Daniel Isn't Talking

by Marti Leimbach

  As for the enzymes, I have to plump for them, and they aren’t a giveaway, I can tell you.

  At night, because I am lonely and because Daniel wakes up so often that I become unable to go back to sleep myself, I ring my brother.

  ‘Why don’t you watch TV?’ he says. ‘Don’t you have cable? Cable, twenty-four-hour supermarkets, chat rooms, casinos, airport lounges, all these things were made for people like you.’

  ‘But what I actually want to do is steep,’ I tell him.

  ‘OΚ,’ he says, like that’s no problem. ‘Valium, Ativan, Tranxene, Xanax, Buspirone. Just get it off the Internet. God knows, you have time.’

  His other suggestion is that I speed-date. ‘Isn’t that the latest craze in Britain?’ he says. ‘Man, that’s what I’d do if I were in your shoes.’

  I try to explain to him that I am married, that the last thing I want is a three-minute date, and there is nothing whatsoever attractive to me in this notion.

  He makes a sound, Mmmmmm, as though what I’ve just told him is very, very wrong. ‘Mmm,’ he says. ‘All what you just said there, don’t mention it on the date. Just smile and tell them you like sex. That’s the way to do it.’

  Another phone call with Larry. It is five in the morning. The sun is an orange lollipop hanging low behind shadowed buildings. Larry’s voice on the phone is wide awake, however. It’s eleven at night his time.

  ‘Wait a second! I don’t believe it!’ he is saying.

  ‘Well, it’s true!’ I tell him.

  ‘But what you are saying is just not possible in the twenty-first century! You are telling me that the best-loved soap in that country where you live is on the radio?’ he says.

  ‘The Archers,’ I tell him, exhaling a breath of smoke against the receiver. I’ve copped a cigarette Andy left behind by accident. Out in the garden, of course, in the seat by the belching dead water of our pond.

  ‘On the radio?’ says my brother, flabbergasted. ‘During the day?’

  When things are going well I count up Daniel’s words. He has over a hundred now and is beginning to put them together. Having not been able to get a word out of him for three years I now find that if I am inventive enough, he will try for me every time. He likes it, this talking game. I teach him to play ball, rewarding him for every effort he makes to catch or throw.

  ‘Nice catch,’ I say, standing an arm’s length from him.

  When I tried this months ago, Daniel just let the ball hit him in the face or body, wherever it might land. When I gave him the ball he held it to his eye, squinting. Or he cast it up, never looking where it went, then walked away. Now he can catch. Now he makes some kind of effort to toss it my way. Well, most days he makes an effort.

  We wheel down the pavement on his tricycle, shout ‘Duck!’ at the mallards that crowd Regent’s Park. I hold the swing seat, pressing my weight against the tension of the heavy chains, and say, ‘Ready?’

  ‘Ready, steady, GO!’ says Daniel, and I release him so he flies.

  On a bad day I feel like crap, looking for a switch that I can flip or something that will remove me from this life. When Daniel isn’t talking or looking at anything, and none of the people I want to talk to return my messages. Everything is bad and my shoes don’t fit. At the grocery store I am injuring myself by staring at the mothers with boys Daniel’s age – boys who shoot sentences from their young mouths effortlessly, holding sophisticated negotiations with their mothers over such matters as how much chocolate they can buy. They seem to shine, these children. They seem covered in some sort of gloss that both protects them and attracts light. Meanwhile, Daniel slouches in the seat of the shopping trolley, staring blankly or pushing his tongue around and around the edges of his mouth until he forms a bright pink oval of skin beneath his lower lip. He might point and call out a word, but mostly he will remain silent until I speak to him, prodding him into conversation. It is as though he is one of those old-fashioned cars you have to crank into working. However, once he’s talking he can say quite a bit. And these days he doesn’t need to have a pack of chocolate biscuits just to stay seated. The strategy I learned from Andy was to feed him a huge meal before we went shopping, bring along chocolate biscuits that are gluten-free, and keep rewarding him for sitting in the trolley. It works – though it didn’t the first time. The first time Daniel screamed so much that he made himself sick, then tried running away. Andy stopped him, so Daniel threw himself down on the floor, writhing and crying. All of this sent me into agony, but Andy just worked through it.

