‘More healthy,’ Max says, and puts his fist up in the air, shakes his short, muscular arm. Then he cups his hands around his cheeks and says, ‘And in the face. More colour.’
‘You need bosoms,’ says the youngest, whose name is Paolo.
I go to him now, to Paolo who stands outside the rather crematorial-looking bread ovens with their blackened interiors, their clattering trays. I put my mouth next to the ear of this boy of fifteen, whose father is going to hit him, he says, if he cannot shut his mouth.
‘Paolo,’ I coo. His brothers are staring. Their eyes, filled with expectation and amusement, fix on the two of us. ‘I have bosoms.’
And now they are laughing, even Paolo, who sinks down under the weight of his own chagrin and cannot look at me without giggling for many days.
* * *
The other person I have to say goodbye to is Jacob the Shrink. He leans back in his leather chair, his legs stretched forward, crossed at the ankle. He holds his pen at each end with the tips of his fingers, blows through his lips so that his cheeks fill with air, then lie flatly once more, two burnished brown planes. He studies me hard through his thick lenses.
‘Why don’t you come for a reduced fee?’ he suggests. ‘You’re really not ready to quit therapy altogether.’
‘What’s it going to help?’ I say. The weather is warmer now. I have on last year’s rather grungy sandals, a pair of cropped jeans. My hair, which defies elastic and metal slides, wags below my chin in chunks of newly sunburned blonde. ‘Not to be insulting, Jacob, it’s just that I know now what my problem is and it’s not going to go away no matter how much we dig up memories while I sit on your nice Conran sofa here.’
‘Is that what Daniel is? A problem?’
‘Screw you, Jacob,’ I say, and he laughs.
‘You are so young,’ he says. ‘You think you’re all grown up, but when I see you I think you are awfully young to be out on your own like this.’
‘I’m not so young,’ I say.
He waves his fingers through the air in a manner that means he does not agree but also will not argue. ‘I’m concerned about you,’ he says. ‘And I do have my reservations about this ABA thing. What happens if it doesn’t work?’
Jacob is not a fan of this new therapy idea for Daniel. Behavioural psychology conjures up for him the idea of mild electrical currents and boxed rats. He keeps asking me how this is going to affect Daniel’s emotional health if his mother is constantly challenging him to produce sounds, holding out a chip of chocolate as a reward for his efforts. Better than what his emotional state will be if he goes through the world unable to speak or understand, is my fast reply.
‘I might be able to help you to come to terms with what has happened,’ Jacob says.
I consider that. ‘Well, you know something? I am not sure I want to come to terms with what’s happened. I feel like my unwillingness to see this as a closed deal somehow helps Daniel. I know he is autistic, of course, but what I am thinking is that if I work tirelessly to move him away from the autism, then maybe he’ll end up someplace closer to normal than he otherwise would have been.’
I know what Jacob is thinking: that I’m wasting my time. And he may, too, be thinking I’ve got some nerve to believe that other mothers just didn’t ‘work’ hard enough for their children. I don’t believe that, of course. I don’t think I’m more clever or more diligent. Other mothers have worked hard and have moved their children just that little bit further along – I keep hearing stories in which this is the case. It was the other mothers who got me Andy O’Connor’s phone number. Another mother who stopped me in the supermarket and told me my son was lovely.
They are the ones that tell me to try. And what is so wrong with trying?
Jacob says, ‘And we need to talk about Stephen. It sounds as though you will have to come to terms with that as well.’
Stephen, I do not want to think about. ‘I’ve got a different agenda than he does,’ I say. Pictured in my mind is an image of myself as one of these tough, stout women with broad calves and strong, rough hands, a woman who runs her house with coarse efficiency, claiming Monday as washing day, Tuesday for the polishing of all surfaces.
Someone in control, in charge, a woman not even Stephen could challenge. But of course, I am not like that. I put on a brave front for Jacob, but really I am just all mush inside. Scratch me and my misery rises like sea foam.
‘You want to know what I worry about now?’ I say.
He raises his eyebrows, fingers his moustache like he always does.
