“What are you doing in here, boy?” the nurse asked. She had a friendly face, not exactly pretty but not mean. Her hair was pulled back into a bun and she was wearing round wire-rimmed glasses. She reached out to Gerrard, took him by the elbow, and escorted him toward the door before Gerrard had a chance to answer.
“Did you touch anything?” she asked. Gerrard was back in the hallway before he could answer.
“I didn’t touch anything except the pillow, madame,” he said.
The nurse shut the door behind them, and then turned and looked Gerrard up and down, appraisingly.
“Where are your parents?” she asked.
The nurse escorted Gerrard back to his mother. She was sitting in the same spot, apparently not having noticed Gerrard had gone. She was still looking at herself in her mirror. When the nurse cleared her throat she didn’t look up, but simply nodded at her own reflection.
“Thank you, mademoiselle,” his mother said.
“I found him in an operating room that was to be kept sterile.”
“Did you touch anything?” his mother asked.
“No.”
“He didn’t touch anything,” his mother said.
“Please keep track of your child, madame,” the nurse said.
“Of course. Thank you.”
When the nurse left, his mother put away her mirror and looked up at Gerrard. She looked tired and faded, but confident. She told him that they were going to leave the hospital, that they’d spent enough time there, more than enough, and that they were going home.
“I’m sorry, Mama. I didn’t mean to make it so we had to leave.”
His mother stood up and put her arms around her son, gave him a brief hug. She looked him in the eye and told him not to worry, that it was not his fault. They were not leaving because of anything he’d done.
On their way to the exit Gerrard’s mother stopped at the nurses’ station and asked if Patrick had woken up yet. He had not.
“Would you tell him that we waited for him? Would you tell him that we hope he feels better soon?”
“I’m sorry, Mama,” Gerrard said.
“It’s not your fault,” she said.
But Gerrard didn’t believe her. They wouldn’t see Patrick again. Even if Patrick were to get better, they were leaving him behind for good. Gerrard didn’t quite know why he thought this was true, but as they walked down the hall toward the stairway, made their way past another frightened old lady with tubes in her nose and a vacant stare, he stopped and made as if to tie his shoes. He got down on his hands, squatted so that he could put his palm down on the hard wood floor, and found that the floor was soft. It had a give to it that he wouldn’t have expected. Gerrard scratched with his index finger and the wood broke apart. The soft wood came up and he held it in his hand.
Hiding the soft wood away in his jacket pocket was easy. His mother never noticed this sort of thing. He doubted she’d see what was happening beneath their feet even if he pointed it out to her.
When they were on the street Gerrard felt his feet sink into soft cobblestones. Each step required more effort, and it wasn’t until they were on the Metro, until he leaned up against his mother and closed his eyes, that he came back to himself. The world was out there, beyond his eyelids. Everything was real and solid again as he listened to the rhythmic clacking of the Metro.
His mother put her arm around him and Gerrard drifted into sleep.
6
Christopher wished the doctor’s office was cleaner. Had no one in Brixham heard of the pathogenic theory or Pasteur? Doctor Reinhard’s rolltop mahogany desk was littered with a glass ashtray full of cigarette butts, papers, and what appeared to be black-and-white pebbles. The dark orange wallpaper had an aura of the nineteenth century clinging to it.
The doctor didn’t seem to notice or care how his sloppiness affected Daniel, or how difficult it was for Daniel to endure strange and disordered spaces. If the office had been hygienic and functional then maybe the news wouldn’t have cut so deep. It would have seemed objective rather than personal. As it was, when the doctor told him that Daniel was mentally deficient Chris felt like he’d been punched.
“When you described Daniel’s hand flapping, his rigidity and lack of age-appropriate bonding, it seemed likely the boy was what we call self-isolating or non-normative,” the doctor said. “The testing I performed confirmed this diagnosis.”
