His Secret Family (ARC)

by Ali Mercer

All parents are dreamers. Romantics. Fantasists. The flipside of the fear we feel for our children is hope. Who hasn’t looked at their little one and wanted great things for them? Mark and I were no different. As months went by and Daisy became more settled, there were intervals of calm when we gazed at her in her cot and imagined lives for her – all kinds of lives. She could become a doctor, a ballerina, an explorer… a scientist, a poet, an entrepreneur. So many possibilities, all wide open. Or so it seemed.

  Ingrid was the first person to suggest that for Daisy, those opportunities might not be open at all.

  It started with a disastrous evening of babysitting, when Daisy cried solidly for hours and she had to call us and ask us to come home. Then I caught her looking suspiciously at me when I fed Daisy with a spoon rather than her feeding herself. There were questions about potty training, sleeping, whether Daisy was talking yet. Insinuations, or so I felt.

  I complained to Mark about it. I wanted him to come down on our side, to say she was being ridiculous, but he didn’t. Instead he had words with her and afterwards he was sombre-faced and refused to tell me what she’d said.

  Suddenly, having my mother-in-law nearby stopped meaning free babysitting and started to mean trouble. I no longer left Daisy alone with her, and we began to see her less and less. I’d have been happy to stop seeing her entirely, but I knew Mark wouldn’t be able to bring himself to cut off contact, no matter how insensitive she was, so resigned myself to occasional frosty visits.

  ‘We just need to give Daisy time,’ I said to Mark more than once. ‘She’ll catch up.’

  But time, as it turned out, was not on our side.

  Never underestimate the power of denial, as someone else once said. But some kinds of denial can’t last forever. And on the day of the pre-school Christmas show, when Daisy was three years old, our time was finally up.

  * * *

  When we arrived, half an hour before the performance was due to start, there was already a queue lined up along the wooden porch that ran the length of the pre-school building, spilling out onto the shallow steps alongside the ramp. They were mainly mums, with a few dads and grandparents, all huddled in their anoraks and hats and scarves. Mark, who had taken the morning off work, was the only one there in a suit and overcoat.

  He did not look best impressed. ‘Looks like we should have got here even earlier,’ he grumbled.

  ‘We should still be able to get seats. I hadn’t realised it was going to be quite so popular.’

  Mark looked round at the Portakabin that housed the pre-school, and the outdoor play area with its old tyres to sit on and faded plastic ride-on toys. The fence that separated the pre-school play area from the neighbouring primary school playground was decorated with hangings crafted from old CDs that the children had covered with glitter and stick-on jewels. To my eyes, it looked cheerful and friendly. But it seemed that wasn’t how it appeared to Mark.

  ‘I do wonder if this is really the best we can do for her,’ he said, not quite quietly enough for only me to hear. ‘We need to help her get on, not hold her back. Especially now, while she’s so little. The brain is just like a sponge at that age, soaking everything in. We need to make sure she’s in the right environment.’

  The dad who was ahead of us in the queue, who was scrawny but tough-looking and had the air of being up for a fight, turned round to give us a brief, baleful stare.

  ‘For heaven’s sake,’ I hissed at Mark, ‘if you’re going to criticise the place, keep your voice down. Can’t we talk about it later?’

  Mark had the grace to look a little sheepish.

  ‘It’s just, you know… I want the best for her.’

  ‘I know. Me too.’

  And then, as if there was no point talking to me at all if we couldn’t discuss what was really on his mind, he got out his phone and gave that all his attention instead.

  One of the mums I sometimes chatted to joined the lengthening queue, spotted me and waved. I waved back and hoped she wouldn’t see me with Mark engrossed by his phone and assume we had a terrible marriage. Anyway, it was just as well she was too far back in the queue for me to need to try to introduce her, because I couldn’t remember her name. I thought of her as Lydia’s mum, and probably she thought of me as Daisy’s mum. This was how it was, for all of us: inside the school gates, we belonged to our children.

  Mark put his phone away, turned to me and said, ‘Have you got the tickets?’

