Genius

by Clare Nonhebel

CHAPTER 38

  'I've finished,’ said Eldred, putting down the felt-tip pen and closing the box of coloured pencils.

  'That was quick,’ said Mildred. 'Which picture did you choose? The one of the children on the beach?’

  'No,’ said Eldred. 'I mean I've finished the book.’

  'You can't have coloured them all in, in that time,’ said Mildred. 'Let me have a look.’

  Eldred handed her the colouring book. 'Can I have a cupcake?’

  'Yes. They're on the worktop.’

  'Do you want one, Mum?’

  'Pardon?’ she said, looking through the pages. 'I mean, no thank you, Eldred.’

  She was bemused. Trust Eldred to make something odd, she thought, even of a child's colouring book. She rebuked herself. She must stop comparing him with other children. Hadn't she warned that Louise woman against putting Eldred in a freak show? She shouldn't, in her own mind, keep thinking of her son as different from 'normal children'. What was normal, after all? All children had their funny little ways. She was surely exaggerating things, because her child was an only child; if he had a whole horde of brothers and sisters he wouldn't stand out at all, Mildred told herself.

  She stopped at a picture of families at the zoo. A zebra gazed over the edge of a fenced-in pen. Eldred had coloured the fence panels alternately black and white. 'Did you do that to match the zebra?’ Mildred asked.

  Eldred, hanging over her shoulder and dropping chocolate cake crumbs on the page, nodded, his mouth full. 'Mm.’

  'And the people,’ Mildred said. 'They're all dressed in black and white.’

  'It's the way the zebra sees them,’ Eldred explained, through the cake. 'He's colour-blind.’

  'Oh,’ said Mildred. 'And that's why the seal is black as well, is it?’

  'No,’ said Eldred. 'Seals are black.’

  'Oh,’ said Mildred. 'Of course. And you've given the man here a ponytail. And his children are black, though he is white.’

  'Yes,’ said Eldred. 'I thought the person who drew the picture was a bit out of date. I expect that's because the book was designed quite a few years ago. All the people in all the pictures have old-fashioned hairstyles and clothes, and they're all white people. It isn't really representative of today's society, is it? I mean, I'm not being politically correct or anything, but that isn't the way a crowd of people at the zoo would look, is it? The chances of them all having white skin and short hair with a fringe must be statistically quite low.’

  'Why is the fish that the seal is balancing on its nose gold, when everything else in the picture is black and white?’ asked Mildred. 'Isn't the seal colour-blind?’

  'I don't know,’ said Eldred. 'I just thought, if the seal has been there for a number of years - which it could have been, because it looks quite big and therefore might be quite old - it would have been looking at the zebra for a long time. So it might think all the other creatures around - like the people in the crowd, for instance - were zebras, since it can tell they aren't seals. So it sees all the people in black and white.’

  'But not the fish?’ said Mildred.

  'No, not the fish,’ said Eldred. 'The fish is the high spot in its life. The light of its life, see? The excitement.’

  'I see,’ said Mildred. 'So it sees it in gold?’

  'Glorious technicolour,’ said Eldred.

  'What about this one?’ said Mildred, turning to a picture of children building sandcastles on the beach. 'I can see why you finished quickly. You didn't take much trouble over this one.’

  'I did!’ said Eldred indignantly. 'It doesn't mean you don't take trouble, just because something is quick.’

  'Well, all you've done is a blue scribble for the sky, another blue scribble on the sea, a yellow scribble on the sand and the sandcastles, and everything else is in yellow and blue. All blond-haired children in blue swimsuits with blue buckets and spades and blue flags on the sandcastles.’

  'That's because they're all the same family,’ said Eldred patiently, 'and the parents are unimaginative. They like blue, and they like all their children to be alike so that everyone can tell who they belong to. So they've given all the children the same colour swimsuits and toys, just as they gave them the same colour hair and eyes and the same kind of faces.’

  Mildred laughed. 'That's not the parents’ choice, what kind of looks their children have. That's fate.’

  'But human beings are free creatures with power of choice,’ said Eldred, 'even when they exercise that power over their fate from their deep unconscious and don't recognize it with their conscious mind.’

  'Is that right?’ said Mildred, still laughing.

  'Yes,’ he said.

  'So your father and I chose for you to have brown eyes like him and mousy hair like me?’ said Mildred teasingly.

  'Well, you chose for me to have a name that was half of both your names, didn't you?’ said Eldred. 'So perhaps you agreed I would have half of each of your physical characteristics.’

  Mildred turned to look at him. 'Then tell me the answer to a mystery,’ she said. 'Who chose for you to have a brain like yours?’

  'It is a mystery,’ said Eldred earnestly. 'I came from both of you but I'm just me.’

  'But I'm not brainy,’ said Mildred, 'and your father is no more than average.’

  'Why aren't you brainy?’ said Eldred. 'Why do you say that?’

  'Oh, Eldred,’ said Mildred. 'You know me. Brain like a sieve. I'm always forgetting things. And I can't answer any of those general knowledge questions on the game shows on TV.’

  'That's not intelligence, that's acquired knowledge,’ said Eldred. 'It's not the same thing. The brain selects which information to retain because it can't keep everything on the front page. The rest goes into a pending file somewhere.’

  'So I've got the answers somewhere in the background of my brain?’ said Mildred. 'Then why can't I find them anywhere?’

  'You may not give the appropriate instruction for their retrieval,’ said Eldred. 'Like on my computer. I can open a file, then use the windows facility to open another file on top of it, so you can't see the one behind. If I want to go back to the one behind it, I have to do the right procedure to close the one in the foreground. Otherwise the currently displayed information obscures the previously viewed document.’