The doctor could use euphemisms, but he couldn’t compensate for the inappropriate tangibility of the office, of his person. It was too late. Simply by allowing the physical aspects of his life to be so visible the doctor had already intruded. The doctor was standing too close to him. Chris could feel the man’s damp breath on his face and smell it clinging to the air. Chris stepped back.
Abby stood dumbly by the office door, her arms draped across Daniel’s small frame. The two of them looked blank, uncomprehending, Abby with her permanent curls, her lipstick, her copper-colored dress and red scarf, and Daniel with his eyes that never seemed to focus, with his knee pants and a bow tie, but who might as well have been wearing pajamas or a hospital gown.
There was something incomprehensible about the moment. The doctor was telling them that they should feed Daniel more bananas, that his diet was very important.
Daniel was autistic. It was a disease brought about by the deficiencies in their family. His symptoms were brought on by their unconscious neglect.
Usually it was the mother who was at fault, the doctor said, but not always. The doctor puffed on his pipe and then held up a banana and a leaflet. He offered these items to Christopher. Then the doctor reached under the desk and produced a plastic dollhouse. He set the toy down next to the glass ashtray and asked Christopher to look through the tiny windows.
Nothing this northern doctor did made any sense. His accent was so thick that he was nearly unintelligible, and if the toy house was some sort of therapeutic device for damaged children then why did the doctor want Christopher to look in it? Shouldn’t Daniel be the one to look inside?
But, Christopher did as he was told. He frowned as he looked through the cellophane window. Inside there were three rubber people with painted-on clothes, permanent smiles, and wires beneath their skin. There was nothing charming about these toys. They had no character; they were designed to be universals. They weren’t meant to be played with, just to assist in acting out some predetermined interpretation. They weren’t toys at all, but tools for reenacting what the doctor called “the family drama.” Christopher squinted, and then reached inside the house and dislodged the father doll from his place at the head of a yellow plastic table in the kitchen.
“This is the father?” Chris asked.
The doctor nodded.
* * *
During the drive back to Dartmouth, Christopher and Abby quietly quarreled. They made small observations about the road and the weather, but the emotional connection was so fragile that even this much was dangerous.
“The doctor said Daniel would have a better chance if he were to play with it in a therapeutic setting,” Christopher said.
Abby had the toy house on her lap. She had all three rubber dolls grasped firmly in her left fist. The mother doll was slightly bent between her index and ring finger.
“That’s true,” Abby replied.
Christopher said nothing to this. Instead he simply focused on putting his foot down on the gas. Daniel might stack these dolls neatly, or find a way to fit them into cracks or gaps in the woodwork of their home, but Daniel would never play with the toys.
Somebody would have to play with the toys for him and hope that his … echolalia, the doctor had called it, would move him to duplicate the act. What dreary games might be brought to life with such toys? Did Abby think that it would be Christopher who would imagine these scenes for their son? Did she expect him to work out what junior would say to the father doll over breakfast?
“Slow down, please,” Abby said. She looked like a stranger to Christophe
r. Where was her easy grace, that smoothness of line he’d seen in her when they were courting? With her stylish hairstyle and perfect clothes, she’d been beautiful, but required protection. Even after this shock she looked pretty, smooth, and presentable, but Christopher knew how thin the surface image was. What seemed durable often turned out to be a brittle façade. Christopher had to handle her with care.
“Did we really need to bring his therapy home? Couldn’t we have left the house in the doctor’s office? Daniel could play house during his visits, couldn’t he?”
Abby turned around and looked at Daniel in the backseat. She reached out to their son and took his hand. Christopher kept his eye on the road and the Channel appeared in front of them as they followed a curve. The Channel was a dark flat green surface spread out into fog.
Chris looked to his left and watched as Abby bent across the passenger seat. With her rear end pointed toward the windscreen she was ridiculous. She was half over the edge, crying into the backseat.
“Daniel?” she asked. “Do you see the mother doll? Do you see how she is sitting next to junior? She is so very fond of her son. Do you see that?”
