‘Sit down!’ I scream. ‘Sit down right now!’
Will cowers, huddling in the corner near the door to the living room. He pulls out the cutlery drawer and crouches beneath it, arms wrapped around his shaking legs.
*
The same nurse is on duty as last time.
‘It’s you today, I see,’ he says, ripping open the cover on a sterile swab.
‘My son pushed me. Yesterday he broke my favourite vase and cut himself on it, today he pushes me into a cabinet.’
The nurse gives me a look, as if he thinks I might deserve it, then shakes his head. ‘I see it more than you’d think,’ he says, and leaves me holding a compress as I wait for the doctor. X-rays, no concussion, stitches, a bandage. A minor incident in family life, I suppose, for the vast majority of people with children. To me it seems like a crisis from which we may not recover. I imagine returning Will to the department store where we bought his bed, asking for another model, one that is not quite so defective, but Edward and I agreed, no matter what, we would not give up on this boy. ‘Altruism,’ I said to Edward when we made the decision, ‘weighs significantly more than love.’
‘How do you mean?’ he asked.
‘I feel it on my shoulders already,’ I said, and he took me in his arms, plumping me upright.
When I come out to reception, Edward and Will are sitting hunched over a colouring book, an adult colouring book, one of those intricately designed things composed of botanical and animal motifs, each leaf a maze of competing patterns, every feather a mosaic of byzantine complexity. Will is focused on a frog, working hard to stay in the lines of the serpentine forms that make up its legs.
‘What do you say, Romeo?’ Edward prompts the boy who, if we all play nicely and adjust to one another, will legally be our son in a matter of eight weeks, from which point onward dissolution will become much more difficult, might require, for all I know, me declaring myself an unfit parent.
‘Sorry,’ the boy mumbles.
‘Sorry for what?’
‘Sorry for pushing you,’ says the boy.
‘How about a kiss?’ says Edward.
No, I want to say, I do not want a kiss from that little beast, but I lean over and let him embrace me, his arms circling my neck, hot breath landing with a smack alongside my nose.
*
At dinner, I allow my husband and this boy who breaks my belongings and attacks me without provocation to do all the talking. How have they bonded so easily? I do not laugh at the boy’s jokes. I refuse him eye contact. I clear the dishes, I ask Edward to see to the boy’s bath and bedtime. I have a headache, I say. I take a painkiller and grip the edge of the sink, looking out on the common gardens of the development, listening to the buses pass, the sirens running to the hospital, and, down the hall, the sound of laughter, the boy and my husband joking, joshing, getting on so well with each other. This was not what I signed up for. I will phone the social worker on Monday morning and tell her to come get the boy. The bed can still be returned to the department store – the frame at least. I’ll donate the mattress. Health and Safety rules. Contamination. Does no one think how a feral child might contaminate its nest? We will start over, remortgage the flat, hire a California surrogate. I do not want to spend the rest of my life fixing someone else’s failure.
‘You can’t continue to punish him,’ Edward says, after we have gone to bed.
‘He needs to know he can’t behave like that.’
‘I think he knows. He’s just a boy.’
‘He’s not a boy. He’s an animal. We can’t keep him. He has to go back,’ I say, as Edward suddenly seizes my hand, staring past me. I turn my head, and Will is there in his pyjamas, standing in the light of the doorway, his face scrambled and wet, features drawn to that terrible point. Pinched, I think, I have acquired an English child with pinched features. How much I would rather have one of my own, an American baby with no early trauma other than separation from its biological parents, a child I could hold from the moment of birth. As I look at the tears on the face of the boy I agreed to turn into my son, I wait for the ballooning of love in my chest, but nothing comes, no breath of affection.
The boy turns and runs down the hall, Edward springing from our bed to go after him. I listen to the crying and beneath it the murmur of Edward’s consolations. He is good at consolation, as he is good at almost everything, perhaps save self-interest or introspection, or the development of an inner life. I wonder sometimes if my husband is ever contemplative, or is instead as purely animal as he so often seems – animal in the best sense, of course, natural and responsive and fit, a thing of nature within nature. Consolation is an animal trait. Pet videos have proved it to us. The behaviour of elephants, too, in a time of death. What is their mourning if not an act of group consolation?
