Truancy

At That Time, in That Place

Hesitant speech, speech yet unsure of itself, speech that does not know the decorum of speech, of what might be said and the way it should be spoken: I remember how we spoke, then, as adolescents. I remember a speaking at the brink of itself, a searching-speech which was never resolved, a speech tentative and half-formed, as though it were looking too quickly to clothe its nudity. A speech in which what mattered was not the content of what was said, but the fact of speaking, in which speech, all of speech, spoke of itself.

It was not a matter of personal confession, of anecdote or intimacy. True, there were confidences, that’s how it began; I learnt about you and you about me, we spoke of ourselves in trust and sincerity. But such speech is magnetised by what it would convey; it was not yet indifferent, it did had not come to speak of itself and only of speaking, the fact of speaking; it was not full with the wonder of speech where each word is strange because it is addressed to another, where each word is wondrous because it is unsure as to where it is travelling, and to where it will bear speech and its speakers.

How quickly we wore speech away! Almost at once, there was nothing to say and speech was worn down like a pebble. But that was the condition of speech. It was then, wasn’t it, that speech spoke and we were dispersed even as it seemed we were brought together? It was at that moment, wasn’t it, that speech interceded on its own behalf?

Perhaps this is to idealise what might have been, after all, only fumbling and idiocy. How could we speak, we who were so young? What had we to say, adolescents on the outside, at the brink of life? But what happened, I maintain, did so because of inexperience; inexperience was its condition.

‘But We Never Said Anything’

We never said anything, that’s what you said later. Then, it was though we were present only to accompany speech, to let speech remember itself and lighten itself by passing between us. Yes, it was as though our presence allowed speech to lighten itself, to offer speech a new direction. Curious that we seemed to come to ourselves after everything had been said, that we were always too late.

But what, after all, had been said? We never said anything. That was true; you always seemed comfortable with that silence, though later you told me you were never comfortable. I was always uncomfortable, I tried to say too much, as if ashamed at the nudity of speech. But in a sense, everything had been said, and silence was the speech of what remained.

Sometimes we drank, we took bottles of Thunderbird into the woods. We drank and we were warm by drinking though the woods were full of ice and snow. We drank and it seemed necessary to drink, as if drinking was another way to assist speech. Then there were silences – many times, we walked home in the night without a word spoken between us. Silence – but that was speech; speech happened by our silence.

We never said anything, yes that’s true, nothing was said, speech was worn down, and it was as though everything we’d said and heard had been the river that wears pebbles into roundness. Nothing was said, we never began, because it was as though we came too late and there was nothing left for us to say.

Truancy

Dusk: I would meet you at the roundabout. Dawn: you’d pretend to be staying overnight with a friend and we would go into the wood and through the fields to see the sun rise. And we were together in the day, too, when we bunked off school and went to the woods and drink beer and skim stones across the lake.

What did we seek? Escape – from school first of all, but then from everyone, everyone else. To face one another? No, never that – we walked one alongside the other, we passed through derelict land and the new golf courses, we passed through the new estates and the land reserved to build more estates, we passed through the last woods and the last fields. We went, truants, and bore between us the truancy of speech, speech as truancy, that demanded we pass and always pass.

Later, when we had learned to speak of many of things, we sought to reckon with what we said and did not say then, so many years before. Later we decided to speak of that we had omitted to address then, in the dusk and the dawn and in the days truant from school. We never said anything, you said, but we knew, didn’t we, that speech had happened, even though nothing had been said. We never said anything, you said on the phone.

Lightened Speech

Then, we had used phones then only to convey the minimum of information: let’s meet at X., see you at Y. We had always written, that is true, but only to seek a writing loose enough to let speech speak. How seriously we wrote! But it was not a pretend-seriousness, there was a lightness to speech, we gave speech lightness by giving it another direction. Speech spoke of its lightness by our seriousness. Speech, between us, playing between us, became light even in the seriousness of our words.

I waited for letters from you, and sometimes they would come. I wrote to you, and sometimes you wrote to me, sometimes letters would reach me. But we never phoned, we distrusted phones, for years I never heard your voice, and that was right. We distrusted phones; my voice was too heavy and yours too light, I was too quick to speak and you preferred silence. Letters came, a flurry of correspondence and then nothing. Years passed, but their passing was marked by letters or by the absence of letters.

Later, we decided to reckon with speech, to speak and to meet. Later, when we had learnt a great deal, we thought we’d chase speech down, to track it all the way to the source. I phoned you – or did you phone me? – we spoke, we arranged to meet. Much later, when we were already old, speech laughed and disappeared – how could we expect speech to be punctual? We lost speech by searching for it. We lost what came of itself and by itself, like the deer that crossed the fields before us in the dawn.

We never said anything, you said, but now we said too much and spoke as adults. We never said anything, but that was because we had not learnt to speak, not then, we had not asserted our rights over speech. And today, what is left for us to say? Too much; everything – but now to ‘catch up’ is no longer truancy, no longer our passing from the world.