‘I worry that I’ll get Daniel just so far, you know, and he’ll be a young guy out there in the world, but not entirely normal, right? Not normal at all, really. And then one night he’s hanging out on a city street, maybe running his eye along an iron railing the way he does – what they call ‘stim-ming’ – and some policemen see him and think he’s acting like he’s on drugs. So they stop him and he yells and tries to run. They think he’s being violent, and so they hurt him. He’s calling for me and I can’t stop them shoving him around and hurting him because I’m not there and he’s helpless.’ I stop speaking and all at once I am shocked by what I’ve said. I’ve spooked myself and I feel a little sick inside. ‘Do you know what I mean?’ I ask quietly.
Jacob says, ‘Please don’t stop therapy.’
‘What on earth is therapy going to do when the police are holding my son?’
Jacob clasps his brow, moves his face back and forth across his palm. ‘Melanie,’ he says.
‘Anyway, I can’t afford you,’ I tell him.
‘Forget this month’s bill. It’s paid!’
‘It isn’t paid!’ I say.
‘I say it is paid.’
And now we look at each other, each as stubborn as the other.
He says, ‘Melanie, listen to me. You’re not wrong to worry about that, what you’re describing.’ He leans forward, his hands raised, fingers stretched toward the ceiling. ‘I have a boy myself, nineteen years old, art student in Camberwell, living in Woolwich. And I have a fear that one day he’ll get cornered by the wrong group of kids and they will beat the life out of him. And when I’m not worried about that, I’m worried about the police who might pick him up and what they will do to him!’
‘Why would they do anything to him?’ I say.
‘Because he’s black,’ says Jacob slowly, as though he’s talking to an idiot, which I guess he is. ‘And if that weren’t enough, he’s also gay.’
I try to imagine Jacob’s son, who bought his father those strange yellow trainers he wore to my house that one day, and who I discover now sculpts statues of people from cold steel.
‘They are beautiful,’ says Jacob. ‘He’s gifted. And we worry about him all the time. You would be very interested in what I say during my sessions,’ he tells me.
And then we are looking at each other, and maybe laughing. There’s some sort of emotion coming here, but I don’t know what you’d call it. A kind of acknowledgement. A kind of instant love.
I say to Jacob, ‘I like you. But I don’t want to come unless I pay you for your time. What kind of shrink are you if you don’t drive a Rover?’
‘I drive a BMW,’ he says.
I tell him the truth is that inside myself I don’t really believe that therapy will make any difference to me. I gesture around the room, at his plush furniture, his shelves of books with titles like Self and Others, The Crisis of Loss. ‘It’s not what I need,’ I tell him.
‘What do you need?’ asks Jacob.
What I really need, I think, is to get back home, Stephen wasn’t so thrilled about looking after the kids tonight, and he’ll be wanting to get back to Penelope. I’m still getting used to that. No, I’m actually not getting used to it at all.
On the way back home I anticipate all of Stephen’s questions. He has probably spent the whole of the evening being kind to Emily, reading her books, arranging fairy cakes for her Disney characters, sailing Dumbo through the air.
She is suffering without him. Some evenings she weeps, pounding her fists against my belly, asking when he will return home, demanding that I bring him to her. For her sake I would be willing to try on Stephen any ploy or mild treachery, any sexual favour. If I could manoeuvre Stephen’s heart by writing him poetry or pole dancing in our living room, do you think I would even hesitate? I’d set into iambic pentameter the longing of my heart while raising my naked leg over my shoulder like a spear.
I mean to have him back is the point. No argument about his shoddy response to Daniel’s autism, about marital treason, about his general aloofness can shelter me from the yearning I have to return to my children their father.
When I come into the house I see the glow of Daniel’s musical lamp shining from the children’s bedroom. It taps out a lullaby while turning slowly round, projecting images of coloured animals across the blank walls. I love this lamp. I have photographs of the children staring into it, amazed at its mystical qualities, how it brings alive their whole room with the dreamy images of giraffes and toucans. Removing my shoes, I tiptoe into the bedroom, finding Stephen in the wicker armchair set in the centre of the room between the twin beds. His arms are folded across his chest, his chin resting on them; perhaps he is asleep. I think how he will be some day, an old man in a chair. Who will sit beside him then? Surely it is not an insignificant thing that I have promised to be that person, who will not need him to be handsome or young. But will need him.