At the start of this process, we agreed that Edward would be the parent who said no, because he has an instinct for comfort, for making rejection palatable. I am too likely to snap and bark (too human, I think, or too like an animal that has been mistreated and so becomes unnatural), and as a consequence I must be the one who always says yes, even if that yes is qualified by the admonition, ‘but ask Papa what he thinks’. I fear we made a mistake, working against our natural instincts in this way.
‘You get to choose,’ Edward says when he comes back to bed, an hour or so later, perhaps longer, after singing Will to sleep with a lullaby I have never heard before, but which made my toes curl with its sweetness. ‘Either you commit to what we’re doing, or it’s over. All of it.’
What are Edward’s eyes doing? The lids are red and the pupils contracting as he stares at me, his chin trembling. I look away and he snaps his fingers in my face to make me turn back. I have never seen such violence from my husband.
‘Don’t do that. That’s not the kind of thing we do to each other.’
‘Listen to me,’ he says, his voice breaking. ‘We are doing this together or there is no more we.’
‘And if I can’t?’
‘You must try. And now it’s your turn to apologize to Romeo.’
‘I cannot call him by that name.’
‘But that’s his name! He’s too old to change it. After all he’s been through, we cannot call him Will. He must be Romeo.’
‘It’s not a name I can say. It’s too ridiculous. It makes me feel like the Juliet I am not.’
‘Then what could you call him? Just as a start.’
I think about this, try to judge from his expression whether Edward really means what he says, but there is determination there, no flicker of falseness. He sounds like he is trying to be patient with me, despite whatever he feels. What would I do to save us? Embrace a beast in our home? Isn’t there a folktale of a monkey turning human? I can think only of stories – real ones – of orphan children raised by baboons and eventually saved by human society. The retraining, the unmonkeying of those human apes, sometimes takes years, as the evolution of humans from our ape ancestors took countless millennia, I remind myself. I must adjust my expectations, perhaps every day for the rest of my life, decades spent in a mode of constant adjustment.
‘I could call him my boy.’
‘Then call him that at least. The name will come.’
‘Or a nickname. I could call him a nickname. Something like Ro.’
Edward’s eyes clear and he smiles despite his desire, I suspect, to be stern with me.
‘You know what that means?’ he asks.
‘Enlighten me, oh scholar of the arcane.’
‘Rest. Repose. Peace. Noun or verb. A Germanic import. Perhaps originally Icelandic. Ró. As in the York Mystery Plays of the fifteenth century, which I was meant to be talking about today if you hadn’t had your little kitchen drama. Nowe are we brought Bothe unto rest and rowe.’
‘Noun and verb? Imperative as well?’
‘Not strictly, but I suppose it could be. Adjust its usage. Language is dynamic.’
‘Name maketh man.’
Ed
ward puts his hands on my shoulders and draws me close. ‘We can only try.’
As I go to sleep, I think of the meaning of the child’s whole name, Romeo, an Italianization of the Late Latin Romaeus, which meant one who makes pilgrimage to Rome, if I remember my high school Shakespeare class. Still, I cannot help feeling it is a vulgar name for a child today. Perhaps in Italy it would be different. Context is key. If I were to take him to Rome, to see the origins of his name, perhaps that would also, by some magic, ro him.
*
The next morning, I find the child again in front of the painting, this time standing on a chair, his face level with the canvas and square with the boy who is composed of fluid oil that has hardened into form: permanent, short of its destruction by fire or blade or the deteriorations of time. Does he see himself in that child with a tail? He has one hand on the wall to the left of the canvas, which is unframed, just as the artist intended, I believe, and as I found it in the gallery in Stellenbosch, in a room of the artist’s other unframed canvases, blurred images of young men and women, families, one of a black nanny holding a screaming white infant titled Monster Love. My heart drops when I see the child I am meant to love. I want to shout at him to get down, not to touch, but then remember my role. I am the one who says yes, Edward must say no. When the boy’s right hand reaches up as if to touch the painting I know I cannot wait for my husband to get out of bed.
