The girl who speaks no words

The database has information on everyone in the world. Everyone, at least, who had made the effort of being given a name. Type in the details of a new-born baby and you will get a link to the birth certificate. Not a lot of other details at that age, but if you click a link on the mother or father’s name you will go to a full file: tax history, health record, photo on driving license and passport, address, details of any encounters with the police or other services, even a record of any demos they have attended and any petitions they have signed.

And it’s not just information from the UK. The organisation Kim works for shares data with equivalent services all over the world. There isn’t a Bolivian peasant or Eskimo prince that doesn’t feature. The names here are trapped in a world-wide web of governmental, or neo-governmental, making.

Kim has already checked all of his personal contacts on the database, everyone he knows, all his friends and family. This is encouraged, if you police your own friends then nobody else has to. It’s the way the service operates.

So he looked up the girl who speaks no words first thing on the Monday morning, before he’d even made himself a cup of tea.

The girl who speaks no words.

They met in a laundrette, well, in a rave, which was being held in a laundrette. He was perched on a washer/dryer with Steg, who was selling him a new drug said to comprise of 50% Pankhurst medication and 50% stoat stimulant.

Steg specialises in drugs that are new to market because, he reasons, the authorities haven’t had time to make them illegal. As a result, the drugs Steg sells are usually entirely legitimate. However, the other consequence of Steg’s obsession with the new, is that the drugs rarely have the pleasurable effect desired of them, and when, on the rare occasion he chances upon the next trending drug ahead of the pack, he’s already moved on long before it becomes mainstream.

“Pankhurst, what’s that?” Kim asked. He popped the sachet of power into his mouth without waiting for an answer. Steg’s clients more often than not get their kicks from the indulgence in risk, rather than any reliable artificial stimulation.   

“It’s a neurological condition where people over-focus on things. It doesn’t actually exist yet, but they’ve invented a medication for it just in case. It’s supposed to make you unable to attend to anything for more than a few seconds.”

“And stoat stimulant?”

“It’s used by illicit stoat-fight organisers to get the stoats excited.”

This short conversation took ten minutes, shouted, as it was, ineffectually above the noise of the music. During this time, Kim’s had already clocked the girl who speaks no words who was standing by the door. She was blonde, slim, all-gesture, wearing a grey T-shirt, as if confident that she didn’t need to dress to stand out.

He mapped out the route to the door, to the girl and in his mind he fanaticised different ways he could walk over there begin a conversation.

But he became so engrossed in his plans, that the next time he looked that way she was nowhere to be seen. He had wasted his opportunity thinking, not doing.

He was surprised again, a second later, when the girl tapped him on the shoulder. She mouthed ‘hello’ and mimed drinking, and further mimed the shape of a bottle of water, lest he confuse her request.

“Steg, you still got that water?” He took the bottle from his friend without attempting introductions. She was all his, he’d already decided. Besides, he hadn’t introduced himself yet. But he didn’t do that immediately, he played it cool, took his time.

“So how d’yer hear about this?” he asked, “I’ve not seen you around.”

She nodded at a girl talking to the DJ. At this point he hadn’t noticed she wasn’t speaking, in all the noise a nod was the best means of communication. This was a room-full of nodders and shakers.

“Oh yeah, Jude, she’s at every party worth going to,” is what he said. ‘Oh yeah, Jude, I’ve slept with her a few times’, is what he didn’t say.

“I’m Kim,” he said. “I work in cars,” his standard lie. None of his friends, nor even his family, had the faintest idea that this was a lie, let alone an inkling of what he actually did. Besides, he did sometimes work in cars. When he was driving somewhere, for instance.

“Do you want some drugs? They’re the latest thing.”

“What’s in them?” she mouthed.

“Stoat stimulant,” he replied, and encouraged by her puzzled expression he repeated all he’d learnt from Steg about stoat excitement and Pankhurst.

He turned to ask Steg more details, but Steg had gone, probably exchanging drugs or drug gossip with Laurus, the transgender bouncer, often hired for these gigs because he/she can police both the ladies and gents toilets. Not that there were any toilets. They were in a laundrette. Did nobody think of that?

Failure to attend to things for very long. That was what Steg had said. But Kim was sure he was doing something really important … oh yeah, the beautiful girl. He turned back to her, all his focus on her, total attention. “So what’s your …”

He went no further. “Oh I love this track,” he interrupted himself. “Let’s dance.”