  I fished the two copies of the show programme that had been sent home in advance out of my handbag and held them out to him. He took one, opened it, briefly scanned it, and then folded it and stuffed it in his pocket without comment.

  Out of sight. But not quite out of mind.

  The programme was illustrated with a selection of Christmas-themed drawings by the children: wobbly six-pointed stars made of two triangles drawn over each other, stick people with wings, even a more or less recognisable angel. I hadn’t asked Daisy whether any of the drawings were hers. Just like Mark, I had known at a glance that they weren’t.

  Daisy showed no interest in drawing at all. Either that… or she just couldn’t do it. She did like to paint, though: she just didn’t paint anything in particular. Every now and then her artwork came home in her bookbag. Everything looked like an abstract sunset: great washes and stripes and whorls of colour blurring into each other, but nothing you could identify as anything else.

  You couldn’t put abstract sunsets on a photocopied programme for a Christmas show. Shrunk down and reproduced in black and white, they’d just look like… like something that didn’t make sense. A mistake. Something with no reason to be there.

  But Daisy’s birthday was in the spring and some of these kids were four already, and at that age, six months made a big difference…

  Anyway, we knew her development was lagging behind, but we’d been given to understand that there was no immediate cause for concern. After all, she was developing – just not as quickly as might have been expected. I’d spoken to the health visitor about it at her two-year check; I’d chatted about it to Donna, the pre-school supervisor, after filling in all the background information forms and being struck all over again by how much she couldn’t do. They’d both said keep doing your best and wait and see. Nobody, apart from Ingrid, had insisted that there was something to worry about.

  But what if there was?

  The queue suddenly began to move forward. ‘Finally,’ Mark said. ‘Let’s hope this is worth the wait.’

  As I made my way up the steps behind him I felt a pang of foreboding. But that was ridiculous; there was nothing ominous about this. Precisely the opposite. What could be sweeter than a Christmas show put on by little children?

  It was just a weird kind of nerves, that was all… it was another of those parental firsts. The children were so little, nobody would be expecting too much of them, and Daisy wouldn’t be the only one who had never done anything in front of an audience before. This was just a bit of fun, a chance to show off to the grown-ups.

  I showed our programmes to the pre-school assistant at the door – it was Amy, the plump, blonde, motherly woman who was Daisy’s key worker.

  Amy beamed at me. ‘She’s done ever so well,’ she said. ‘It’s a lovely show.’

  On top of the bookshelf to one side, I spotted something Amy had put there specifically for Daisy: a little pot of gluesticks. Daisy loved nothing better than to take one of them and roll them between her hands. She would do the same with almost any small object – straws or teaspoons were favourites, too.

  Part of me felt that Amy should be trying to stop her doing this, and part of me felt Daisy needed to do it and would have found a way of doing it anyway. I hadn’t mentioned it to Mark. I was pretty sure he would have objected, and it was easier just to accept it, the way we had both accepted that it would be a struggle to get Daisy off to sleep every evening, and that sometime in the early hours of the morning she would wake up and come into our bed and Mark would sigh an
d go off to the spare room.

  Mark was aware of Daisy’s twiddling habit, of course. He’d once tried to take something she was rolling around in her hands away from her, and she’d been absolutely inconsolable until he gave it back. Screaming, crying, lashing out, rolling round on the ground. You’d have thought somebody was trying to kill her, or at the very least abduct her. He’d never tried that again.

  There were rows of the low chairs the children used set up for the parents to perch on, as if we were an audience of overgrown pre-schoolers. Mark had grabbed the last two seats at the front, facing the makeshift stage. I smiled at Amy and made my way over to settle next to him and wait for the show to begin.

  * * *

  An awful lot of early childhood – perhaps of education in general – is learning how to behave as part of a group. Basically, you have to learn to submit to doing what you’re told, and to get through the boredom that usually follows.

  This was not Daisy’s forte, and it was immediately obvious that this had been taken into account when the staff were planning the Christmas performance and working out how to stage it.

