The Trouble with Goats and Sheep

by Joanna Cannon

sometimes, if you held on to the silence, people couldn’t stop themselves from filling it up.

There was always a glaze of anxiety to Dorothy, even when she was younger. She combed the landscape for the next catastrophe, whittling at her thoughts until she’d shaped a problem out of them and then grooming herself with the satisfaction of worrying about it.

She just listened. No one had ever listened to him before, they had only waited until he stopped speaking, so they could burden him with their own stories.

He had never talked to anyone about Elsie. Not properly. Not with any substance. He had murmured all the words you are expected to murmur when people offer concern, but no one really listens to the murmured words. They’re like punctuation in someone else’s speech, small springboards for another person to bounce their opinion from. Margaret Creasy was different. Margaret Creasy asked questions. The kind of questions you can only ask if you were hearing something in the first place.

I want to be Margaret Creasy.

He was good at keeping secrets, he had proved that much, but for some reason he had told Margaret Creasy. Immediately afterwards, he had felt a relief, as though saying the words out loud had leaked away some of their power. The secret had been trapped in his head, shifting to the perimeter, pushing at the sides and carpeting all the other thoughts until they became silent. He had studied Margaret Creasy’s face as he’d spoken, searching for a condemnation to match to his own, looking for a reason to stop speaking, but there had been nothing.

“Keep making shadows,” he said. “If you make enough shadows, there will come a time when you will know all of the answers.”

I still hadn’t learned the power of words. How, once they have left your mouth, they have a breath and a life of their own. I had yet to realize that you no longer own them. I hadn’t learned that, once you have let them go, the words can then, in fact, become the owners of you.

I knew straightaway that Walter Bishop was the kind of person you could sit in silence with. There were very few people like that, I had found. Most grown-ups liked to fill a silence with conversation. Not important, necessary conversation, but a spray of words that served no purpose other than to cover up the quiet.

“The thing is,” I said after a while, “no one around here seems very bothered about God.” The picking had stopped. Walter brushed flecks of paint from underneath his nails. “They won’t be,” he said, “until they need something.”

A coping strategy, Margaret Creasy had called it. The only problem was, when your whole existence is something you have to cope with, you look back one day and find that your strategy has become a way of life.

She needs to go shopping, but each journey from the house is a difficult one. She tries to take the least crowded pavement, the quietest time of day, but she still feels like an exhibit, a curiosity. She knows that her presence on the street will switch conversations on like a string of fairy lights. As soon as she has moved beyond hearing, they will begin dissecting her misery and her ridiculousness, and dish it out between themselves in manageable bites.

“That’s why I like being around children,” the girl says. “They just see you. They don’t see all the things you carry in your pockets.”