by Ruth Mancini
But then the woman who ran the corner shop on the end of my street had told me about the Roundabout Centre. It was located in a run-down street off the Caledonian Road, and a little off the beaten track between home and the office at Highbury Corner where I worked, but from the minute I walked through the door I had known that it felt right. Ben, as usual, wasn’t so sure, and had immediately started to cry. Lisa, the manager, had looked up from her desk and walked over, bending down and smiling at him, unperturbed by the fact that his wailing was getting increasingly louder, to the point that neither of us could hear what the other was saying. She’d then stood up, and asked me if I’d like her to come and see me – and Ben – at home instead, so that he could get used to her in an environment he knew.
I couldn’t believe my ears. I’d been certain that she was going to tell me that she’d made a mistake when I’d spoken to her on the phone, that the nursery was full, and that they couldn’t have him after all. Instead, sitting in my living room later that evening, while Ben sat in his chair eating Marmite fingers and refusing to make eye contact with her, she told me that he could start on Monday and that she was going to assign him to Helen, who had over fourteen years’ experience of working with children with special needs and would be exactly the right person for Ben. She said that her staff ratios were sufficient that Helen would be able to work with him virtually one on one, for as much time as was needed.
That was a year ago, and I still want to fling my arms around her every time I see her. The same goes for Helen, who appears to be completely unfazed by Ben’s irregular behaviour, his regular wailing, and the daily repetitiveness of play – with so very little progress – that I know from experience can be utterly monotonous and infinitely unrewarding, no matter how much you love him, no matter how much you care.
‘He’s had a really good day,’ Helen tells me, putting the last of the mats back onto a pile in the corner and walking over. ‘He loved spinning the wheels of the pram this morning and so Lisa said we’re going to get some spinning tops in for him, to try and encourage him to work on his fine motor skills.’
‘Oh, Helen, that’s lovely,’ I say. ‘Thank you.’
‘Spinning seems to be his thing,’ she continues. ‘It’s called a “schema”? Have you heard of that? It’s a pattern of play that motivates him and builds connections in his brain. So we can work on introducing other activities that build on that.’
I want to cry again. I know it’s tiredness as much as anything, but I am also overwhelmed with gratitude. Who else but Helen and Lisa could see the positive in a five-year-old who’s obsessed with the wheels of a dolls’ pram?
I wish Helen and Kayleigh a good evening, strap Ben into his buggy and set off up the Caledonian Road. As we turn the corner and cross the Holloway Road towards Waitrose, I contemplate going in. I mentally scour my fridge and cupboards; we need bread, milk and cheese. And cereal. Ben could do with some more bananas. I need coffee. I really need coffee; I had the last spoonful this morning. I glance down at my son. He’s watching the cars as they whizz past us, flapping his arms and giving involuntary shudders of delight. A bus pulls up at the bus stop and his feet fly out and land back against the buggy, kicking it hard. I peer over his head to gauge his expression, but can see that he is smiling; he likes the bus! And then I remember: his spinning schema. Of course. It’ll be the wheels. He likes the wheels on the bus. It’s a different matter being on one. That doesn’t always go down so well.
With that in mind, I decide that I won’t risk the shops, not tonight. He’s tired, but he’s had a good day; it’s not worth upsetting him, upsetting us both. Instead I crouch down next to him, put my head close to his, and sing, ‘The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round.’ Ben turns and makes eye contact with me, gives me a big smile. Is that a smile of recognition, I wonder? Has he made the connection between the big red vehicle in front of him and the song? Does he know now that it’s called a bus, and will that help the next time we have to travel on one? I know that it probably won’t, that it’s more likely he’s just pleased that I’ve decided to sing to him, right here, right now, in the middle of this busy street. But I have to keep trying, repeating words like these in contexts that might make sense to him, in the hope that one day it’ll sink in.
The bus has moved off. Ben stops smiling and lets out a short loud wail. ‘All right, my love,’ I sigh. ‘We’re going. We’re going home.’
