‘You’ll come back?’ I say.
He shakes his head.
‘You can’t live with your sister for ever,’ I say.
‘I’m not living with Cath any more,’ says Stephen. ‘I’m sorry. I’m … I’ve been seeing Penelope again.’
And now I have nothing to say, no way to say it anyway, because I cannot breathe.
‘What happened to the famous French ethnomusicologist?’ I manage finally, gulping. ‘I mean, surely he has something to say about all this.’
‘Penelope turned him out for sleeping with his students,’ says Stephen. ‘She was pretty cut up about it.’
‘Oh, was she?’ I say. ‘Poor Penelope. She wasn’t so cut up when she was the student he was sleeping with, now was she? And I suppose he didn’t do anything so thoughtful as marry her or have a family with her, so maybe she’s a little impatient as well. Is that it? Maybe she’s thinking tick-tock, time for finding a man who likes kids. Oh, and look, here comes Stephen!’
Stephen takes a long breath. ‘You know, your sarcasm is very unattractive,’ he says.
‘Tell me she isn’t talking to you about having a baby,’ I say.
He says nothing. And now I’m even more upset. Because I realise that I am exactly right and that at some point – maybe next year, maybe the year after – Stephen will have started himself a whole new family. Through the glass doors I see Emily, her curly hair, her pink cotton shirt. I think it is seeing her there, so innocently doing her drawing, laughing at the Cookie Monster, perched on the papier mâché chair we made, that makes me feel as I do. I want to take her in my arms and tell her everything will be OK. I will make it all right for her again: a brother who will play with her, a father who is with her every evening. The only thing the child has is me, and what am I? Not much, judging by the way Stephen is looking at me now. A bit of skin over some long bones, a marked-up body, a woman with a mentally handicapped son and no career. Not much more than that.
11
There are certain times in your life when you better take stock, and that is what I did right away. We had what we called ‘the cottage’, a dilapidated stone bungalow with an attic we always meant to convert and no central heating. We stayed there weekends in the summer when London got too hot, hacking back the small lawn which grew like a hayfield from March to September and turned into a kind of muddy yellow hash all through winter. The cottage, which was really only one step up from camping, had been a rash purchase while on holiday in South Wales. I bought it outright with money left to me by my mother. We spent quite a bit getting the water sorted out so we could use the rusted little sink in the kitchen, and patching the roof with slate we’d managed to buy locally. But it also had four damp walls and structural subsidence. The soil around it was more conditioned to grow nettles than grass, and there was also this little issue regarding the drainage – it seemed we were creating a bog in the back garden. The cottage had always been a kind of pending project we meant to get to, but couldn’t due to our immense fertility and the typical manner in which life in London swallows you whole.
The cottage did have one advantage, however: it was entirely in my name. I am aware of the fact I once stood at an altar and vowed to share all my worldly goods with Stephen, but then he vowed to love me until death parted us, which is not quite the same as until things went a little off-kilter and the ex-girlfriend with all the exotic music decided she’d have him back now, thank you. So the cottage went on the market and I began looking around the house for things to sell. It wasn’t that Stephen refused to pay the mortgage now, or that he wouldn’t give me grocery money – that stayed the same. But for all her good manners and whimsical appeal, Penelope was a practical girl who expected Stephen to pay half the rent, the food bill and the petrol. Oh yes, that’s another reason I had to sell the cottage. Stephen took his car one night, stashing it God knows where in this car-hating city. Getting to the cottage was now nearly impossible as it was four miles away from the nearest village – which consisted of only a post office and a tackle shop – and involved driving through a permitted path and crossing the cement yard of a goat farm. So one thing I sold – illegally, of course – was our permit sticker, which I saw no use for now that I had no car. I sold it to a man with a cockney accent and the word ‘HATE’ tattooed across the knuckles of his hand. That paid for a half-day with Andy O’Connor, this guy who specialises in play therapy and says he wants to show me how to get Daniel interested in playing like a ‘typical’ child.
