The song came back in pieces

There is a girl in my family, not mine, a near enough one, who went quiet last year. Not sulking quiet, not shy quiet, but the kind where a child who used to fill a whole house with noise turns the volume right down on herself and leaves it there. The grown ups called it going through a lot, which is the phrase we use when we do not want to say the bigger words in front of the smaller people. She still spoke. She answered when asked. But the singing stopped, and she had been a singer, the fearless tuneless sort who does the advert jingles and the school songs and things she invents on the spot about the cat.

For months there was nothing. We learned not to make a thing of it. You cannot coax a song out of a child the way you coax a shoe onto a foot, though I tried the coaxing first, the way everyone does, and it works about as well as you would expect.

Then one evening in the wet season, the light gone that bruised gold it goes just before the rain, we were on the back step shelling long beans for dinner, the two of us, not talking. The air had that heaviness that means the sky is about to let go. And under her breath, so quietly that at first I took it for the kettle, she began to hum. No tune I could name. Three notes, perhaps, going nowhere, the way an engine turns over a few times before it catches. I did not look at her. I have never in my life worked so hard at looking at a bowl of beans. I was certain that if she caught me noticing, the volume would drop again and stay down.

Then the rain came, and the humming stopped, and I thought, well, that was that, a small good thing that happened once. But the next evening it came again, a shade louder, still going nowhere in particular. And the evening after that it found the corner of a real tune and settled there for a while. By the end of the week she was singing something made up and completely ridiculous about the beans, getting the words wrong on purpose to make me laugh, and I laughed far too much at a song about vegetables, and she did not know why, and I could not have begun to tell her.

This is why I write the way I do, and why I never reach for the big word for what she was going through, not in my books and not here. Because that is not how it lifts. It does not lift because of a good conversation or a lesson or a wise adult saying exactly the right thing at exactly the right moment. It lifts the way her voice came back: in pieces, at the edge of an ordinary evening, over a chore, at the precise moment nobody was allowed to make a fuss. The smallest person in the house, holding the most stubborn thing in it, which was her own returning voice, and choosing herself when the rest of us would finally be let hear it.

She sings all the time now. Badly, gloriously, about the cat again. I would not change a single note of it.