Ghost Boy Page 12

  “Mr. Pistorius?”

  The woman who interpreted my speech into sign language for deaf members of the audience is standing in front of me.

  “I just wanted to say that you’re an inspiration,” she says in a rush. “You are a truly extraordinary man. To have experienced what you have and remain so positive is an example for us all.”

  I can hear how emotional she is and see the strength of her feeling etched on her face. She speaks in a rush as emotion ripples off her.

  “Thank you for telling us your story,” she says. “I feel proud to have been here today.”

  Before I can reply, another person comes up to congratulate me and then another and another—so many faces stare down at me as they laugh and smile.

  “You were wonderful!”

  “So inspiring!”

  “Your story is just amazing.”

  I don’t know what to say. I feel shocked and unsure as Munyane smiles at me reassuringly. I can hardly understand why people are reacting this way, but as they talk to me I think of a mother I met recently after speaking at a school for disabled children.

  “My son is a pupil here, and I would be proud if he grew up to be like you,” she told me afterwards.

  I didn’t understand what she meant at the time, but now perhaps I am beginning to. As hands clap my back and congratulations are given, I sit amid the noise and movement and realize that people want to hear the story of the boy who came back from the dead. It amazes them—it amazes me too.

  32 A NEW WORLD

  Life and I are in constant collision. At every turn my eyes open in wonder as I crash into another experience: seeing a man with a plume of brightly colored hair like parrot feathers running down the center of his head; tasting a cloud of melting sugar called cotton candy that melts on my tongue; feeling the warm pleasure that comes with going shopping for the first time to buy Christmas presents for my family; or the sharp surprise of seeing women dressed in short skirts with faces painted in bright red and blue cosmetics. There is so much to know, and I am impatient, eager, starving for all the information I can gather.

  In January 2004, a few months after I gave my speech, I started working four days a week—two at the communication center and two at the health center. I do everything from editing newsletters and maintaining computer networks to meeting other AAC users. I’m even learning how to build websites and have been accepted into a university course after Professor Alant encouraged me to apply for it.

  I have no memory of school, and my textbooks will have to be dictated onto tapes because I can’t yet read well enough to study them. The rest of my fellow students, however, will be postgraduates—many of them teachers. I won’t get a full degree because I haven’t graduated from high school, but I’ll be awarded an advanced certificate in education if I finish the course. The course is about the theory and practice of educating those with AAC needs, and I’ll need to study every spare minute that I’m not at work in order to keep up.

  I’m finally daring to dream that independence might be within my reach. Work and study are what will help me get a better job, a higher income, and maybe even a home of my own one day. These are the things I want, and I must do my best to achieve them.

  “Look at you,” Diane Bryen said with a smile when we saw each other at a conference. It was a gathering of AAC users from all over Africa and experts from around the world. I was one of the speakers, as was Diane.

  “You were so fearful when I first met you,” she said. “But now you’re beginning to roar!”

  Change is hard to see when it’s your own. I’d never stopped to notice the person I was becoming until I attended Diane’s workshop for the second time, and she asked us to draw a picture of our dreams. Virna was assisting me at the conference. As the pencil in her hand hovered over a blank sheet of paper, I told her what I dreamed of. In strong, bright strokes, she captured my hopes on the paper: I watched as she drew a house with a picket fence around it and a dog wagging its tail. This is what I wanted and when I thought about having a life so much my own, it made me feel as if I was soaring inside.

  A few days after I returned to work, I was sitting with Virna during our lunch break at the health center when she turned towards me.

  “I hardly know who you are anymore,” she said.

  I looked at her, unsure what she meant, and nothing more was said. But I continued to feel confused as I thought about it in the days that followed because I’d always thought Virna was the person who knew me best in the world. Although my feelings for her remain as strong as ever, I’ve been careful not to reveal them again. Instead, I’ve talked to Virna as a friend about my deepest secrets and fears and described to her all the emotions I have as I go out into the world. That’s why I couldn’t understand when she said she didn’t recognize me.

  Now I wonder if learning to communicate more will change the things I thought would always stay the same. Virna has always rejoiced in the new person I’m becoming. Does she find it hard to recognize a man who is finally beginning to see a world without her as its axis? She kept me grounded for so long. Now I’m beginning to fly—but I’m spreading my wings alone.

  33 THE LAPTOP

  I stare at my laptop. The screen has gone blank. Terror fills me. I can feel it creep and crawl, scrabble and scratch over my heart. I’ve been having problems with my laptop for a while and out of politeness sent an email to everyone I knew earlier this evening warning them that something like this might happen. But I never thought my link to the world would actually be lost, and I’d suddenly go silent.

  I know enough about computers to suspect this is terminal. My laptop is completely lifeless, flatlined. I feel sick. If I don’t have my computer, then I can’t send text messages or emails, do college assignments, or finish off the work I bring home from the office in the evenings to make sure I keep on top of everything. I can’t laugh and joke with my friends online, tell them about my day, and ask about theirs. My physical world might still be limited to the home and office, but there are parts of my life that know no boundaries as I chat to people on different continents. I can’t describe to them how I’m feeling or make plans to meet up. All I’ll have to communicate with now is a battered old alphabet board that won’t reach around the globe the way I need it to.

