Future Girl Read online

  My plate’s empty now, but Marley and Robbie are only halfway through their meals. I resist the urge to swipe some of Marley’s fish.

  ‘But you have two stoves,’ I say. ‘Is the other one electric?’

  Robbie’s fingers flash and Marley interprets. ‘No, it’s gas. But that’s only for emergencies. For regular, everyday cooking we try to stick to fuel we can produce ourselves.’

  Robbie signs something else to Marley, and he says, ‘She’s asking if our friend Nick said he could fix it without the part.’ And then, to Robbie: ‘Of course he could. But he’s busy. He’s trying to get his place up and running, especially his garden, so he can eat from it in spring.’

  I drift off a bit, thinking of whoever Nick is and the garden he’s making; of the intense beauty and wildness of Robbie’s garden, and the exquisite meal. Like Nick, I need to set up my own system. But where? How? Our tiny patch of courtyard is exactly big enough for one of the garden beds in Robbie’s box-room. There’s the nature strip out the front, and the dead island down the middle of our street. But how would I protect them from tree vandals?

  Robbie thumps her hand down on the table and I look up, startled. She’s banging to get my attention, but there’s no anger in her face.

  ‘You still want to learn to grow food?’ she asks, both signing and mouthing the words. I don’t need Marley to interpret that: I lipread it easily, and her signs are clear, her hands taking on the shape of plants emerging from the earth.

  ‘Of course. But’ – I gesture towards Robbie’s garden – ‘I don’t think I could ever know enough to do this.’

  Robbie shakes her head and signs something again, but I don’t understand this time. I look at Marley.

  ‘You don’t start with this,’ he interprets. ‘I can break it down into simple steps to get you going. One thing at a time.’

  ‘You would teach me?’

  She nods. She turns to Marley and signs something fast.

  Marley clears his throat. ‘Rob’s happy to teach you, but she doesn’t have the patience for lipreading. You’d have to learn some sign language, even if it’s just a few basics: how to fingerspell and a bunch of signs. Then if you help her in the garden, she’ll show you what you need to know to start your own.’

  Marley’s signing while he talks, and even though I don’t know most of the signs, it still makes it easier for me to lipread him, with him pointing to me and Robbie and the garden.

  ‘Okay,’ I say. But this doesn’t actually feel okay at all. This whole sign language thing is mesmerising, but the thought of trying to memorise a few hundred thousand signs, on top of learning to garden, is more than a little daunting.

  ‘Where do I go to learn sign language?’ I ask.

  ‘I’ll teach you,’ Marley offers.

  Robbie’s hands flash playfully and Marley blushes, but this time he doesn’t interpret.

  ‘I’m perfectly happy to teach you,’ he says to me emphatically instead.

  ‘What? Is something wrong?’

  Marley swallows. ‘Only Ddeaf people are supposed to teach Auslan. But Robbie says because I’m a CODA, it’s my language too.’

  Robbie throws Marley an amused look, and I know there’s more to it than that, but I don’t press him.

  ‘What can I do for you in return?’ I ask. ‘Or will you charge a fee for the lessons?’

  Marley laughs. ‘No, no. Keep your money. Come to the bike shop for your lessons; you can give me a hand while I teach you. Yes?’

  I nod. So now I have a job in a bike shop, a language to acquire, and garden labour to do in exchange for education, while hearing people got to simply go to Angelo’s free workshop then head home and grow food.

  But I’ve also gained the perfect excuse to hang out with Marley …

  Everyone’s plates are empty now. Robbie slices our persimmons in half and we scoop out the flesh with a spoon. It’s a rich orange jelly, breathtakingly sweet, its flavour delicate and foreign. I desperately want another but don’t say so.

  I help Marley with the dishes – a novelty, since at home we just dump our empty boxes into the bottom of the recon cupboard for Organicore to recycle, and before recon we always used a dishwasher. Marley washes, both hands in the sudsy water. I dry. Our arms bump, sending small electric shocks through my body. I’d like to lean over and rest my cheek against his shoulder, but I’m not brave enough.

  Then it’s time to go, and Marley volunteers to escort me home, which is just as well because I have no idea how to find the bike path. Robbie presses a small sheet of metal into my hand and shows me it’s for the rocket stove. I remember a sign from earlier and place my fingers on my chin then bring them forward towards her.

