A book of silences

Chapter seven - words

Bee never rang her parents and told them about the attack, instead spending more and more time at the Art School, locked in her studio. Her light, airy sculptures, already getting more and more inward-looking following the break in, turned into dense compact masses crumpled on the floor. She made them from tar and lead and stone, with pieces of text embedded in them.

"Dark," was the way Bev described them, but Bee called them therapy, and insisted that they helped her come to terms with the attack. She took to waiting for the others before walking to the bus stop, and liked to spend evenings with her friends, causing Cat no end of trouble fitting in all the extra work she was used to doing as well as her supermarket job, and her landlady's occasional chores.

As she could no longer spend whole nights at the Art School, Cat put work on Golem aside and decided to concentrate on the book Bee had bought her. It was not a large book, but it was beautifully made, with a plain, honey-coloured cover, made from leather that was so old and oiled it felt as soft and supple as skin. The pages were a heavy vellum, folded to half quarto size, and bound in collections of eight leaves with waxed silk thread. But inside was the real beauty, as far as Cat was concerned. Each page had hundreds of words on it, all written out long-hand in a beautiful copperplate hand, perfectly aligned and sized. Two hundred words a page, all in alphabetical order. One hundred and twenty pages. Twenty-four thousand words, all waiting to be recorded and classified. Cross-referenced and ordered. She grinned with anticipation.

Today she'd booked a quiet room in one of the video suites and was preparing to record some of the words. She checked the desk and squared up everything on it. Reel-to-reel recorder, check. List-book, check. Handheld mechanical counter, check. (She wasn't going to get caught out with her usual miscounts). Microphone, check. Small bag of wine gums, check. Can of coke, check. She glanced around the room, making sure the sound-proofed door was closed and, with a happy grin, began.

"Abscedo, abscedere, abscessi, abscessus, abscido," The room, lined with felt tiles, kept echoes to a minimum, and made the words sound a little dead. She clicked her counter with each word to keep place.

 "Abscidere, abscisus, abscisio..." She stopped suddenly, something about the last word had resonated in her head, echoing more than the previous words. A flashing light caught her eye, and she found the recorder had turned itself off.

"Damn," she muttered. Rather than count her way through the wordlist (a difficult task for her at the best of times), she reset her counter and rewound the tape deck.

"Abscedo, abscedere, abscessi, abscessus, abscido, abscidere, abscisus, abscisio..."

Again, that strange echo. She looked down, again the recorder had turned itself off. Typical Art-School stuff, abused by the students and never really maintained properly.

This time she dug her phone out of her bag and set it to record.

"Abscedo, Abscedere, abscessi, abscessus, abscido, abscidere, abscisus, abscisio..."

Her phone made a strange sound and died in front of her. No power, nothing. She shook it, tapped it lightly on the desk, nothing. She glared, then smiled and asked nicely, pleadingly. Nothing. She cursed loudly, two hundred and fifty images not yet transferred to her computer, all that work wasted.

 (Not really just work, a small and honest part of her mind reminded her. At least a hundred and fifty pictures were of shelves at the supermarket that she'd been taking pictures of and telling herself they weren't work. Just interesting).

She sat for a long time in the sound proofed room. She hated losing work, even crap not-work, before it had been recorded in her journal. It felt wrong, as though something had been removed from her, something important, something substantial, and it left her unsettled and out of sorts. She glared at the phone again, then at the book, then settled down for a good long mope.