The Ginger Child

by Patrick Flanery

  ‘You should make the time,’ Will says. The adult inflection is as disconcerting as his readiness for school. No doubt it’s something he has heard from one of his foster parents, or even his birth parents, father chastising mother or vice versa, the parent who failed to be as available as he or she should have been getting told off by the one who has no choice but to do it all. I know, in fact, I should not frame it with such doubt: neither mother nor father made the time, they both ignored him, did not even feed or clothe him properly, though there was always money for beer, or so Will’s file told us.

  ‘It’s not nice to speak like that,’ I say, trying to flatten my voice.

  Then, in a single fluid movement, he reaches out, picks the white ceramic vase from the coffee table and drops it on the floor. I watch it shatter on the parquet, a genuine Stig Lindberg reptile vase that I took months to source after buying the painting, part of the process of making the room match the art. I scream, a reflex, but Will – Romeo – smiles. ‘You should make the time,’ he says quietly, and puts his hands on his hips, scrutinizing the room, as if searching for something else to destroy. I see the mid-century couches ruined, the sliver of coffee table smashed, the television in its reproduction retro housing kicked in by a six-year-old foot.

  ‘I can’t. And because of what you’ve just done, you lose all your screen time for a week.’ The punishment is unduly harsh, but it’s too late to reverse course. A day’s worth of no screen time would have been adequate: a week for a boy his age is eternity.

  He grunts and stomps his foot, bare sole coming down hard on an edge of broken pottery, and then he is the one screaming without thought, tears erupting from his eyes, snot from the nose, boy become fountain. I lift him up in my arms, he puts his hands around my neck, sobbing, and I carry him to the bathroom. Edward pushes open the door, his face red, as if he has already decided that I must be to blame, or so I imagine.

  ‘What the hell happened?’

  ‘Why are you yelling?’ Will wails.

  I explain to my husband, I wash the cut in the boy’s foot, I see that it’s too serious simply to be bandaged, the bleeding is slow to stop, the tub is pink and crimson and white. In a different context it would be beautiful.

  ‘We’ll have to go to the hospital.’

  ‘I’ll take him,’ Edward offers, as if he thinks I might not be up to the task.

  ‘No, really, it’s okay.’

  ‘Your meeting.’

  ‘I can reschedule.’

  *

  At the hospital there is a security alert. A car has been abandoned outside the emergency entrance and a dozen police cars are surrounding it, blocking traffic, lights flashing, cones and police tape cordoning off half the street. I watch as an officer breaks the driver’s side window and reaches into the car. I hold my breath, expecting the vehicle to explode, but nothing happens. The fifteen-foot-tall Victorian wrought iron gate to the car park has been chained shut and we have to find a spot several streets away.

  ‘I can’t walk,’ Will says, as I help him out of the passenger seat. ‘It hurts too much.’

  ‘I’ll carry you,’ I say, imagining what the hospital staff and social workers will think, the questions they will inevitably ask. I wonder if I can carry him the whole distance, but the neglect that Will suffered means he is smaller and lighter than a six-year-old should be. He climbs me, clings to my neck, holds on, surveilling the road behind us. I inhale his odour: white bread soaked in sweet milk, a dusting of cinnamon, a faint note of coffee and cardamom, and then his head is nuzzling my hair and a balloon of warmth expands in my chest.

  ‘I’m too heavy.’

  ‘No, you are very light.’

  ‘Like air?’ he says into my ear, almost whispering.

  ‘Even lighter.’

  *

  By the time we get home from the hospital it is after noon. Blessedly few questions from the staff, and instead an understanding from the nurses and the attending doctor that these accidents happen, a gash on the foot is not the kind of thing an abusive parent might inflict, although come often enough with strange wounds and they would have to wonder: abusive, sadistic, or ill. My mother once had a patient with Munchausen’s by proxy. Though confident of my innocence, I feel the guilt of speculation.

  ‘What about school?’ Will asks.

  ‘No school today.’

  ‘But I’ll get in trouble.’

  ‘You won’t. I’ll phone them. You need to heal. Keep your weight off the foot. We’ll have a long weekend instead.’

  ‘What will we do?’

  This is the moment I have been dreading since we started the process more than two years ago. With an infant it would have been easy, no expectation of entertainment at first, just routine care, the instincts of parenting, months and years to get used to each other before demands for entertainment would ever be articulated. What does one do to occupy a child of six all day? Can a boy that age not amuse himself? No, unwise: a boy like Will might fill the hours by emptying my home of all that I cherish. Art, objects, mementoes of travel accumulated over the course of my life. I am not prepared to sacrifice such things for the sake of a child’s entertainment.

  I look at the painting across the living room, the image of the boy gazing at the person absent from the picture, the white vase on the impression of a coffee table, the painting in the background of the painting, the wall lamps, the spectre of couches and cushions, the old-fashioned television, a world that is recognizable, a mirror of the room I have created around it, but as if seen through a scrim that both separates and distorts. Art, I think. Art is a thing I know how to do. I am, after all, a professional.

  ‘We could do some painting.’

  ‘Painting my bedroom?’

  ‘Painting a picture.’

  ‘Like making art?’