  ‘We have the whole morning,’ he reassured me, his voice measured, controlled. Somehow he even managed to grin. ‘Forget everyone in the shop. It’s just you and me and Daniel. Stay calm and we’ll make it.’

  I stayed calm. Daniel eventually slowed down his crying. Andy picked him up and walked him along the aisle by putting his feet under Daniel’s feet and half carrying him, talking with him all the while. I put jam, eggs, a loaf of bread in the trolley, hardly noticing, as I watched Andy and Daniel ahead of me.

  ‘Fantastic walking!’ Andy said, even though it was Andy who was doing all the work. ‘Keep going, mate!’

  When Daniel began to walk himself, Andy turned his head and winked at me. Then he gave Daniel a biscuit. We managed five minutes like that, then left the shop without buying a thing.

  ‘But you can’t just leave a trolley with stuff in it like that!’ I said, as we slipped out the door.

  Andy laughed, thumped my arm. ‘Oh, I think we can,’ he said. He got out Daniel’s favourite battery-operated Thomas train. ‘Every day, maybe twice a day, until I see you next.’

  ‘So when will I see you next?’ I asked.

  Now Daniel has new requests, more sophisticated, not to mention articulated.

  ‘More trains,’ he says, and it is a command, not a question.

  But there is the increasing problem of my poverty. I’m wishing the cottage would sell – and fast – because Stephen thinks I am irresponsible with money. All these doctors’ bills, homeopath bills, kinesiologist bills. OK, they might have been a waste of time, but how did I know before I tried? And certainly what we pay Andy is not a waste. He is as necessary as water, the heartbeat of Daniel’s recovery. But Stephen won’t give me any cash at all and is warning me about the credit card.

  I’m running out of things to put through the free ads, through Loot and AdTrader, to pin up with a colourful ‘FOR SALE’ at the newsagents. And there are specialists I mean to see with Daniel.

  Autism turns out to be an expensive condition. That is, if you treat it.

  When Stephen finds out that I have taken up the carpets, sold his favourite chair, sold the antique maritime clock we once had on the mantel above the fireplace, the Persian rug we had beneath our glass coffee table (also gone), not to mention his collection of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanacks, he looks like a fire that has been stoked and fed until it gathers its fury and comes at you, hissing. I think he may hit me. I’ve never stood in front of a person who is going to hit me, and I find it requires a mixture of courage, foolishness and quiet denial Not unlike what it takes to try to help your autistic child, I note, stepping back as Stephen shouts.

  ‘Well, this is what I get for marrying a crazy person!’ His teeth flash as he yells. There’s a scowl line like a dark canyon, separating his eyes. I see the veins in his neck, in his forehead. He seems to grow in height and breadth, all at once too big for this near empty room, which he moves through like a giant, swatting the air.

  Strangely, selling all our possessions has little effect on me at all. It’s not that our things held no value for me, only that value is relative. I will trade all these possessions for a few new words from Daniel. I am in a different market than the rest of the world.

  ‘You can shout all you want. It doesn’t touch me,’ I tell Stephen.

  He warns me that if I keep destroying our children’s home he will expect them to come and stay with him, even though he has only a single large room with a
kitchenette and even though Penelope is there.

  And now it is my turn to explode.

  ‘If you are issuing threats, I might remind you they have American passports,’ I tell him. ‘And that no judge in the land will give the father permission to extract his children from their mother to go live with his girlfriend!’

  ‘Unless she has a psychiatric history,’ he says. He’s so quick, Stephen. He didn’t go to business school without learning how to wield power. Didn’t get whizzed through the ranks of management for nothing.

  ‘There are no records,’ I tell him. ‘In fact, it is on record that I am not receiving psychiatric help. At Daniel’s assessment the paediatrician wrote it down!’

  ‘I have financial records,’ counters Stephen.

  ‘Would you listen to yourself, you fuck?’ I say.

  ‘Would you stop swearing?’

  ‘Would you get out of my fucking house?’

