I look at Andrew and wonder what this means.
Marla has suggested we take a drive to show O— the airport as preparation for his trip to London. It takes us more than an hour to get there, and while T— sits in front with me, the man now chattering on as if we’ve known each other for years and are good friends, O— is in the back with Andrew, who points out things that we pass on the road.
Look at that tower, Andrew says.
Why?
Because it’s interesting.
Why?
It just is.
Why?
A pause.
Oh, Andrew says, see those horses in the field? They look warm under their blankets, don’t they?
Why?
Because the blankets keep them warm.
Why?
Because they’re thick and it’s cold and damp today.
Why?
Because it’s almost winter.
Why?
Because it’s nearly the end of autumn.
Why?
It’s just that time of year.
Why?
Because we go through different seasons every year. Spring, summer, autumn, winter. It’s almost winter now.
Why?
Because of what I just said.
Why?
At the airport, I find a parking place in the lot near the terminal. As we walk towards the entrance, a world of threat opens around me. Either Andrew or I has to hold tight to O—’s hand at all times or he starts running away, but he is also increasingly frustrated with having his hand held, wants to let go, and then, if he squirms out of my grip, he’s off, running, a little gingerbread man, and I have to catch up to him, pausing and crouching down and telling him as calmly as I can that there are cars and he has to stay with me and hold my hand.
It’s not safe to run off.
He nods, sort of, and sticks out his tongue.
You’re horrible, he says.
Why does he only ever say this to me when the two of us are alone?
Inside the terminal, we visit the check-in desks before going to look at the security checkpoint.
We’ll come get you and then the three of us will drive to the airport and fly back to London, I tell O—.
And K— and T—? he says.
No, just us.
No K— and T—? he says, shaking his head, chin wobbling.
K— and T— are staying here, I say, wondering how he could still think that getting two daddies does not mean losing his foster parents.
It’s just going to be us, I say again, and give him a hug.
But what if we are not enough?
We spend a quarter of an hour, half an hour, an hour watching planes take off and land. O— has never been on a plane, cannot fathom what it means. I try to explain what it will feel like, that it will be like sitting in a room, in a chair, and we’ll be able to look down at the clouds and the airport and the people from above, but he is not interested. He shushes me and turns to watch a 747 lift into the air.
T—, I discover, has also never been on a plane. Nor has K—. Their entire lives they have never been out of Britain, never been to London, have not even left their corner of the Southwest.
Even if Andrew and I were British ourselves, we would be nearly as foreign to them as we are in any case.
On the drive back to the village, the seating arrangement is the same: me driving, T— in the front, Andrew and O— in the back. Good teacher that he is, Andrew points out some of the same things he pointed out earlier, as if to reinforce the lesson.
Look, there’s the tower we saw on the way here, he says.
Why?
Because we passed it earlier.
Why?
Because it’s on the same road. But this time it’s on the other side of the road.
Why?
Because we’re going in the other direction.
Why?
Because we’re going back to K—’s and T—’s.
Why?
Because it’s almost time for you to have your dinner and bath. Why?
And at that moment, or perhaps later, after a similar exchange, Andrew simply stops answering and the boy falls silent. Any time Andrew or I point out anything, say anything at all, O— replies with the same ‘Why’, a ‘Why’ without curiosity, a ‘Why’ that is only sound to fill silence, a ‘Why’ that is not jokey or teasing or ironic.
If any of the information from earlier in the day has been retained, there is no indication that this is the case.
Today we are meant to stay for O—’s dinner, help give him his bath and put him to bed.
Once O— has had his bath, K— takes him into the kitchen. Ten minutes pass. Twenty. Andrew and I go to investigate and find K— giving O— his dinner alone. We stand and watch as O— finishes eating his sausages and mash. Then he gets to have an ice cream. A treat, I think, for his last dinner with the woman who has looked after him more than three times as long as the woman who gave birth to him.
In K—’s place, I would be beside myself with grief, and I suspect that she is.
Andrew and I sit with O— on his bed looking at the scrapbook we made for him. As I turn the pages, every photo, every aspect of our lives seems new to him. I ask him what he thinks of the photo of his bedroom in London.
It looks amazing, he says, and he sounds genuinely amazed, breathless. His use of the word surprises me, though. It seems too much, too sophisticated.
And then, as we try to make our way further in the scrapbook, O— loses patience, until finally we give up and say goodnight.
Driving back to the B&B, I say to Andrew what I said last night. There were moments today when I wondered what we’re getting ourselves into.
The ‘whys’, Andrew says.
Yes. The whys.
The lack of focus.
That and other things as well. What the teacher told us, for instance. We ask ourselves what it means, all of it together. We don’t know, and it doesn’t seem as though anyone can tell us, but the uncertainty begins to weigh more heavily with each passing hour. We spend the evening making dinner for ourselves, but whatever sense of joy and excitement we might have had seems to have evaporated, leaving a crackling residue of anxiety and fatigue.