  ‘Yes, making art.’

  Will nods.

  Where will it be safe? A mushroom stain easily washed off the kitchen wall, and we can begin with watercolours, nothing too permanent, something that will wipe clean from tiles and granite. We used washable paint in the kitchen, the floor repels everything that falls on it, the cabinets are metal and glass. Watercolour, even if splattered, cannot do much harm in a kitchen. From the materials cupboard in my study I get out tubes of paint, brushes, and two large spiral-bound pads of watercolour paper. Will limps behind me as I lay a drop cloth on the counter and drape old towels over two of the kitchen stools. The floor can look after itself. I open the pads of paper next to each other on the counter, squirt paint onto the two palettes, and fill empty tuna cans with water from the tap. I tell Will to change into old clothes, and then realize he has no old clothes, he has hardly any clothes to his name, coming to us with a single duffel bag of belongings: seven pairs of underwear, seven pairs of socks, two sets of his old school uniform, a couple pairs of jeans, shorts, shirts and t-shirts, one coat, no hat or scarf, two pairs of shoes, no toys or books or other possessions.

  ‘A white t-shirt,’ I say, ‘or that black one you have, and a pair of shorts.’

  ‘I only have school shorts.’

  ‘What about the ones from your old uniform?’

  He hesitates.

  ‘You won’t need them again. Different colours at your new school.’ Is it wrong to feel pleasure at being able to provide with such confidence, to assure the child in my care that what he has struggled to maintain may now be discarded with impunity? There will always be more, cheap, until it all runs out, or the world upends itself.

  When he has changed, I help him onto the stool and show him how to dip the brush first in the water, then in the paint, and begin to apply colour to the paper, deciding to let him experiment, not to be prescriptive. Let him make mistakes, allow him to see what happens with too much water, the way the paper will begin to curl and undulate.

  ‘What should I paint?’ he asks me.

  ‘Whatever you like.’

  ‘But I don’t know what to paint.’ He rolls his eyes, pouting
a little.

  ‘Paint yourself. Do a self-portrait.’

  ‘A picture of myself?’

  Why should this seem so preposterous to him? Because no one has ever suggested to him that he is worth representing?

  ‘Why not?’

  He pushes his face to a point, brows and lips forced outward as though trying to join up with the tip of his nose. ‘Okay, maybe I could do that,’ he says, and chooses a brush, dips the brush first in the water and then in the orange paint, which he applies to the paper in a circle. He fills in the circle and on either side of it paints two arcs, and then at the base of the circle a long post, out of which protrude four smaller posts: a stick-figure self, naked. I try to occupy myself with my own painting, to let him work without feeling observed. A memory of a Paul Klee exhibition leads my hand to an irregular grid of colours, a flattened harlequin, or a clown crushed by a steamroller. Will dips his brush in the water, swirls it about, and then jabs it into a worm of blue paint. Wet on wet. He will either be captivated by the possibility of colours blurring, or distressed by the imprecision of the result. As the blue enters the orange, they combine into a greenish-brown arc where he has intended to paint a shirt. He quickly withdraws the brush and watches as the colour spreads.

  ‘It’s messy.’

  ‘Wet colours run, but it’s fine, there’s nothing wrong with that.’

  ‘Your one isn’t messy,’ he says.

  ‘No, but I use less water, and there are different kinds of paintings.’ I show him some reproductions of work by Marlene Dumas, wet on wet. ‘You can make any kind of painting you want. Just experiment.’

  ‘Espeeramet?’

  How his accent grates. It will have to be ironed, flattened, dried out.

  ‘Try things. See what happens. Don’t worry what it’s going to look like in the end. Just get a feel for the medium, the paints.’ I catch myself being prescriptive even in my desire to liberate.

  He tries again, brush against the paper, blue into orange, feathery blurs of colour. This is a child who wants precision, who has undoubtedly been required to stay within the lines of colouring books, whose teachers have praised tidiness rather than creativity. His parents – the first people who called themselves his parents, who forfeited the right to call this boy their son – probably shouted at him if he made a mess. I can imagine the foster parents, a couple in their sixties, rough in their speech but tidy in their habits, houseproud with net curtains and silk flowers, shouting at Will if he stepped out of line. His clothes arrived clean, pressed, folded in that duffel bag, the spare shoes wrapped in plastic, all of it, every stitch, manufactured in China, perhaps even by children like Will. When I think of China I think of regimentation, the management of nature, everything controlled and precise, chaos pushed to the edges or hidden behind façades. This, I note, is the Year of the Fire Monkey, a year of change.

  Will throws his brush down on the counter and grunts through his nose in frustration. Watercolour was the wrong choice. Crayons, coloured pencils, fine-tipped magic markers, those would have been better.

  *

  Will is in bed after calling George and Henry names so rude even they, usually unflappable, are shocked. Where could he have learned that language, except from adults? Surely no child his age would know such artful obscenities. For half an hour after being put to bed, he continued to scream. I worry about what the neighbours will think, and then, as if my psychological evolution is outpacing my expectations, I find that I no longer care about neighbours.

  ‘I’m sorry, guys,’ I say, ‘I hoped he might behave for company. One of my many recent miscalculations.’

