[stylist] Trials of an honorary Dragon. Chapter 13 (new chapter)

[helene ryles]

Chapter 13
The gift of flight and other fallacies by Nadia Murat
1995

‘I want my baby to fly’
 (An extract from ‘the Reptilian Times’:   13th November, 1991)
Humans lead sad earthbound lives.    Their only means of flying
depends on bulky contraptions such as hand gliders or parachutes, but
this is not the same as real flight.   Now the new Darthrilan research
team ‘Let Them Fly’ think they will soon be able to offer a cure for
this devastating condition.
“We have always longed for flight,” says Mrs Blanc. “My daughter and I
regularly go hand-gliding.  This activity elevates our need somewhat
but it’s just not the same.   We dream about flying all the time.  It
is too late for me, but I have hoped that my child will one day take
to the sky”.
"Mrs Blanc is one of many humans who yearn to become airborne, but the
opportunities just weren't there for them.  Now we are very excited
that this might change with new advances in genetic engineering,
prosthetic limbs, and anti-gravitation drugs which will make Mrs
Blanc’s dream of flight become a reality,” announces Mrs Bird, the
fundraising coordinator of  ‘let them fly’.
Three year old Bianca Blanc now attends 'The National Implant Research
Centre' (NIRC) that was originally founded to research various ways of
helping additionally impaired humans.  This new research project has
great potential to help a far larger number of people.
“I’m feeling very positive that it will have the desired effect” Mrs
Blanc said.
Mrs Blanc said she was indebted to those who have so far donated money
and helped fund the potentially life-changing treatment.
“We would like to thank everyone who has helped us,” she said.
‘Let them fly’ can be reached on 0123 333 777.  They will be happy to
accept all donations over the phone.   Please donate today to help
little Bianca achieve the gift of flight.


                    ***  ***  ***

I used to see the little children being made to jump off the balcony.
They had these wing-like devices strapped to their backs.  As they
jumped off the balcony their wings would stretch out.    They would
flutter slowly towards the ground.  One little kid didn’t even manage
that.  His wings failed to stretch out properly.  At that point many
of my classmates abandoned their seats and crowded at the window to
watch.
“What’s happened to him?” I wrote.  I surreptitiously passed this note
to a boy in a red jumper, who sat a few desks away.  I felt
frustrated.  I didn’t bother to leave my desk.  The action was bound
to be happening well beyond my range of vision.
A few minutes later a hand furtively passed me back my paper.  I
peered closely at it.
“Another flying kid has crash landed.  The ambulance came and took him
away on a stretcher.   There was blood everywhere,” I read.
“That’s enough! That‘s more than enough,” our teacher screamed.  Her
pale face turned an angry red colour as she made her way to the
window.  She yanked various pupils back to their desks.  Then she
pulled out a cane, whacking many of her pupils with it.  I felt
stinging pain when her cane came down several times on my hand.
“I am well and truly ashamed of this class.  How dare you get out of
your seats in this disruptive manner!  How dare you pass about such
meddlesome notes!  You should know better then to discuss things that
are none of your business.   You are all to stay in at lunch and tea
time…” The teacher yelled into her FM system.
The sound of her voice made me wince.  I instinctively moved a hand to
my ear in order to turn down the Volume. The teachers here had
insisted on amplify the volume on both my cochlear implant and my
hearing aid.   Now many everyday sounds had become unpleasantly loud.
 “Put your hand down Nadir, how dare you move when I am talking to
you,” the teacher yelled at me.
“What about our food,” a grey-skinned child asked in concern. He wore
the same silver speech processor that I wore.
“Silence, you are meant to raise your hand before you speak.  Nobody
is to eat anything today.  You will spend the time writing lines.   I
can only hope it teaches you to mind your own business in future.”


