Enchantment

by Monica Dickens

  In the moment that Tim had been out of the room, Julian had taken off his clothes, all except a large nappy and plastic pants, which were tightly fixed on. He had a thin, agile body and long legs and lovely, healthy skin. He looked like a dream child.

  He snatched the cloth from Tim and sucked it savagely.

  ‘Here, give it to me.’

  ‘It to me.’ It was the first time Julian had spoken.

  ‘No, to me.’

  The naked child came towards Tim, legs apart in the ballooning plastic pants. Kneeling on the carpet, Tim held out his arms. Julian came close to him. Helen came in with the coffee mugs.

  ‘Look, he likes me.’ Tim felt triumphant.

  Staring, the child stabbed out his fingers, and Tim jerked his head back only just in time to avoid having his eye poked out.

  ‘He could probably see that light on the wall reflected in your eye,’ Helen said. ‘Things like that fascinate him. For a moment.’

  Already the boy had backed away from Tim and was sucking hard on his own bare arm.

  ‘How do you – er, sort of manage?’

  ‘Search me.’ Helen sat down with her coffee. ‘I just do. I get some help, of course, in the holidays, but weekends I can manage. Spend most of the time cleaning up, and stopping him from wrecking the place.’

  ‘Why do you have that wire covered? Does he suck that too?’

  ‘He bites it.’

  ‘He bites it?’

  ‘He could chew right through it.’ She laughed at Tim’s shocked face, one of her brief, snorty laughs and blew out her pale lips, without a smile.

  ‘Helen, I-I really, I mean, you’re amazing, how you cope.’

  ‘You get used to it. His father never did. That’s why we split up, really. He couldn’t stand me coping and him not.’

  She spoke very fast, but Tim thought that was what she had said. No abusive drunken sailor then? It didn’t sound like that.

  ‘Will he get any better?’

  Helen did not answer. ‘Oh dear, Julian.’ She made a face, and put down her mug. ‘Come on, let’s go and change you.’

  ‘Change you.’

  Washed and dressed again, he was still a lovely-looking child. He sat in a chair opposite Tim, jiggling his feet, winding up his hands, crooning to himself, a brief repetitive refrain, over and over.

  ‘Julian,’ Helen said lovingly. ‘Julian.’

  ‘Such a noble name.’ Tim told her what he had thought. ‘Such – such handsome looks. He ought to be a prince.’

  ‘A sleeping prince,’ Helen said. ‘But no princess can wake him.’

  Why couldn’t I?

  Julian rocked back and forth and appeared to ignore them both, but haltingly, Tim began to tell the child a story.

  ‘Once upon a time, there was a golden-haired prince, who had a magic top. He could hang on to the top and spin himself away through space, anywhere he wanted to go …’

  ‘He can’t understand, I’m afraid. Autistics don’t know about fantasy or make-believe.’

  But I will teach him. I will lead him by the hand out of the dark enchanter’s forest and into his own shining kingdom.

  However, a trip with Helen and Julian to the supermarket was enough to make him decide not to have anything more to do with the sleeping prince.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ Helen said before he left, ‘but I need a few things from the shops. Would you just come and help me with Julian?’

  Getting Julian ready took about ten minutes. ‘He loves to go out,’ Helen said, but he became very agitated about his socks, and practically had a fit when she tried to put boots on him.

  ‘No boots, no out,’ Helen said firmly.

  Tim held the strong struggling child while she forced short red rubber boots on to his feet (it was raining). She carried him down the stairs, and held his hand while they walked down to the main road. When Julian pulled back and tried to bend his knees and sink to the ground, Tim took the other hand and they pulled him along between them, his woollen hat over his eyes.

  ‘Dragging the poor child along,’ said a woman pushing a trolley towards the door of the supermarket. ‘It’s not good enough.’

  ‘Can’t she see –?’ Tim asked.

  ‘They don’t want to know.’ Helen had put Julian into a trolley, and it was Tim’s job to keep him in it, while Helen scooted fast along the shelves to get what she wanted.

  Julian threw out his hat. Tim picked it up. Julian threw it out. He pulled off one boot and threw it down the aisle. He let out a high hooting sound which made people look round, and then look away again.