When I first meet Andy, I think him little more than a child himself. He is about my height with a schoolboy’s mop of dark chestnut hair, and a less-than-average amount of facial hair for a full-grown man. Nonetheless, he carries a briefcase, dresses in a suit, and smiles as though he sees treasure the moment he lays eyes on Daniel,
‘Clever bugger,’ says Andy, who hails from County Cork. He holds out his hand for me to shake, but keeps his focus on Daniel the whole time. Right now Daniel is running his eyes along the countertops, squinting. This is one of his favourite activities. Whole hours pass with Daniel squinting at Venetian blinds, at shafts of light across a floor, even at the broad end of a shiny spoon. Now Daniel pulls a chair to the sink so he can climb up to the window and lick the condensation at the corners. ‘Not MR, no,’ says Andy. ‘Look at him, sticking his tongue out. He won’t be slurring too badly then. Once he’s talking, I mean.’
MR is mentally retarded. I asked the paediatrician who assessed Daniel initially whether ‘developmentally delayed’ really just meant mentally retarded. She was hesitant to tell me that the answer was yes, and showed me a number of charts which indicated that 80 per cent of autistic people were also mentally retarded. I don’t know if I expected to be shown so conclusively that my son was retarded and remember feeling a little dizzy as I took this in. We’d gone that morning from a family with two healthy, beautiful children (we thought) to one with a mentally retarded, autistic child. It seemed impossible that we’d suddenly moved into such territory and it was at that point that the panic set in and I could no longer speak. ‘Delayed’ meant retarded, and my son was delayed in every single area of development.
‘How do you know he’s not retarded?’ I ask Andy.
‘I just know right away. All these stupid tests they give you are shit,’ he says, throwing his briefcase onto the seat of an armchair, taking off the earphones to his music player.
‘I spent four hundred pounds on those tests,’ I tell him. ‘He scored an IQ of 49. The educational psychologist says he’s functionally retarded. Now you say he’s not?’
‘No, love, he’s not,’ says Andy. The guy is just about the most self-assured, cocky young man I’ve ever laid eyes on, hanging his jacket on the high end of a door, stripping his shirt of its tie. He unclips his cuff links and rolls them across the table like dice. Then he kicks his shoes off, pulls his shirt-tails out of his trousers, undoes the button at his collar.
‘What are you doing?’ I ask him. I’ve got him for three hours and I’m paying him more than brain surgeons get, so he’d better not make himself too comfortable here. One more button comes loose and the man is going out the door, cute green eyes or not.
He laughs. ‘You want me to play with this kid or get out the British Ability Scales?’ I turn my head, indicating with my eyes his discarded jacket, his flipped-off shoes. ‘I’ve just come from an educational tribunal,’ he explains. ‘I’m helping on a case in Reading where they won’t release the kid from special school so he can do a home-based programme. His mother has set the whole thing up, but does the school care? It’s her kid and they won’t let her help him. It’s a fockin’ sham.’
His face is dead serious but I can’t help but smile. Five and a half feet of Irish hero is my man, Andy. In his socks, his sleeves rolled up, he gets out the wooden Brio track and expertly aligns all the bits to make a figure of eight, including a bridge and a tunnel. Then he rifles through the toy box, finding Annie and Clarabel, the two passenger cars th
at Thomas always pulls, at least on the videos anyway. He takes out another blue engine, which he knows from years of experience is called Edward, and makes persuasive steam-train noises as the train goes barrelling around the track. All of this has Daniel interested. He steps toward Andy, looking shyly at the track.
‘Oh nooooo!’ Andy shouts playfully. ‘Crash!’
The track is broken up, has to be repaired. Annie has to be put back with Thomas, Clarabel needs her wheels sorted out.
‘Back on the track!’ says Andy, then around the track again until the bridge, which Andy knocks with his knee. ‘Crash!’ he says, and the whole sequence starts again.
At some point – and I couldn’t say exactly when – Andy puts the trains together and then backs away from the track, an invitation for Daniel to have a go. Daniel puts his finger out and touches the train, pushing it gently so that it moves a centimetre, no more.
‘Choo! CHOO!’ Andy calls, pushing the train toward another crash site. As the train nears the bridge Daniel jumps in the air, anticipating the crash.
