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not to look at. You all sit so close to each other but what can any of you talk about ’cept the thing you want to talk about least: ‘So, why are you here?’ One old biddy was knitting. The sound of her needles knitted in the sound of the rain. A hobbity man with watery eyes rocked to and fro. A woman with coat-hangers instead of bones sat reading Watership Down . There’s a cage for babies with a pile of sucked toys in it, but today it was empty. The telephone rang and the pretty receptionist answered it. It seemed to be a friend, ’cause she cupped the mouthpiece and lowered her voice. Jesus , I envy anyone who can say what they want at the same time as they think it, without needing to test it for stammer-words. A Dumbo the Elephant clock tocked this: to – mo – rrow – mor – ning’s – com – ing – soon – so – gouge – out – your – brain – with – a – spoon – you – can – not – e – ven – count – to – ten – be – gin – a – gain – a – gain – a – gain . (Quarter past four. Sixteen hours and fifty minutes to live.) I picked up a tatty National Geographic magazine. An American woman in it’d taught chimpanzees to speak in sign language.
    Most people think stammering and stuttering are the same but they’re as different as diarrhoea and constipation. Stuttering’s where you say the first bit of the word but can’t stop saying it over and over. St - st - st - st utter. Like that. Stammering’s where you get stuck straight after the first bit of the word. Like this. St …AMmer! My stammer’s why I go to Mrs de Roo. (That really is her name. It’s Dutch, not Australian.) I started going that summer when it never rained and the Malvern Hills turned brown, five years ago. Miss Throckmorton’d been playing Hangman on the blackboard one afternoon with sunlight streaming in. On the blackboard was
     

     
    Any duh -brain could work that out, so I put up my hand. Miss Throckmorton said, ‘Yes, Jason?’ and that was when my life divided itself into Before Hangman and After Hangman. The word ‘nightingale’ kaboomed in my skull but it just wouldn’t come out . The ‘N’ got out okay, but the harder I forced the rest, the tighter the noose got. I remember Lucy Sneads whispering to Angela Bullock, stifling giggles. I remember Robin South staring at this bizarre sight. I’d’ve done the same if it hadn’t been me. When a stammerer stammers their eyeballs pop out, they go trembly-red like an evenly matched arm wrestler and their mouth guppergupperguppers like a fish in a net. It must be quite a funny sight.
    It wasn’t funny for me, though. Miss Throckmorton was waiting. Every kid in the classroom was waiting. Every crow and every spider in Black Swan Green was waiting. Every cloud, every car on every motorway, even Mrs Thatcher in the House of Commons’d frozen, listening, watching, thinking, What’s wrong with Jason Taylor?
    But no matter how shocked, scared, breathless, ashamed I was, no matter how much of a total flid I looked, no matter how much I hated myself for not being able to say a simple word in my own language, I couldn’t say ‘nightingale’. In the end I had to say, ‘I’m not sure, miss,’ and Miss Throckmorton said, ‘I see.’ She did see, too. She phoned my mum that evening and one week later I was taken to see Mrs de Roo, the speech therapist at Malvern Link Clinic. That was five years ago.
    It must’ve been around then (maybe that same afternoon) that my stammer took on the appearance of a hangman. Pike lips, broken nose, rhino cheeks, red eyes ’cause he never sleeps. I imagine him in the baby room at Preston Hospital playing Eeny-meeny-miny-mo . I imagine him tapping my koochy lips, murmuring down at me, Mine . But it’s his hands, not his face, that I really feel him by. His snaky fingers that sink inside my tongue and squeeze my windpipe so nothing’ll work. Words beginning with ‘N’ have always been one of Hangman’s