  Thank you.

  Next thing we’re riding, rolling down the hill of the bike path so fast that I’m flying. I gulp in great breaths of night air. My heart soars. Everything from this amazing evening whirls in my head. I feel like I’ve grown wings and Marley and Robbie have launched me into the night for my first flight.

  Marley and I stop outside my gate. I think about inviting him in, but that would involve introducing him to Mum and showing him our dismal abode. I stare at him. Will we kiss? He shuffles from one foot to the other, awkward, then suddenly leans down to touch his lips quickly to my cheek.

  ‘You might need this,’ he says and hands me the heavy-duty bolt lock from his bike. Then he’s gone.

  I slide into bed without turning on the light, and my dreams are full of mixed-up, incoherent, beautiful images.

  My body sings. I don’t care that I’m at school. It was easy to get here, pumping the pedals on the bike Marley made me. I don’t care that Taylor’s not here. English and Science disappear as I dream of plants, without a hint of food-poisoning worry.

  In Art I pull out my journal and it’s me, paint and paper for a whole hour. I drip paint everywhere – rich greens and blues, the colours of Marley and me riding home late at night. I take one of Grandma’s pieces of old sewing paper from my journal pocket, tear off pieces and scrunch them, gluing them down. I grab a palette knife and spread paint into a horizon, layering black, blue, green, smearing them together. I take the lid of a paint jar and spread it with white and press it against the page. It looks like the moon. Beautiful.

  I can’t believe a guy as gorgeous as Marley is interested in me. But he is. I feel it. And yet, how can that be? He doesn’t even seem to mind that I’m deaf. It’s almost as if … he LIKES it?

  It’s been three days, and I can’t hold out any longer – I have to see Marley again! I pull on my school uniform and unlock my bike. Then I practically inhale the second half of yesterday morning’s Singapore Noodles, rubbery as usual, as I stand in the morning sunshine in the courtyard. I’d been planning to save them for lunch, or even brunch, but I couldn’t resist – as usual. This constant hunger is really, really starting to do my head in. We received yet another half-cupboard from Organicore yesterday, the third in a row, and I’ve given up hoping that they’ll deliver the other half next week.

  I spot movement from the corner of my eye and catch the little boy, Tiger – no, Taggert – peeking out at me from behind the living room curtains. I wave, but he just stares back at me solemnly. I haven’t caught sight of either of his parents even once since they moved in last week.

  I wheel my bike up the driveway to the street and turn right instead of left, heading to Marley’s bike shop, the cold air biting my fingers even through my gloves. I hope Mum doesn’t catch me wagging. What’s the point in going to school, though, when I could actually learn something useful instead?

  I stop by the river to collect a bunch of twigs, for the rocket stove I’m going to build. I’d make one today but I can’t exactly do it during school hours with Mum breathing down my neck. I push the twigs into my backpack for later.

  Next, thanks to my renewed interest in hygiene, I head back to High Street and stop at three shops looking for soap and washing powder. Mum and I are out of both, but it’s s
old out everywhere. Doesn’t anyone make this stuff locally? Mum did a huge load of washing at a laundromat a week ago – it’d been two weeks since we’d moved into the guesthouse and lost access to our washing machine, and everything was dirty. But it cost so much, even on cold wash, that she’s decided next time we’ll have to handwash our clothes. How that’s going to work with only cold water and no washing powder I just don’t know.

  By the time I’ve pedalled my bike up the hill to the bike shop, I’m much warmer. Marley is serving someone when I arrive – a red-haired guy with pitted but glowing skin and dirty clothes. Marley’s face lights up when he sees me, and he throws me a grin. I plug my hearing aids in and grin back. He rents the red-haired guy a large three-wheeler, then two more customers ask for something and Marley says no – bikes for sale, I presume. He should put a sign on the door: Bikes for rent only.

  Marley calls out something towards the back of the shop and a guy with a short dark-brown beard, flat hair scraped into a ponytail and warm black eyes emerges from the back room, wiping his hands on his jeans. He and Marley exchange a few words and he reluctantly takes Marley’s place behind the counter. Marley grabs a bit of paper and writes ‘Ryan’ on it.

