Everything Under: A Novel by Johnson Daisy

Author:Johnson, Daisy [Johnson, Daisy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Literary, Small Town & Rural, Fairy Tales; Folk Tales; Legends & Mythology, Family Life, General, Booker Shortlist 2018
ISBN: 9781555978266
Amazon: 1555978266
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2018-10-23T05:00:00+00:00

Four

Knock Knock Wolf

The Cottage

I decide that I will go mad if I don’t work, that it is good for us to establish a structure, that we cannot go on this way for ever, and I tell you that for an hour every morning there must be quiet.

Quiet? you say, as if you’ve never heard the word before.

Yes, I say. Silence. There must, in fact, be silence. You can sit in the sitting room with me but I’m working so you have to sit quietly. In silence. You have to sit in silence.

You tip your head on one side. Working? You’re only thirteen; you don’t have a job, Gretel. You say it with such conviction I can think of nothing to reply and only hold my finger up warningly until you turn away, sidle to the armchair and sit down with your eyes closed.

I email Jennifer and she replies straight away telling me that she is glad to hear it. She gives me a word. An easy one: extraordinary. I make us a pot of coffee, pour you a cup and put it by your chair, sit at the desk. There is – for the first time in a week – calm. I put my head down and make sure not to look over at you. I can feel you watching me. I get out my index cards: white for citations, blue for production reference, yellow for drafted definitions. I drink some coffee.

When I first started working at the dictionary I was young and still thought of you often. You were inside me then in a way that faded as I grew older. I could still open my mouth and hear a sentence come out and know that it was there because I’d grown up with you. You’d made me and I wanted nothing more than to cut you out, cut you right out of my insides the way Alzheimer’s did to a chunk of brain the size of an orange. You populated me; you ran the spirals of my thinking. I went to work, sat at the same desk every day, dreamed of something swimming in the River Isis, dreamed of your mouth moving around words I could no longer hear. I went to the same shop to buy a sandwich every lunchtime and – standing in the queue one day – I understood suddenly what you had done by creating your own language and teaching it to me. We were aliens. We were like the last people on earth. If – in any sense – language determined how we thought then I could never have been any other way than the way I am. And the language I grew up speaking was one no one else spoke. So I was always going to be isolated, lonely, uncomfortable in the presence of others. It was in my language. It was in the language you gave me.

I had done no work on extraordinary besides arrange the index cards. The small clock on the table says that two hours have gone.

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