Daniel Isn't Talking

by Marti Leimbach

  Tonight, for the first time since Stephen left me, I go out at night wandering the city in a haze of insomnia. I wake Veena before I leave, telling her I am going out, to please listen for the children, and that I will be back in a few hours. They are asleep; they will not miss me, or know I’ve gone. She looks up from the bed, her hair splashed like ink across the crisp white sheets. She nods. Then she raises her hand to touch the side of my face, moving her head back and forth like a slow pendulum. She cannot understand why I am not afraid to be on my own, alone in the city, why I do not worry about myself but instead about others, always others. About my little girl who must go to school for some absurd number of hours the moment she turns five years old, about my marvellous son who spins and flaps his hands beside his eyes and must work a thousand times harder than other children just to understand the world. About her, even. Yes. Because I don’t know who will value this flower of a woman whose brain consumes the works of Benjamin and Derrida while all around her people expect she has no real intelligence, being not only Indian but small, female, with a darker complexion than most others from her country.

  This summer night is no proper colour for midnight, the stars hidden by clouds reflecting the moony orange glow of street lamps. This is London: you never see the real night sky but live beneath this nocturnal haze. The Underground entrance is full of cigarette butts and rolling cans. Down on the platform there are no bins, due to bomb scares, so crisp packets and sandwich wrappers scatter through open places, collecting in corners. The breeze is cool, a balm across my hot cheeks, like the breath of a parent who blows against the fever of their child, soothingly. I walk through the disparate groups that hang about such places, young people clubbing, couples hanging over each other, heading to one bed or another, businessmen late from important dinners, standing kerbside just outside the station, hailing cabs. In my pocket is the money that Stephen gave me rolled in a band, thick as a cigar. A newspaper skids across the dirty station tiles, the headlines turning like a flip book’s pages. I might walk now to the Italian pastry shop, except it wouldn’t be open. And anyway, I know where I am heading. Standing in front of the turnstile, eyeing the slot for my railcard, I realise I am not here to wander aimlessly, to observe the world in my ruined state, to flee from my bruised heart, the desperation, the fear. I am no longer that woman; and I’m not in the least bit afraid. I put away the railcard, get out the money once more. When I turn now, it is as though I’ve split my life like a soft melon, into two opposing halves.

  It is an easy drive, straight over Vauxhall Bridge.

  The taxi driver is not talkative, not friendly. He pulls away from the kerb with a jolt and I steady myself in my seat. Leaning my head against the window, I feel the vibration of the taxi’s engine, the swift swells and isolated potholes of the London streets. It is a city I would compare only to itself, majestic and impoverished, full of feverish lights, garish and improbable against the elegant backdrop of splendid buildings, of lurid advertisements that change every minute as the billboards exchange one set of women’s breasts for another. There is traffic all the time, as in New York, but it is more lovely. With chains of lights across the river, bridges that stretch for miles if you stand at the railings and search, with parks deep green and undulating, and people from every nation, skin of every shade, like so many colours in a tray of chocolates.

  South of the river there is the Oval, no less grimy for all the impressive cricket that is played there. And here, in a backstreet of Camberwell, an anonymous sort of street filled with identical Victorian houses, with their cement front porches, windows of thin glass, some of them boarded up, some of them lit by single hanging bulbs. At the end of the road, beside a dry-cleaner’s that has had its security doors decorated with every imaginable type of graffiti, is the place where Andy lives. I’ve never been here before, of course, but London taxi drivers know their maps well, and therefore I have been able to enjoy the ride without overdue concern about arriving at my destination.

  I give the driver one of Stephen’s twenties, fish out another ten. I was right to take a cab. Veena would approve.

  His room is at the back of the house, ground floor, what would be the sitting room if it were a proper house instead of converted into flats. He has described for me the neighbour’s cat which he spies in the mornings when he wakes, stalking birds in the small garden. Through a narrow, dark alley, past bicycles fastened with many chains to a metal drainpipe, I tiptoe around the house, looking for clues to Andy’s whereabouts. All at once I am worried, what if he isn’t home? Then a new feeling creeps over me, of jealousy, of regret. What right do I have to expect him to be alone?