Christopher felt the pressure in his chest slowly dissolve. He listened to his wife babble at their son, listened to her voice crack, and knew, somehow, that they would be all right. The two of them, mother and child, would survive this. Abby treated Daniel as though he was sick and not the sickness itself. For Abby there was a way forward.
Christopher kept his eyes on the road.
* * *
When they arrived in Dartmouth Chris almost flattened a vole right at the start. They stopped at the local hardware store and the rodent scurried through the parking lot, hid itself in the spot where the rear tire met the asphalt. The animal was wedged into the small angle there, and Chris wouldn’t have seen the creature at all if Daniel hadn’t mentioned it.
“Mouse,” Daniel said.
“What’s that?”
“Mouse.” The boy stopped by the passenger-side door of their blue BMC Morris sedan and pointed at the yellow dividing line. Chris didn’t look right away, but placed the planks of timber and cans of orange paint he’d just purchased into the backseat of the sedan first, and only when that business was completed did he turn to look where his son and wife were indicating.
“It might be a mouse,” Abby said.
Chris looked and looked but didn’t see the brown vole tucked up between the wet leaves on the asphalt and the rubber of his rear tire. Still, it was there. In fact, Chris had difficulty seeing it precisely because it was what his son said it was. He’d become accustomed to Daniel’s echolalia, didn’t expect the word mouse to match up to anything in the real world, and he was looking for something like a coin, something shiny. When Chris finally let himself see the vole, when he recognized the brown furry ball as the mouse in question, he decided that the animal should be made to move.
Chris approached the back tire expecting that the sound of his feet scraping along the asphalt would set the mouse in motion, but the animal did not budge. Christopher leaned over and tapped the creature with his index finger, thinking the thing was dead and that he’d find it cold to the touch, but while the vole straightened itself out under the tire, it did not otherwise respond to Chris’s prodding.
Chris risked a bite and picked the creature up, holding it in the palm of his hand, and the vole set about sniffing and then nipping gently at his fingers. Looking for something to eat, the rodent stuck its head between Chris’s pinkie and ring finger and tickled the back of Chris’s hand with his whiskers.
“What do you have there?” Abby asked.
“Mouse,” Daniel said.
“I believe it’s a vole,” Chris said. The mouse had a short tail and small ears and Christopher traced the curve of the little creature’s face, worked out that it was a field vole and not just a mouse, and then turned his hand to keep the little fur ball from walking off the edge. The vole turned a right angle and stuck his nose up the sleeve of Chris’s shirt.
* * *
When they got home, above the Harbour Bookshop, Christopher decided to convert the therapeutic dollhouse into an abode for their new rodent friend. He stuffed straw into the tiny master bedroom after removing the king-sized bed with its spongy pink foam mattress and the yellow plastic dresser, and then lined the hallways, kitchen, and living room with the previous day’s Times.
He handed the furniture and bendable mother, father, and child to Daniel, but Daniel let all of these fall from his hands to the orange carpet. Daniel watched the vole in its empty cardboard box, a box that had once held paperbacks. The vole looked especially small in the left-hand corner.
Christopher cut small squares of green hardware cloth from a bale he’d found in the garden shed and nailed these over the dollhouse windows. Then, when the toy was prepared for it, he opened the front door of the dollhouse for the vole and placed the rodent inside.
“Mouse is home?” Daniel asked.
Chris turned the dollhouse so that Daniel could look inside and watch. The vole was curled up right inside the front door, underneath a plastic chandelier, and leaning against the yellow plastic door. Christopher waited to see if it would move, maybe find its nest, but as always the little guy was perfectly still.
“Out?” Daniel asked.
“You want to take him out again? We just put him in there.” But Christopher unlatched the dollhouse and opened it slowly, splayed the two sides of the structure apart, opening it like a book. The vole rolled onto the orange carpet and Christopher picked him up again and held him out to Daniel, but the boy seemed to be focusing first on the orange carpet and then on a standing lamp by the bedroom window. Daniel tracked the curve of the electric cord all the way to the outlet.