  Which he does, very quickly, without saying goodbye to the children who are in the garden now. Emily is there with her bucket and spade, sitting in the green plastic sandbox shaped as a frog. She is looking in the direction of the house, frowning beneath her straw sunhat, wondering no doubt what is going on inside, why her parents argue and never kiss any more, never make up.

  On Fridays, to the last minute he is here, Andy works like a plough horse in a wet field. In his torn jeans, his chestnut hair all askew, he holds up a pad and writes furiously with a marker. He is all energy, bounding through the house chasing Daniel, who squeals and giggles and runs, his head turned to watch as Andy trails after him. Andy pretends to be a cruel diesel truck bent on attacking the innocent engine, Daniel, as he travels his branch line. With a cape and hat he is a conjuror of magic, able to make Daniel invisible for ever! Grabbing him round the middle, he hauls Daniel gently to the ground, tickling him until Daniel says, in the shattering high notes of a choirboy, ‘Let go!’

  And now they are off again.

  In the middle of all this the phone rings. I am laughing as I answer it. I have so loved watching Daniel charging around the house with Andy that I’ve forgotten everything else for the moment.

  But the phone call reminds me. It is Stephen. ‘We shouldn’t be arguing right now,’ he says flatly.

  Andy is standing in the living room with Stephen. He is wearing a Live 8 T-shirt and what my brother would call ‘pickle’ trousers – that is, army issue. Stephen, in a summer suit, is wilting in the heat. He takes off his jacket, rolls up his sleeves. He has left the office early for this, wants to learn what Andy does that works so well. I am very grateful.

  ‘You have to make it fun, the zanier the better,’ says Andy. ‘So you hold the chocolate. When you call “Daniel!”, he has to call “Daddy!”’

  I can hardly believe we’ve gotten this far, to have Stephen actually taking instruction, but we have. It’s a wonderful day, a day I ought to celebrate, except Stephen is again in a rotten mood. He’s mad because I will not go to see the special school he has made an appointment with. I will not countenance putting Daniel in school at all. Any school. It’s not that I think special schools are so terrible, only that we are busy with him now at home and he is learning so much. Eventually – if it is at all possible – I’d like Daniel to go to regular school, perhaps with an aide, someone there to help him. For some reason Stephen disagrees. And yet here he is, so perhaps there is hope.

  ‘So remember,’ says Andy, ‘make it all seem like great fun. You hold the chocolate. When you call “Daniel!”, he has to call “Daddy!”’

  Stephen looks in Daniel’s direction. ‘Daniel,’ he says. Then he coughs.

  ‘OK, er …’ says Andy to Stephen. ‘The tone is, may I say it, a little businesslike. Probably because you’ve just come from the office. Put a little … uh … joy into your voice. You know, like you’ve got a great surprise for him.’

  Stephen nods, then squares his shoulders. ‘Daniel!’ he calls.

  ‘Definitely better,’ says Andy. ‘But if I’m terribly honest, Stephen, you sound a little cross when you say it that way. Try this: “Daaaaanieeeeel!”’

  ‘Oh, I get it now,’ Stephen says. He takes a few steps closer to us in the garden and says, ‘Daaaaanieeel!’ in a sing-song voice, loud and clear.

  I am sitting on the bench with Daniel. When Stephen calls his name I say, ‘Daddy!’ which Daniel will repeat. ‘Daddy!’ he says, and now Stephen brings him the chocolate.

  ‘A little faster on the chocolate,’ I tell Stephen, ‘so that he connects the reward with what he has done, which is to answer his name.’

  ‘Oh, for fucksake,’ he says.

  Striding toward us now is Andy. ‘Brilliant, the both of you,’ he says. ‘Not to mention our little star here.’

  He kisses Daniel’s hair while Stephen frowns.

  Because I am so broke, I ask my brother to please-please-please lend me some money. My brother is not concerned about pollution, has no nagging conscience about the environment, is not interested in green issues of international importance. He has established what he calls a ‘Vice Fund’, which is to say he pours all his money into companies that produce cigarettes, alcohol, gambling casinos, weapons. He’s a jerk but not poor. His investment slogan is ‘Bet on vice to win, place or show’.

