Water Under Water

by Peter Rix

  An easy child. At the local health clinic, Fran burnt at the other mothers’ boasts: Emily sat unsupported today for the first time. I put her down and she reached for her toys. Just like that.

  Just like that. For Tom’s mum, that meant hours of exercises. She placed him in a sitting position, pillows all around, and he tottered and toppled sideways or backwards or forwards, head on knees, gurgling at the new game his mum had found.

  Yes, you are a beautiful boy, Tom. Try again.

  And again, ten, twenty times. It would have been easier to build muscle tone in a rag doll, but she rejoiced in the small victories.

  He held his rattle today, Jim. I’ll crack open the champagne at the clinic tomorrow.

  In fact, she ticked off the milestones with the other mothers whose children were enrolled in the Early Intervention Group – a university research program that they were lucky to get into. Take a collection of babies with Down Syndrome and put them through intensive physical, cognitive and social activities, three days a week, for five years.

  From six weeks old? Fran asked. Isn’t that a bit early?

  Do you want the place?

  Early intervention. She put the strange term on the kitchen table, ploughed through the journal articles and academic papers, the challenges of statistics and parental responsibilities.

  We chosen few, Fran christened the group.

  She was grateful, though, and patrolled the observation window with the other mums. The praise if Tom did well made the day. If his progress did not match the graphs and charts of the researchers’ expectations, she suffered the raised eyebrows. In between sessions at the university, she put in long hours of work with Tom.

  Of course I want him to do well, she said. I just hate the constant measuring.

  We’re all measured, Fran, Jim said. James will be at school; me in my job. Being measured defines us.

  That’s bullshit! Tom’s a baby. Can’t he get used to life before it starts to run the ruler over him? And he trusts us. He doesn’t even know he’s being judged.

  She only rebelled once, though. A toilet-training chart appeared on the noticeboard, the children’s performances graphed and displayed. Report all occasions, please, mothers, successful or otherwise. Updated weekly like the leaderboard in a golf tournament, Jim suggested. Fran tore the sheet from the wall to confront the head of the research team.

  Can’t you leave them one little piece of dignity?

  Three years on, at a local playgroup, another young mother smoothed her maternity dress over a seven-month belly.

  I don’t know what I’d do if there was something wrong with this baby. It’s silly, I know, when everything was fine the first time. But I can’t help it.

  Of course, it was genuine concern, but there was no missing either the shiver rippling the surface of the room – a couple of the mums actually hugged themselves across their chests. Smiling bravely, lady-in-waiting accepted their murmured comforts. Sitting with Tom on the play rug, Fran felt the passing of the cloud. Soon, the room would drift into complacency again. After all, everything would be fine. It always was. Wasn’t it? Mum-to-be was confident.

  It should be. I’ve done all the right things: given up smoking, cut down on wine with dinner.

  Fran stuck it out, though. Why should Tom be apart from the other children? Why should he have to deal with prejudice or ill-informed stupidity?

  How is a baby wrong, exactly? That’s what she itched to ask, but she knew how that would turn out and so kept it inside. The children played with Lego. She sat with Tom on the floor while the other mums gossiped; no intervention needed for their kids.

  Like this, Tom. Nearly. Try again.

  The others glanced across, uncertain. Will we? Should we?

  Fran turned to another child on the mat. Marie, that’s a beautiful aeroplane you’ve made.

  These are its wings, and this is where the driver sits, Marie chanted. Except it’s called a pilot. What’s Tom making?

  Tom held up a piece in each hand.

  You have to put them together, Tom, Marie chattered confidently. I show you.

  From the other side of the room, Marie’s mum was quick. Marie, just play with your own Lego. Let Tom do his.

  Fran told Jim the story that Saturday as they walked the dog, James proudly holding the lead, Tom in a pushchair. You’d think I’d get used to the ignorance, she said. People are frightened of heights, unfamiliar religions, confined spaces, the dark …

  They’re not rejecting him, Fran. He’s different, that’s all.