  There is no light on, but the curtain is left open. I can see by moonlight a room lined with books. He has stacked these books on shelves made of plywood and brick, and above each row of texts are volumes of loose paper, folders, videos stacked on their sides. I know this is Andy’s room, not just because the titles are all about child development, about language, about autism, but because his presence is everywhere. His bed is a mattress on the floor; and he sleeps with the window open. The window is flung high, like an open mouth. It is easy to glide through. In a single swift movement, as I lean into the open space of the window, the house seems to contract like a muscle and pull me inside. I stand before Andy’s bed, blinking. He is not there.

  Then I hear something, the sound of someone walking through grass. I turn and peer through the open window out into the garden. I see him now, gliding across the lawn in his boxer shorts and bare feet, a cigarette in his mouth. He sees me here – in his room, beside his bed, unannounced. I watch as the breeze filters through his hair, as he drags on the cigarette, which answers with a strong, orange glow. His face is serious, contained. Somehow I’ve entered his life and left him like a visitor peering in. He might not know this yet, but I do.

  ‘How long do I have you for?’ he says now. He is not asking how many hours tonight. So I answer the question I think he is asking.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think it’s up to me.’

  Andy puts the cigarette to his mouth, inhales, holds the smoke in a sigh, and then releases it all at once. ‘Is it up to him, then?’ he says. He means Stephen, of course.

  I wish I could give myself to Andy. Nothing could be more natural. I’d like to tell him I am his, that he can write his name on me if he likes. But I don’t belong just to myself; I belong to others as well. To Emily and to Daniel. There are no decisions that are mine alone.

  Suddenly, I am ashamed. For being here I am ashamed, and for not being able to give Andy the answer he wants I am equally ashamed.

  ‘He’ll come back,’ Andy says. He flicks his cigarette on the ground. ‘Then he’ll go again. When something else happens.’

  ‘How do you know?’ I ask.

  He shrugs, takes in a breath. ‘I’ve seen it before. I see it all the time. In and out of people’s lives, their houses and their children’s games. I know what is coming, but it’s no use talking.’

  He looks at me, smiles sadly. Then he climbs through the open window, pushes his face into my neck, his hands on my hips. ‘Even so, I’m glad you’re here,’ he says.

  23

  At the bus stop there is a group of girls. One has lavender hair, which is dead straight and reflects light in an odd manner, as though it has a kind of internal light of its own, phosphorescent and very weird against her young face. She wears a nose stud and several other piercings that seem artlessly placed, randomly it appears to me, as though carved into her skin by a drunken man. Another, with pale skin and hair like Wednesday Addams, wears her skirt two sizes too small, slashed to the hip, revealing a tattoo of a malicious-looking long-stemmed rose, A third, hunkered down on the pavement with her back to a street lamp, is a plump girl in a miniskirt, whose thick legs resemble the armour of a heavy machine. Inside the bus stop, shielded from the August sun, is a boy less than Daniel’s age asleep in a pushchair.

  The girls chat together, diggin
g out their cigarettes, wrestling with slippery purse straps that slide from their naked shoulders, with mobile phones that look like small toads squatting in their palms. The boy dreams on. I wonder which one is his mother.

  At home, Andy is teaching Daniel how to cut with scissors. That is the whole of the plan for him today: to take scissors and dig them through colourful sheets of sugar paper. It is all part of the effort to prepare him so he can go to a regular nursery, instead of one for children with special needs. I cannot remember ever having to teach Emily how to use scissors. She just knew. Emily, with me, has brought her hobby horse, a palomino head with dark plastic eyes attached to a varnished stick, which she uses to trot around the bus stop as we wait for the number 10. We are headed for the rental car agency so that we can drive to Wales, a trip she is so excited about she rings the bus stop with scuttering legs and giddy cries of ‘To the beach! To the beach!’ as her hobby horse bobs and scrapes along the pavement.