The girl gestured to the floor.

The problem with laundrettes as a venue, other than the absence of toilets, the poor quality sound (lots of tinny machines to vibrate off) and the almost totally un-rave-like ambiance, is the lack of space. Big washing machines and driers take up every square inch. The dance-floor, such as it was, was crammed tight with approximately 37 more people than it could comfortably fit.

“Let’s dance here,” he said, and, still sitting, the two of them began to mobilise their arms in tentacled dance formation, the drier shaking beneath their movement. Shaking a lot in fact. Almost as if it was on. Hang on, it was on. Someone was doing their washing, Kim realised. Here, of all places. He checked this thought – now, of all times. That was it. Someone was doing their washing, now of all times, in the middle of a rave.

Inability to attend, Kim thought again. Stop thinking about the mystery washer, there was something more important. Oh yes, the beautiful girl.

And so the evening went on. Steg returned but Kim didn’t bother introducing him to the girl. Then he changed his mind and started to introduce her, before realising he had no idea what her name was.

Funny. They’d been talking for nearly two hours and he hadn’t actually asked her name. In fact, he hadn’t noticed that she hadn’t said anything, that she was mute. It was just, you know, a noisy party. Who actually listens to words?

“What’s your name,” he shouted several times. In return she mouthed what might be a name, or might simply be a silent ‘I can’t talk’.

“Let’s go outside,” he said. “It’s too loud in here, I can’t hear myself think.”

Outside was a back passage, a grotty alleyway, still noisy and full of people, “But at least we can hear each other,” Kim said, as if completing an unspoken sentence.

The girl who says no words gesticulated a contrary view.

“Yeah, I was wondering? Can’t you speak then?”

She shook her head.

“So, do you do sign and stuff?”

She shook her head.

“Want some more stoat exciter?”

She shook her head.

“It also cures Pankhurst. Not that Pankhurst exists. Did I tell you that? What is a stoat anyway? Is it like a lion?”

The conversation went on in a similar vein for a long time. It transpired, eventually, that the girl who speaks no words hadn’t always been on silent mode. It just happened suddenly, a few weeks previously, when she woke up unable to speak, for no apparent reason. The doctors were baffled, but all reassured her it would only be temporary. Or it might not, they added, just in case.

That piece of information, took her ten minutes to convey, via the medium of mime, combined with scribbling on her arm, then on his arm. Touch. Physical contact.

“I’m done here,” he said suddenly. She shrugged, as if to say ‘Where now?’

“Let’s go back to mine,” he said. He expected her to say no; well, to shake her head, but she surprised him by kissing him.

They went back to his. There was no small talk, well, perhaps a little, but it was one-sided, and in no time at all they were in his bedroom, getting to know each other properly. Talking the universal language. The language that needs no words.

Over the weekend they had sex enough times and in sufficient different ways to fill a racy novel. Maybe even a sex manual. Kim learnt things he thought he already knew, or possibly they were things he didn’t know and he learnt them in the normal manner, but it was confusing, it was a blur, a sexual, emotional blur.

They spent nearly every second of the weekend together. In-between sex they talked, or at least he talked, and she wrote the odd thing down. Such as her name. It transpired that she worked in PR for a power company and that she lived nearby. Her nationality seemed to involve wearing a hat, or possibly an exotic hair-do, but after twenty guesses he gave up. It hardly seemed important.

She went home briefly, to pick up spare clothes, but came back with a bag of things that suggested she was planning to stay more than just one more night. It was spring and some of her baggage seemed to be winter wear, or was that him being paranoid. Can you be paranoid about something you want to happen?

They had already made plans for the rest of the week, a film, another party, a thing (Kim didn’t understand everything she mimed and sometimes tired of asking). To be fair, the thing seemed wildly exciting, whatever it was.

From never having met her, from never intending to have a serious relationship with anyone in his entire life (his work made that sort of thing difficult) it suddenly seemed entirely plausible that they might spend the rest of their life together. It was one of those weekends.

Kim was in love, though that’s not exactly how he’d have expressed it. But it was the first time he’d typed a name into the database first thing on the Monday morning, before he’d even had cup of tea. He had to know. He had to know immediately.

The girl’s file popped up on his screen. He stared at it for a long while, no quite believing.

‘Holy shit!’ he thought, but said nothing.

For once it was Kim who was lost for words.