  She would not be comforted. When it came to reactions to Tom – be they from family and friends, doctors and plumbers, strangers in the street – there were those who accepted her son as an individual not a category and those who didn’t, or couldn’t, or wouldn’t.

  How many different ways will people find to make him invisible, Jim?

  There were ones like Marie’s mother, a gut-instinct recoil from the boy with the small head, flattened face and staring eyes. Others who slipped through the outer perimeters. It’s lovely to have Tom over to play with Sean. I’ll just move this vase; it is rather valuable. And the pitiers. Oh, the poor mite. It must be such a worry for you, dear.

  Fran was sweet reason. Tom gives his share, she told them. Of course, James is still wetting his bed. And he jumped off the garage roof last week and broke his ankle.

  Oh, but at least he’ll be all right, the well-wishers murmured. You know, in the long run.

  Some questioned the decision to bring Tom home. All the time and money you’re putting into Tom. I hope you’re not disappointed in the results. And, let’s face it, everything you devote to him you take away from James.

  And vice versa, Fran said. But that’s different, I suppose.

  Another two years on, it had become a constant issue between Jim and Fran, too. Was Fran setting Tom up to fail? And herself?

  Maybe I am, Jimmy, she said. But James is never going to be Mozart either, so should we forget about the piano lessons?

  He told her what he had come to believe. For a mother to love her children is innate; they are of her, as she’d said herself. Without that connection, a father has to search for recognition, some essence of himself.

  I’m trying to find myself in him, he told her. I really am, Fran, a hundred ways.

  She accepted it, but not that he should have needed to in the first place.

  Look, if both our sons were normal, he protested, then you or I could easily have been drawn more to one than the other. No one can change what they feel. What counts is what you do, and I’m doing the best I can.

  Jumbo Parkes’s warning came back to them. They rushed to close the gap, held hands across the kitchen table, sought refuge on safer ground. It was only one thing, and they would survive it. But Tom had taken over their lives. No more Jim, Fran and James, just extensions of Tom. Every meal, every outing, every get-together with family or friends. He was always at the centre of everything. What else did they ever talk about?

  It’s not the ones who reject him outright, Fran said one evening at the sink. At least I know where we stand with them. Like they’ve discovered we aren’t who they thought we are. It frightens them, like the wrong sort of people moving into the neighbourhood – simpler just to move away. I can’t believe Jan Thompson didn’t visit me in hospital. We were so close when James and her Corey were little. She never calls now.

  She watched the boys through the kitchen window, James and a school friend pelting Tom with grass clippings when he blundered into their game. Jim slipped a saucepan back into the sink.

  That one needs a bit more. Jan’s probably flat out with her own kids. She sent flowers.

  Fran took another swipe and held the saucepan up to him, daring it to be still dirty.

  A huge bunch. Don’t make excuses. The Thompsons, others we don’t see these days, it’s not hard to work out. Tom was a problem for them and they moved on. I watch people with him as if I’m looking through binocu
lars. He’s up close so of course that’s where your eye goes, but if I look into the background, there they are. Some are great. Others, people we thought we knew … nice, comfortable lives, nice house in a nice suburb, nice children, all the fingers and toes and brain cells …

  The saucepan hung loosely at her side. She let Jim hold her while soapy water dripped down their legs. They must feel so self-contained, she whispered. Just as we did. I might have been the same myself.

  Jim hated to see her like this. No, don’t say that. Look, people don’t know, that’s all.

  That’s the point, Jimmy.

  As she saw it, the little cuts and jabs damaged Tom most of all. They diminished him precisely by being unintended, put him somewhere out on the margin.

  Tom is Tom, she insisted. That’s all. Just like James is himself, or you, or me, or bloody perfect little Marie. He’s not a category. He’s Tom. And he’s getting to be more Tom every day.

  Jim folded the tea towel. He’s coming along, and that’s great, he said. We have to be careful, though. You do. It’s like you’re putting so much time and effort into Tom there’s nothing left.

  Nothing left for you, you mean?

  He shrugged. You said it … but, no, I didn’t just mean that. You too. You said they’d have you back at the network, or somewhere else, part-time even. It would give you something …

  To take my mind off my disabled son, you mean?