  'Ah, right,’ said Mildred.

  'Do you understand that?’ asked Eldred kindly, 'Or shall I show you on my computer screen?’

  'No, don't bother,’ said Mildred. 'You see - I'm not brainy enough even to understand the explanation.’

  'No,’ said Eldred, 'you're making a choice. You're deciding, on past evidence, that being shown or told something more will make you feel tired and discouraged, probably. And you've convinced yourself that even if I showed you the procedure for retrieving information, you'd forget how to do it.’

  'Very likely!’ said Mildred.

  'That's because part of the software which drives your computer ­ your brain - includes an instruction to block out certain kinds of information,’ said Eldred. 'It doesn't mean you don't have a powerful and fully functioning brain. It means that to call up all the information, you must adapt your usual program.’

  'Uh-huh,’ said Mildred. 'Have a brain transplant, you mean?’

  'No, no,’ said Eldred, distressed. He rubbed her head protectively. 'There's no fault in the hardware, you see. Only, the program you're running it on isn't adequate to access the growing quantity of information you've been taking in, over the years. The memory is sufficient, but you need more commands to retrieve it. And that may involve cancelling previous commands.’

  'What previous commands need cancelling?’ said Mildred, becoming intrigued.

  'Say, the one to regard yourself as a brainless person incapable of handling new information,’ said Eldred.

  'I never told myself to be brainless,’ said Mildred. 'I worked terribly hard at school. I just never got any results from it.’

&n
bsp; 'You may have had a stronger counter-command,’ said Eldred seriously, 'overriding the conscious command to achieve. Suppose your conscious command was to work hard and achieve your potential. But your counter-command was to believe that however hard you worked you'd achieve only very little. Then your potential would actually reduce itself in proportion to your work, in order to keep the same input/output ratio.’

  'What?’ said Mildred.

  'You would always achieve about the same level of success,’ said Eldred, 'regardless of how hard you worked.’

  'That sounds like me,’ said Mildred ruefully. 'But why would I tell myself not to succeed? I mean, why would my unconscious do that to me?’

  'I don't know,’ said Eldred. 'But you must know, at some level. Knowing you, Mum, I would think it must have been quite a good reason.’

  'Oh, you do?’ said Mildred. 'Thank you.’

  'Not that there is a good reason for failing to achieve your potential really,’ said Eldred, considering. 'But there could be a reason that seemed relatively good to you in your schooldays, and then, even when that reason became superfluous, you continued to make the same pattern of choices, from habit.’

  'Now you're losing me,’ Mildred admitted. 'I don't really know what you're talking about.’

  Eldred screwed up his face thoughtfully. 'Well ... suppose your mother didn't have much self-confidence and felt she hadn't achieved very much with her life, at least not intellectually.’

  'Mm,’ Mildred said. 'Well, she brought up four children, which is an achievement in itself, but she never did anything you might call academic.’

  'Right,’ said Eldred. 'So maybe she thought of herself as the unintelligent one of the family. And you, out of sympathy with her, produced evidence of low intelligence, so that she wouldn't feel isolated. That would be a choice, wouldn't it? Because you would also have the choice of producing evidence of high intelligence. But you chose not to.’

  'It's not that simple,’ said Mildred, becoming ruffled. 'It's a nice theory for those who succeed, to believe that we poor duffers had a choice. But, conscious or unconscious, Eldred, I can tell you, no one would choose to be bottom of the class. It's not nice.’

  'No,’ Eldred conceded. 'But then few would choose to come top. There's a price to pay for success as well.’

  'That's life,’ said Mildred. 'Nothing's for free, as they say.’ She flipped a page in the colouring book. 'I thought you said you'd finished, Eldred,’ she protested. 'This one's only half filled in.’

  'Which one?’ said Eldred. He was lying on the floor on his stomach, reading the newspaper editorial upside down.

  'The one with the family at the supermarket. You've coloured in the people but only one of the tins on the shelves. You've left the rest blank.’

  'The other tins aren't theirs,’ Eldred explained. 'That one stands out for them, because it's what they're going to choose to eat this week. The other ones are going to stay on the shelves, so they won't take on any reality till someone else comes along. Hence the absence of substance and colour, you see?’

  'Seems like a waste of a colouring book to me,’ Mildred grumbled. 'Only filling in little bits of a picture like that. And what about this one? The boy and his little sister? A few little details in red, and that's it. I suppose they're colour blind as well, are they?’

  'No,’ Eldred said. 'It's seen through the little girl's eyes. The best thing in her world is her brother, and because he's wearing a red sweater she notices the other things that are red. The rest isn't meaningful to her.’

  'What about this one?’ Mildred said. 'The children in the park. A few little blobs of colour. You haven't even kept inside the lines, Eldred. A five year old could do better.’ His comment about her choosing to be unintelligent was rankling. 'And it's not that you can't do it if you want to. Look, this child is perfectly coloured in. And the park-keeper you haven't bothered with at all. Just a messy black scribble around his head.’

  'It's depression,’ Eldred said. He swivelled the newspaper round and studied a word. 'I can't find an anagram for "platonic",’ he said plaintively. 'Claption isn't a word, is it?’

  'Depression?’ said Mildred, alarmed. 'Are you depressed?’

  'Not me,’ Eldred said. 'The park-keeper. Surrounded by a black cloud, seeing all the children out of focus, except for one. That's the one he sees as alive, and because he feels dead inside he's going to drain the colour out of that child's life. He's a paedophile.’