  Panic turns my stomach in cartwheels. My life is ruled by the press of a single button. It stands and falls on a network of wires, and I never know for sure when they’re about to go wrong. They aren’t like a body that can give me a sign, such as a spike in temperature, a rush of sickness, or a sudden pain. Instead, I must spend the rest of my life relying on a hunk of metal that might give up suddenly without a hint of warning.

  I can hardly breathe. My life is so fragile. I’ve spent all this time thinking that I’d left the ghost boy behind forever. It’s only now that I realize how closely he still shadows me.

  34 THE COUNSELOR

  “How are you feeling today, Martin?”

  I look at the counselor sitting opposite me. I’m not really sure what he’s expecting me to say. I stare at my laptop and click on three symbols.

  “I am well, thank you,” my voice intones.

  “Good,” the counselor says with a smile. “Can you remember what we were talking about the last time you came to see me?”

  I’m not sure. Do we ever actually talk during the hour I spend in this office each week? We speak, of course—the counselor sitting behind his glass desk in a sturdy, black office chair that sways to and fro when he leans back, me on the other side in my wheelchair with a laptop in front of me. But I’m not sure if this exchange of words is really talking.

  When I’m here, I often think of a film I once saw on TV called Short Circuit. It’s about a robot that developed a human personality and an insatiable desire to understand the world around him. No one, except for the girl who rescued him after he ran away from the laboratory where he’d been created, believed he could really have feelings. He was just a machine, after
all. He couldn’t be something he wasn’t.

  As time passes, I feel more and more like Short Circuit because the counselor, like other people, doesn’t seem to know quite what to make of me when I try to communicate. I didn’t notice it when I first rejoined the world because in the rush of excitement at being able to say even a few words, I didn’t see clearly how other people responded to me. But now I watch the counselor staring at the ceiling and checking his nails as he waits for me to talk or hear him rush on with the conversation as I’m left trailing in his wake, trying to answer a question he asked ten sentences ago, and I’m filled with frustration—just as I often am when I speak to people now.

  I feel more and more angry at a world that I often don’t understand, but I’m as much to blame for my anger as others. When I was a ghost boy, I could understand people: if they dismissed, doubted, or undermined, I could see it; if they praised, teased, or were shy, I could tell. But I’m no longer an outsider. I see things from a different perspective now. It’s impossible at times to recognize how people are behaving towards me as I try to interact with them. All my reference points have changed. It’s as if I can only calibrate others when they have nothing to do with me: if someone is rude, I don’t realize it; if they are impatient, I can’t see it.

  When Mum and I went out shopping recently, we met a woman whose son had been in my class at school.

  “How’s Martin?” she asked my mother.

  The woman didn’t even glance at me.

  “Why don’t you ask him?” Mum replied.

  But the woman couldn’t bring herself to make eye contact or ask me a simple question. It seemed almost normal to me because after so many years of being invisible, it’s sometimes hard even now to remember that I’m not. My mother was livid at the way the woman had treated me, and it was only her reaction that helped me to understand someone had slighted me.

  It happens a lot. When a TV crew came to film at the communication center, I knew something bad had happened after Professor Alant introduced me to the producer.

  “I’m from Canada,” he said in a very loud voice, carefully enunciating each syllable. “It’s a very long way away.”

  I stared at the man, unsure why he was telling me something so obvious in such a loud voice. Only my colleagues’ outraged expressions told me that he had been rude.

  My mother is the one who decided that I should see the counselor after I told my parents a little about what had happened to me during all my years in institutions. She believes I’m angry about what I told her, which is why I should talk to someone. But all I want is to move forward instead of look back. Nevertheless I’m brought here each week to see the counselor. After my mother has accompanied me into his office and checked my laptop is working properly, she leaves us alone as I try to make sense of all that has happened.

  “You have to accept that you are very intelligent,” the counselor tells me again and again.

  I never know what to say when he says this. It’s as if the words won’t permeate my brain. The concept is too big for me to fit into my consciousness. I spent years being treated as an imbecile, and now the man paid to be my friend tells me I’m clever?

  “Most people have ways to express their emotions,” he says. “They can slam doors or shout and swear. But you only have words, Martin, and that makes it hard to show your feelings.”

  Then he sits back in his chair, looks at me seriously and I’m at a loss once again about what I’m supposed to say. It feels like I’m trying to play a game, but I’m missing all the clues. Although I send the counselor an email each day telling him how I feel, just as he asked me to, he rarely replies. Then, when I see him, he talks in platitudes I don’t understand. It makes me wonder if he’s really interested in what I think or if I’m just a case study to be intrigued by. Will he help me solve the problems that I never even considered I’d have when I dreamed of being able to speak? Or will I end up as the subject of a scholarly study about the man without a voice?