‘You are late,’ he says.
I say, ‘Have the children been happy – happy to see you, I mean?’
‘I thought perhaps you’d decided to go on one of your midnight jaunts,’ says Stephen.
‘Only for a minute. I went to a bookshop, to the medical section. I want to know more about how the brain develops.’
‘It won’t matter what you learn,’ he says. ‘It’s not going to make a difference.’
‘I couldn’t afford the book anyway. It was eighty pounds.’
‘You can’t go around buying eighty-pound books, Melanie,’ he says.
‘Well, I didn’t. And your shirt costs eighty pounds,’ I tell him.
In the Bible somewhere – is it the Book of James? – we are warned about the words that we speak. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. Quickly, before it is too late, I change the subject. I say, ‘I do not, of course, leave them in the middle of the night on their own.’
‘I should think not,’ says Stephen. He knows perfectly well I’d never leave them. I won’t even leave them at the supermarket crèche.
‘Daniel says the word “crash.” And he plays with his trains,’ says Stephen. ‘Plays, not just holds one in front of his eyes. I want to meet this man who you say is teaching him.’
I nod.
He says, ‘Cath gave me a book on child development and it says he should have several hundred words in his vocabulary by now. Full sentences, questions that begin “Who”, “What”, “How”.’
‘One step at a time,’ I say.
He stands. His hair is pushed back so that it flops to one side. His chin is thick with stubble. It appears that among the new changes in his appearance, a different way of combing his hair, a new shirt, Stephen is now going in for facial hair. So perhaps he will some day turn up with clinging clothes and a mossy beard. Chuck in a few tattoos and put a bull ring through his nose and I would be most happy never to touch him again. Unfortunately, he looks good in his new facial hair. Doesn’t that just take the piss?
He says, ‘I can’t help but think we are holding him back by not allowing him to go to a special school. And that you cannot continue as you are. At this rate we will most certainly go bankrupt. And for what? We have been told he cannot attend regular school, or be like a regular child.’
I shake my head dumbly. I wonder, has Stephen ever been to a special school? Has he seen how impossible it is to learn language in a group setting, surrounded by others who either cannot speak at all or repeat the same dismal, senseless phrase over and over? Does he not realise there is no way to model your own behaviour on normality when there is nothing normal happening around you? Has Stephen looked at the rate of improvement among these children who get so-called ‘special’ help? Because the morning I went along to check out the special school that the Local Education Authority would like Daniel to attend, I thought to myself he could be there all his life and never learn a single word.
‘You’re out of your mind,’ I tell him.
He stands close to me, too close. His face is menacing. With this expression in his eyes and his new beard, he looks plain mean. I don’t know what happened to the guy who taught me how to waltz, laughing as I clambered all over his toes, who sat patiently – and really, rather bravely – in the passenger’s seat as I screeched through London in his car, trying to figure out how to drive on the left side of the street. This man, towering above me, is nothing like the one who made me a record player out of a rosewood box, told me in his perfect French that my body was like a garden – he saw in it everything beautiful. Now he looks at me with a mixture of pity and disdain. He says, ‘You just came back from your psychiatrist and I am out of my mind?’
In my dream I am walking down a street on a wet night. Winter leaves form clumps at the kerb; the trees have that skeletal look, as though they could never again bud flowers. Suddenly I remember that I have left the children in the house alone. It is impossible that I would ever do such a thing, but in my dream I have suddenly remembered that they are all alone in that house. I rush through the city now, panic rising in my chest. It seems the streets are all tangled up; I cannot find my home. Then all at once I am there, running for the door.
Inside there is a man I think I recognise. Bettelheim. He’s small, weasel-like, with heavy glasses. He sits in the armchair – Stephen’s favourite chair – and points to Daniel, who stands in a corner turning round and round, focusing on nothing. Daniel doesn’t even look fully alive as he spins slowly in a circle.