* * *
After dinner, well after when they could usually expect Daniel to be asleep, Christopher and Abby were interrupted. Daniel opened their bedroom door without knocking and stepped quietly up to the side of their bed, and Christopher didn’t notice he was there until he dropped the small animal on his father’s head. The thing rolled onto the covers and Chris looked over and met his son’s look with his own.
“Daniel? What are you doing?”
“Mouse is dead?” Daniel asked in turn.
Christopher rolled off his wife and sat up under the covers to look closely at the animal his son had dropped. It was broken open, but rather than organs or intestine, cotton was spilling out from the rupture. Turning on the table lamp and holding the dead vole up to the light Chris saw that the rodent had turned pink. Instead of a wet nose and real whiskers it had a sewn-on smile and beads for eyes.
“Oh, Christ!” Abby said.
“An egg?” Daniel asked. This was his television talk. “Every day of your pretty life,” he said.
Christopher managed to stay calm. He dressed in his pajamas and went to fetch his box and the three of them looked inside. Chris let Daniel take each item out and hold each up to the light but stopped him from opening the jar of mud. After a while Christopher convinced Daniel to go back to bed.
What had happened was that Daniel had tried to open the house to get the vole, but when the vole had started to run he’d slammed the house closed again at just the wrong moment, splitting the creature open. In Daniel’s room there was a spot of blood on the orange carpet and Abby fetched a pail of soapy water and brush while Christopher removed the newspapers, straw, and vole droppings from the dollhouse.
“He killed it?” Abby said.
“It could have happened to any boy,” Christopher said.
But, of course, what they had seen when Daniel came into their bedroom couldn’t have happened. Not to Daniel or anyone.
Instead of a dead vole they had a broken piglet doll. It didn’t make any real sense, but Christopher just shrugged and smiled while Abby hyperventilated.
“Am I going crazy?” she asked.
“Couldn’t be both of us at the same time, could it?”
If one
of them was anxious the other should see the best of the situation. That had been the arrangement all along, and given that Christopher had switched over into anxiety at the doctor’s office while Abby had dedicated herself to carrying on, now that Daniel’s vole was a piglet doll it seemed only fair to switch. Abby was allowed to be horrified. They worked it that they might switch off. After all, both horror and optimism seemed to be required.
After cleaning up the mysterious blood spot and seeing Daniel back to his bed, they returned to their bedroom and confirmed their willingness to cooperate, to match each other. This time they weren’t interrupted.
PART TWO
1967–MAY 27, 1968
In which Gerrard goes to University, most of France goes on strike, and Christopher Robin finds the North Pole
7
By the time Gerrard was seventeen his dreams were predictable. He hadn’t forgotten the police museum, but he figured he was free of it and on his way to reality when the girl in his dorm room took his hand off her shoulder and put it on her breast.
Her name was Natalie and she was working to realize free love. She kissed him but then broke off their embrace in order to read aloud from a copy of Fançoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse.
“‘As his lips touched mine we both began to tremble with pleasure; our kiss was untinged by shame or regret; it was merely a deep searching, interrupted every now and then by whispers.’” She scratched her head. “I don’t know. Did you feel any regrets?” she asked.
“Me?”
Gerrard entered Nanterre University in September of 1967 and met Natalie there. He fell in with her crowd, a group of malcontents called Les Détournés. This student group was affiliated with the notorious Situationist International and they said they aimed to disrupt student life in order to change it. The leadership of the SI had given every member of Les Détournés an assignment to this end. Natalie’s task was to live out Françoise Sagan’s best seller, to make her own life on campus over as a roman à clef. Nobody thought the book had intrinsic merit as literature but it contained utopian, if reified, impulses. Sagan’s debauched and bored middle-class family and their sexual misadventures weren’t much to contemplate or read about, but the book, when approached as a set of instructions, might be useful. Natalie aimed to discover free love. She wanted to realize it, not only for herself, but for and against the university.
Billy Moon : A Transcendent Novel Reimagining the Life of Christopher Robin Milne (9781429948074) Page 5