  No. Yes, all right. Would that be a bad thing? You loved your job. And not just you. Remember what Jumbo said about siblings? What about James?

  James poked his head around the door. What about me?

  It’s time you were upstairs, Fran said. Dad and I were wondering if you feel like you’re missing out. You know, because of Tom.

  Eight-year-old James took in the kitchen scene. William Bond’s mum and dad got divorced, he said slyly. He got a new bike.

  Fran flicked soapsuds at him. Yeah, nice try. Bed.

  James grinned. He turned at the door. Mum, he’s just Tom, that’s all.

  They heard him bound up the stairs. She raised a fist, triumphant. They sat at the kitchen table with coffee.

  Of course, we’ll do our best for Tom, Jim agreed, but let’s be realistic with what we’re trying to achieve. He’ll always have one thing that defines him.

  She had this way of arching her eyebrows. He knew before it came that the joke would be on him. I see one thing in Tom more than anything else, Jim, she told him, and it’s not Down Syndrome.

  All right, I’ll bite.

  You, of course.

  Oh, come on.

  You scoff, but he’s much more like you than James is. You’re compulsive organisers, both of you. Look at his little pile of rocks. It’s just like one of your lists. And persistent. Once you start on something, you’re like dogs with bones, as bad as each other. A couple of control freaks, too, in your own ways. And there’s that thing about time. Can’t you see it, Jim? The line is so clear you can almost see it. How about his sense of humour? He laughs just like you … she reached across to hold his face in her hands. Like you used to, Jimmy. Like I so much need you to again. My bet is, take away Down Syndrome and what have you got? Little Jim. Jim the Second.

  She wrote it in the air with her coffee spoon.

  TOM, SON OF JIM.

  They were quiet then until she said, Remember Andy Mayfield’s idea about the strings that join us? Tom is son to both of us, but the connection is through you, Jimmy, it really is, and I wish you could see it and love him for it.

  Christ, Fran, do you really want to bring Andy into this?

  They’d lost touch with Andy. After Jim and Fran married, he’d drifted for a few years, kept his flat in the inner city as the rest of their group ticked off university and retreated to suburban safety. He had a go at various jobs, even spent a couple of years labouring for a builder. With a brain like his! Several times while Jim and Fran were in Europe, he made plans to meet them in some secret place he’d heard about, but the exotic rendezvous never eventuated. And when they returned to Australia, their circles rarely crossed. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, but at least Jim sent Christmas cards, invited Andy out on the firm’s boat.

  When they did get together – Fran, Jim and whichever girl Andy had on his arm at the time – it never felt like it used to. Perhaps three finally was a crowd, or maybe it was just the way things slip away. It was gone, though, and they all knew it. He turned up with extravagant gifts for James’s first birthday but then virtually disappeared for a couple of years. He left the city a few weeks after Tom was born, with just one goodbye visit to the Campions. On some whim or other, he was moving to the tiny settlement of Sutton’s Lake, a few hours north of Sydney.

  No, mate, I won’t stay. I’m heading off tomorrow. Got to pack.

  Andy, Fran said quietly, Jim was going to ask you to be godfather … Come into the nursery and –

  Oh, Fran, please, no, he stammered. It was like she’d asked him to change the baby’s dirty nappy. No, please, don’t wake him. Look, I’ll get in touch when everything’s, you know, a bit more settled.

  Poor old Andy, Fran said after he’d hurried away. A brush with real life.

  Jim thought about his friend loading up his boards and gear and heading up the coast. Free. That’s what Jim had always envied, the way Andy could just take off and put things behind him. He and Andy hadn’t talked properly since the morning of the hospital phone call. It was probably better like that. With everything he was going through after Tom’s birth, at least it was one less thing to deal with.

  About a year later, Fran dumped a bulky envelope on Jim’s desk. Isn’t that Andy’s writing?