  ‘Careful!’ I call to her. I worry some whimsical turn of the game will bring her out into the street, where she would last exactly one second before a car took her away. Away from me and the world and her future, from her palomino pony and her dollhouse full of small, grey mice with beady eyes and Victorian clothes, their tails poking through gingham aprons and pale breeches. It is everything I can do to stop myself from insisting she stay here, with me, holding my hand, for it is only when she is physically attached to me that I can relax. But she wants to play, insists she will be careful, so I watch her, anticipating every move, my back to the street, my eyes fixed on her blonde head, her exuberant, pink and happy face.

  The boy in the pushchair has hair the colour of recently ploughed earth, and much of it. He sits stiffly, his legs not bending over the edge of the chair as you would expect them to at this age. Casting my glance toward him now, I realise that there is a great deal not right with this child. His nose is not centred in his face. The lobes of his ears seem to melt into this cheeks, continuing in tiny bumps down toward his chin. There is more, something not quite correct with his breathing; perhaps his nose doesn’t do what it ought to do. He sleeps with his mouth open, a pool of mucus along the groove that runs between his nose and upper lip, like a slow-moving glacier. When he awakens, as he does now, he does not move. The girls by the street lamp are laughing, telling jokes with the mild, mindless swearing you would expect. They seem to be planning to meet up with others, almost surely men, and they laugh with the slightly lewd intoxication of promised love.

  Then, just as the boy stirs, the girl with lavender hair goes perfectly still, like a deer who has heard the faint sound of hunters’ boots. She hands her mobile phone to the dark-haired girl and moves in long strides to the pushchair, where the boy raises his arm. I see, attached to his wrist, the plastic loop of a hospital band. His fingers do not bend, but stand straight out in a horrid and unnatural fan. As his mother reaches down to him, you can see her lacy underwear, sexy against her white, blossoming hips. She picks up her child, a boy whose tragic collision of DNA means he will most certainly never speak or play or kiss or sing, who it would appear must spend his time mostly in hospital, and who, given his condition as I see it, cannot grow normally in any way whatsoever. As Emily circles the bus stop, calling out her beach dreams, this mother, with her lavender hair and casual piercings to her pretty face, nestles her baby against her cheek, coos to him, and loves him, and looks for all the earth like a saint, like someone from another, better, more loving world. I want to say something to her. I want to tell her that she is a woman of great virtue. A woman of grace. That I admire her. And that I see her differently than perhaps she sees herself. Now that I have truly seen her, now that I have taken notice. But this woman who I suddenly admire and care about is also someone I cannot reach. For like so many others in these circumstances I am silenced by the inequity of her condition, and that of her baby, who might have been my own.

  Daniel and Emily are playing a game where the ponies have to jump over a course of hurdles as fast as possible without knocking them down. The hurdles are bundled socks. The timer is a stopwatch. Daniel likes the stopwatch. Emily likes the ponies. I am videoing it because Andy wants to present the video to the Local Education Authority to persuade them to provide funds for autistic children of pre-school age. He wants to train others to work with these young children. That’s his life’s ambition, clear and simple. And I think it’s a good one. Another reason, I suppose, that I love him.

  ‘Ready, Emily? You got your pony all set?’ Andy says.

  Emily nods, smiles up at Andy.

  ‘Daniel, you got your pony? Daniel?’

  Daniel looks but doesn’t say anything. Andy nods vigorously, and Daniel takes the cue, begins to nod. Now they are off, the ponies flying over the socks, the stopwatch ticking like a metronome.

  ‘I saw this boy at the bus stop,’ I tell Andy later. ‘He was so …’ I shake my head. ‘I thought, what could anyone do?’

  Andy nods. He kisses my forehead. He tells me next time I’ll talk to the girl. Next time I’ll know that there are no fences between us.

  ‘Wait a second,’ I say. I pull him back to me. I want him close.

  My brother doesn’t know how to spell ingenious. For this reason, and this reason alone, he’s called me tonight. No hello, no introduction. Any normal person would not have answered the phone, not at this exact time. But my senses are heightened as one who has been hunted like a live animal. I’ve become overly alert for danger. When the phone rings, I jump.

