I nod, jealous as hell of this big woman, who for some reason I imagine with a burly, bearded husband, and all her children just perfect. I would love to be pregnant again, to feel the soft kicking, to lie in bed and hold the edges of my belly, feeling for my baby, counting the weeks.
On a red yoga mat, pushing his train along the edge of the mat, is Daniel. The speech therapist heaves the copious folds of her skirt around her and kneels down next to him. ‘Hi there, Daniel,’ she says in cheerful American parlance. ‘How’re you doing?’
Already I am thinking she is using too much language. Saying ‘Hi’ would have been enough. With so much dialogue to take in, Daniel ignores her, preferring his train.
‘So you got a train there, that’s pretty neat,’ says the speech therapist. Still Daniel will not reply.
‘Do you mind if I just show you?’ I say gently. ‘Just to give you some idea of what he can do if he sets his mind to it?’
The speech therapist is not so sure. She pulls off her eyeglasses and rubs her forehead with the back of her hand. ‘All right,’ she agrees. She has a mask of freckles across each cheek the same way I did when I was pregnant. And her fingers are a little swollen – yes, I remember that, too. She says, ‘But I still think we’re wasting our time here.’
I go to the mat, sit down next to Daniel, and stare hard at Thomas, the train. Then I take two fingers, and walk them up Daniel’s leg, opening my mouth as though I am astonished at what these naughty fingers are doing, walking up his leg! Walking across his stomach! And now they are tickling him! When he looks at me I retreat, pretend I wasn’t even involved with this tickling business. Then I start again, slowly walking my fingers up his calf, his thigh. This time he’s ready for it. Before I tickle his tummy, he shoots his attention my way. ‘Hi, Daniel,’ I say.
‘Hi, Mummy,’ says Daniel.
I start singing the tune to Thomas the Tank Engine. ‘Thomas the Tank Engine …’ I sing, and nod my head quickly, indicating he must continue.
‘Rolling along,’ says Daniel.
‘Rolling along!’ I sing.
‘Rolling along!’
The speech therapist watches this, a look on her face that tells me my ideas are not welcome here.
‘Daniel, how old are you?’ she asks. He doesn’t answer. He’s watching my fingers, which may at any second shoot up his leg to tickle him on the belly once more.
I say, ‘I am twenty-nine!’
Daniel says, ‘I am three!’
He holds his hand up, trying to get three fingers to stick up in the air, which he cannot manage.
‘Good boy!’ I say, and help him with his fingers so he’s got three pointing up, his thumb and little finger bending across his palm.
‘I don’t think you quite understand how to be a speech therapist,’ says the speech therapist, a woman whose three children smile from a photo on her desk, and whose fourth child sits quietly inside her. ‘You seem to be playing tricks on him to get him to speak.’
Playing tricks? I don’t understand.
‘Daniel, what is your favourite toy? Is it that train? What’s the train called?’ she says.
Three questions all at once. He cannot cope. He doesn’t know which one to answer and which ones to leave.
‘I cannot teach this child,’ says the speech therapist. On that we both agree.
I want to see an eighty-pound-per-hour occupational therapist because the NHS has nobody available and Daniel needs help with his vestibular system, whatever that is. There is a ninety-pound orthopaedic surgeon I want to check out because Daniel seems to find it difficult to walk for any distance. Then there is the fifty-pound podiatrist who may or may not have some kind of orthotic sole for Daniel’s shoes that will discourage Daniel from walking on his toes all the time. Plus I want to see this rather clever doctor who suggested the gluten-free diet and says that sugar is extremely bad for autistic children.
‘What do you want to use for primary reinforcers, then?’ asks Andy when I tell him that we can’t use Smarties any more to motivate Daniel. If he were an Englishman he’d give me a look of exasperation, but because he’s Irish he looks amused, interested, wants to hear all about my new-found suspicion that sugar is like heroin for autistic kids.
‘I don’t know,’ is my honest reply. I am out of answers.