  The counselor stares at the ceiling as he waits for me to speak. What can I say? That I thought my life would change completely when I started to communicate, and now I know it isn’t going to? That my greatest challenge is not learning to communicate but being listened to? That people don’t hear what they don’t want to, and I have no way of making them listen?

  I look at him, frozen by indecision. I know I must try to discuss emotions that I buried deep within myself years ago, dig up a past I’m still trying to outrun each night when I fall asleep. Although I’ve talked a little about the past to my parents, I understand it is a minefield they don’t want to cross with me for fear of triggering an explosion. I, too, am scared of destroying the fragile peace we’ve created together. I don’t want words, even those spoken to a stranger in an anonymous room, to open up a Pandora’s box I’ll never be able to close again. But I know I must try to communicate some of what I’ve seen; I must attempt to put it into words for this man who sits so still and silent in front of me.

  My pulse races at the thought of confession. What happened to me is a darkness that is always with me, and I fear I will be tormented forever if I don’t try to speak of it.

  35 MEMORIES

  “Eat it, you f--ing donkey,” the caregiver snaps at me.

  I stare at the mince lying gray on the spoon in front of me. I am twenty-one years old and still the ghost boy.

  “Eat it!”

  I open my mouth, and burning hot food is shovelled in. A rancid taste fills my mouth. Bile rises in my throat. I force myself to swallow.

  “And another.”

  I open my mouth obediently. I know I must try to think of something else if I’m to persuade my stomach to accept what it is being fed. I look around the room. The jarringly soft strains of classical violins play in the background as I look at the other children here. Some cry; others are silent. My throat burns as I swallow.

  “Hurry up, you heap of rubbish. We’ll be here for hours if you don’t speed up.”

  The metal spoon crashes against my teeth as she forces another mouthful into me. I wish she would leave me hungry, but I know she won’t.

  “Eat up!”

  She pulls my hair—two short tugs that make my eyes water—before she raises another spoon of food towards my mouth. My lips close around it, and my heart starts to race as I swallow. I can feel nausea rising inside me. I can’t be sick. I breathe deeply.

  “Come on, freak. What’s wrong with you tonight?”

  She lifts up another spoonful of food, and a thick smell washes over me. Too late to choke it back down, I can feel the vomit surging up, and there is nothing I can do to stop it, however desperately I want to.

  “You piece of shit!” the woman screams as I’m sick all over myself and the plate in front of me.

  She slaps me around the face. She is so close that I can feel her breath hot on my cheek.

  “Do you think you’re clever?” the woman screams. “Do you think you can get out of eating just by puking up?”

  I watch as she pushes the spoon towards my plate. She guides it through the vomit and fills the spoon to the brim before raising it to my mouth.

  “Eat!”

  I open my mouth. I have no other choice. I must force myself to swallow the food that my body has just rejected, praying that it won’t do so again or worse will happen. The woman has done this before; she will do it again. I’ve learned that I can’t cry because it only makes her angrier. As the spoon is rammed into my mouth, I hear peals of laughter. I fight down the nausea that is rising once again inside me. The woman smiles, relishing her triumph.

  That is the reason why I hated the home in the country so much: one woman there tormented me while other caregivers laughed. Some days I was just pinched or slapped; on others I was abandoned outside in the blazing heat or left to freeze after being taken out of the bath, shivering until she finally decided to dress me.

  There were times when I wondered if she scared herself with her own violence:
after giving me an enema so forcefully I bled, she put me into the bath, and I watched the water turn bright red. After getting me out, she dipped a toothbrush into the filthy water before cleaning my teeth with it. Later, after she’d set me on the toilet, I stared at the water turning red once more below me and thanked God that I was going to die, smiling at the irony that a bleeding arsehole would be the thing to finish me off.

  If I flinched when she touched me, she’d hit me so hard the wind would be knocked out of my lungs. Or she’d smack me on the back of the head if I cried after being left sitting in my own dirt for so long that my skin turned a livid red.

  Each day I’d count down the minutes until it was over, and I was another twenty-four hours closer to going home. Usually I was at the care center for only a few days, but sometimes my stay was as long as six weeks, and panic filled me whenever I heard the phone ring. Was it a call to say my parents had been killed in a car accident? Would I be left here forever, a prisoner in an institution where no one would remember me? The fear would build inside me day by day until I could almost taste it. When my mother or father finally came to pick me up, I listened helplessly as they were told I’d had another good stay.

  Even when I went home I found it hard not to be afraid because I would soon start to wonder when I’d have to go back again. I wasn’t taken there often—maybe once or twice a year—but each time I was put into the car and driven out of the city, I’d start to cry as I realized where we were going. When we crossed over a railway line, I knew we were nearing the home and I’d listen to rocks ricocheting off the bottom of the car as we drove along a dirt road littered with them. As my heart beat and my throat tightened, I would long to scream and wondered if I could make my parents hear my thoughts if only I tried hard enough.