by Tim Parks
So I casually mention to Neil, the MD, who any day now will be inviting me to be a director (I have seen an exchange of memo’s between himself and one of the non-executive partners), that my mother also has a back problem. (I have never told anyone at work that I have a handicapped child. Somehow I know it would be unwise.)
Having thus wangled address and phone number, I then have to persuade the fabled Miss Whittaker to give me an appointment on Saturday afternoon. Soft-spoken, the woman has the irritating habit of leaving long pauses on the telephone. She doesn’t usually ‘receive’ on Saturday. She goes to see her mother in Richmond. I offer to pay double and to drive her on to Richmond afterwards if that would help. Politely, she says she is not interested in money. Then I remember that what I must say with this kind of person is, ‘please’. ‘Please, Miss Whittaker, please, I’m desperate, and I really can’t come any other day.’ The appointment is arranged.
Now it’s merely a question of getting Shirley to let me have Hilary for the afternoon. Because I don’t want Shirley to know. Lourdes is one thing, huge, institutional, traditional, respectable. Everybody tries Lourdes. You’d be amazed how many common-or-garden, middle-class protestants have been there with their chronic arthritis, low sperm counts, dyslexic children and miscellaneous cancers. Lourdes is respectable. But a faith-healer off the Fulham Road is something else altogether. The trouble being that the more I try to solve the problem, to save Hilary rather than just leave be, the more bizarre the gestures I make, so the closer Shirley believes I’m getting to doing something drastic.
A certain macabre suspicion has crept into our relationship. She keeps her eye on me.
‘I just thought I’d take her off your back for an afternoon. Give you a chance to relax.’
Shirley is indeed worn out. Who wouldn’t be? It’s been a week of ear infection again. Hilary can’t take regular antibiotics because of the additives they have. She is likewise allergic to the solution most drops come in.
‘Of course if you don’t want me to get close to my daughter . . .’
She concedes.
And as I prepare Hilary for the trip I sense again how right I am to insist on finding some kind of solution that will truly be a solution, on not accepting this miserable situation as permanent. For just getting a coat and hat on the girl is a hopeless, wearing, heartbreaking task. Her arms won’t go in the holes. The elbows don’t bend properly. She wriggles and moans, arching her little body fiercely, unnaturally, backwards, eyeballs rolling away so that the iris is almost gone.
I try so hard to be gentle. I force a hand into a sleeve. Then she scratches herself quite badly behind an ear. There’s blood.
Shirley says I haven’t the knack.
I say the girl’s nails shouldn’t be allowed to get so long. Briefly I reflect on the quite endless occasions for discord.
I carry her down the back steps to the garage tossed over my shoulder like a sack of potatoes. She has no muscle-tone. She can’t cling to me like a normal child would. But sensing, from the changes in sound, smell and light, that we must be going out, she begins to gurgle happily. Then cries again as we go through the business of getting her into the car and into some kind of acceptable position on the car seat where I can strap her in. Leaving her crying, I hurry back to the house for nappies, creams, her special two-ton pushchair.
I tell Shirley I’m taking her to hear the band in St James’s Park. It’s a pleasant spring afternoon. Open air and music are two of the few things she is capable of enjoying, aren’t they? Shirley is touched now and embraces me. We would both like not to argue, to be close. ‘George,’ she mutters. ‘Thanks, really.’
In the car when I look in the mirror, my daughter’s head is lolling heavily to one side, a beatific smile on her face which gradually smooths out into sleep. At least I get the fun of the drive.
I suppose I’m expecting somebody thin, drawn, spiritual, mysterious, perhaps dressed in black. I have in mind a medium I saw on some up-market TV drama with dull, glazed, at once unseeing and all-seeing eyes. A make-up job probably. Instead, having humped the sleeping Hilary down a flight of cement steps and negotiated my way past a line of bins and assorted pots with geranium cuttings, I am greeted by a woman who surprises me by her likeness to my mother when she was younger. It is the florid, matronly wholesomeness of the round middle-aged face that strikes me, the clear, kind eyes.