  A couple of big cardboard boxes had been reassembled and painted to create the curved prow of a ship. Most of the children were sitting in rows on the carpet; others were sitting on chairs inside the boat, visible from the chest upwards. Daisy was right in the point of the prow, wedged into place so she couldn’t wander.

  She and the other children were meant to be stars – they were all wearing navy-blue Fruit of the Loom T-shirts with star shapes in silver sewn onto them, and holding silver paper stars attached to silver-painted sticks, like wands. Daisy was rolling her star wand to and fro between her hands – not frantically, but slowly, thoughtfully, with a serious expression, as if she was a junior ballerina executing exercises at the barre.

  I had sewn the star on Daisy’s T-shirt late one night, after finally getting her off to sleep. I hadn’t made a great job of it. I was never going to be the costume-making, cake-baking kind of mother. But I’d done my best… hadn’t I?

  Could I have done more?

  Should I?

  Mark called out to her: ‘Daisy!’ She ignored him. Next to her, a small child regarded her in bemusement.

  ‘Billy! Billy, mate! Break a leg!’

  It was the tough-looking dad who’d glowered at us in the queue: he’d also made his way to a seat in the front row, a couple of places along from us. A lively looking boy in brown who was sitting on the carpet waved frantically to him, and the man gave him a big thumbs up sign and an encouraging smile. Suddenly he didn’t look quite so tough after all.

  Next to the boy was my friend’s daughter, Lydia, wearing blue and holding a baby doll, beaming and blushing as her mother looked on fondly from a seat somewhere behind me.

  Billy and Lydia were Joseph and Mary, obviously. The children who had been entrusted with the responsibility of leading roles. Children who were not only conscious of their parents sitting in the audience, but were pleased and proud to have them there, and determined to impress them.

  But Daisy seemed not to see us that way, as people she could please or disappoint, or exert any influence over – when she noticed us at all.

  Mark fell to staring gloomily into space. I wanted to say something to him, to make him feel better, to jolly him out of it, to remind him that I was there too – anything, from I don’t think she saw you to she’s probably feeling a bit overwhelmed to don’t they look lovely?

  But I couldn’t. I knew I wouldn’t be able to comfort him.

  And now it was showtime.

  I had a slightly sick feeling in the pit of my stomach as Donna, the pre-school supervisor, stood in front of the stage and gave us the spiel about fire exits and not taking photographs until the end and not sharing them on social media, and reminded us that a video recording was being made and would be available for purchase.

  Meanwhile Amy picked her way round the edge of the audience and slipped into the boat. The other children shuffled along, and she sat down next to Daisy in the prow.

  Next to me, Mark was rigid with tension. Was it anxiety he was feeling? Or humiliation? Or shame? What was the name for this – this sense of falling forward into a dark pit, of not knowing what you were hurtling towards?

  Donna withdrew to press a button on the CD player that had been set up on a table at the side of the stage. Music began to play: ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’, picked out on a piano.

  The children got to their feet and sang, their high, thin, clear little voices mingling to create a kind of music that is purer and more hopeful than any other that humans are capable of: the choir of the very young. The sound of people who are finding their voices, whether sweet or warbling or robustly off-key: who haven’t yet learned to think of themselves as able to sing or not, or to distinguish their own voices from the effect they create by mingling with everybody else.

  A few of the mums were sniffling and dabbing their eyes with tissues. Further along the front row, Billy’s dad sat with his head bowed, as if he was struggling manfully not to join in with the weeping.

  But Mark was stony-faced, and Daisy wasn’t singing.

  With Amy’s encouragement, she had got to her feet, a beat behind everybody else. Her mouth was open, but it was obvious that nothing was coming out of it.

  She didn’t know the words. She didn’t know how to pretend to know the words. She didn’t know how to sing. Of course she didn’t. How can you sing if you’ve barely learned how to talk?