This morning, while Andy works with Daniel, I take the train to Hatton Garden to hock my engagement ring, a square diamond set in white gold. It’s a day full of the liveliness of spring. Around me are couples heady with the thought of their own impending weddings, old ladies whose gnarled hands are stocked with gold and stones, tourists looking for bargains. It is not hard to find what you are looking for in Hatton Garden. Even the pawn shops are easily identified, distinguished by the age-old sign: three brass balls hanging above the door.
What I think about as the jeweller examines my ring with his circular eyeglass is not what it means to lose my lover, my husband, the man onto whom I hung every hope, but that I am damned glad I didn’t let Stephen give me that ring his mother had. If I’d taken the sapphire and diamond she offered, one that has been in the family for many generations, I’d have had to give it back.
The jeweller is not so impressed with my ring. He tips the spyglass up from his eye, purses his lips, and makes me an offer which I am forced to accept. It’s the best one I’ve had this morning, and I’ve been up and down this road. I am cross with myself, however. I should have brought the pearl necklace as well.
And now I go home to make my phone calls, set up the appointments, continue with my life.
* * *
‘You don’t have any beer, do you?’ asks Andy. Friday. 4 p.m. He’s been worn to a frazzle trying to get Daniel and Emily to play hide-and-seek together It involves me hiding with Emily, and Daniel being guided by Andy to find us. If he finds us he gets the reward we hold in our hand, a bit of chocolate that must be gluten-free, sugar-free and dairy-free and can only be purchased in specialty shops, of which I have now become an expert. I know three different places you can buy such chocolate within a half-mile of my house.
I shake my head. ‘No money for been Anyway, it makes you fat.’
‘Fat you are not, Mrs Marsh. And yes, I have noticed things keep disappearing round here,’ he says. In the place we used to have Stephen’s armchair Emily and I have put a new papier mâché chair, drying now on newsprint beside an open window.
‘If you took credit cards this would be easier,’ I say. ‘He’s not yet cancelled my Visa, which is how we eat. Stephen’s strategy, I believe, is to starve me of money so that I file for divorce. Some clever lawyer must have suggested it. If I file, then we have to start negotiating. I’ll have to compromise, set in writing his rights of access to the children, for example. Right now he doesn’t really have any rights, you see.’
‘And you don’t have any money,’ says Andy. He takes my left hand and studies my fingers. In the spot beside my wedding ring, in the place where the engagement ring used to be, is a waxy-looking circle of pale skin.
‘Oh, he’s a sly one,’ says Andy, smiling, still holding my hand. ‘Why don’t you do the right thing then, and make an honest man out of him?’
‘What? Divorce him?’ I laugh. It’s how I cope, turning it all into a joke. ‘Why should I be so nice?’
‘Oh, you’re tough,’ says Andy, his finger pointed at me. ‘I have to admit I like a tough woman.’
The next week Andy arrives with three bags of groceries, an electronic children’s book that sounds out the words when you press it with a special tool, and a case of Guinness in bottles.
‘Don’t you put those things in my cupboard, Andy. I don’t need them!’
‘I should say you don’t, Mrs Marsh! Look over there at the candelabra on your mantelpiece. You could melt it down to an ingot, you could! And what about the fireplace surround? Architectural salvage will have it, I’m sure! Don’t forget all the brass on your door handles, Mrs Marsh, Surely they’ll fetch a few bo
b.’
And God, isn’t this pathetic. I actually think he’s got a point. That candelabra is probably silver.
I go to the counter where he is unloading the shopping, humming a tune as he sets out each item. He looks so natural in my house, as though he belongs. But I grab his wrist and shake my head no. ‘Under no circumstances are you to bring food or drink into my house,’ I say.
He cocks his head, looks at my hand on his wrist, smiles brazenly. ‘This beer here is top dollar, Mrs Marsh, and you might like to have some to make you relax a bit, if you don’t mind me saying.’