‘It’s better not to touch it,’ I say. Romeo’s head swivels so he can look at me, but his left hand remains stuck against the wall and the right one is frozen mid-reach. ‘We have oil on our hands, and dirt, and those things are bad for art.’
‘Why is oil bad for art?’
‘It leaves a residue. A trace. An invisible mark. And over time, that trace would collect dust and dirt and gradually it would become a black mark, and over an even longer time that black mark would begin to decay and destroy the painting.’
He squints. I have lost him.
‘Think of the painting as if it were the cleanest thing in the world. Would you want to get the cleanest thing in the world dirty?’ ‘Maybe.’
‘But it’s good to keep clean things clean.’
‘You said it was okay for things to get dirty.’
‘Some things, yes, but not works of art.’
‘Why?’
‘So we can enjoy them in their ideal state. So that other people can enjoy them. If we get a work of art that is very clean dirty, then it has to be cleaned again, and every time we clean it, a little bit of it gets worn down or disappears, and so we speed up its process of decay. This painting is in an almost ideal state. I acquired it – I bought it – new from a gallery. No one else has owned it but the artist herself. It has never had to be cleaned. If we look after it, it will not have to be cleaned for a long time yet, and so we will make it last longer.’
‘But I want to touch it. I want to see what it feels like.’
This is a boy, I realize, who has never touched an oil painting, who has never possessed anything of value other than his clothes and shoes and a few small toys.
‘We’ll get a special one just for you.’
‘A painting?’
‘Yes. We’ll go today, to find a painting that you can touch.’
*
I tell Edward my plan and his eyes narrow, looking away from me in that English way he has of suggesting demurral, or deferral, I’m never sure which.
‘How much will you spend?’ he asks.
‘A thousand. Fifteen hundred.’
‘That much?’
‘Not if I can help it,’ I say, ‘but that’s what I’m prepared to spend to secure the future of the painting I love. The alternative is to frame it, under glass, and have it securely bolted to the wall, and that would cost no less.’ I do not tell Edward, hardly tell myself, that I have dreamt of Romeo destroying it.
I take him to a junk shop that calls itself an Antique Market. Sensing his skittishness, I squeeze his hand, smiling with my eyes, as my mother taught me, to reassure, to express genuine warmth, although I feel the mechanics of my own performance. All too human.
The owner of the Market, a woman in her sixties, has an inflated sense of the stuff she peddles, thinking it all priceless when it is, mostly, run-of-the-mill brown furniture and Victorian genre paintings that few people want. She watches every move my boy makes.
‘We’re looking for a painting for my son’s room,’ I tell her. ‘Something interesting, with character, with people in it.’
She leads us to the back of the shop and points to an antechamber full of paintings, some hanging, others stacked on the floor and leaning against the walls, many framed, a few not. I have in mind a classical scene, perhaps something with hunters, or even a family portrait. Romeo’s eyes dart up and down before he shakes his head. ‘It isn’t here.’
‘We haven’t looked properly,’ I say.
He dismisses pictures of horses and cows and dogs. He has no interest in a group portrait of one family’s seven children. Landscapes bore him. Classical ruins puzzle him. ‘Why make a painting of that?’ If it has a frame, he shows no interest. Near the back of the room, I find a curious eighteenth-century painting of three men: a white Englishman, his son, and the man’s African slave. I put it aside, but this is the one that Romeo notices.
‘We could maybe take this one,’ he says.
‘But here’s a nice tropical picture,’ I say, finding a French salon painting of a woman with large breasts and a flowing white gown reclining on a divan surrounded by Asian-looking attendants. There is even a monkey playing on the ground, reaching for a bauble.