  Scrawl, more like. Five rambling pages complete with diagrams and hieroglyphics. Andy described the idyll of his days doing odd jobs for the locals, prawning the shallow lake, sharing the left-hand break at nearby Cerberus Point with a few longboarders and the occasional bronze whaler. And with Andy there had to be a cause. This time, it was a sacrificial chaining to a bulldozer to prevent some piece of hidden scrub being cleared. He’d enclosed a clipping roughly torn from some local rag. Jim wouldn’t have picked him from the photo except for the arrow he’d drawn, a great, bushy beard on him. The pages sat for weeks on the desk until they were finally suffocated by notes for a report on a takeover target.

  This is a fine life, son, Andy had written in a PS. And then a PPS: Call in when you’re heading north.

  He’d included for James a sketch of a surfer on a wave. Uncle Andy Hangs Ten, said the caption. No mention of Tom, as if their second son were just another skin Andy had shed.

  Six

  Are we there yet? Are we there yet?

  Tom, if you say that joke one more time, I’ll hang you out the window headfirst.

  Russell’s teasing? Amit said.

  Yeah, mate, just teasing.

  Tom whispered, Hey, Virginia, why don’t you change with Amit? I want to show you something on the back seat.

  Like his mum, Kaylee had had enough sometimes. She didn’t even look around. Give it a rest, Tom. It hasn’t worked for two hours. Why would it now?

  Russell said to Kaylee, Forget it. He wouldn’t know which way’s up.

  Kaylee laughed. Subtle.

  He and Kaylee talked about Tom and Virginia in quiet voices like parents do. It was all about the day Tom had asked Virginia to take her clothes off in the special storeroom. But Amit dobbed them in to Kaylee and she took them outside and pointed to the sign that said that members should not go into that room because it might be dangerous in there. And anyway, Tom, you know what behaviour is appropriate. Now, Kaylee was telling Russell all about it, as if you couldn’t tell.

  Russell asked her, Did you talk to …?

  Tom’s dad, Russell meant, even though he didn’t say the name.

  Take my advice, I’m not stupid, Kaylee, Tom said in a loud voice to make them stop talking about him.

  That’s one thing you certainly are not, mate. A handful, m
aybe, but definitely not stupid.

  Then Russell and Kaylee talked about going on the river and how they had to make sure it was safe.

  These guys will be stepping up to a new level of independence, Kaylee said. That’s for sure.

  That’s the thing about rivers, the surf, all serious water, I guess, Russell told her. It’ll always find a way to test you.

  Kaylee looked at him. Hey, you’re not losing your nerve are you?

  Russell shook his head, but he didn’t say anything.

  Look, Kaylee told him, the whole idea of these trips is to raise the bar a little. Okay, if anything goes wrong, the doubters will be all over us. But we’ve always known that. Managed risk, that’s the term, isn’t it? And it’s not just the confidence it’ll give these guys, it’s also about proving something … helping them say to the world, Look at us. We’re real.

  No argument here, boss, Russell said. And then he yelled back to the group, White-water rafting, guys. Let’s do this!

  I need a pee, Tom shouted from the back of the van. Quickly.

  Nice try, mate, Russell called back, but we want to get a bit further on first. And he didn’t even look at the Macca’s sign at the side of the road.

  Russell doesn’t even know about people’s rights to go to the toilet, Tom said in a loud voice. I’m going to tell my case manager about Russell.

  Russell looked at Tom and did the thing with his eyebrows, but all he said was, Whatever, Tom, whatever.

  Then Kaylee drove for minutes and hours before she pulled in so the group could have lunch. It wasn’t a Macca’s, but the group didn’t care.

  Tom’s mum said that choosing food for him and his friends could be described in two words. The first word was no and the second word was surprises. She said it after Amit gave his order at Tom’s sixteenth birthday at the fast-food restaurant, and that was because it was the same order Amit gave every time, ever since he and Tom had been friends.

  When Russell said it was time for lunch, a cool dude wearing a black leather coat held the restaurant door open for Kaylee. Amit always wanted to stay with Kaylee, and so did Virginia, so they walked in next. Lizzie could never walk fast, so she came behind. Then Newton came with Russell. Tom waited for the others to go through the door, to have good manners.