My spirits lift just a little as we round the corner to our street and I see our little house waiting for us, looking all Victorian and beautiful, just as we left it this morning. I’ve grown to love this house, and I still see it with new eyes each time I come home, even though we only own the ground floor, and even though the move from Southwark was hard and saying goodbye to that flat had been painful. It was the home I’d bought and shared for five years with Ben’s father, Andy. But it wasn’t big enough once we had Ben, and the last few years had been a squeeze – in more ways than one.
Fortunately, the flat had gone up in value during that time, and there was enough equity for a decent deposit on a bigger place. But then Andy had told me that he wasn’t moving with us, that he was going back to Australia, for good. He was homesick, he said, he missed his family, and I knew in that moment that Ben and I had never really been his family, that he’d always been a tourist in our lives. He didn’t want any of the money from the sale, he said, I could keep it, for me and Ben – his way of easing his conscience, no doubt, at having bailed out, leaving me to bring up our disabled child alone. He told me he’d come back whenever he could, and assured me that I would be welcome with Ben any time I wanted to visit Perth. But we both knew that this wasn’t true. And besides, if I struggled to keep Ben calm on a ten-minute bus journey in London, I didn’t even want to think about what he’d be like on a twenty-four-hour flight halfway round the world.
I pause outside the corner shop on the end of the street, and briefly contemplate popping in to get the few essentials that we need, but again dismiss the idea. You don’t really ‘pop’ anywhere with Ben; it’s always an ordeal. He is so heavy now, and his Maclaren Major buggy so big, that it’s difficult to negotiate through the doorway and round the aisles of a shop that small, especially with Ben yelling his head off and waving his arms. I can’t face being stared at, not tonight, even though I’m used to the disapproving looks, the looks that say, ‘She’s a bad mother who can’t control her child.’ But you can’t ‘control’ a child like Ben. You can’t negotiate with him. You can’t tell him he’s going to get a treat if he stops crying and behaves himself, because he doesn’t understand; he doesn’t understand what you’re saying, he doesn’t understand what a shop is or why you’ve brought him there, and he doesn’t know whether he’s going to be stuck there in his buggy – staring at rows of tins and people’s legs – for five minutes, for half an hour or for the rest of his life.
So instead, I lean forward and kiss the top of Ben’s tousled, wind-tunnel hair and we walk on past the shop and up the street, and open the gate to our house. Once inside, I give Ben his tea, then we snuggle up on the sofa and I flick on his favourite DVD.
Ben grunts appreciatively as the sun comes up on the TV screen and giggles at us. He has been watching the same Teletubbies DVDs every day for the past four years and, while I long ago reached the stage where I wanted to wrestle Tinky Winky’s stupid red bag from his arm and shove it up his big purple bottom, I’m instead going to listen patiently while he bleats on about it, about Dipsy’s hat and about Laa-Laa’s ball, while the horn on Po’s scooter parps its way through my nerve endings, and the endless repetition of the same few bars of music makes me want to weep in despair. Because Ben, unlike me, finds comfort in that same familiarity, in the constant repetition of image, music and sound – and since Ben lives in a world that makes so little sense to him, this is what we do, day after day, year on year.
‘Uh-oh!’ I repeat when Tinky Winky drops his bag, and ‘Where�
��s Dipsy’s hat?’ I ask, patting my head, and wrinkling up my face in mock concern. I know that Ben doesn’t care about Dipsy’s hat any more than I do; he just likes the music, the dancing and the noise. But he joins in the game and smiles and reaches up and touches my face. I respond with a squeeze (‘Big hug,’ I tell him), along with a kiss on the nose.
After a while I get up and give him his medication. It always makes him sleepy and it’s not long before his eyelids are drooping and I’m putting him to bed. Ironically, though, when I finally crawl into my own bed, I’m wide awake.
