Shtum

by Jem Lester

  ‘Peter Pan, Peter Pan,’ Tom cried again, and Johnny unwrapped him, gripped him around the waist and started flying him round the landing, crying high and loud: ‘Peeeder, Peeeder, Peeeder …’ Tom laughed and, by my feet, Jonah laughed too and stretched his arms out toward Johnny.

  Amanda took Tom in her arms. ‘Johnny, look, Jonah wants a go, do it with Jonah.’ Johnny was about to pick Jonah up when Emma stepped in.

  ‘No. Make him say it before you do it, Johnny. Make him say Peeeder.’

  ‘Come on, Emma, that’s cruel, look at him,’ I said. Jonah was more desperate than ever. Emma crouched on the floor with him. ‘We’ve got to push him, Ben. It’s the only way.’

  And she began to call to him: ‘Come on, Jonah, if you want to do it, say Peeeder, come on, Peeeder, Peeeder, Peeeder.’

  I hated it. Jonah bounced up and down on his backside and Emma wouldn’t let it go. I was about to intervene when a shrill cry filled the air.

  ‘Peeeder, Peeeder, Peeeder.’ It was Jonah, and the words were not just identifiable, they were pitch perfect, tone perfect like a recording of Emma’s version. We all looked at each other, stunned. Johnny picked him up and flew him round, crying Peeeder himself. Jonah had said a few words before – bubble, door – but that was months earlier and we had begun to question whether he’d really said them at all. But this felt different, like a spiritual moment, an awakening. The evening was a joyous one, full of laughter, hope and relief. The breakthrough had come and we went to bed happy.

  It was the last word he ever spoke.

  BIRCH: Jonah has a diagnosis of ASD, but, in my view, this does not convey the severity of his condition and it should be noted that he is at the most severe end of the Spectrum and, as such, falls within the small range of children displaying complex ASD.

  And then it just got worse and worse and worse. No words, no eye contact, no bodily control, no physical affection …

  I watched him play inside the plastic Wendy house, opening and shutting the windows, through the door, round the back and in again, back to the windows. Emma chewed her nails, crossed and uncrossed her legs. The door opened and we were called in. I called Jonah, but he ignored me. I put my head through the Wendy house window and tickled his tummy. Finally, he took my hand and allowed himself to be led into the office. He started flapping his hands as if he’d been engulfed by a cloud of midges.

  The consultant was small behind his desk, near to retirement, his accent sing-song Indian.

  ‘So, you must be Jonah?’

  Jonah ignored him.

  ‘And how old are you, Jonah?’

  ‘He’s two and a half,’ Emma said.

  ‘No language at all?’

  ‘He had some, maybe forty words or so.’

  More like six, I thought.

  ‘But he just stopped using them.’

  ‘How long has it been since he spoke?’

  We looked at each other, Emma answered. ‘A year, maybe.’

  The consultant made some notes. Jonah was fighting to get off my lap.

  ‘I have the report from his school. I have also observed Jonah on two occasions.’

  We didn’t know this.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Jewell, all the indicators suggest strongly that Jonah is autistic.’

  ‘But he had words, he had words.’

  ‘This is common among autistic children, Mrs Jewell.’

  I watched her eyes redden, but I felt calm, somehow, like I’d already known.

  ‘But why? Why?’

  The consultant scanned some more paperwork and looked up at me.

  ‘You have an alcohol problem?’

  ‘Had,’ I said.

  ‘But you were drinking heavily around the time of conception?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘You are aware that this could have caused Jonah’s autism?’

  Could have. God knows I’d trawled the internet until the Google logo was burnt on to my corneas and couldn’t find any evidence that it was my fault. But despite that, after hearing someone say my worst fear out loud, I walked from the office overcome by shameful tears.

  Minutes later, Emma and Jonah followed me out. I watched her as she picked Jonah up and marched to the lift. She couldn’t bring herself to look at me.