  ‘How do you spell ingenious?’ Larry asks. Beside me, in bed, is Andy. His pale chest is inches from my own. He is propped on an elbow, his lips wet from my kisses, his cheeks rosy and hot. The expression on his face says put down the phone. Hang it up, hurl it out the window, flush it down the toilet, but get rid of it. Now.

  ‘How do you spell ingenious? I don’t know. I’ll tell you tomorrow,’ I say to Larry. The children are both asleep – at present anyway – and there is little time to do what I want to do, which includes many things, but does not include speaking to Larry. ‘Oh wait, I can’t tell you tomorrow, can I? I’m going to Wales for a few days. Listen, don’t worry if you call and I’m not here, OK?’

  ‘I’m not worried,’ Larry says. ‘I never worry about you. It’s me I worry about. I’ve got so many responsibilities.’

  I’m trying to think of any one responsibility my brother has. The trailer is Wanda’s, the parrots are Wanda’s. Apparently he drives Wanda’s car. Perhaps the US Army gives him responsibilities. A frightening thought.

  Andy has figured out what is what. He gets out of bed, strides across the room to where his jeans, his sweatshirt, his socks, his sack of toys and notepads, folders of developmental charts and graphs are, and gets a pen and paper. From across the room he writes out the word and holds it up for me to read.

  Meanwhile, Larry is talking, ‘I’m trying to write, “I’ve got an ingenious idea,”’ he says, ‘But I can’t spell ingenious.’

  I consider this. Then I say, ‘Then maybe you shouldn’t?’

  An hour later I am leaning against Andy’s chest, his chin resting on my head. The breeze blows gently at the curtain; outside I can see the moon high and marbled in a starless sky. I listen carefully for the stirrings of Daniel and Emily in the next room. When I’ve satisfied myself that they are both asleep, I relax,

  ‘We would hear their footsteps if they woke,’ Andy says. How does he know what I am thinking?

  ‘Emily always sleeps through the night. It would be Daniel,’ I tell him.

  ‘If he wakes up I’ll go get him, bring him to you. Until then, I’d like to stay, if that is what you want.’

  ‘Of course you can stay.’

  He lowers his hands, fishing among the bedclothes, pulling them high up, covering us. ‘I’m asking what you want,’ he says. ‘I want to know, even if I don’t like the answer.’

  His eyes are serious. He speaks beseechingly, touching my face, my lips, as though trying
to memorise me with his hands. ‘Tell me,’ he says, ‘the truth.’

  There are so many things I could tell him. That it feels perfectly natural to have him in my house, in my bed. That no matter how close I am to him, it is not close enough, I want more. I want to hide in him as though in a cave. I want to wear him like a second skin. But all I can manage – me, who is so full of words – is ‘I want you’. And even then my voice is barely a whisper.

  A car passes below our window. From far off an urban fox calls in hoarse yowls across the city.

  ‘You’re not going to change your mind, then?’ he says. ‘I couldn’t blame you for it.’

  ‘I won’t change my mind.’

  He says, ‘When I first fell for you I wanted to rub your husband’s face from that family portrait you have on the mantel. Now I just feel sorry for him.’

  ‘Don’t feel all that sorry for him,’ I say.

  ‘I’ve had this other thought. I can’t quite describe it. Like I’ve narrowly escaped a terrible event – a plane crash, a sinking ferry. Because that’s how it would feel to me if I hadn’t met you.’

  I want to tell Andy that I daydream about him. I see his smile and I walk down the road feeling happy. He seems to understand something inside me, the way I think, who I am. When he sees me fretting over Daniel, trying to get him to join the other children in a game of tag or speak to a child who has approached him in a playground, he doesn’t become agitated or impatient or mocking or angry. He understands and hears me out, reassures me, tells me it is something we will work on and that we have time.

  Now he says, ‘If what you are after in me is some magic that will make Daniel completely normal, as though autism has never touched him, then you will be disappointed.’

  ‘That’s not why,’ I say, perhaps a little too quickly.