  When Helen came back, Tim went for the boot. Helen tried to put it on, but Julian screamed and raged and threw tins out of the trolley. In the queue at the check-out, people edged as far away as they could without losing their place. Nobody helped, or even looked sympathetic. Tim wanted to tell them, ‘He can’t help it,’ but Helen didn’t, so evidently it wasn’t the thing to do. While Tim was trying to stop Julian climbing out of the trolley, the child got an arm free and hit him hard across the face.

  You bugger! If people had not been looking, Tim would have hit him back.

  ‘Here – I’ll take him out. You pay.’ Helen gave Tim her purse and shopping-bag, picked up Julian and carried him out.

  The rage that had made Tim almost hit the child merged into a giant blush. He put the shopping on the counter and paid for it and took the bag outside, the back of his neck on fire, feeling eyes on him.

  Chapter Seven

  Willard Freeman did not answer any more of Tim’s letters, so after a bit, Tim took him off his list of special heroes. Mary Gordon did not answer either, but that was understandable, for a radio star. She stayed on the list.

  When Tim got his spring bonus from Webster’s, he did not pay Harold back. He paid off the rest of the garage bill, and Buttercup came home to him, gears working like silk. Zara would be thrilled.

  Life looked up. The sun came out and Tim drove his mother out for a picnic on the tow-path by the river. She did not want to get out of the car and sit on the grass, so they ate their sandwiches in the car park, and watched the swollen river sliding by, and people walking along the tow-path with dogs and fishing gear.

  ‘That man is going to catch the biggest perch of the season. Look at his determined face. It will be stuffed and hung over the fireplace in his local pub.’

  ‘Bad luck,’ Tim said. ‘He has to throw it back in the river.’

  ‘He’ll pretend he doesn’t know that, and say it came from the reservoir. Look, that barge is full of old ladies from the Silver Threads. I can see them drinking tea.’

  ‘This summer, I might get a boat.’

  ‘And we’ll cruise down to Henley regatta in style. Not like those two.’ A man and a girl were labouring to row a small boat upstream. ‘She’s saying to him, “You call this a day out?” and he’s saying, “You said the river was romantic.”’

  ‘I’ve seen just the boat I want. A little red cruiser in a yard near the wharf.’

  But as usual, she was more interested in her invented dreams of strangers than in the reality of his.

  Towards the end of April, the repertory theatre, the Boathouse, opened by the river wharf, and Tim was able to do a few jobs for them, as he had last year. Mostly it was selling programmes and showing people to their seats and locking the fire doors after the show.

  This year, there was a cheerful, burly young man in the company called Craig Reynolds. It was his first year in repertory, but he performed small parts well, and was very friendly to everyone at the theatre. The ushers usually did not have any contact with the actors, but Tim sometimes stayed late on Saturday to help get out the old set and fit up the new one for next week, and Craig was one of the assistant stage managers.

  ‘You here again?’ Craig said to Tim as they were getting out the set of Poor Lucy. ‘You give a lot of time to this place.’ Tim signed himself up to usher as often as possible, partly because he did not want to be at
home if Harold came round looking for his money. ‘Great to see such enthusiasm.’

  ‘I saw the play four times this week,’ Tim said. ‘I like that bit where you’re cornered, but the audience still doesn’t know you’ve done it. “That’s right, you fools.”’ He lifted a light door off its hinges and put it down to declaim. ‘“Waste your time with me, while the real murderer is probably miles away by now. If you want a – a scape – a scapegoat, look into your hearts to see who really killed Lucy Grainger. You – all of you, with your smothering protection and your pills and therapists that turned a normal, bright girl into a zombie!”’ It was so much easier to say someone else’s lines than to talk out of your own head. ‘“I loved her, do you understand? I – (Craig’s break in the voice) I loved her!”’

  ‘Jolly good,’ Craig said. ‘You should have done the part instead of me.’

  Tim put Craig on to his specials list.

  Harold had rung him up a few times, and had come round once and made a bit of a scene. Tim had pretended he was shampooing the rug, and would not let him into the flat, so Harold made the scene on the small platform at the top of the stairs, and Brian had opened the kitchen door and called up, ‘If you break that step again, you can mend it yourself!’