  PRICE: Mrs Jewell was out with Jonah on Sunday 5 June last year and experienced the worst, most aggressive public outburst she had seen from Jonah since Christmas the previous year. Lasting approximately twenty minutes, Jonah attacked her and two strangers (who tried to help) as well as self-harming. The key point here, according to Mrs Jewell, is the suddenness of this meltdown – ‘although he had clearly not been in the best of moods for a few days prior’ – as well as the severity of the aggression. It shook her terribly and left her in no doubt that she could no longer manage these outbursts on her own in public owing to Jonah’s size and strength.

  What’s going to happen when he’s older? When he’s too big for even me to handle. Will he kill someone? Maim them? What happens when I’m dead? Where will he go …?

  ‘Don’t come back until five,’ Emma had said.

  I’d been driving for forty minutes and I had an hour left. We’d been to the park, we’d been to McDonald’s, we’d been back to the park, back to McDonald’s. I had a Costcutter bag on the passenger seat. Contents: ten apples, six bags of Quavers, a loaf of white bread, eight tubes of Smarties, a large bag of Minstrels, a bottle of water, forty Camel Blue and half a bottle of vodka for luck.

  My left leg was cramping from the incessant clutch use, so I pulled over – careful to ensure I was not overlooked by a house. Then I spun the bottle lid and drank. In the back, six-year-old Jonah pulled apart the feather duster I had bought. I had given up feeding him individual Smarties and he had emptied the tube beside him on the seat; he banged on the sprung cloth like a bongoist and the bright tablets jumped up and down in time.

  How long would I get? Two minutes, ten? Thirty, sixty? Each movement, each exclamation made me flinch. I tossed food back at him like a zookeeper feeding a lion. I dropped the window and felt my face spotted by rain. I lit a cigarette and furtively took another swig while the digital clock flashed the seconds and the radio banged on about Manchester United.

  My God. It. Was. Hard. How could I explain it to anyone? The feeling of utter failure, the battle that raged in my head between love and desolation. I could abuse him like that because he couldn’t tell anyone. I could sit in my car inhabiting a different universe, not engaging with him and dreaming of solitude and the end of fear, because he was locked away elsewhere and knew no better. We would arrive back home at the appointed hour and I’d make up some drivel about how great a time we had, list the places and activities encountered, how good he had been, and he couldn’t contradict me.

  What did that make me? A bad father or a prison-camp guard? A fantasist or a simple liar?

  He started to laugh and bounce on his seat – this might have given me another ten minutes, or his mood could have changed in three. It was the constant uncertainty, the unpredictability. It was the way I felt when I walked past a pit bull terrier on the street or in the park, primed for an expected attack.

  But Jonah wasn’t an animal. This was a vodka conversation, self-pity and self-loathing all wrapped up in one easily breakable package.

  Thirty minutes left. I would start up when there were ten.

  My phone rang: ‘Could you make it six?’ she said.

  ‘No problem,’ I said – although it was, I knew it was, but the words were out before I had a chance to think. It was always like that, I was unable to say no, then I was cursing Emma, and myself, for being so weak.

  An hour and thirty minutes was left. Too long to drive, too long to sit. I flicked through the contacts on my phone; was there anyone I felt comfortable just dropping in on? My father? Johnny? I’d try J
ohnny. My finger hovered over the call button, then my heart thumped as I pressed it and it rang. I was just about to hang up when he answered.

  ‘Sorry, mate, you should have called earlier, we’re off to the cinema. Why don’t you meet us there?’

  Then I cursed Johnny too. Didn’t he realise? Jonah wouldn’t sit in the cinema. I was as lonely as I’d ever been, with just a silent boy and a bottle of vodka for company.

  ‘We are not wanted, sweet boy,’ I told him. I couldn’t face Dad because he’d guess why I was there. He’d shame me more than I’d shame myself. He’d smell the vodka.

  And then I felt his fingernails in my neck and I cried in pain. Jonah’s eyes were glowing, he took another swipe. I grabbed his wrist and squeezed harder than I needed.

  ‘Will you just fuck off and leave me alone!’

  Tears erupted from his eyes and mine caught on like a yawn. Where could we go from there?

  PRICE: If it pleases the tribunal, Mrs Emma Jewell would like to address the tribunal.

