Zaph Mann : Writer

Excerpt #2 from Death & Sex a short story from the trilogy A Free Man

For Geoffrey, things continued to work out quite well. Geoffrey had picked up more about behaviour in those few days after Mr. and Mrs. Pine died than he had during his difficult time spent at University. Life wasn’t only patterns, Geoffrey now understood that life was also run by signals – signals within behaviour. Signals had always been hard for Geoffrey, but now he began to see them everywhere, as if he had new glasses. He began to see the unspoken body language of people. Where Geoffrey had previously only seen variable shapes, he now saw that people presented him with thousands of wonderful, and simple, yet complex signs.
Signs showed up on worn faces: ticks, blinks, winks, sneers, tightening lips… Looser people stood making shapes, with shrugs, turns, thrusts, and retreats… Nervous types favoured darting looks and rapid head movements. Geoffrey’s favourite clues came from hands: Palms up, palms out, waving, gripping, finger pointing, finger tapping, scratching, snapping. Some did it all – they used their whole bodies to talk, then slumped in chairs, against walls; they must tire themselves out with all this activity, thought Geoffrey.
He told Miss Chilbury all about this, and she had been surprised that he had so much to say, but she was glad he was interested in it. Geoffrey, as you know, was a great listener, but when he discovered something new like this he was a 10-year-old boy.
‘…people even paint cartoons of themselves on metal and put the metal on poles to leave messages for other people when they aren’t there!’ Geoffrey told a confused Miss Pine. ‘They make glass ones full of coloured gas too.’
‘They do?’ she said.
‘Yes, you can see the gas moving – ‘
‘You can?’ she said.
Miss Pine was concerned about where this would lead. Once Geoffrey had decided that telephones were ‘signal devices,’ he then asked her if she had ever seen the sound waves coming to her telephone, which had no wires connected. ‘No’ she’d said, she’d never looked at it that way – but he was right, was Geoffrey, ‘why even the TV wouldn’t work without a signal.’
The next day, when Geoffrey went up onto the roof to watch the signals arrive for the TV, Mrs. Pine had arrived and shouted at him with a great deal of concern. Geoffrey wondered if she’d seen some bad news being transmitted to the antenna. He didn’t. Anyhow Mrs. Pine made some very agitated waving body signals to show that she was very worried so he climbed back down.
Mrs. Pine, who quickly became Miss Pine, was really Miss Chilbury – it was an innocent mistake that Geoffrey often made. After six months it was something of a habit, a pattern, you might say.