‘Crash!’ calls Andy, then connects the train again, waiting for Daniel to push it a centimetre, maybe two centimetres.
It isn’t long before Daniel himself is pushing along Thomas, Andy blocking him every so often and calling ‘Crash!’ which Daniel loves. You can see a light in the child’s eyes, a kind of recognition. I cannot describe what it does for my heart, seeing him on the floor with his new pal, Andy.
‘What about all these other therapies?’ I ask Andy. There’s art therapy, music therapy, sound therapy, therapies that involve brushing the child in order to help with ‘sensory’ issues, not to mention many highly structured teaching practices that happen in schools.
He’s setting out a new track, one that finishes at the edge of a seat cushion so that the train will crash to the floor. He looks at me, then back down to the track again. He says, ‘You can try other things. Mostly they won’t hurt him.’
‘But will they help him?’
He shrugs. ‘I’m a play therapist. And I like the behavioural approach.’ A flat statement, a non-comment. But it feels to me he is saying much more, that I am speaking to someone in the trenches, who has been in the trenches for a long time, who is battle-weary but full of wisdom. It is as though he is saying, ‘Here is the only gun that fires. Pick up the bloody gun.’
Later, we walk to the school to fetch Emily. I show Andy how I get Daniel to say ‘Go!’ while seated in the pushchair.
‘Brilliant,’ says Andy, and winks at me. ‘You’re a natural, sister,’ he says. ‘You want a job?’
The mothers and nannies at the school gate all notice Andy. Maybe they think I’ve gone in for him, and frankly you could do a lot worse than hitch yourself to Mr O’Connor here, who taught Daniel to say ‘Mama’ today by raising him up in a tiny blue chair like a rocket launching into space every time Daniel got his lips into the shape to make a ‘mmm’ sound. He then raced him like that across the room holding up the chair with Daniel in it whenever Daniel made a ‘ah’ sound. I could hardly watch, thinking both were going to crash into the wall at any second. But Andy knows how to motivate Daniel, that’s for sure. Clownlike, he’d skip across Trafalgar Square in a pink tutu and a garter belt if that’s what it took to get my boy to speak.
‘It’s that lass, isn’t it?’ he says now, pointing out Emily.
‘How did you know?’ I ask.
‘Look likes you, and miserable in that school, I see.’
‘She says she likes break times … and, uh, I’m sure it’s good for her to be around other children.’
‘Keep her home one day, Melanie Marsh,’ he says, stringing his words together into one long one. ‘It’d be good crack seeing them play together, don’t you think?’
I don’t know where he’s come from, or what I’ve done to have the good fortune of this man – a play therapist, who knew there was such a thing? But he’s the first professional who has looked favourably on Daniel. When I say that Daniel is autistic, what I mean is that he reaches into his nappy and smears his faeces across the backs of chairs, the glass doors that lead to the garden, the tiles of the fireplace. If I don’t engage him in some other activity he will spend hours pulling at the individual strands of wool on our carpet, lying on the floor watching his Thomas two inches from his nose, or pushing his face against the glass of the television. He is dangerous to himself – will slap his head if you get cross at him. He refuses point blank to use a toilet and will scream and hit anything in front of him if you try to convince him to sit on one. If what Andy is promising is that Daniel might one day play with his sister, actually get a toy and do something with it that includes another child, I will do whatever it takes to keep him in my employ. At home I look for more to sell. If I pull up the carpets, I reckon the Hoover can go, for one thing.
12
Veena tells me a soldier has been looking for me.
‘He came to the house this evening while I was cleaning the cutlery,’ she says. It astonishes me to think Veena can stand in the middle of my house – which is covered in dried oatmeal, dropped crusts of toast, candy wrappers and discarded toys – and serenely polish the cutlery, but I try not to register this. ‘I took with me to the door a long knife, just in case. He was a very clipped fellow, his hair shaven here and here, and a diamond of fur just across the top of him.’
‘Veena, that is a vivid description, but his name would be of more use,’ I say.