  Oh.

  Emma stands and opens the leather-bound folder in front of her. I have never seen her in action before. In all these years I have never once visited her at her offices, met her colleagues, joined her at functions. This Emma is a stranger to me. She is tall and elegant and poised. I do not recognise the line of her lips or her eyes as they cast around for an audience. They alight on me briefly and in that instant I believe I know how it must feel to be prosecuted by her. She holds it within her power to flay me, she always has, but now I feel that she will expose me. I cannot show my face. I bury it in my hands and await the knife as she coughs and closes her folder. I anticipate the words she delivers now will pierce my carefully constructed stoicism. There it is again, words. If nothing else, I have come to this moment of clarity: I fear words more than anything. I can find whatever meaning in them I wish, twist them for my own purposes, beat myself up with them, use them as an excuse to drink, to rage against the world, to withdraw from the world. If only others would use the words I want to hear, I’d be happy – but there’s as much chance of me successfully willing Jonah to speak as there is of Emma or my father speaking the words I feel I need. Even if, by some miracle, Dad expresses remorse for my shitty childhood, or Emma begs me to take her back, I would find alternative motives for their words. But, just by looking me straight in the eyes, or inviting some physical contact, in a moment Jonah informs me of his true feeling without words and I believe him. Words become meaningless if you don’t tell your truth and they become weapons if you try to tell someone else theirs. Through his silence, Jonah allows me to listen to him – there is no wall of words to clamber over, no self-defence of the reality of him. I need to follow his example; silence will allow me to evade the internal clamour for regret and retribution. As Emma clears her throat, I try to clear my head.

  ‘Some of you may think harshly of me for leaving the care of my son to his father and grandfather, or for leaving my husband.

  ‘I won’t make any excuses, because I can’t make you walk in my shoes any more than I can make you walk in Jonah’s, all I can do is relate my story in so far as it relates to Jonah and Jonah’s in so far as it relates to me.

  ‘You have seen his picture, I know. He is beautiful. Everyone commented on it when he was born – and yes, I know that every new mother thinks her baby is the most beautiful baby ever born and that everyone tells her so, but with Jonah, with Jonah it was true. He looks like neither of us, Ben or me, he looks like himself; apart from his grandfather’s amber eyes he is as individual as it is possible to be.

  ‘When Jonah was born, one of my closest friends had a three-year-old boy who just would not talk. He was difficult, odd, his behaviour irritating and I’m ashamed to admit that I pitied her. Somehow – or at least that’s what I believed at the time – she pulled him out of it, bullied him, demanded that he speak and he did. Slowly at first and then in great flowing sentences. I was in awe of her, sang her praises at every opportunity. He has Asperger’s, is now sixteen, goes to a mainstream, selective school and is a virtuoso on the piano.

  ‘It never occurred to me that I would follow her down the same path, but it happened. Jonah’s early milestones were severely delayed, but I didn’t panic – we put it down to him being top heavy, Ben and I, and laughed about it and made up rhymes about him: “He’s fat, he’s round, he must weigh fifty pounds, Jonah Jewell, Jonah Jewell.”

  ‘But it wasn’t that at all.

  ‘He wasn’t talking and he wasn’t walking, he wasn’t playing with other children and I convinced myself he was shy.

  ‘Then, when he was about two and a half, he forced out a word. Ben and I had reported words to each other before then, but we were both lying to ourselves. But this was a word. My son’s first word, the sound that lit up our world, was “bubble”. In the bath, with us both present, Ben blew bubbles in the air for him to pop and as we both pressed the word on him, he repeated it. “Bubble,” he said. “Bubble, bubble, bubble.” And then everything was okay. “Bubble” was followed by “door” which was followed by a handful of other words and we were off and running.

  ‘But it stopped as suddenly as it had started. Jonah would use a word, just once, and never use it again, however much I prompted him, pushed him, cajoled and withheld his favourite food. Then “bubble” disappeared and he was silent.