                ***  ***  ***



Flight wasn’t the goal for us.  They had an equally futile goal for
those who attended the oral deaf unit.  They used a system called
auditory verbal training.  This involved training us to hear using our
hearing devices alone, without the little helpful clues such as lip
reading or signed instructions.  This time, it all had to be done by
listening alone.
After a day of dreary auditory verbal trailing, I spent most evenings
having to do lines.  I had to write things like: ‘I must not sign’;
‘I must not talk back’;    ‘I must not disrupt lessons’;   ‘I must not
pass notes about in classes; or ‘I must not throw things’. I wasn’t a
particularly biddable child.  In fact I had taken on the role as class
clown.
One day, a few weeks after I first arrived at this school I got really
brazen and wrote: ‘I must sign’.
I watched with tense agitation as the teacher got very red in the face
after my lines were passed back to her.
She tore up what I had written and made me start all over again.  So I
did.  I kept writing ‘I must sign’.
I got a beating for that.  Afterwards it was time to go to bed.  They
dragged me to my dormitory.  It was a medium sized room lined with
triple bunk beds.  After that they turned the lights off.
I was feeling so angry and rebellious that night that I felt for the
bed next to me.  I felt for the child in the bottom bunk bed.  He gave
a start.
"My name is Nad.  I can sign.  Can you?” I asked using tactile sign
language.  I’d got a lot of practice signing to my sister Zaina over
the last year.  There was no response so I did the same to the child
in the middle bunk with the same results.  It didn't seem as if anyone
knew how to use tactile sign language here.  It made me feel ever so
alone.

                    ***  ***  ***

"Hey Nad, What were you doing last night?" a tall skinny boy asked the
following morning.
"I was signing to everyone using tactile sign language.  It’s what
deafblind people use,” I explained.
"Why do you need signs for?  Are you stupid?" He asked.  I’d come
across that attitude before with some of the hard of hearing children,
from the oral classes at Druzil.
"Are you?"
"Only stupid deaf sign.  Clever deaf speak."
"My aunt says that's audist nonsense.  Besides my sisters sign and
they are very clever.  They already know more then one language.   Do
you?"
"Liar."
I hit him.  We ended up rolling about on the floor.  One of the
teachers had to separate us and we were made to stand in the corner.

                   ***  ***  ***

After Liza’s unsuccessful attempt at rescuing me, the police officers
took me back to NIRC.
"You've taken me to the wrong school.  I go to Druzil School for the
deaf and the blind..."  I told Beria angrily.  She did not respond to
me.
"No.  You are at NIRC now,” the blonde officer told me, “That's where
your mother wants you to go to school.  So that's where you have to
go.  Your aunt Liza was very naughty to kidnap you.  You will see your
mother next summer."
"I don't want to see mother ever again.  I want to see Aunt Liza..."
The blonde officer picked me up and carried me up several ladders to a
dormitory.  As soon as she put me down, I turned and shouted some very
rude words at her.

             ***  ***  ***

Angrily, I made my way to what I thought was my bunk.  A strange boy
was sitting on it, attentively pressing buttons on his Game Boy.  He
had a couple of odd-looking humps on his back.  I was about to tell
him to get off my bed when my cochlear implant batteries went flat.
I tried to find some spare batteries in my bedside drawer.  None of my
things were in the drawer.  The draw was full of things that did not
belong to me.  None of my things were where they should have been at
all. The strange boy turned on me angrily at that point.  This is when
it began to dawn on me that this wasn’t my bunk at all.
The police officers must have taken me to the wrong dormitory.
 I made my way back to the door.
It was locked.
I looked frantically round.  I saw a set of prosthetic wings next to
the nearest bed.  All the children in this dormitory had the same
weird humps on their back.  Nobody here wore hearing aids or speech
processors.  From these facts, I began to deduct that I had
accidentally been put with the strange children who were being taught
how to fly.
A boy with a note pad came up to me.
"How many times have you been in hospital?" he wrote.
"I go sometimes to have my hearing devices seen to.”
"Oh that's nothing.  I've been in hospital nineteen times so far. I've
broken my right leg nine times, my left leg fourteen times, and I've
also had several broken ribs..."
"My aunt Liza is like that.  She was training to use a Parachute but
they decided that she wasn't meant to become airborne.  In the end
they gave up.    Maybe you weren't meant to become airborne either.
Have you asked your family if you could change schools?"
"I don't have a family.  My mother was in prison, on death row.  She
will have been executed by now."
"I wish my mother was in prison. Then I could go and live with Aunt Liza again."
"Sounds like you are in love with your aunt."
"What's wrong with that? Of course I love Aunt Liza.   She rescued me
from mother who just wants a son that can hear and see normally."
"Some parents send us here because they want us to fly.  They are very
stupid.  Maybe they don't realise how we keep breaking our bones.   I
don't like this place.  I don't want to learn how to fly.  I want to
run away."

