His speech therapist claimed that shed seen this happen before (that it was relatively common, even). Remember Gareth Gates, shed said, with his terrible stutter, who finished up second on Pop Idol? Stevens like him she paused, speculatively although perhaps a littleuh
One of the volunteers in Stevens class was a member of Ashford Churchs prestigious choir. With Mrs Santas encouragement, she took Steven and his mother along to meet the choir master. Steven sang for him. In fact he sang his shoulders back, his hands clasped, his tiny face all pinkly beatific for upwards of half an hour.
The choir master had been both charmed and bemused.
Its an early Madrigal, he told them (over the continuing sounds of Stevens vocalising), in a kind of bastardised Latin. Or maybe Welsh or Cornish. Definitely not a tongue Im especially familiar with
The choir master had been both charmed and bemused.
Its an early Madrigal, he told them (over the continuing sounds of Stevens vocalising), in a kind of bastardised Latin. Or maybe Welsh or Cornish. Definitely not a tongue Im especially familiar with
Dyou think he made it up? his mother asked.
I simply cant answer that.
Dyou think you could make him sing something else?
Im sure I could try.
But when the choir master sat down at his piano and began to play, Steven put his hands over his ears, began rocking and screaming.
The instrument, the rhythm, the tempo, the pitch. They were all wrong. They were vile and cacophonous.
Modern.
He found it disgusting.
Elen couldnt help wondering why.
Why Albi?
At first shed considered the actual placeits geography; its historical background tales of religious strife were certainly legion; the basilica had been built by a cruel bishop
Blah blah
Uh
Toulouse Lautrec had been born in the town, theyd built him a museum
Hmmn
But after a while she decided to simplify things. She went back to basics. She began by considering the word itself, the name; its linguistic ramifications; the actual semantics (to do so, shed found in her extensive experience of problems of this kind could often pay dividends).
Albi?
Al bi?
Hang on
If you inserted the I (placed yourself in the picture), you got al-i-bi.
Alibi
In Latin (she looked it up in a dictionary) that meant elsewhere. I-am-elsewhere.
This funny little riddle just lodged in her head. And it stayed there.
Soon Steven was actually speaking was chatting away, and with an amazing fluency in this extraordinary new language of his, but only Mrs Santa noted when he was in (or around) Fleets general vicinity. It was almost as if he felt Fleet might respond (but Fleet never did), as if he thought Fleet might actually understand.
And while Fleet wasnt ever aggressive (it wasnt in his nature to be), it was plain that he found the boy (and his language) both stupid and exasperating. He would turn his face to the wall, or simply walk away. He made his contempt quite obvious. Everybody noticed.
Eventually the home visits were gently discouraged.
Two weeks after Steven had entered the Special Care stream, he completely abandoned his strange, new tongue. He began to stammer and to falter again. He lost his curiously ecstatic air. He recommenced his relationship with the Gameboy (head cocked, mouth open, fingers jabbing), but hed only ever play with the sound turned off. He was almost ludicrously punctilious on that point.
He took no interest in Fleet any more.
A while after that, when the dust had finally settled, Mrs Santa caught Fleet staring at Steven during break one morning.
Is anything wrong, Fleet? shed asked.
Fleets eye-line didnt alter. It remained fixed on Steven as he answered her.
Steven should stay hiding behind the shapes, he murmured, inside that funny little play-box of his.
Really?
Mrs Santa tried her best to draw him out.
Yes.
And why do you say that, Fleet?
Fleet glanced up at her, a look of mild surprise in his impish eyes. Because thats where hes safe, Mrs Santa. All alone. In the quiet.
But ofof course.
Mrs Santa delivered him one of her brightest smiles. She glanced nervously around her. Two girls were squabbling over a skipping rope
Of course
She rapidly marched towards them, determined to interfere.
ELEN
It wasnt all just corns and bunions
Uh-uh
No way.
Of course there was a certain amount of what a novice might term the run-of-the-mill stuff (although for Elen, nothing was ever run-of-the-mill, because in her eyes every symptom no matter how small or uncontentious invariably belied a deeper cause, and uncovering somethings origin, its genesis, was an essential part of the challenge of good chiropody; part of that special, transformative magic the buzz, the voodoo which made all the hard daily slog the cancelled appointments, the stroppy clients, the crazy hygiene feel absolutely worthwhile).
Take bandaging, for example. Elen just loved it. As a small girl she remembered painstakingly binding the limbs and the torsos of all her dolls and her teddies with neat strips of fabric cut from old handkerchiefs (almost mummifying them, in several cases). It was just like weaving (was artistic; provided her with a similar kind of primitive thrill), but there was always that fascinating hidden variable in her line of work a particular kind of condition, a certain shape of instep or toe, a preferred type of shoe which made each and every application into something fresh and stimulating.