I lie in the dark and think about Ellie who, at this moment, is lying in a prison cell, and I wonder how low you’d have to feel to hurt your child. Pretty low, is the answer; and I should know. There have been times, there have been dark moments in the past five years, when I’ve been so utterly wrung-out and unhappy that I’ve allowed my mind to wander into a world that doesn’t have Ben in it, where Ben ends up back in hospital and I lose him, where I no longer spend my days running in a sleep-deprived fog from work to nursery to home and back again, where I’m not constantly, endlessly, at someone else’s beck and call. I guiltily imagine having the life I used to have, the life where I got to eat out with friends and go to the cinema, the life where I used to be able to go on a holiday abroad, to lie on a beach in the sun.
Right now, I’d settle for being able to read a book or watch a movie or eat a plate of food without interruption, without being needed for something – to change a DVD or a nappy, or to sing, or to soothe, without having to leap up to prevent an accident or to provide a change of scene with a car ride or a trip out to feed the ducks. It would be so good not to have to try and guess, guess, guess all the time what it is that Ben wants, why it is that he’s wailing, so that I can calm him, stop him from screaming the house down, from hurting himself, from biting himself or me. I mash food, I watch for accidents, for hazards, for steps that could trip him, for small objects that could choke him. I try to anticipate the triggers that will upset him, the noises that will wake him. After five years of being permanently ‘on call’ I’m hardwired to report for duty, and it’s got so that, even on the nights that Ben doesn’t wake, I still do, the slightest movement from his room, or sound from the street, like an alarm going off in my brain, jerking me awake and calling me to action.
But I’d never harm my baby – I know that about myself. I love him deeply, desperately, more than I’ve loved anyone before or since the day that he was born. Just the thought of any harm coming to him causes me to get out of bed and creep into his room. I stand in the doorway for a moment, listening for the soft, regular snuffle that tells me he’s asleep. When I hear it, I creep nearer. I can see in the soft light from the streetlight outside that he’s kicked off his duvet and is on his back, his arms and legs flung out around him, his face tipped towards me, his beautiful features at peace beneath the shock of gorgeous thick strawberry blond hair that’s still sticking up over his brow. Mild relief floods my veins. He’s asleep; there’s nothing wrong. There’s been no thrashing or jerking, no banging of limbs against his cot, no rolling of his eyes. I know that this is what I’ve been half expecting. It’s what I’m always expecting, with Ben: the worst.
I put his duvet back loosely over his body, and give him the lightest of kisses on his forehead. Back in bed, I pull my own duvet tightly round me. In spite of the heat, I’m chilled to the core and teardrops escape from the corners of my eyes as Ben and Finn blur into one in my mind. I force myself to imagine slapping and punching Ben, taking his little hands and crushing cigarettes out on them, feeding him salt, by the spoonful, while his eyes look trustingly up into mine. I then see myself on the hospital ward, calmly, calculatingly, removing a tube that’s keeping him alive and then getting into bed beside him and closing my eyes, knowing that, beside me, he’s bleeding to death.
I know she’s little more than a child herself, but I just can’t imagine how Ellie could do what they say she’s done, and if she did, quite how bad she’d have to feel to do it. I know that everyone has their limit, their pain threshold, that there’s only so much each person can take (look at Andy), and maybe I just haven’t quite got there yet. But I know that I could never hurt my baby, no matter how bad things got. I still remember how it felt to be rigid with fear the first time his body started its jerking and twitching and then to hold him as he lay, lifeless, in my arms, the ambulance weaving its way through the early-evening traffic. I still remember how it felt to watch him being hooked up to tubes, his little chest caving inwards on every breath as his muscles, weak and immature, struggled to fight off yet another lung infection, to let in air. I remember how hard it was to take a proper breath myself as I looked on in terror, petrified that I was going to lose him, berating myself for every dark thought I’d ever had, making bargains with God and begging Him not to take my son from me.
No. I don’t want to be without Ben. Ever.
I just don’t want to be so alone.