  I start to speak but Marley gestures for me to stop. He shows me to clasp and rotate my palms; separate my hands, raise my index fingers and bring them together to meet each other; then point to Ryan. Pleased to meet you.

  Ryan gives me the thumbs up, and Marley leads me down the back. We go outside into a concrete courtyard full of bike frames, squashed wheels, cracked bike seats with upholstery spilling from them, and dirty wheel pumps. I thought the shop was messy, but this is something else.

  Marley clears some junk off a couple of plastic crates and offers me a seat. I wish I was wearing my jeans, not my school uniform – it’s going to be impossible to keep it clean here. I dust off the crate with my hands and sit down.

  Marley wriggles his fingers so that the tips seem to be kissing each other, then holds up one finger. ‘Fingerspelling first,’ I lipread.

  ‘Okay,’ I say.

  He shakes his head, indicates his throat, and makes a hand movement as if he’s turning off a tap. It’s clear that he expects me to turn off my voice. He hasn’t said a single word since I arrived.

  Marley mimes writing in the air, first with his right hand, then with his left, then flips both hands out towards me in an inquisitive shrug, eyebrows raised: Right-handed or left-handed?

  I hold up my right hand, and he nods. Then he waggles his own left hand. Hmm, okay then.

  He touches the index finger of his left hand to his right thumb, and writes the letter A in the dust on the concrete. He touches the next finger along and shows me that it’s E. Right, so we’re doing the vowels. Five fingers, five vowels – only I’ll use my right index finger, to point to my left thumb. I can do that.

  I copy. Marley reaches over and takes my hands gently in his. I startle at the heat from his fingers. For a moment I think he’s abandoned the Auslan lesson, but then I realise he’s shaping my fingers. I’m bending my left fingers back too far when I touch them with my index finger. He puts my fingers just where they need to be and withdraws his hands. Aww.

  B, he shows me, and it does look a bit like a B. The D is a dead ringer. Unfortunately it’s also easy to copy and Marley doesn’t need to adjust my fingers again until we get to S, which I accidentally do with my index fingers instead of my little fingers. I toy with the idea of messing up more of the letters so he’ll touch me again, but I don’t want him to think I’m stupid.

  Once we’ve done the numbers too, Marley graduates me to a sentence. It’s much harder to make sense of the letters when they’re not in alphabetical order. It takes me maybe twenty seconds, but then I have it. ‘SORT THESE.’

  I glance down at the rusted bucket Marley’s indicating, which is overflowing with screws, nuts and other metal bits I can’t identify.

  I take the plunge and fingerspell a question. ‘CAN I SWITCH BETWEEN WHICH HAND I USE?’

  Hurrah, I’ve made another mistake. Marley takes my hands lightly and orients them towards me, rather than him. When making each letter I’d instinctively twisted my hands around so that those letter-shapes were facing towards Marley. But it seems I’m to hold my hands in front of me and fingerspell the letters as if I were my only audience. He will read the signs backwards. Do I imagine it, or does he squeeze my fingers slightly before he lets go?

  To answer my question, Marley shakes his head. He mimes writing with his right hand again, only this time he’s made his left hand a flat board and he’s writing onto it. He points to me. Then he mimes writing with his left hand, using the right as a board, and points to himself. Okay, so the dominant hand does the most moving, with the non-dominant hand acting as a base – and I should be consistent.

  Then Marley mimes holding a drink with his left hand, and shows me that even though his left is dominant and normally does the moving, he can cheat and switch to the right if the left hand is busy. Cool!

  ‘YOU WANT ME TO SORT THESE INTO PILES?’ I ask. It takes forever, and it’s so awkward compared to how Marley and Robbie talk, fingers flying.

  But Marley waits patiently and nods.

  This is how the day continues – not a spoken word between us, me sorting, Marley dismantling derelict bikes and heaping their components into piles of wheels, handlebars and frames. Every now and then he drops a fistful of small bits into my bucket and we swap a few painstaking fingerspelled sentences. Unfortunately I can’t think of any excuse to touch him, but the way he looks at me, intensely, right into my eyes, sets everything sparking between us anyway.

  Between customers, Ryan joins us and fills my bucket too. Like Marley, he doesn’t say a word to me, but I don’t think he can sign. He’s just the grunty type, maybe?