And it wasnt just the medical aspect. It was the mundane things, too. The chiropody minutiae: the pad, the splint, the plaster, the wedge, the gauze, the strapping, the brace, the stockingette
Oh the smells
And the whiteness
Or better still the creamy-white
The stretch, the non-stretch
The earthy putty,
The sterilising tingle
The dizzy glue
Each item
Oh, but look
Arent they all justjust beautiful?
tidily arranged inside her briefcase (or laid out in that neat, spotless provisions drawer at her usual room in the practice). Every object immaculately packaged; each box and label so plain and clinical, so severe and uncompromising, so unapologetically
Uh
generic
That was it!
and timeless, too: the future/the past, all painstakingly rolled up into one hugely reliable sanitary bundle.
Elen liked the clean (very much of course she did she had to), but she absolutely loved the dirty: the malformation, the bump, the crust, the fungus. To Elen a foot was like a city, an infection was the bad within, and she was its ombudsman; making arrangements, sorting out problems, instituting rules, offering warnings.
On a good day she was a Superman or a Wonderwoman, doggedly fighting foot-crime and the causes of foot-crime (usually when all was finally said and done the ill-fitting shoeOkay, so it was hardly The Riddler, or The Penguin, but in a serious head-to-head between a violent encounter with either one of these two comic-book baddies and an eight-hour, minimum-wage shift behind the bar of a happening Ashford night-spot with a corn the size of a quails egg throbbing away under the strappy section of your brand-new, knock-off Manolo BlahniksWellitd be a pretty close call).
Elen firmly believed that she was making a difference.
She was nothing less than an evangelist for the foot. She was a passionate devotee. She worshipped at the altar of the arch and the heel.
Sometimes it wasnt easy. The foot was hardly the most glamorous of the appendages (yer dogs, yer plates, yer hoofs). No one really gave a damn about it (although fairs fair the acupuncturists had done a certain amount for the cause, and the reflexologists had sexed things up a little, but in Elens view, the short-fall still fellwell, pretty damn short).
The foot had sloppy PR; it mouldered, uncomplainingly, down at the bottom (the fundus, the depths, the nadir) of the physiological hegemony. It had none of the pizzazz of the hand or the heart. The lips! The eyes (the eyes had it all their own way). Even the neck, the bellythe arse. Even the arse had a certain cachet.
But not the foot. The foot had none (the foot had Fergie, with her lover, sprawled on a deckchair, in the Côte du Tawdry).
The foot lived in purdah in cold climes particularly. It was hidden away, crammed inside, squeezed.
Sometimes, as Elen dutifully chiselled into thickened wodges of hardened skin
Ah, the bread-and-butter work
flakes of which would shoot like shrapnel on to her apron-front, hit her goggles, or fly past her ears, Sylvia Plaths poem Daddy would suddenly pop into her head and take up a brief residency there. Shed learned it at school
You do not do, you do not do
Anymore, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breath or Achoo.
Ah yes
She loved that poem.
If shed actually ever thought about it and she honestly hadnt then she might have drawn a few, tired parallels between her own life and the life of the foot (that frustrating opposition of support and neglect). But then again, if shed thought about it some more, shed have realised that all struggles foot-related or otherwise could be encapsulated as some kind of battle between an objects natural function and its actual often thwarted circumstances.
Thems the breaks, huh?
Her own daddy (to extend the Plathian metaphor just one stage further), whom shed admired devotedly (up until and beyond his premature death in 1989), had been a hard nut to crack; fair but irascible, sincere but undemonstrative, hed worked his entire adult life in the Services. Elen had been a true Army Daughter (drilled, polished, guarded, wrapped up, packed off sometimes left behind, sometimes shoved dutifully into a khaki knapsack).
There was never a happy medium with Dad: he was either perpetually absent or too resolutely there (like a badly focussed close-up
Lobe
Cheek
Whoops!
Moustache
Teeth
Pore
in an amateur video), and each state (too little, too much) somehow rendered its opposite inexplicably traumatic.
Hed served four years in Germany, two, undercover, then was posted to Northern Ireland (where his iron nerve and skills in the realm of bomb disposal were deemed especially useful). He retired in 83 (well-decorated for bravery after the Falklands War).
Following two, brief years on Civvy Street (a wonderful reprieve for the family, but hed found it hard to relax, felt drained and grey, seemed to sorely miss his old life of careless extremity) hed joined the Metropolitan Police Marine Support Unit: the Underwater and Confined Space Search Team (even working briefly as a freelance safety consultant on the Channel Tunnel, although hed resigned, in disgust, after their first fatality).