The Good And The Bad - Volume 1 (ABANDONED?)

Chapter 2: Luke

Luke:

I'd always felt different from the people around me. And people have always thought the same, but they've never been able to test this theory though, when you don't speak people don't hear you.

"Any change Luke?" my speech therapist asked in her heavy regional accent. I signed no, like every week. "Have you been doing the mouth exercises?" she asked, scrawling something down in her notebook. I nodded, but she hardly noticed, writing furiously, I looked closeer without moving and watched the lead on the pencil quickly wear down before she cursed, threw the pencil to the floor where it landed softly on the carpet, before rolling beneath an armchair. She looked up at me haggardly, and gestured to a pencil beside me.

I picked it up and passed it to her, glancing at the notes as I passed. "Most likely pshycological not physical cause; treatment extremely difficult". I looked back to the door, the practice I was in was crammed on the second floor of a seven storey building, wedged between a pharmacy and cheap hairdressers, whose voices carried down and rang in my ears, but, then again, I could hear the pills clattering in their bottles downstairs. The practice wasn't exactly world class, but it was the best one this far our of Paris.

It only consisted of two rooms, the reception and the therapy room, the therapy room was where I was now. It was small and rectangular, the walls were whitewashed and a bright red carpet lined the floor, the only furniture in the room was the chair I was sitting in now, the chair my therapist was sitting in, a small dresser, and the armchair that now concealed the lost pencil. It was nice, but it always felt empty and I was always accutely aware that we were their only real customers. Spider thin cracks traced the walls giving away the shabby painting and the age of the building, giving it a kind of quaint feel, I shouldn't have been able to see them, but they were clear through my eyes.

The room was basically a box if you removed the door and a single window on the wall opposite, the notre dame cathedral was outlined majestically on the horizon, it looked beautiful in the setting sun, the shining orb just dipping behind the main bell tower, we were on the outskirts of the city, and had to drive for about half an hour just to get here. It was about ten miles to the cathedral, but I could see the cracks in the gargoyles arms from here, clear in my vision. About an hour went by of the same thing as normal, practicing mouth movements, and then at the end she asked me if I could try to say a simple word - apple. I tried, but I couldn't.

 I had spoken once when I was young, and never again. I could hear the wing beats of a bird two miles away, and count the individual feathers in it's plumage. I can hear someone breathing from across a building, through the walls, I don't know why. So when I speak now, the noise that close to my ears leaves me deaf for weeks, and what use is a deaf and mute teenager? It's not natural. These things are so obvious to me but I've never told anyone, I feel that if I did, they'd try to fix it, make me normal, and then I'd just be a mute kid, I'd still have my problems, and have nothing to gain from it. The therapist sighed under their breath as the third pencils lead wore down as they continued to scrawl in the notebook.

My social worker, Callumn pushed open the door and beckoned me out to the reception as the therapist closed their notebook and stood up. I followed her, leaving into the reception. I sat down on one of the cheap seats at the side of the room while Callumn started talking to the therapist, Callumn's stilted version of French was sometimes hard to understand, but most of the time it was easy enough to get the gist of it. They were talkinng about the session, they were talking quietly, but I heard every word, I'd made no progress and after going to the practice consistently for almost two years now, the outlook didn't look good.

I looked down at the floor, the ceiling, my bag. Anywhere but at them. God. I looked over at a painting on the wall, I always liked it, when you can see every brushstroke, paintings look all the more amazing, but now as I tried to focus, I couldn't. I could still hear them, and I couldn't get rid of the noise. The previous beatiful ship, sailing into a sunset backed horizon, now just looked like a blur of colours.