  And yet she did sing… At home sometimes, in the garden, when she was as good as alone, sitting on the grass with flowers in her hands, twiddling them. She had a habit of picking the flowers, and I let her – they weren’t precious prize flowers or anything like that, after all, and Mark wasn’t really into gardening and would barely notice. And as she played, she’d sing – a song without words, a kind of gentle ululation that rose and fell and repeated itself without coming to any particular conclusion.

  She had stopped rolling her star round between her hands, and was gazing questioningly beyond all of the parents at the ceiling, as if there might be something there that would make sense of all of this. But clearly no answers were forthcoming.

  Then, with the resigned air of one who has been forced by unenviable circumstances to find her own solution, she turned her back on the lot of us and started twiddling her star again.

  A small, barely suppressed titter of laughter ran around the room. I managed a smile myself – it seemed like the most suitable, the most sporting response. Kids, eh? They’re so new to all of this. She just hasn’t got the hang of it yet. I knew the laughter wasn’t meant unkindly. It was the kind of thing you might see on an out-take compilation – the funny little girl who thinks the best thing to do with an audience is not to face it! But I hated it. I hated this whole thing, and all I wanted was for it to be over.

  But it wasn’t. It went on and on.

  Amy induced Daisy to turn round and sit down again, and she did, and carried on twiddling, and the story began to unfold.

  It was about the stars sailing through the night sky to deliver the Star of Bethlehem in time to light the way for the shepherds and the three kings to find the baby Jesus. When they had all made it through the final song – ‘Little Donkey’ – there was heartfelt applause, and the staff looked relieved and the children looked delighted and the parents looked pleased and proud.

  All except us and Daisy.

  Daisy had got through it, somehow, but every time she was expected to get up and sing she’d pulled off the same trick as for the first song – she had turned her back on everyone. People had actually stopped laughing about it. It was as if there was an unspoken agreement to turn a blind eye to it, the way you might to somebody muttering to themselves on the bus.

  Donna stood up in front of everybody and gave a short thank you speech about the hard work and effort that had gone into the show, and said she was sure we would all want to congratulate our childr
en and could take a few minutes to do so, but could we please stay seated and let our children come to us.

  The other children rushed forwards and merged with the audience. All around us there were hugs, questions, backslapping and reassurances, and the noise levels in the Portakabin were instantly turned up from hushed to tumult. But Daisy didn’t move.

  Amy tapped her on the shoulder and said something in her ear and pointed in the direction of the route out of the boat, the way the other children had gone. Finally Daisy understood: she was free. As if she’d just been released from prison, she got up and shot forwards.

  As she went she knocked over the mast of the boat, which was a big silver star attached to a cardboard pole. It toppled onto some mother’s head and Amy sprang forward to check the woman was all right. Daisy fled past us and made her way to the exit.

  The door to the cloakroom was slightly ajar and Daisy sped on through, with me following her as fast as I could.

  ‘Daisy! Daisy, wait for Mummy. Daisy, stop!’

  Thankfully, the main exit was still closed and secured. She hadn’t tried to get out anyway; she’d made her way to her peg. Each of the children had one, with a laminated name label written in a clear, cursive adult script and decorated with an animal. Daisy’s was a smiling crocodile. Not a word I’d ever heard her attempt to say.

  Apart from us, the cloakroom was empty and quiet. There were coats hanging all around, and lunchboxes lined up on the shelves above the pegs, and a faint smell of wet wellington boots. All as usual. All as it should be.

  Daisy had a picture of Thomas the Tank Engine on her lunchbox; most of the other girls had ones with Disney princesses on, but Daisy had shown marginally more interest in Thomas and friends than any other characters. You were meant to worry about kids watching too much TV, but Daisy barely seemed to see the point of it. Thomas was pretty much the only thing she liked, and even then there were just a few scenes that caught her interest, and they didn’t hold it for long.

  Her red coat was still hanging up, just as I’d left it when I’d dropped her off an hour earlier. Daisy was standing next to it with her star in her hand, looking lost. No, not lost. Shellshocked, as if she was standing in the middle of a scene of apocalypse.