  ‘It’s all tied up,’ he explains to me. ‘And anyway, money isn’t going to help you.’

  Of course. Why do I bother asking him? He thinks autism is incurable and hopeless, like everyone else. And anyway, he lacks empathy, a condition Daniel is supposed to have, but does not. If someone cries, Daniel cries. It’s almost as though he has too much empathy. So I try to keep Emily from ever crying by plying her with sweets. If I feel a tear coming on, I run to the sink to splash water on my face. Meanwhile, my brother who is, I suppose, perfectly normal – this man who lives with shouting parrots and believes with all his heart that no matter how bad the economy is people will still buy everything they need to kill themselves – says he has no money to help out his only nephew.

  However one night I get a call from Larry. This is most unusual because he is too cheap to phone overseas. He tells me that the Chinese, due to a shortage of grain, have decided to save their grain by killing all their sparrows. Something he has heard about or read or perhaps been notified about through one of the millions of user groups he’s on. He calls while I am reading a story to Daniel, or trying to read it. Keeping him still is the first part.

  ‘What?’ I say.

  Larry says nothing.

  ‘What?’ I say again. All I hear is miles of empty silence.

  Larry says, ‘I can’t tell you. I’m speechless. I don’t have words to describe … language doesn’t have the capacity to hold the depths of … what is it? Anger, frustration, shock, a feeling of intense betrayal …’

  ‘You’re doing very well, actually, but why do you feel like that?’ I ask. Has Wanda left him? Has a parrot amputated his ear?

  ‘Birds,’ he says. ‘Are. Being. Gassed.’

  We sit in a circle and I say, ‘Mummy!’ Andy says, ‘Andy!’ Daniel says, ‘Daniel!’

  ‘You are Daniel!’ I say, tickling him, delighted, laughing, proud of him in a way you cannot know unless you’ve lived with a child who cannot say his own name at three years old, and at times during those years seemed to have no identity at all.

  But Andy shakes his head violently, telling me to stop. ‘Don’t use pronouns. He’s not ready for pronouns.’

  ‘OΚ,’ I say, committing this information to memory as I do everything Andy says, ‘I won’t do it again.’

  He begins to speak again, then stops, touches my shoulder. His eyes hold a tenderness that makes me turn away. ‘Don’t worry so much,’ he whispers.

  ‘Andy!’

  ‘Mummy!’

  ‘Daniel!’

  Later, I ask if I can try to teach Daniel to say ‘I am Daniel’.

  ‘You can try,’ says Andy. He’s lying on the floor catching his breath after a particularly taxing sessi
on during which he had to fly Daniel around in the blue plastic child’s chair again. ‘But he’s got to get two words together solidly before he will get three.’

  I nod, standing above him. He puts his hand out; I take it and he rises up. For a moment we remain there, standing hand in hand. His fingers are warm in mine. His eyes are the colour of sage. Emily is drawing a picture of Donald Duck, which Daniel notices. ‘Duck,’ he says, which makes Andy wheel round and congratulate him.

  ‘Donald Duck!’ says Andy.

  ‘Duck!’ says Daniel.

  ‘Donald Duck!’ says Andy slowly.

  ‘Donna Duck,’ says Daniel. Andy takes him by the hands and whirls him around.

  ‘What about me?’ says Emily, holding out her arms. I clasp her wrists and twirl her as she laughs, my little girl, my pal.

  With so little furniture in the downstairs of our house, there is more room for toys and games and tossing children into the air.

  The speech therapist is even bigger this time, her belly hanging on her like a cannon ball she’s slung onto her waist. I’ve come back because she told me if Daniel could speak – even a few words – she would work with him. But all I can think about since coming into the office is how pregnant she is. I keep staring at her belly, at her hand that lingers there, at her swollen ankles, her jolly, expectant shape.

  ‘When is the baby due?’ I ask.

  ‘Two months,’ is her shocking reply. I was thinking she might go into labour any second. It crosses my mind that she might be having twins. She notices my wide-eyed silence, glancing down at her bump. ‘This is number four,’ she says. ‘When you get to number four the muscles collapse the minute you read the pregnancy test. If they see a dot, they just give up and dive toward your shoes.’