‘You must be Mr Crawley. Do come in. Is this your little daughter?’
Miss Whittaker’s dumpy body is dressed cheaply and sensibly in patterned skirt and synthetic pink sweater. I am disappointed. Far from a mysterious place of healing, her flat might be any of the more middle-class variety one sees when visiting colleagues from work: stuffy, cleanly-kept, unexciting. Photographs of relatives and so on. Though plentiful flowers do give a sense of repose.
‘Mrs Johnson told me about you.’
She wrinkles her forehead and frowns: ‘Mrs Johnson? I’ve got a head like a sieve I’m afraid.’
‘She had a bad back and . . .’
‘Oh, yes, right. It’s better now of course.’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘I am glad. And what can I do for you?’
Catching a faint twinkle in her clear eyes I realise that she is aware of, and rather amused by, my sense of disappointment. She is intelligent.
As I begin to mumble my story she walks me through to a small back bedroom where floral curtains and a mass of potted plants are allowing only a dim green light to filter onto spartan furnishings: divan bed, armchair, chair, bookcase. There is none of the religious bric-a-brac I had imagined. Not even the texts my mother invariably hangs on bedroom walls (’They shall rise up on wings as eagles: they shall run and not faint’). Perhaps it’s not going to be the performance I expected.
‘Ah, the girl. No, don’t tell me anything, Mr Crawley. No medical details, please. It only interferes. Just lay her on the bed then, will you.’
Naturally as I try to slip her coat off, for the room is over-heated, Hilary wakes with a heart-stopping howl that freezes thought. Her mouth opens wide, wide, wide. She wails. Under my breath I involuntarily mutter, ‘Bloody hell!’ And immediately, startlingly, I sense that although it is surely impossible with the volume of that howling, Miss Whittaker has somehow heard me. I turn quickly to find her smiling at me with sympathy, but also with a certain sternness. Again I am reminded of my mother.
‘You don’t believe, do you, Mr Crawley?’
‘No, I’m afraid I don’t.’
‘You don’t believe I have any power.’
She talks sweetly without any hint of challenge.
‘Well, I . . .’
And all the while I’m trying to stop poor bloody Hilary from rolling off the bed. She is unusually agitated.
‘So may I ask why you came?’
With sudden and I know rude belligerence, I say, ‘Why shouldn’t I come? I’ve got nothing to lose.’
She doesn’t react. On the contrary, there is something irritatingly demure about the way she stands with her fleshy white hands folded in front of her. ‘I think I understand,’ she says. ‘In any event it surely doesn’t help if you curse and swear over your child, does it?’ She raises her eyebrows. We exchange a brief glance, during which I again have the impression that she is coolly aware of what I am thinking: that she is a pious fraud.
‘Do you want me to undress her?’ I ask. The child is crying softly now.
‘No, no, you just relax and sit in the armchair for a little, will you?’
I had been afraid I might be asked to pray or something. She waits for me to move away and then goes to the bed and strokes Hilary’s hair. Immediately the child quietens and begins to gurgle softly.
‘What a pretty little girl,’ Miss Whittaker murmurs. ‘What a pretty pink ribbon Mummy has put in your hair. What pretty clothes. Someone’s mummy and daddy think a lot of them, don’t they? Someone’s a very lucky little girl.’
Curiously, she is right. We
do think a lot of her.
I sit in the chair watching the woman’s squat back. Hilary is lying quite still and calm, despite the strange place, the strange voice. This is very unusual. A good sign. So, do I sense the faintest ray of hope? It’s quickly quelled. How can this woman even know what’s wrong with my daughter? There’s nothing to be seen without taking her clothes off. She’s not obviously spastic or mongoloid. The charlatan doesn’t know what I brought her for.
Kneeling on a cushion, Miss Whittaker runs her small podgy hands the length of the child’s body, letting them slide lightly over her clothes. Minutes pass. She has stopped talking now, her hands move back and forth, not hypnotically or even rhythmically, but more with a questing motion, stopping here and there, hovering, moving back, coming quietly to rest: on her head for a full minute, above her knees, her ankles, which below her socks, I know, are fierce with scars. Hilary lies still, eyes blindly open, breathing soft. She doesn’t even move when a plump hand covers her face, gently pressing the eyelids. Leaning over her, Miss Whittaker blows very lightly on her forehead. Then repeats the whole rigmarole.