                 ***  ***  ***

After hammering on the door without much luck, I spent the night in
that dormitory.  The door wasn’t opened until the following morning.
A large lady in blue overalls opened the door.
I saw the children line up, so I did the same.  We were taken to the
canteen where we were given porridge to eat with a lot of sugar heaped
on top.  Despite the sugar it had a very weird taste.  When I failed
to eat much of it a large woman sat me on her lap and started spoon
feeding me with it.  She held her hand over my mouth to stop me from
spitting it out.
Then we were all lined up again and marched along the corridor until
we got to a balcony. I started to feel a little peculiar.  I wasn't
afraid of jumping at all.  I wondered what it would feel like.
The staff must have noticed I didn't belong in that group.   They were
trying to communicate with me but I couldn’t hear what they said with
just my hearing aid.   Finally a woman grabbed my hand and led me to
the hearing impaired unit.
I'll never know what came over me next. I felt a strange surreal
sensation.  As if I would be safe whatever I did.  So I climbed on to
my desk.
“Hello everybody, my name is Nad,” I signed.   I told them all about
my family; about my twin sisters, my aunt Liza and her dragon.  I also
told them about Katrina and her signed storytelling.   I even told
them about my dog Bella.  I stood there blissfully signing to
everybody.  I saw the staff smacking my legs with their cane but I
couldn’t feel it at all.  I still would not stop signing.  The other
children loved it. In the end I was lifted bodily off the desk and
dragged out of the classroom by my ear.
I found myself locked in my dormitory for the rest of that day.

           ***  ***  ***

"Hi Nad, You were brilliant.  Can you do that again tomorrow?"
"Hey Mad Nad! Want to come and join our group.  Can you teach me how to sign?"
"Me too!”
"Yes of course.  I'll teach you tonight.  My Aunt Liza will come to
rescue me again tomorrow,” I informed them, but she never did.

            ***  ***  **

A few weeks later, I restlessly got up to peer through the door.  To
my delight I saw someone with the dark red police uniform walk in.
I gave a cry of joy as I rushed at the person who I mistook to be Aunt
Liza.  I even threw my arms round her.  The other children all burst
out laughing.
 It was the wrong cop.
At that point I rushed tearfully from the room.
I lay weeping in a deserted corridor.
I had been waiting expectantly for Aunt Liza to come, for days now.
The teacher had to pick me up and carry me back to my desk.  They even
had me tied to my desk a few times.   When I wasn’t tied down I kept
leaving my seat in order to see if Aunt Liza was there yet.
 “She won’t come, you know.  They never do,” a small, skinny boy told
me, in a flat tone of voice.  I scrambled up when I heard him.  He was
wearing an odd assortment of clothes.
“Who are you? How do you know?” I snapped.
“I’m Mitch the Midget.  I was expecting my mother to show up for a
long time, but she never did.  I’ve been here ever since she got
married to that other man.  Maybe she had my dad poisoned?  I don’t
know as none of them ever came to collect me for holidays or
anything.”
“What do you do during the holidays then?  Doesn’t this place close
down for the holidays?”
“No, NIRC is open all year round.  Most of the fliers never go home.
This place takes a lot of unwanted children.  In fact they prefer
children without parental attachments in the flying department.  It
means nobody is going to ask awkward questions if a kid or two breaks
their neck.   The other parents are really obsessed with the need to
fly.  They are so obsessed in fact, that they are willing to sacrifice
a few of their kids in the process.  Can you keep a secret?”
I nodded.
“I’m not really hard of hearing at all.  They had me put down as a
flier, but I managed to make myself ill.  I did that a lot in the hope
my parents would come rushing back to see how I was, but they never
did.  I also wanted to postpone the operation.”
“What operation?”
“The one where you have your wings surgically attached and your brain
modified.”
“I thought fliers had the wings strapped to their humps.”
“The humps are the actual wings.  What are strapped on are just
prosthetic extensions to make flight easier.  It’s all very
complicated.  The fact is humans are just not intended to become
airborne so they have a lot of modifications to make it all possible.
Sorry I can’t go into any greater details because that’s all I know.
 I spent most of the time in sick bay when I first got here.
“Anyway, I met this deaf kid in sick bay.  We talked via pen and paper
for a bit.   He didn’t think he could take much more grief from the
hearing impaired unit, so we agreed to trade places.  The last I heard
he’d died of meningitis.    My parents never even attended my
funeral.”
I patted him awkwardly on the back.  Not sure what else to do.
“Hey lay off, Nad.  No need to molest me.   Why don’t you climb on
your desk again?  It was ever so funny last time you did it.”
So I became 'Mad Nad' the class clown.  I took my feelings out on the
obnoxious teaching staff, by playing up in class.  They could hit me
and deprive me of meals, but they couldn’t hurt me worse then I was
hurting inside, by my Aunt Liza’s absence.