Tonight is the US presidential election. Though I have kept relatively calm about the race for the past few weeks, feeling as though it must go Clinton’s way, I find myself so worried I can hardly eat. We agree not to check on the news during the night, to wait and see what the morning brings. Tomorrow we will be spending the day alone with O—, picking him up after breakfast to go on an outing to a city more than an hour’s drive away. We will take him to a museum and give him dinner before bringing him home for his bath and bedtime.
I can hardly sleep. Sometime around midnight, I move to the couch. I resist looking at my phone, but I have a sense of dread. I do not write in the diary I started yesterday.
Tomorrow, I think. I’ll make up for it tomorrow.
WEDNESDAY
Andrew wakes me before six. He whispers the news I have been fearing. I am exhausted, and now I am devastated. I cannot believe it is true. I cannot fathom that Clinton has lost. I struggle to get up, stumble to the shower, feel as if I have been dipped in acid, drunk it by the gallon, burned myself inside and out. My eyes sting, my stomach aches, all of my nerves are frayed and fried, scorched by an electrical fire. But today we have to be bright and happy. Today we have to see what it feels like to be alone with the boy who will be our son, to whom we are already his daddies.
Outside, there is a strong wind, gusts up to forty miles an hour, driving the sheep towards the building so that they stand grazing right up against the sliding glass doors.
It feels like the end of the world.
Our drive to the city takes in part of the same stretch of road we travelled back and forth to the airport yesterday. Andrew is sitting in front this time, O— in the back. It is our nature to comment on things that we see as we travel, and a
gain Andrew points out the horses with their blankets, the tower, the same landmarks we noticed yesterday. Today, again, O— greets every statement we make in the car, every act of noticing, with a ‘why’ that holds neither curiosity nor memory. Equally, these do not sound like ‘whys’ as game. There is no sense of teasing or play. Each ‘why’ reverberates like a mechanical reflex.
We have planned to spend the day at a family-friendly museum with a menagerie of taxidermized animals and other natural history displays that look promising online. When we arrive, I am surprised by the size of the building and wonder if somewhere smaller might have been a better choice. O— has never been to this city. He has never visited a museum. Again, perhaps not the best choice, but Marla thought it sounded great, and we have blindly trusted the guidance of all the boy’s social workers at every stage.
While Andrew checks our coats, I start taking O— through the exhibitions. We know that he likes animals, so we start there, but he spends two seconds at most looking at each display, whether skeleton or stuffed giraffe or diorama, whatever I try to point out to him. He dashes through gallery after gallery, upstairs and downstairs. When he starts running I jump to catch up to him. I crouch down, I talk in a low voice, telling him calmly that we don’t run in museums and he needs to stay with me.
He shoots me his puckish grin. Sticks out his tongue. Wriggles away.
Andrew catches up to us. We see every room of the vast museum in less than an hour. The only things that keep O—’s focus for more than five seconds are objects that light up and make noise. Anything immobile, anything requiring a moment to understand or think about or appreciate, fails to capture his interest.
And in the space of that hour the future I have imagined as a family begins to disappear.
We will not be taking him to galleries in London, none of the museums I have been dreaming of visiting as a family. It may sound like a trivial concern, but visits to art museums were among the most important activities of my childhood, and now faced with a child who has no interest even in a museum designed for children and families, I start to despair. Is this a child who will change our lives beyond all recognition, and not in the ways we might wish?
O—’s behaviour shifts from distracted to resistant. He will not take my hand. He will not walk with me. He is finished.
We go to the café to have lunch. We order sandwiches. He wants a soft drink or juice. No, I think, no sugar. Water. We’ll have water.
He wriggles in his chair while families with children the same age sit politely around us, eating sandwiches with devastating composure. It is horrible to feel embarrassed by the child in my charge, ashamed that people will think I am an inadequate parent. Already, he calls me ‘Daddy’ without hesitation, and Andrew is ‘Papa’, as we have suggested, as if we are turning ourselves into the characters from my story.
He eats the ham from the middle of his sandwich but refuses the bread.
He wants cake and sugary drinks.
No, we’re not having those things.
Nuts and raisins, Andrew suggests, going back to the counter to buy several packets.
There are other things we begin to notice, such as a problem with pronouns. Men are often she or her. Women are often he or him. Andrew is she more than he. What am I? Do I have a gender in his mind? Should it matter?
More worrying, he has no sense of what the social work system has taught us to call ‘stranger danger’. He walks up to a man in the museum and starts talking to him, takes his hand and embraces him. Even when he sees that this other man is not Andrew or me, he does not react. It’s a more extreme version of running up to the child in the playground and kissing him. The city we’re in right now is a fraction the size of London, many orders of magnitude less threatening, less rich with risk and danger. How quickly this boy might, when my back is turned, take the hand of a stranger who means him harm.