I watch, biting a nail. Fifteen minutes. It’s hard keeping still frankly. I fidget. I feel tense. It’s farcical. For of course, now I’m here, I don’t expect anything. In the end I would have done a lot better by myself and Hilary if I’d gone to St James’s Park. Shirley would think I’d lost my marbles.
Another ten minutes before at last Miss Whittaker rises slowly to her feet, then sits on the bed and strokes Hilary’s hair in what is now an entirely normal way. Immediately the child begins to smile and gurgle again.
‘Poor little lovey.’ Then she turns to me. She says: ‘Well, apart from some small irritation or infection which I may have been able to help, your child is really perfectly healthy, Mr Crawley, and beautifully, beautifully innocent. Don’t you see how her smiles shine?’
What? Is the ‘session’ over? Is that her verdict? But she holds up a hand to stop my protest. ‘As for the question of what she is, I mean the form in which she was sent into this world, I’m afraid it is far, far beyond my humble powers to alter that.’
After a moment’s awkward silence in this dimly-lit room, I decide the best thing to do is cut my losses. Only £12.50 after all. A joke. I stand up to go, reaching for my wallet.
She smiles her sad smile, so similar to any sympathetic, middle-class smile an older woman might give you waiting in a long queue at supermarket or post office. She is still stroking Hilary’s hair. For the first time, standing above her now as she moves her legs, crosses her ankles, I think of her as feminine, ample, faintly perfumed, a woman. They are always women. And she says calmly:
‘Perhaps I could help you, though, Mr Crawley.’
‘I’m sorry, I beg your pardon.’
‘Perhaps I could help you more than your child.’
‘Oh I’m fine.’ Caught by surprise, I automatically assume my jocular office persona. ‘As terminal patients go I mean.’ I laugh falsely. I’m never ready for people’s extraordinary presumption.
She raises her eyebrows. ‘In some ways you may be less healthy than your daughter.’
‘That,’ I tell her emphatically, dropping any attempt at humour, ‘is patently non-sense. Anyway, I’m in a hurry.’
‘Of course, as you wish.’ But then as I extract my wallet, she adds: ‘It’s just that you said you were desperate.’
‘I am. For her.’
‘And for yourself.’
‘Only in so far as I find her suffering unbearable.’
‘So perhaps I could help you with your desperation, help you to bear it.’ She works on me with her soft eyes the way certain women will.
‘Frankly I’d say desperation was the only normal response to this situation. I shall be desperate while she is like she is. She is the cause, not a symptom. And that’s that.’
Miss Whittaker sighs, faintest half-smile wrinkling the corners of a generous pale mouth. ‘As you wish. Dear Hilary,’ she says again as I struggle to get her into her coat.
At the door she declines payment with a simple shake of the head. She has exactly my mother’s serene sad wistfulness. For Christ’s fucking sake. I hate people who won’t take the money you owe them.
And once in the car I go for the Fulham Road with a real vengeance. Only at the second or third lights do I remember I’d offered to take her to Richmond. Of course. Suddenly it’s very important that I honour this promise. I don’t want to be thought a shit. I am not. Quite the contrary. I swing the car through a U-turn, alarming the inevitable pensioner in his Morris 1100. But when I get back to Fernshaw Road no one answers the door. She has put two milk bottles out that I don’t remember seeing before. I look up and down what is after all a fairly long street. Could she really have walked so far?
At the first newsagents I pick up a few bars of chocolate and feed myself quickly, heading for Battersea Park. Who knows if a band mightn’t be playing there? In the mirror I can see poor Hilary’s lolling head. My eyes fill with tears. It is this I can’t stand. I would so dearly like to give my daughter some chocolate, to see her gobble it up greedily like I do. I would like to give her at least this small piggy pleasure: good thick foil-wrapped chocolate. But the sugar brings Hilary out in rashes that cover her whole body.