‘Stop calling me Mrs Marsh,’ I say, trying to hold on to my small petal of anger, trying not to let the great weight of Andy’s generosity squash it. In the wake of such unasked-for kindness I find myself unsure what to do. I want to thank him, but then, at the same time I am struggling to hinder the mild annoyance – no, the embarrassment – I feel for appearing to require the charity of another.
‘You know what you need here?’ says Andy. He steps toward me, scoops his hand under my chin, holds it there. ‘You know what you need other than your husband, Mrs Marsh? You need a friend or two, do you know?’
I say nothing. I look down.
‘Have I made a mistake bringing you something nice, then?’ he asks. He has not made a mistake. I feel drawn to him, with his hair going every which way, with his sweatshirt frayed at the sleeves, his faded collar. He has probably skipped lunch to bring me these things. He says he’s my age, but he doesn’t look more than nineteen. He says he wants to be my friend, but I’m not sure I have any room in my heart right now. Still, he hasn’t made a mistake, no.
‘Andy, I like you. But don’t be an eejit,’ I say, a word I know means ‘idiot’ but that Andy uses affectionately, in the same tone I’m using it now. It’s one of those Irish things he does, like rolling his own cigarettes, which he smokes in our garden beside the pond that I’ve bound in wire and ruined for the birds.
‘Would you kiss me, Melanie?’ he asks. His voice is music, his eyes are soft, loamy. ‘If I was ever so quick about it? Would you let me?’ he says.
There is nothing I would like more. Now that it’s a possibility, now that he’s said it. ‘Not in front of the children,’ I whisper.
16
Daniel is three and a half and the Local Education Authority are asking – rather insisting – that I register him with a nursery school for children with special needs so that he has a place for when he is four. I cannot help but think Stephen is behind this.
‘It will free up some time for you,’ says a lady with her eyeglasses on a chain round her neck, her hand-knit cardigan floppy around her sinking bosom, her sleeves extending untidily over her arthritic wrists. They have sent this sweet, motherly lady to pat my hand and tell me what a good job I’ve done for Daniel, but also to suggest that denying him access to other children now, at this critical point in his life, may actually weaken his chances of assimilating into a classroom.
‘We are all thinking of what is best for him,’ she says. ‘For Daniel.’
But I don’t want to put him in a classroom. What is so great about a classroom anyway? It holds no magic. How will it help him, to be with children whose behaviour is abnormal? It’s not as though these children look at each other and say, ‘Oh, I see you have special needs like me. Let’s be friends.’ All he will do is imitate children who aren’t acting like ordinary children in the first place. I’ve spent six months teaching him how to imitate and now they want his role models to be children who are not able to attend regular school themselves?
‘Some of the children will be even more able than he is right now,’ the LEA lady assures me. She speaks in a low, careful, kind manner as though to a frightened dog. Come to me, she seems to say to the dog: here, girl.
‘No,’ I say. It seems to me that he hasn’t even had a chance yet. Why won’t they let me give him a chance?
‘You do realise he needs, and will always need, very skilled practitioners?’
‘No.’
‘And we will accommodate the dietary requests you have stipulated. No gluten, that’s fine. And you’ll provide his special milk?’
‘No.’
‘Mrs Marsh, I believe you are making a mistake,’ she says, but she says it kindly, in a tone that suggests it pains her to see me decide upon something so irrational, so detrimental to my son and myself. ‘We have specialists,’ she assures me. ‘You wouldn’t have to pay for speech therapy any more. There’s a speech therapist on site.’
But I know all about specialists. I’ve seen neurologists, paediatricians, orthopaedic surgeons, podiatrists, ophthalmologists, gastroenterologists, speech therapists, music therapists, homeopaths, craniosacral therapists, and every whacked-out practitioner of alternative medicine you can find in this city – and I mean to tell you there are many. Some were mildly helpful, some were no help at all. None of them believes Daniel will ever go to a normal school or lead a normal life.