  After a while, I realise I don’t need my hearing aids anymore and slip them into my pocket. The relief is instant. It’s more than just the lack of pressure in my ears. It’s knowing that if Marley wants to talk to me, he’ll touch my arm; that there is no expectation that I’ll hear anything. I don’t need to try to remember to scan the room every few minutes, just in case there’s a whole bunch of people chanting Pi-per, Pi-per … Slowly my shoulders relax and I get into a zone.

  Just after midday, Marley rests his hand lightly on my shoulder to get my attention. He mimes eating, which is a little awkward given I’ve polished off my food for the day already.

  I follow him back inside, and we wash our hands at the sink behind the counter. There’s no soap, though, and my fingers stay black. I twist around to check my school uniform but can’t tell if the bike grease has smeared the back. Never again will I come here in this dress!

  Marley and I perch behind the counter on rickety chairs and he takes a metal lunchbox from a shelf and opens it to reveal a hard-boiled egg and pile of cooked green leaves. He rummages around under the sink and produces an extra fork. Then he holds out the container and I realise we’re supposed to share it.

  I can’t take his food! There’s barely enough here for one person, let alone two.

  But when I don’t take any, Marley loads up a fork with a piece of egg and a small pile of the greens and holds it out to me. It feels too intimate to let him feed me, so I take the fork from him and let my fingers linger momentarily over his. Is he aware of it too, all this unnecessary touching we’re doing? It’s heavenly.

  Marley eats some himself and his wristlet lights up – a message. He turns away to read it. Is he hiding something? I hope he doesn’t have a girlfriend.

  The egg and greens are delicious. I try to chew slowly, to make it last, and hope I don’t get food poisoning – I got away with it the other night, but surely I’m tempting fate if I eat wild food too often.

  Marley’s busy writing back. My belly feels warm and good, and I’m so glad I came here instead of going to school.

  When he turns back to me, I take a deep breath and spell, ‘THAT YOUR GIRLFRIEND?’ br />
  Oh my god. How awkward can I get? But I have to know.

  He shakes his head. ‘I’M SINGLE. I SPLIT WITH MY GIRLFRIEND MONTHS AGO. YOU MUST HAVE A BOYFRIEND? OR GIRLFRIEND?’

  Why would he think that? Of course I don’t. It’s not like there are great queues of guys – or girls for that matter – lining up to go out with the deaf girl. I shake my head, my face hot. Okay, we’ve put it out there. This flirting can get official. But I’m too embarrassed to take it further now, so I change the subject.

  ‘IS THERE A SIGN FOR YOUR NAME?’

  Marley nods. He shows me his left palm turned to the sky, his other hand bouncing in it twice, with his first two fingers making the shape of a V.

  I copy him. ‘HOW DOES THAT RELATE TO YOUR NAME?’

  ‘IT DOESN’T. WHEN I WAS LITTLE I WAS ALWAYS BALANCING ON MY HEAD. EVEN IF I WAS IN A CHAIR, I’D BE UPSIDE DOWN. SO MY MUM GAVE ME THIS NAME SIGN.’

  Marley makes his two fingers walk on his palm, and I get that they are supposed to be legs. Then he flips his hand upside down. The fingers I first saw as a V represent his two legs, up in the air. Clever.

  ‘HOW DO YOU SIGN PIPER?’ I ask.

  Marley shrugs. ‘YOU DON’T HAVE A NAME SIGN YET.’

  ‘MAYBE YOU CAN MAKE ONE UP.’

  Marley shows me the sign for no, forming a small O with his thumb and forefinger and shaking it.

  ‘YOU CAN’T JUST MAKE UP A NAME SIGN. IT HAPPENS NATURALLY. AND THEY CAN ONLY BE GIVEN BY A DEAF PERSON.’

  ‘WHAT DO YOU CALL A CHILD WHO DOESN’T HAVE ONE YET?’

  ‘YOU FINGERSPELL THEIR NAME. OR SHORTEN TO INITIALS. BUT WHEN WE TALK TO SOMEONE IN AUSLAN, WE DON’T SAY THEIR NAME. WE JUST POINT.’

  I can tell I’m not going to have a name sign any time soon, since I only know one Ddeaf person.

  ‘PMCB,’ I sign, for Piper McBride. Marley fingerspells the last three letters back to me with a questioning look on his face, so I spell out my full name for him.