  Tim had made up some promises that Harold seemed to believe, and when he had gone away grumbling, Brian came up and said something unsettling about rough trade.

  Tim would have to invite Helen up here soon, for the look of it, but he was not sure whether he wanted to see her again. Without Julian, she was passable, he supposed, although she was about six years older than him, and looked it. He thought about Julian a lot, with fascination, but also with fear. It had been terrifying to realize how easily he could have hit him – hard.

  Tim puzzled about the strange child.

  ‘Can’t do make-believe,’ Helen had said. What must that be like? ‘He probably can’t imagine the past or the future,’ she had told Tim.

  He sat down and cleared his mind and tried to live in the present moment, to see what it would feel like. It couldn’t be done. Images from yesterday, last year, this morning, words, people, thronged at the edges of the mind and spilled over into it. Thoughts raced ahead. Tomorrow’s Thursday, stock-taking. Next week, Private Lives starts at the Boathouse. Only principals. Craig won’t have a part. I wonder if he’ll be doing front of the house. Must think of a joke for him in case I see him. Two days ago, I had that lovely steak and kidney pie. The gravy bubbled up through the crust. When I’ve finished this nonsense, I’m going to have some bread and cheese.

  Five minutes without imagination? It was impossible. Helen must be wrong about Julian, just repeating some rubbish the doctors had told her. There must be dreams and memories behind that princely brow, and Tim could unlock them if he chose. But after the supermarket, he was not sure that he did choose.

  He watched the dress rehearsal of Private Lives with the other ushers and staff families, and afterwards he found Craig on the grass bank by the river, throwing bread at the ducks and swans.

  The ducks were vulgar opportunists, but Tim loved the swans.

  ‘Royal birds.’ He sat on the grass and admired Craig’s agreeable looks in the sun. The swans carried their beauty above the surface, sailing magically. Below, the dark water hid the ungainly angled legs and splayed feet that propelled them. Tim stretched up his neck to try to imagine how it would be, and turned his head stiffly, blinking his eyes.

  ‘I was a swan in a former life,’ he told Craig.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Oh I – just know.’

  ‘I was only a lump of ooze. Are you psychic?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Tim would say anything to get Craig’s attention.

  ‘I’ll pay you in May,’ he had promised Harold. ‘Cross my heart.’ He did pay off some of the debt, and decided to put the rest out of his head until he could save some more, or sell something. Sell the television? He couldn’t see himself going downstairs to ask Brian and Jack if he could watch the late films. They went to bed at ten, because they got up early to have a jog round the park in orange track suits. Once, walking early after a nightmare, Tim had seen the girl friend going out at dawn with Brian in the same colour suit. Perhaps she had borrowed Jack’s.

  As May got warmer, there were more boats on the river and people strolling on the streets with open faces, instead of pinched and hurrying. Tourists came to the town to look at the cathedral and its close and water garden.

  If visitors looked lost, frowning over maps, Tim might offer help, and even go a short way with them, enjoying the brief contact with strangers, liking to be seen as a knowledgeable native. At this time of year, he sometimes went into the hushed, aloof cathedral and knelt down, pretending to pray, as a bit of local colour for the tourists. Their voices became quiet, their steps softer, impressed with the devoutness of this place.

  There were printed guides to the cathedral, but they cost two pounds, so most people just wandered round and looked at random. If they were lucky, they met Tim, ready to invent for them the saga of Sir Leonard and Lady Margaret, inviting them to feel how the stone of the garments was worn away, like the toe of St Peter in Rome, by the hands of bygone generations who believed this would cure arthritis.

  Or they could find him on the bench opposite the pitted wooden crucifix, moving down to the end so that they could sit down with him and contemplate the sorrowing figure of ancient days.

  He might ask Americans if they had heard the legend.

  ‘Why no.’ They pricked up their ears like dogs for a biscuit.

  ‘It’s been said – it’s only a legend, mind (in case they bought a guide or asked a verger) – that a sixteenth-century monk, after intense meditation here, was seen with blood on his hands and feet.’

  ‘Gee.’