I close my eyes and imagine a man’s arms wrapped round me, his body warm next to mine, his breath on my shoulder. I imagine talking to him about the way I’m feeling, and I imagine him being completely OK with, and accepting of Ben. Soon he’s kissing me, and then we’re making love, and before I know it he’s packed his bags and is moving in. But then reality kicks in. I can’t allow myself to have a dream like that. Let’s face it, who’d want to take on a woman with a son like mine? My experience of the people I meet during my daily life is that most of them will fall silent or recoil in embarrassment and change the subject if I talk about Ben openly, honestly; if I talk about things as they really are. I’d like to feel connected to the world, the way others feel connected: through shared experience and common ground. But there is none, not for me.
People say that when you have kids you lose touch with your single friends, that your best friends become other parents, the ones that won’t get bored of talking and laughing with you about baby sick and spit-up, about crawling, talking, first steps, first day at nursery, first day at school, about each new achievement, about the latest funny thing that their son or daughter did or said. But I can’t do that, because Ben can’t talk. His first steps still haven’t happened, and his new achievements are paltry by comparison. (‘Oh, listen, this is so funny – Ben spent the morning spinning the wheels of a dolls’ pram. Does your son like to do that?’) My experience of raising a child is so vastly, immensely different from anyone else’s, that all I can do is keep my mouth shut and listen and smile. I’m stuck on the outside of those conversations by a wall of glass; I can hear them, but I can’t join in. I’m not included. I’m not in their club.
I’m in nobody’s club any more. That is what I have lost.
I wish for the millionth time that my mum was here.
I screw my eyes up tight as I think of her and I ask her, as I always do, to help me get through this time, to let it get easier somehow, to let me come out the other side.
I wait patiently, as always, until I feel her hand in mine.
Now, at last, I will sleep.
3
The day starts badly at seven a.m., when I realise that we’ve overslept. I flick the kettle on before running to the bathroom, but then remember that I have no coffee. I wash and dress us both hastily, give Ben the last two slices of bread, cut up into fingers, and toast the crusts for myself while I pack our lunches. I then lock up and jog behind Ben in his buggy most of the way to the nursery. I run for the bus and again for the crowded Tube train, where I stand, upright, like a tin soldier, sandwiched so tightly between my fellow travellers that I don’t even need a handrail for support.
I breathe a sigh of relief as I exit the station at Elephant and Castle and walk up the street and through the gate to the Inner London Crown Court. The stench of cigarette smoke soon wafts towards me from a disparate crowd of lawyers, court staff and defendants who are gathered outside, sneaking in a quick ciggy before the day’s list gets under way. I spot Will near the steps, already
robed and bewigged, deep in discussion with the prosecutor, both of them puffing away and flicking ash idly onto the pavement.
‘Ms Kellerman!’ Will exclaims, as he sees me walking towards him. He squashes his cigarette out against the railing and flicks it into a litter bin.
‘Filthy habit,’ I reprimand him.
‘I know.’ He makes a remorseful face and looks round at the court building behind us. ‘I’m thinking of giving it up. I’m going to retrain as a bus driver. The pay’s better.’
I laugh.
‘But since we’re both here,’ he says, taking my arm, ‘let’s go and talk to our young lady. Serco prison van’s just arrived.’
‘You got the papers OK?’
‘Yes. Interesting brief. Thank you.’
‘How’s Finn? The baby?’ I ask. ‘Did Carmel tell you anything?’
Will shakes his head. ‘No change. That’s all she knows.’
‘You know she denies it?’ I tell him. ‘It’s going to be a “not guilty” by the looks of things.’
‘Yes, well they won’t expect a plea today. We’re missing several key statements, including the father’s. We have one from the social worker assigned to Finn’s case and also one from the ICU nurse, the one who says she saw Ellie pick up the baby. Although Carmel’ – he nods his head at the prosecutor, who’s walking back up the steps ahead of us – ‘says they’re in some difficulty there. She was an agency nurse, it seems. African. She’s left the hospital. They don’t know where she’s gone. Possibly back to Africa.’