‘He left some presents,’ she says.
Behind her, on the kitchen counter, I see a large Sears bag. I haven’t seen a Sears bag since I left America and the sight of it turns something inside me – homesickness, I imagine.
‘It wasn’t my brother, was it?’ I say. ‘He didn’t look like a cross between Brad Pitt and a large black rhino by any chance?’
Veena waves me away. ‘He was a soldier, that’s all I know. I don’t speak to soldiers. What is bratpit?’
‘So you didn’t actually open the door?’
‘Of course not,’ she says, like that is a question?
We investigate the presents. I have to do this because it would not be entirely out of character for my brother to give a three-year-old boy live ammunition and a budding five-year-old girl a collection of thongs. That’s just the kind of guy he is. But the presents turn out to be nothing like that. He has put real care into choosing toys that are appropriate for Emily and Daniel’s ages, and he’s wrapped them beautifully in pastel paper and ribbons. For Emily there is a shimmering mermaid costume, which I know she will adore. For Daniel, a small soft football and a tiny-sized football helmet. It touches me that Larry would send someone by with these gifts, because even if it was Wanda who chose the gifts and wrapped them, it must have been Larry who convinced his army buddy to carry them all the way across the Atlantic to my door.
‘So now you know they aren’t pornography, we wrap them up again, is that it?’ says Veena wearily. She thinks it is complete nonsense to vet gifts from relatives.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘We have to make it look like nobody opened them.’
‘This is like working for the government,’ she says, ‘all this covert wrapping and unwrapping.’ But she sets about refolding the paper, bringing the tape back to where it was before so that the pattern on the paper is perfect.
‘You have lovely children,’ she says now. ‘I will miss cleaning their toys.’
It’s the last time Veena is here to clean for me. I can’t afford to pay her any longer and I won’t let her take any less, which she has offered to do several times now. I am going to miss her. I always look forward to Thursdays when she arrives with her handmade radiator duster, her hair tied back with an army of clips. Each afternoon when she finishes, she tells me the house looks no better at all. Standing in the middle of the room, she frowns as though the room has personally insulted her. When I pay her she shakes her head as though to say it is wrong to pay for jobs that are incomplete, or perhaps to say that the money
isn’t enough. Either way, she would be correct. I wish she weren’t going.
‘Ah well, I should be reading my Walter Benjamin anyway,’ she said when I gave her the news. ‘And watching you starve yourself has been no fun at all.’
Now she is on her way out. It feels to me like everyone is leaving my life, one at a time, as though through an invisible door. ‘Come over whenever you like,’ I tell Veena.
‘I leave you my duster,’ she says, slipping her cloth bag over her shoulder, touching my cheek with her delicate, brown hand.
Veena is not correct that I am starving. At the Italian pastry shop they fill my arms with biblical-looking loaves of pane toscano, with glazed plaits of polenta bread sprinkled with pine nuts, with focaccia dimpled with the fingerprints of Max’s sons, who knock back the bread dough and wheel it on their fists.
‘My wife has made you some dinner,’ says Max. He passes me a brown bag of home-made ravioli, its top daintily folded. Through the paper I can feel the warmth of his wife’s tomato sauce, the hard glass of the jar. ‘You are looking better, we think,’ says Max.
I feel better. Life isn’t perfect, no, but this one thing is going well and it’s enough: Daniel is talking. All over the house he’s invented crash sites for his trains, which may not seem like much but is a heck of an improvement on rolling them one inch one way and one inch the other in front of his face. Now the trains fly off the edges of window sills, the corners of the dining table, the flat top of the television casing, the rim of the bath. ‘Crash!’ he says, and there the trains tumble. ‘Go!’ he says, and off they shoot. He must say ‘Mama’ if he wants my attention. Tugging at my hand without the essential word will get him nowhere. When he says Mama, however, I pick him up, twirl him, let him lead me wherever he cares to go. I’m his pesky friend, always invading his games, his happy dog nosing behind. He has a new word almost every day, taught to him deliberately, methodically, but it is still a new word. For this reason I feel great. I smile at Max and tell him so.
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