Working his hands in American Sign Language, Davey had been begging George to cook up some of his famous ricotta hotcakes with honey. It was Davey’s favourite BBB breakfast treat, which George falsely claimed he’d invented at the original Big Bad Burgers diner even before Isabel had walked in on the scene. Unlike Ed, who had mastered ASL, and Isabel who was adequate, George was totally inept so the boy turned his request into a kind of charades.
Davey loved it when George laughed—his teeth stuck out even further and his wiry grey ponytail flailed round so he looked to Davey like both ends of a horse. His bucktoothed grin was where George’s nickname ‘Buckets’ came from; at least that was Isabel’s child-friendly explanation. George had laughed when she told the boy that little lie. It had been the summer of ’64 and George was on security for the Rolling Stones’ first US tour. In those days George was always overflowing—with booze, drugs, whatever—and it was one of the Stones, Brian Jones, who bestowed the nickname on him. (Brian was the wild blue-eyed boy who ended up at the bottom of his swimming pool and, even then, people said he looked better dead than fellow Stone Keith Richards did alive.)
George, now in his seventies, hadn’t done drugs or alcohol for decades, often joking he got the same effects these days just from standing up fast.
He was about to head off to make the flapjacks when Davey tugged at his shirt to stop. The boy turned to Ed and after asking him to act as interpreter for his new joke, he made the sign for “big” and thumped his chest.
“A big gorilla,” said Ed, his grin widening.
Davey then put his finger to his mouth and his ear.
“Ah, a big deaf gorilla.”
Davey nodded and continued.
“A big deaf gorilla… King Kong,” Ed said, “is storming through a town… he reaches down to pick up this beautiful woman. She’s deaf too. He has the deaf woman in the palm of one hand and says to her…”
Suddenly, Davey smashed his free hand down onto the palm that was holding the imaginary woman and started to jig on the spot. Ed cracked up himself and, until father and son composed themselves, all Isabel and George could do was look to each other, trying to guess at what was so funny.
“I’m sorry,” said Ed, wiping a rare tear. “King Kong says to her in ASL,” but he broke into laughter again. “Okay, this deaf King Kong says, ‘Will you marry me?’ But see, the ASL sign for ‘marry’ is to slap one hand down onto the other so King Kong, instead of asking her to marry him, crushes her to death.”
Isabel leant over to give Davey a big hug as George laughed his way to the kitchen. Ed excused himself, too. “I’ll be back in a few minutes, Davey,” he said, and after stroking his son’s head he walked off.
Isabel was so flushed with laughing that her scar stuck out against her neck.
“Why have you got that?” Davey signed when the two were alone. He reached for it and touched it gently, though to Isabel, his finger seemed to burn. Davey had asked before but she’d fended him off with her stock answer, “Someone hurt me once.” Previously it had been enough for the boy, but he was getting older and more insistent.
“Who hurt you?” He pressed it this time.
The ASL sign for a man, Isabel knew, mimicked grasping the front brim of your hat, but gallantry was out of place. Her colour drained and she let Davey lip-read instead, “A man,” she whispered. “A bad man.”
“A boy hurt me at school yesterday,” he signed almost immediately; Davey was, after all, only eight. “He whacked me over the head with his lunch box.”
Isabel forced a smile. “I’m sure it was an accident.”
“No,” he continued signing. “He was angry because I hid his water bottle. How did the bad man hurt you?”
There was no way Isabel would reveal the shockingly sensitive details to an eight-year-old. She’d never publicly admitted it was a rape, just an assault gone very bad. Fortunately for her, the records from back then were patchy. “Davey,” she said, “he cut me… with a piece of glass and…” Her voice broke off.
Ed walked back in. “Hey, big feller,” he said, making sure Davey’s eyes had followed Isabel’s toward him, “Are you telling the next president how she should run this country, or are you still jabbering about gorillas?”
“A man hurt Isabel, daddy. With a piece of glass,” the boy signed earnestly, then touched her scar.
Ed saw the silent wail on Isabel’s face and the scatter of smile lines around his eyes fell away. “Isabel doesn’t want to talk about that, Davey,” he said. “Okay?”
Davey shook his head so his hair flew out at the sides, “Not okay.”
Isabel rested her hand on Ed’s arm, and breathed in, “It’s fine,” and turned back to Davey. “Davey, the man did bad things to me, so… so I can’t have any children.”
Davey absorbed the information for a moment, chewing his tongue and tapping Pip his stuffed toy penguin on its head. One of Isabel’s campaign badges was pinned to Pip’s chest—the button with the red, white and blue rose. “But I’m your child. You said so!” he signed, a tear drizzling from his blue eyes. “Why can’t you have me anymore?”
She shot a look of alarm at Ed. “Of course I can have you, Davey. I meant that I can’t have a baby.”
The boy nodded weakly, sniffed and wiped his eyes. “Did the man hurt you a lot?”