  ‘He’s very alpha for a six-year-old,’ George says, pouring himself a second vodka.

  ‘I fear what may be coming in a few years’ time, sweetie,’ says Henry. ‘Are you ready for all the teenage issues?’

  ‘He’s only six.’

  ‘Ten is the new fifteen,’ George says, ‘I have godsons, my dear, I know.’

  I glance at Edward, giving him the tight smile that says this is exactly what I predicted would happen and he should have trusted me in the first place.

  ‘It’s going to be fine. He’s had a difficult start,’ Edward says, and I find his confidence as maddening as it is reassuring. I want to say: You have not spent the day with him, you cannot imagine the difficulty of scrubbing blue and orange handprints off the living room walls as the child who is now your son threatens to throw himself from the balcony to his death because he hates you. ‘We will all adjust, and things will calm down. Love conquers all.’

  ‘Love does not conquer trauma. Only psychoanalysis can help you there,’ George says.

  ‘Or pharmaceuticals,’ says Henry, smirking. ‘I know a doctor who will give you anything if you switch on the tears.’

  ‘If he wasn’t happy painting, what does the boy like to do?’ George asks.

  ‘He says he likes to dance.’

  ‘But you like to dance, darling. You used to be so good at it.’

  ‘You should teach him to tango,’ Henry laughs. ‘That’s a dance which is all about governing rage.’

  *

  He wakes me up, pushing a space between Edward and me, and then, after a minute, begins to breathe a stately waltz of sleep. It is too dark for me to see Edward’s face, but I hear his head turn, his mouth open, and I know that if we could look into each other’s eyes, we would both be smiling, brows crinkled in expressions of empathy, or sympathy, for the troubled child at rest. Will’s arm twitches, not pushing my husband and me apart, I try to tell myself, but pushing out a space for himself, opening a compartment within the us that already is, expanding our sense of the we as we’ve known it.

  *

  Saturdays are always hopeful. Will comes tiptoeing into the kitchen, rubbing his eyes, a flag of hair flying after being pressed into place by ten hours in bed. I wash the wound on his sole, examine the stitches, and he winces when I wrap it again and pull on the sock. This is your own doing, I want to say, but know that is both true and not. His doing was the work of other hands, those of the absent birth parents who created this beast – no, child – who breaks what is precious to someone else and, when chastised, injures himself in retort: a piece of brutalist performance art. Someone should give those birth parents the Turner Prize. We could open our home as a gallery space, stage nightly performances for a limited run. I might turn myself from a designer back into an artist, take the credit, sign my name to the work of my child.

  After I have cleaned up the cotton swabs and tissues from dressing Will’s wound, I give him a bowl of cereal. He picks flakes from the milk and arranges them in a smiley face on the kitchen table, checking out of the corner of his eye to see if I will scold him. Edward does the work for me.

  ‘Don’t play with your food, my boy,’ he says, smoothing Will’s riot of hair back into place. I wait for our child to react, and Will seems to be waiting to see how he himself will respond. He looks from Edward to me and back to Edward, then picks each flake of cereal from the counter and puts it in his mouth before finishing all the food in his bowl. This is the child corrected, trying to be good, and yet I struggle to smile, to reward him for doing as he has been told. We need to have a conversation about words, the words he used last night. The later we leave it, the harder it will become, but Edward has to attend a symposium, and either I will do it alone, or it will wait until this evening, and that, I feel certain, will be too late to have the proper effect, to make Will see that calling our friends names is unacceptable, that there are limits to our capacity to accept his behaviour, that he must mould himself into a different version of the boy he has always been. I would rather do it with Edward, but it must happen now, so I wait until my husband is out the door and then sit down across the kitchen table from Will. He turns his spoon upside down and a trickle of milk dribbles along the steel edge.

  ‘You seemed very angry last night,’ I say, holding out my hand to him. He looks at my palm as if he does not know wha
t to do with it, then puts his own hands in his lap, leaving mine there, naked, abandoned.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Those were angry words you used with our friends.’

  His features pull together again into a point, his head twitches, he makes animal noises, clicks his tongue against his palate and scratches his armpit. Is this acknowledgement or refusal? I need less ambiguous sign language.

  ‘Do you know what those words mean?’

  He shakes his head. Quite clear this time.

  ‘Where did you hear them?’

  ‘Can we dance?’ he asks.

  ‘No, not right now. We’re talking about words.’

  ‘But I want to dance.’

  He gets up and shuffles across the kitchen to the stereo, switches it on, prods the tuner button until he finds a station he likes, turns up the volume, and begins throwing his arms in the air. A chimpanzee, I think, an orangutan. The song is not one I have heard, on a station I would never choose, but Will knows the words and sings along with the girl on the radio, lyrics about moving furniture to dance. When his back is turned, I slip past him, turn off the radio, and stand with my arms folded across my chest. He spins around and growls at me, then hurtles forward, palms out, and pushes me backwards against the counter, throwing me off balance so I hit my head on the cabinet. Half the room goes black and the other half ripples with small silver explosions. I stagger, put my hand to the back of my head, feel moisture and stickiness.