I shan’t be going to any faith-healers again.
The Good Samaritan
January 1988. Hilary is five. Feeding her this morning, I thought: ‘We get less change out of her than one would out of a three-week-old puppy.’ I alternate between this ruthless realism and cloying sentimentality. The girl is so constipated that sometimes we have to hook a finger into her anus and lever the turds out. Shirley does this. I simply can’t.
Travelling to work, I am fascinated by the truth that I am both seriously mentally disturbed and at the same time among the most conventional of commuters on the Northern Line; the soberly dressed junior director of a highly successful software company, personally responsible for a whole new concept of computer usage on small- to medium-size building sites. Forty grand. Saab Turbo. Walletful of plastic. On/off highly erotic affair with lovely marketing director, Marilyn.
But the Telegraph tells me that an Indian in Walsall has been arrested for the attempted murder of his five-year-old Downs syndrome son using poisonous mushrooms masked in a hot curry. I buy the Telegraph now, not just because it is generally free of the kind of social pieties one finds in the other ‘serious’ dailies, but mainly for the eye they have for these sort of stories. The paper comments briefly on the deplorable morals of some ethnic minorities who not only abort healthy foetuses for no other reason than that they’re female, but have a quite horrific record as far as handicapped children are concerned. ‘All too often the social services cover up such incidents out of a perverse inversion of race discrimination. In March 1986 a young black girl suffering from elephantiasis was burnt to death in a caravan in Brixton. The story was not . . .’
Fire. The idea suddenly comes to me. Cleansing fire.
If the cause were sufficiently disguised . . .
For a moment I am quite rapt by the beauty of this solution. Fire. Pushing my way through the crowd at Hammersmith with briefcase and squash racket before me, I am, as it were, enveloped in flames. I can really see myself doing it at last. This is actually possible.
But not in our beautiful Hampstead home.
For Mr Harcourt, I should have said, died last year, just as we were about to set off to Lourdes. Which is why in the end we never went. Being a profoundly lucky man he died suddenly: heart attack on the john, in company of the FT. In any event, we called off the trip to Lourdes for the various solemnities, quickly followed by the sharing of the spoils, which in this case, fortunately, were considerable indeed. Of course, the taxman took his whack, but what was left, in both our names I was relieved to see, allowed us to move up into the three-hundred-grand property bracket. Gainsborough Gardens, a gorgeous close a stone’s throw from the Heath and no more than five
minutes from the tube.
I’m not going to burn that place down.
‘Unless somehow,’ I’m saying to myself on the return journey of that same day, ‘it’s the sacrifice required of me.’
What a strange thought! Much easier surely, just to refuse her oxygen when she has one of her respiratory problems. How could they ever really know I’d done it on purpose.
But staring at my curiously double image in the carriage window, I remember an incident of a few weeks ago which made a big impression on me. I’d stopped to fill up on the Finchley Road and after paying, as I was walking to my car, somebody on the road hit a cat. The animal wasn’t dead. Using just its front paws and squawking fearfully it dragged itself toward me in spastic jerks across a patch of pavement. With the winter evening’s yellow sodium light, its mutilation was garishly lit. Its back haunches had been completely crushed into a pulp of black fur and blood. Its wild howls were attracting the attention of passers by. Then, unable to pull itself further, it lay and writhed. Clearly the one thing to do to this cat was to get a brick, or even the jack from the boot, and put it out of its misery as soon as possible. Yet nobody did this. Not I, nor the home-going secretaries, executives, workers. Nobody had sufficient compassion or courage to dirty their hands with a liberating violence, to bring down the brick, the jack on this poor animal’s skull. Nor did anybody want to talk about it. They hurried by silently, not stopping. Perhaps, you could suppose, if it had been a question of playing Good Samaritan, of saving an animal with glass in its paw, a cut on its haunch, perhaps somebody would have stopped. For that is something entirely different and infinitely easier. But what was needed here was a savage coup de grâce. And for maybe two or three minutes I hesitated, staring at this shrieking cat. Then got into the Saab and drove away.
