recently, in making things flat. He has turned his books horizontal and slotted them neatly into cardboard boxes. He has folded his shirts and his trousers and his jumpers, and arranged them across a dustsheet in the bottom of an Ikea bag. He has pressed yellowing photographs between the pages of a slim album. One, the victim of small clumsy hands, smells like half-remembered perfume. It’s okay little one. No harm done.
Another press of the rolling pin. He pushes his tongue against his front teeth.
He has flattened also the rhotic Rs inherited from his grandmother, her childhood on the pre-Estuary English Dorset coast revived in the warm consonants that fell from his mouth. He has ironed those linguistic relics, the jigsaw-puzzle clues of an insular, few-voiced upbringing that spun the silk of his voice from fibres long since dried. They contributed richly to the arsenal at his tormentors’ disposal as they chased him across the playground, hands cupped around an unseen thing.
“It’s only a spiderrr Jon. Scarrred of a little spiderrr?”
(oh yes.)
(terribly so.)
(and perhaps you should be too.)
“Jonathan Sims,” he said to the mirror, holding his hand out to himself. “Pleasure to meet you.”
Pleashur…
No, no no -
Pl..pleashuh
Pleash..ah
Pleashaah.
Pleashah.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes, that’s alright.
Pleash-ar –
DAMN.
The face in the mirror glared back at him, all flared nostrils and hooded eyes. He snarled at it, and wrenched his jaw open so wide he heard a crack.
No longer do lilting Rs peak like molehills in his words. Instead, languid vowels slide as mud on the steep hill that his words tumble down. Their descent stops only when snagged by the sharp edges of a harsh consonant, their cut at least preferable to that of a sharper laugh.
His grandmother’s hand appears on the rolling pin.
“That should be enough,” she says softly.
He nods again, stilling.
He hopes so.
He really, really hopes so.
***
The acoustics of the dining hall are frankly absurd. The high ceilings and polished stone create a perfect echo, unsullied even by the hundreds of insulating bodies adorned in robes. Jon’s paranoid ears amplify even further the reverberations of his own voice as he mills around the room, biting down on the instinct to run as he repeatedly introduces himself.
Well.
Introduces someone, anyway.
His voice is not a voice is not a voice is not a voice is not a voice is not real is not his is a lie is a lie is a lie is a -
“Jonathan Sims. Pleasure to meet you,” says a voice that belongs at Oxford.
A high laugh, a little startled.
“How formal. Georgina Barker. Georgie. Nice to meet you too.”
Goodness.
She has very soft hands.
- trap.
***
“When we first met, I thought you were putting on that accent to sound more impressive. Oh. Oh, Jon… I’m so sorry.”
“Oh… No, it’s alright. I, er, I mean, I-I guess I did exaggerate it. It’s a long time ago, anyway.”
Something old and shameful curls up in his gut, before he asks, “Proof?”
***
“I meant to tell you earlier,” Georgie says a little too brightly over the film projecting orange light across her living room, adorned with cheap tinsel. “Drama Soc released their Snow White cast list yesterday. I’m afraid they’ve found their Grumpy. I’d have told you earlier if I’d known you were interested. There’ll be other opportunities. Chin up.”
Jon blinks for the first time in about half an hour, and frowns down at where she is resting her head on his chest.
“You can stop the method acting, is what I’m getting at. You’re stiff as a board and glaring daggers.”
When he doesn’t move or soften his expression, she sighs heavily and sits up, folding her hands in her lap.
“Look,” she claps her hands together harshly, mouth pinched. “If you think this is a mistake you can just say so. No hard feelings, probably some awkwardness, but frankly, that’s kind of your MO anyway. But what I don’t want, is to be led on. So, if you’re regretting trying out this whole dating thing, just tell me. Steph and Jess are still at the pub, I can bitch about you for an hour, then we can pretend this never happened.”
Jon looks down at his hands. He can feel Georgie tensing beside him as the seconds tick away; can see the corners of her mouth crinkling below stormy eyes in his peripheral vision. Something explodes on the screen. His scowl turns to a grimace, and he slowly shakes his head.
“That isn’t it.”
Georgie has very soft hands. Sometimes they find their way to his hair and wander across his scalp like whisper-quiet nomads. Sometimes, their quiet permeates his skull and settles across his whirring mind, and he can hear the world beyond the din, just for a while. Sometimes she whispers through the quiet, words that do not cut, words that do not maim, words that do not lie.
You’re very strange, you know.
I like it.
And it makes him think –
Maybe.
Just maybe, this impossible thing might something he can –
Even if just for a while.
If he can just manage to be a little less -
“Then what the hell is wrong? Because you’re really not giving off ‘having the time of my life with someone I find romantically –‘”
“Is that your laptop?” he blurts.