‘No, this one,’ Romeo insists, touching the picture of the three men. His index finger taps at its surface, while his ring and middle finger scoot back and forth, learning the texture of varnish and oil, the suggestion of soft tackiness that remains, even years after a painting is finished.
In the end I buy both. The woman wraps them in brown paper and ties them up with a rough brown cord. We take a taxi home.
*
‘It’s a very gloomy painting,’ Edward says, grimacing at the portrait of the three men, which now hangs above Romeo’s bed.
When he sees it on the wall, Romeo shouts, ‘It’s not right,’ and thrusts his fists to his side. I wonder if this reaction is prompted by Edward’s scepticism.
‘But it’s the one you wanted, my boy,’ I remind him.
‘I want the other one!’ he screams.
I go to our bedroom and bring back the painting of the woman and the monkey and the Asian attendants. Louche, I think, a rather dubious painting for a little boy’s room.
‘No!’ Romeo screams again. ‘I want your painting. In there.’ He points towards the living room. I know which painting he wants. It is time for Edward to play his part, to say no, to make the refusal palatable, but this time, Romeo will not be consoled and we spend the rest of the day and the evening listening as he sobs in his room.
*
In the middle of the night, I wake from a deep but troubled sleep, dream ravaged, I say to myself. Something has woken me, but Edward remains asleep. We went to bed to the sound of Romeo’s cries slackening off. He refused to eat. He would not bathe. He went to bed in his day clothes. He screamed obscenities at us, worse than anything he said to George and Henry. For the first time in the past week, Edward looked shaken by the child’s behaviour. He saw what I have had the privilege, or burden, of seeing on my own.
‘I don’t know,’ he said as we turned out the light. ‘Perhaps you were right.’
I expect to find Romeo in the living room, but then notice the light from his bedroom. When I look through the open door I am stunned to find Interior: Monkeyboy hanging above his bed, in place of the eighteenth-century portrait of the men and the boy. He must have swapped the paintings on his own, and then I notice that he is wearing his new pyjama bottoms but no shirt and his body is covered in red streaks. At first I think he is bleeding, flayed, but then I see that on each of his
arms there is only a red stripe of paint, watercolour, extending from his elbow to wrist, red stripes that imitate the red highlights on the arms of the boy in the painting. There is also an appendage, just above the waist of the pyjamas at his back, a long thin tail, twisting slightly, that piece of rough brown cord from the Antiques Market, affixed to his skin with electrical tape.
For a moment we stand there, him looking at the picture, me looking at him from the hall. I hear the shushing of a bus and a siren’s drone, although the noise is scarcely audible through the closed windows and may only be in my mind. Perhaps sensing my presence, Romeo turns his head, offering me a three-quarter view. His eyes are dark and beady, like the boy in the painting, his chin set with confidence, wilfulness. Alpha, as George said. An Alpha male, my Romeo. I know what I must do.
‘Come here, my boy. We can dance if you like.’
‘Now?’
‘Yes. I am going to teach you to tango.’
LOSS
A year after being approved as potential adopters, we have an annual review with Gemma’s new supervisor, Adriana, an Italian woman who is the most sympathetic social worker we have encountered since Eleanor. It is not lost on any of us that Adriana, too, is an outsider in Britain. She is well educated, thoughtful, attentive to our concerns. She seems to recognize that we have not felt understood or even seen by the whole of the British social care system.
For the first time in months, we feel hope again, but it is a hope immediately undercut by grief.
When you are a late-in-life child, you arrive at the season of loss sooner than most. A few years earlier, Andrew’s father suffered several small strokes, but remained stable until now, when he has a bad fall, contracts pneumonia, comes out of the hospital with what appears to be dementia, and spends weeks in a care unit. He eventually goes home and my mother-in-law looks after him with the help of assistants and nurses.
By January he seems to be recovering, but has slowed down appreciably. Most of his days are spent at home in his plantation chair on the veranda, looking over the tops of eucalyptus trees to the mountains which must be for him, now nearly blind, little more than a shifting blur of greens and ochres that disappear into a white mist when the clouds descend.
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