  ‘This doesn’t happen. Once you know a word, you know a word and then two and three. Once you know one, others follow, you build sentences, you speak, it’s natural. I became desperate and Ben didn’t. I don’t know why he could accept it and I couldn’t. But I resented him for it and started looking for causes. From which side of the family did this nightmare emanate? Was it the Jewells or the Carlins that carried this devastating gene?

  ‘When Jonah started Northlea Nursery it was painfully obvious how different he was, but still I hoped. And the cruellest thing sometimes is hope.

  ‘There he was described as “lazy” and “within the broad range of average intelligence”. All hope – and when we had the big meeting, the statement meeting to decide just what was wrong with my beautiful son, the borough’s educational psychologist was adamant that he didn’t have autism, that he was just suffering from Global Delay. How cruel is that kind of hope. Delay – I hung on to that word like a life preserver. Delay – the very word meant that he would catch up, that at some stage he would reach his destination like everyone else, there were just leaves on the line. The real Jonah would arrive, I just had to be patient. Ben didn’t agree. He wanted Autistic Spectrum Disorder on Jonah’s statement, he argued endlessly at that meeting for the inclusion of the diagnosis that we had already obtained, but in my head as he argued I was screaming “No, no, I want him to be delayed. Shut up, you quitter.”

  ‘Ben finally won. I hated him for it, as if the inclusion of ASD on his statement confined Jonah to life’s waiting room for ever. Ben had torn up his ticket.

  ‘My son was now officially autistic and transferred to Roysten Glen, a special school. The phrase made me feel sick. I’d seen those minibuses with children staring blankly out of the windows and I’d look away, embarrassed. Disability made me uncomfortable. I cried the first morning one of those buses arrived to pick Jonah up.

  ‘And yet still, in my mind, I thought, he’s delayed, he’ll be at Roysten Glen for a year, they’ll sort him out and he’ll back at Northlea again. But the minibus kept arriving day after day after day and, of course, he never went back.

  ‘Then the charlatans started to arrive with their programmes and promises and hefty invoices, like some gang of venal, money-grabbing evangelists. False hope is an industry like any other. That was five years ago. I have watched my son grow from a beautiful silent baby, smelling of poo and baby shampoo, to a beautiful silent boy on the verge of adolescence, smelling of poo and baby shampoo.

  ‘Towards the end of last year, the cogs finally slipped into place.
Jonah is autistic, he will never speak. Being attacked, scratched and punched, having your home constantly smell of air freshener, acts as quite a truth serum. And after ten years of denial, resentment and quiet anger, I decided to fight for him and was told time and time again until I could take it no longer that really, he didn’t matter. Essentially what we are being told is that there is an epidemic ravaging our children, but let’s pretend that no treatment is available rather than spend the money on administering it.

  ‘Do any of you know how it feels to know your child will never call you Mummy?

  ‘I was never able to share any of this with Ben. Maybe that’s the biggest irony of Jonah’s condition. Not only has it robbed Jonah of the ability to talk and interact like a human is supposed to, but it has robbed those around him of the ability to admit their pain to each other.

  ‘I love my son. Some may doubt it, but I do. I always want to be in his life.

  ‘But I want others to take over the shame that I have felt for ten years and, mostly and simply, I want to watch my ten-year-old child wee on the toilet. Thank you for your time.’

  I feel worthless. It’s shameful that I never asked the right questions and never accepted her pain could be anything like my own. I had heard the shouting, seen the crying, but it repelled me. I heard, but I didn’t listen; her words were just background noise, the shriek of seagulls over a waste dump, an incessant car alarm. Nothing else I say here now is going to add to Emma’s powerful portrait of her life – our lives – with Jonah, and it may appear as a pitiful exercise in one-upmanship.

  ‘Mr Jewell, would you like to add anything?’ the judge asks.

  I rise, self-consciously. I feel foolish and fraudulent. I must do him justice. This wonderful, exhausting, terrifying, vulnerable, beautiful son of mine. I clear my throat.

  ‘Jonah does not have a voice, he cannot tell anyone what life truly feels like for him. So I must be his voice.’ I pull the leaves of paper from my inside pocket.