  ‘Some people believe that’s still possible.’

  Tim’s hands were clenched on his knees, so they could remember that afterwards, and wonder …

  At the end of May, Harold was waiting in the brick-paved alley at the back of Webster’s. Tim came out of the staff door with Gail. They were going to walk to the card shop and get a card for Fred’s birthday.

  Harold walked with them. Tim kept himself between Harold and Gail.

  ‘All right, come on.’ Harold clicked his fingers. ‘Let’s have it.’

  ‘I told you, by the end of the month.’

  ‘It is the end of the month.’

  ‘I meant next month.’

  ‘Sod that,’ said Harold, and Gail poked her head forward across Tim and giggled. ‘I’ll beat you up. I’ll murder you.’

  ‘Are you –’ Tim stopped and faced him. ‘Are you threat-threatening me?’

  ‘What do you think?’ Harold’s eyes were fiery boiled eggs. ‘I’ll cook your kidneys.’

  ‘I could report you,’ Tim said. ‘Uttering mena-menaces – there’s my bus!’

  He broke away and ran across the street through the traffic and hopped on a bus going in the wrong direction.

  Next day at work, Gail told him, ‘Timothy Kendall, you’re getting quite weird. What are you up to? Who was that man?’

  ‘Nobody. He’s always trying to borrow money off me.’

  ‘He’s got a hope. Ugly-looking customer, though. I nipped into the arcade till he’d gone. I got the card, no thanks to you.’

  It was a huge birthday card with gold borders and a raised pink-satin heart. They all signed it, even Mr D., and put it in Fred’s drawer.

  He had a little weep when he found it, his lumpy blue lips trembling.

  ‘Getting past it,’ Lilian said, meaning Mr D. to hear.

  Tim pushed her against a stand of heavy leatherette.

  ‘Do you mind?’ Being broad-based, she didn’t topple. She righted herself by clutching at Tim’s sleeve, pulling his jacket half off.

  Tim was quite shaken by the ambush at the staff door. If Harold was going to stalk him, life would not be worth living.

  ‘If I had a gu
n, I’d blast the whole lot,’ he had said that time in the flat, when he had revealed his secret dreams and rages. Would the next thing be a chunk of concrete dropped on Buttercup’s roof from a bridge over the road, or a bullet pinging through the gabled window of the flat?

  When the papers for his next turn at Domain of the Undead arrived, Tim was even more uneasy. Blch and his daring raggle-taggle army, who had taken possession of the settlement at the very foot of the hill fortress, which might or might not hold the swift zoetic rapier, had been overwhelmed by a sudden influx of new and powerful characters attacking them brutally from the rear. Vrage, Vrevolta, Gorescalp – where had they come from? Some player had poured a lot of money into the game to buy the forms to create and control all these new ghastlies. Someone very vindictive and cunning. One of the new ravagers was called DeAth.

  Tim wrote to Harold. ‘This is a letter because my phone is out of order.’ He had been leaving it off the hook a lot of the time when he was at home. ‘I’m the victim of a dastardly plot. Are Vrage and Gorescalp all yours?’

  In return, the small card’s tiny writing, so unlikely from the large hod-carrying fist, told it all.

  ‘Got it in I. Blch & co is doomed. Y not give up?’

  Tim sold his television set to Jack, who wanted an extra one for his bedroom.

  ‘How will you get along without it, being on your own?’ Jack asked.

  Tim shrugged. ‘Mostly it’s rubbish.’ Implying: some people lie in bed and watch that crap through their toes. ‘I’m studying.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘To better myself.’

  ‘Good for you.’ Jack was such a nice fellow. He had a wide, comfortable smile and good spirits in his eyes. ‘So am I. Tough, isn’t it? There’s a management training programme in the Accounts Department at Webster’s, you know. Do you want me to –’

  ‘I’ve talked to them.’

  ‘Who did you see?’

  Panic. ‘Mr – Mr Wood.’

  ‘He left last year.’

  ‘That’s when I talked to him.’

  Jack wrote a cheque. Tim cashed it and took the eighty-five pounds to ‘Marbella’, Brentwood Close, and gave it to the woman with the high bottom and violet lips.