Her head twitches to the side owlishly, mouth still open from being cut off. She opens and closes it like a goldfish.
“Sorry?”
He sighs heavily and points at the sticker-adorned brick of a laptop on the coffee table.
“Is. That. Laptop. Yours?”
“It says Georgie on it, Jon,” she says slowly, enunciating every syllable. “In great big purple letters.”
He nods slowly, while she watches him suspiciously.
“Can you…”
He closes his eyes and draws in a breath.
“…Jon?”
“Can you look up if the cat dies,” he expels in a single breath.
Georgie’s folded brow irons out in brief surprise, then lowers again in tandem with widening eyes into a cartoonish picture of bewilderment.
“I’m sorry –”
“The cat. At the start,” he gestures to the screen. “The police guy was playing with her for a long time, and then there was that lingering shot of her pawing at the door for no apparent reason, and it’s feeling a bit Chekov’s Tabby –”
She cuts him off with a laugh. Not a cruel one, just… surprised. And almost –
Fond?
He can’t quite let himself entertain the notion.
“Jonathan Sims, aren’t you full of surprises?” she says with an impish grin.
“No,” he mumbles, burying his face in his hands. He feels the sofa cushion shift as she leans over him for the remote and presses the pause button, then again as she reaches for her laptop on the coffee table.
“Don’t look until I say it’s safe,” she stage-whispers, over a soundscape of tapping keys. He murmurs an affirmative. There is the whirring of a fan, a click, a few moments of silence and then, “Richard’s cat Sparkler is seen alive and well in the penultimate scene, sunbathing on the windowsill of a high-end New York apartment.”
He nods into his hands, then hears a breathy chuckle and feels fingertips scratch the nape of his neck.
“Satisfied?” she asks, audibly amused.
He blows out a breath.
“Yes. Thank you.” He drags his hands down his face and braves a glance at her. When he sees a pursed and twinkling smile, he leans back and opens his arms again. “You can come back now. Please. I promise to be more comfortable.”
She chuckles, and shuffles to the other end of the sofa, rolling her eyes at his slightly dismayed expression. “Oh no,” she opens her arms instead. “You and your shot nerves are coming here. It’s like laying on a sparrow at the best of times, laying on a trembling sparrow feels like large-scale pins and needles.”
The scowl returns to his face and remains determinedly secured even as he shuffles towards her lap. It relaxes only once he’s turned away, and she presses play.
“You need to use your words Jon,” she says softly, mostly playful but with something close to imploring colouring the meaning slightly darker. “I can’t read minds.”
Me neither, Jon thinks.
Wouldn’t it be nice.
***
his voice is not a voice is not a voice is not a voice is not a voice and he does not even need to speak aloud for the words to lure and to lure and to guide wandering fingers to doorhandles and it should have been him it should have been him he should have been the one –
silenced.
***
“Explain it to me.”
There are chip shop pamphlets on the table and half-moons in his palms. Georgie wraps her fingers around his jaw, not tight but certainly not gentle, and tilts his chin up. His blank gaze does not meet hers, but drifts through it like fog.
“Use your words, Jon,” she sing-songs as she has begun to, in the familiar timbre of a cruel playground.
Ring-a-ring o’roses,
A pocket full of posies,
A tishoo! A tishoo!
Jon.
Falls.
Down.
He remembers the kick to the back of his knee and winces back from her grip. Her fingers fall away. She folds her arms and frowns down at him.
“I can’t help you if you won’t tell me what’s wrong.”
He lifts his left shoulder in an imperceptible shrug.
The world is very sharp today, he wants to say. The mouth I live inside has turned all to canines, and I have taken refuge beneath the tongue.
He does not say this, because he cannot say anything at all.
Georgie’s sigh ricochets off the walls, landing at his socked feet. He tucks his knees under his chin, away from it, and away from her.
***
“Hey. You need to stop that.”
Her voice permeates a haze of sleep. Her fingertips are light on his temple, then dance down to his jaw as he blinks blearily awake.
“Stop what?” he croaks, squinting at her in the low lamplight. Her book is open on her chest, spine cracked backward and floppy pages prone.
“You were grinding your teeth in your sleep again. You know what the dentist said, and you know you can’t afford that private treatment nonsense she was on about.”
His fingers join hers at the hinge of his jaw, where a newly acknowledged ache flares down a nerve path.
“I didn’t know I was doing it,” he mumbles miserably.
“Yeah, well. Try to stop.”
She looks at him meaningfully for a moment, then picks up her book. He shifts onto his side to face her, then slides his eyes shut again.
His fingers curl around the hem of her shirt, as in still dreamlike terror he wonders what exactly his subconscious is trying to crush.
(and how many legs it has)
***
We found the one we believed most likely to bring about their manifestation. We marked him young, guided his path as best we could.
And then, we took his voice.
***