Except Andy O’Connor, with his notebooks and his charts indicating where we are on Daniel’s developmental profile and where we ought to be. He won’t take any more money from me now. Says he can’t – it would kill him. It turns out that he usually ends up doing most of his work for a greatly reduced fee when people run out of money. There’s a guy in Acton living in a tiny flat with no garden. Wife walked out, child with severe autism. Andy didn’t even charge him the first time, let alone the hundredth. But the people in Holland Park get the full whack. It’s a kind of sliding fee scale, not what you’d expect, and done rather ad hoc, it would seem.
‘I’ll pay you as soon as I have the money from the cottage,’ I told him.
He said, ‘Don’t even talk about it.’
And he’s the only one who was worth his fee,
‘When are we going to see Daddy?’ says Emily. It’s Saturday. She’s learned the days of the week by figuring out which days she sees her father and which days she does not. I find this fact of her development almost too terrible to take in. That she doesn’t seem to think of Stephen at all on the days he isn’t here is equally terrible.
‘After breakfast,’ I tell her. She’s crawled into my bed, her head on my shoulder. Beside us is Daniel, opening and closing his fingers in front of his eyes.
‘What’s he doing?’ Emily says. She climbs over my chest and stares hard at her brother. ‘Daniel, what are you doing?’
Daniel doesn’t answer.
‘Daniel,’ I tell him, ‘say, “I’m playing.”’
‘I’m playing,’ he repeats.
‘What are you doing?’ I ask him.
‘I’m playing,’ he says.
It’s seven in the morning, but therapy turns out to be an all-day kind of thing. I will give him pudding without a spoon so he has to ask for the spoon in order to eat it. I will make out that I’m putting his shirt on like trousers so he has to say, ‘That’s not right! ‘I’ll put a sock on my nose, an uncut apple between two slices of bread.’ No, Mummy,’ Daniel will say. He speaks because he must, using the language we have taught him, one prized word at a time. His words are like water to a parched throat, I drink them in and am satisfied.
‘What’s he pretending?’ Emily asks now.
God knows. I don’t like to think. ‘That dust particles are spaceships,’ I tell Emily, because I know this will please her.
‘See Daddy,’ says Daniel.
I am astonished.
‘That’s right!’ I say. ‘You will see Daddy! Later today. This morning!’
‘Good talking!’ says Emily. I look into Emily’s face and she smiles at me, really beams, and I don’t know if it’s because she is going to see her father today or because Daniel is speaking to us. But anyway, she’s happy and so am I. I can’t wait to tell Andy how Daniel spontaneously spoke of an event in the future, one that he had to anticipate. This is the sort of sophistication of language I’ve dreamt he might have some day. Of course Andy won’t be surprised. ‘Have faith,’ he’ll say. �
��Your little boy is smarter than you think.’
Whenever I get the children ready to see Stephen, it is as though I am preparing them for an audition. First I iron their clothes, then I brush their hair. Then I make sure their fingernails are clean, their faces scrubbed, their shoes free of mud. I make sure they eat a big breakfast, that they don’t need the toilet, that they are in the right frame of mind. No sulkiness or hyperactivity. No complaining – I’ve taken care of whatever is required. I pack a little bag with a few toys, some snacks and drinks, sunhats or raincoats, depending on the weather. We meet at the playground and I hand over my children, all perfectly presented. Emily runs to him, holding the corners of drawings she’s made. They flap in the breeze, showing colours all the way to the edges. Her best work, the ones for Daddy. It seems to me this habit she has of only showing him what she does best is an ominous sign for the future. How can I stop my little girl from trying too hard for men? How can I show her that the best thing she can ever do is be herself, full of rough edges and the complex logic that is her own?
‘Don’t trip!’ I call to her as she takes off like a gazelle, running to her father’s open arms. Don’t risk yourself. Don’t forget how priceless you are, just as you are. ‘Don’t run too fast!’ I say.
But she doesn’t hear me, cannot hear me. Stephen is standing with his arms outstretched, his knees bent, his raincoat trailing on the grass. He is promising her his whole person, every inch of him, right down to his shoes. She cannot turn her attention now from him. And this, I’m afraid, I understand all too well.
Daniel Isn't Talking Page 16