We return to the taxidermy displays, to other rooms we hope might be of interest, but again, he runs from object to object. When we crouch down and try to slow his pace, to talk about a display, he becomes impatient, looks away, refuses to make eye contact with us or listen, and then he is off again.
Is this what life will be like from now on?
I find myself losing patience.
I think, aghast at my own response, run away then.
Go on.
Run away as fast as you can.
If that’s what you want.
I don’t know what else to do, what to feel. This is a child who needs things I cannot give him, I begin to think. And even if I somehow manage to provide him with everything he does need, I suspect the effort will destroy me.
Having exhausted the museum, we go outside. The wind has died down, although there is still a strong breeze. I look on my phone to find a park with play equipment. We walk past a homeless encampment and some teenage alcoholics getting smashed, before arriving at the deserted playground.
O— attacks the slides and climbing equipment as if he has bottomless reserves of energy, while Andrew and I are both exhausted, in a state of despair. This is not what we imagined. There is no pleasure, no sense of connection, no feeling that this little boy enjoys being with us any more than he might enjoy being with the stranger in the museum.
Although we have been watching him closely, keeping him from doing anything dangerous on the play equipment, he suddenly dashes across the playground and climbs onto the stump of a tree. I run to steady him, but he’s already falling, slipping forward and landing with a thud on his chest, luckily not hitting his head. How quickly it could have gone disastrously wrong, how easily he might have fallen backwards instead. I help him up, we look him over, and he starts to cry. I lift him in my arms, or perhaps Andrew does this time, I can’t remember any more, and he cries for less than a minute. Then, miraculously, he stops.
He smiles, he’s bubbly, everything’s okay.
It seems too easy, this immediate consolation. In the evening, we’ll wonder why he didn’t ask for his foster parents. In fact, throughout the entire day, he does not ask about them even once. Why is he so quick to attach to us, these strange new daddies? Would he just as rapidly latch on to the stranger in the museum, allow himself to be consoled by that man, zigzagging along any path he might be led? This pliancy in combination with his bursts of aggression totally unnerves me. Each moment feels unpredictable and fraught with one sort of risk or another. Over the course of the day I begin to realize that taking care of him is unlike any experience I have had of looking after children in the past. Whatever skills I possess seem inadequate, or the wrong skills entirely. I start to doubt every decision I make, have no sense that what I do or suggest in any given moment is what this boy actually needs.
On the drive back to the village, O— responds to the horses under their blankets, the tower in the distance, the change of seasons, everything we have noticed before with the same litany of ‘whys’ until we simply stop answering him, stop speaking at all. Everything we say, even if not an attempt to inspire a sense of curiosity about the world around him, is met with a shattering ‘Why?’ And because this is not a child we have known since birth, a child to whom we feel bonded, it is even more difficult to muster a sense of patience.
When we stop speaking, it is as if something inside him has been turned off. Without aural stimuli he shuts down and goes to sleep.
It is mid-afternoon by the time we arrive back at the B&B where we’re meant to spend an hour doing an activity and having a snack before making dinner. We have thought of drawing – perhaps drawing what we saw in the museum, or even just scribbling.
O— is still asleep when we arrive so we sit in the car, engine off, listening to his breathing. We look at each other and what I see in Andrew’s face reflects what I feel: not joy or contentment at the sound of the child who is meant to be our son sleeping peacefully, but relief that he is unconscious, that for a brief stretch of time we do not have to engage with him.
We sit there for twenty m
inutes as the car gets colder and colder. I think about the US election, about my family and friends in America, my sense of utter devastation and fear about what this means for my country and for the world. I think about how this may affect our future, about the uncertainty of the years and decades ahead. I listen to the child’s breathing, the steadiness of it, and think about starting the engine and driving off, driving around, just to keep him sleeping. Then, without prompting, he wakes.
It is the first time I have seen O— in a domestic space other than his foster parents’ house. Other children I know might enter such an unfamiliar place cautiously, a little anxiously, but O— shoots in and surveys the territory, running from room to room. He starts opening all the drawers and cupboards in the kitchen. The latches I reinstalled in our flat before we left were not an unreasonable precaution.
We sit at the table and get out the pad of paper and crayons and markers we have bought. I suggest we draw dinosaurs or horses or the tower we passed, or he could even do a picture of himself. This does not seem too much to suggest to a child less than six months shy of his fifth birthday. I watch as he picks up a crayon and makes the least intentional of marks on the paper. When I show him how to change his grip, he produces a faint scribble of blue across the page.
And that’s it. He’s up, on his feet. He’s had enough. The activity I hoped would fill at least ten minutes has taken less than one. Andrew tries to reengage him but he’s not interested, and I notice the gesture I have seen but not wanted to see a thousand times today: when prompted to look or focus even for a moment, he shakes his head and makes a brushing off motion with his hand.
He’s not interested.
He wants a tablet or a phone or an object that lights up and makes noise.
He wants the television turned on, but we say no, we’re not putting it on.
The Ginger Child Page 22