The Voice of the Xenolith Read Online Free PDF

about.
    Maybe it sounds to you like I am contradicting myself, because I said that I love to search for things which are hidden, and then I said that I like things to be organised and labelled and not hidden. But it is not a contradiction. I search for things so that I can find them, and once I find them I can know them, and I can keep them safe. But the search comes first.

7
A strategy of accuracy
    The Perfection of Spaces isn’t only about keeping things in their correct place; it is also about being accurate when you are talking about spaces and places, and when the geography teacher said things that were not accurate I spoke up and said so.
    For once, I wasn’t keeping quiet, even though the main complaint about me at the new school was that I was too quiet. So I was getting into all kinds of trouble at school; sometimes for speaking, and sometimes for not speaking.
    ‘Sullen’ is what one of the teachers called me when she spoke to me one day after a lesson. “You have an Attitude, you are Sullen, and it won’t do you any good in this school my girl, so better snap out if it right now, and then we will get on just fine.”
    Well I didn’t want to get on with her. I didn’t like the way she taught and I didn’t like her or her personality. Or her Attitude.
    And the P.E. teacher also picked me out, in class, in front of everyone, for having a ‘half-hearted attitude’ and for having ‘no team spirit’ because I only like to do sports or activities which are solitary. Well that is true; what I like to do in P.E. is the fitness work. Fitness is something that is important to me, because if you are fit you can get out and go on long hikes to different fossil sites. It takes a lot of energy to keep going for hours, bending down, digging, and checking the tide is not coming in and that the cliff is not going to fall on you while you are digging.
    In the school Mission Statement – I looked it up online – it says that they aim to give their students ‘a balanced life’, with academic fitness and physical fitness, and nowhere does it say that you can only get physically fit if you play team sports.
    I am not a team player and never will be. I am not interested in belonging to a team and having us all win together, and I am not interested in getting a ball into a net or a goal or anywhere. I know I have to be fit to be healthy, but I can get fit by working out by myself in my room with weights, or by running on a beach, which I love doing. So why would I want to be part of the basketball team?
    The thing I hate most about working in a team is that not everyone makes an effort. At school we are sometimes given projects to do in a small group. Usually it is left to me, because I hate it when people produce work that has mistakes or is half-finished, so in the end it always comes down to me taking it all home and fixing it up so that the presentation is correct, without mistakes, and looks good. So team work actually means, for me, that I have to do twice the work of everyone else. I suppose that is my fault, I asked for it, because I would rather turn in nothing than turn in something that isn’t accurate.
    If you do something it should be done well. Or not at all. And for some teachers, I choose not at all.

    So I suppose I was the least favourite student of a whole bunch of teachers at my new High School. Well, that was something I could share with them: the feeling was mutual; we were the least favourite of each other. I certainly won’t put their names in my book because that would make them famous and I am not going to help them be famous.
    It was no surprise when the first parent-teacher meeting of the year ended with my parents coming home that evening looking serious and asking me to sit down with them to have a discussion.
    I think that my dad was secretly a bit pleased with me when I told him the geography teacher had made mistakes and I had corrected him, but they didn’t like it that I had no team