‘Look what you’ve done!’ shouts Bettelheim. His face is the mask of an accuser. I recognise him more by this fact about him than any other, and the thought that I am to blame stuns me, silences me.
I rush for Daniel, the blood pounding in my ears, but when I reach him he feels like wood in my arms.
‘Look what you’ve done!’ Bettelheim taunts once more.
When I wake there is orange light flooding through the window. I have forgotten to draw the curtain, so the street lamp shines through the window in the manner of the glowing bulbs of certain terrariums and fish tanks. I feel I am being observed. Outside, the morning sun is hovering low in the sky. When I open the window, the air smells like coal and it smells like rain. The man in my dream is gone now, as is the man in my life.
13
I have a book of all Daniel’s new words. Among others, he can say ball, Thomas, egg, button and balloon. Except he doesn’t say the whole word, of course. That would be too hard for him. ‘Balloon’, for example, is more like ‘bah-ooh’, but that’s fine. That’s beautiful. At first I was afraid to keep a record of his words, for fear he would lose them. That is what seems to have happened all through his babyhood, which I am at pains to remember is over now. At three and three months he is a little boy.
‘We have time,’ Andy assures me, but all I can think is that Stephen will insist Daniel go to nursery school by four. And where will he go if he cannot speak?
‘He can speak, woman,’ says Andy, then swigs back some tea. He drinks his tea sweet and strong, ‘the way the brickies like it’ is what he has said. His two brothers, who also work in London, build walls all over the city. ‘What are you writing in your book about him if not all his good words?’
On the days that Andy is here, I find myself a bit simpering, a bit quiet. I rely on him to reassure me that Daniel won’t return to mute, won’t become one of these children who must move from nappies to adult diapers, the sort that go round as incontinent old men. No, he will develop into a b
oy who pulls on his jeans and races shirtless to the garden with a bat and ball. He will find friends to compete with on hillsides, battle on playgrounds. Easter will bring egg hunts; he will dream of racing cars and piloting hot-air balloons. He will be normal – or close enough. He will be happy.
Andy tells me that Daniel’s progress is steady, controlled. He says it’s magic compared with that of other children he has, and that I am lucky. Lucky, the word sticks in my throat, but as Andy speaks I begin to understand why he says that, and why it is true. One of the children Andy works with, an eight-year-old, used to run through the house repeating, ‘Have a Break. Have a Kit Kat. Have a Break. Have a Kit Kat.’ Hundreds and hundreds of times he uttered this same slogan, often under his breath until it was only a hoarse whisper. Yesterday he came out with ‘Have you been hurt in an accident? Call 0800 treble five treble nine. That’s 0800, treble five, treble nine.’ And he hasn’t mentioned KitKats since.
‘Verbal stimming,’ says Andy. ‘Worst kind of stim.’
I ask him if he can help this child, wait for his answer to be no, some cases are well out of his ability.
‘Oh, sure,’ says Andy, snapping a rolling paper from its cardboard wallet. He dumps in a clump of tobacco that smells wet to me, like freshly cut summer grass mixed with leather. Rolling the paper back and forth in his fingers, he says, ‘It’s best, however, not to let a child get that old without useful language.’
As though he has to convince me.
‘Will you help my friend Iris? She has a teenager. He can talk, but I get the impression there are other problems. Quite bad ones.’
The trouble with Iris’s son, among other things, is the fact he has become a grumpy adolescent. ‘If there is anything worse than a teenager,’ she told me, smiling, ‘it’s an autistic teenager.’ He storms through the house, stomps out to the garden, paces and swings his arms. He wants to go out in the middle of the night. He seems to be fascinated by the lighted windows of people’s homes, by the gleaming colours of Piccadilly Circus, the abrupt, moving brightness of night buses. Midnight, one or two in the morning, the later the better. Iris has placed complicated locks on every door and every window. She makes no apology for making her house into a prison from which, sadly, her son is clever enough to escape.
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