Daniel Isn't Talking (19 page)

‘Oh my God! When does this insanity begin?' he says. He's clearly in agony. Behind his voice the whole of the Amazon jungle he lives with call out their inane, senseless chatter. Especially the one bird.
Life is sweet
rings loud and clear across three thousand miles.

‘Tomorrow, at noon. There will first be a moment of silence for all people shot by guns over the whole of world history. And then, an end to the metaphors.'

Daniel is naked from the waist down, his slim legs like two drinking straws, his knees splayed out as he sits on the chequered tiles of the bathroom floor. We have brought in the Duplo bricks, hundreds of colours that make a pleasing sound like seashells if you roll them together, and
which fall clattering to the hard floor when we tip a tall tower. The base must be wide, so we form a square of bricks across the green Duplo board, its grid of convex circles perfectly in line.

‘You watch his willy, I'll do the tower,' says Andy. He squats on the floor in his dirty trainers, no socks, his jeans the colour of the sky on a cloudy day. He's missing a rear pocket, a fact I noticed when he came through the door this morning, looking at him the way I do now, studying his anatomy as a careful student might. I am aware, as a lover might be, of the curling hair along his ankles, thickening as it disappears inside the dark folds of his jeans, the ruby birthmark the size of a thumbprint that begins at the hairline on the back of his neck, the white scar above his right eyebrow, where he has pierced it, then let it heal.

We are teaching Daniel to use a toilet. There is no hope of regular nursery school for him unless he abandons the nappies.

‘When you see it rise just a little bit, then get him to the toilet,' he says. ‘And be prepared that he might scream.'

Daniel looks at me, then at Andy. ‘Nappy,' he says,

‘Toilet,' says Andy.

On the ledge at the head of the bath we are armed with chocolate drops and orange juice – both of which are particularly coveted treats. Daniel has been taught using this reward method for so long that he knows the prize reliably arrives with his best effort. He thinks he is meant to make a tall tower, and so focuses all his energy on creating what he thinks we want, a colourful tower as tall as his arms will reach.

‘I want juice,' he says.

‘Nice try,' says Andy. He looks at the juice, indicates with his finger. ‘Can I have some juice please?'

Daniel watches him, considering this example, but turns to me instead. ‘I want juice,' he says.

Andy makes it more obvious. More dramatic. With one hand on his hip, the other stretched out, pointing to the glass, he issues his demand. ‘Mummy, can I have some juice please!'

Daniel points. ‘Mummy, can I have some juice please!'

He gets his juice right away, and a nugget of chocolate, too, for trying so hard.

‘Here it comes!' I say.

‘Toilet!' cries Andy.

‘Nappy!' screams Daniel.

I scoop Daniel up and sit him on the toilet, where he yells at me, grabbing bits of my hair and pulling, kicking so that I have to duck.

‘Stop laughing,' I tell Andy.

He smiles, shakes his head. ‘You might like a new shirt,' he tells me. Daniel has peed all down my front.

In the kitchen I peel off my shirt and drop it on the floor in front of the washing machine, then move toward the back door to take a dry one from the line in the garden. I'm thinking so much about whether Daniel will ever give up the nappies that I hardly notice I walk through the house in nothing but shorts and a bra. But Veena notices. She and Emily are playing hospital. Emily is the doctor, of course. And poor Veena, the victim, must lie on the table while Emily examines her for heart failure, a plastic stethoscope angled across her sternum.

‘You're no longer a skeleton,' says Veena, glancing at my shape. ‘You are no longer one of the walking wounded.'

Back in the bathroom we are setting up a garage full
of cars. There are a half-dozen all in their places, but this one, the fire engine, will be the focus of our game. From his pocket Andy produces a votive candle. His lighter, a plastic Bic the colour of Scotch, is fascinating to Daniel, who tips it and puts his eye to the lighter fluid within, as one might stare into a microscope.

‘Nineteen, eighteen, seven,' Daniel says.

Andy takes the lighter, flips it in his hand, stares across its shiny surface which is hard, enticing, reminding me of a boiled sweet. ‘So you're right, you are,' he tells Daniel.

On the bottom of the lighter, in lettering no larger than a midge fly, are these five numbers which Daniel can read.

Rolling his thumb, Andy scares a flame onto the head of the lighter; places the wick of the candle to the fire, and says, ‘FIRE! FIRE! Get the engine!'

And now Daniel rolls the fire engine down the long stretch of the car park's track, making a sound like an engine, heading for the candle which threatens a purple Mini, Daniel's favourite vehicle because purple is his favourite colour. When the fire engine reaches the car he puffs his cheeks and blows the flame.

‘Yeah!' we cheer, clapping. Daniel rolls back into a sitting position, smiles at us. ‘I blow fire,' he says.

Three hours later we come downstairs. We've played cars, blown bubbles, had picnics with train engines, made Donald Duck play hide-and-seek with Pluto. Daniel has peed twice in the toilet and produced one rather hard poo. Once he realised what was at stake – chocolate – and what was never going to appear – his nappy – he found it less difficult to comply.

‘No more nappies,' says Andy, who was witness to it all. Who would think that a relationship could have started like this? With a child who seemed at times as feral as a
wolf boy, among intimacies as unappealing as toilet training? And yet here he is, his eyes full of tenderness for me, for my boy. He brought Emily a half-dozen pastel crayons this morning, wrapped in brown paper and string. For Daniel, his favourite orange juice, plus a ladybird that wiggles if you pull a cord. ‘I don't ever want another nappy on that child,' he says now.

‘Not even at night?' I ask.

‘No.'

Or when we are out shopping and there's no toilet nearby?'

‘No. He can pee on the street. I'd rather he did that.'

I say, ‘Yeah, well, other people might not like it.'

‘Other people,' he says, shaking his head. He has his rolling papers out. He extracts a sheet in a quick movement. He works the tobacco back and forth in his fingers then positions it in the crease and rolls it tenderly, securing the slim log of his cigarette with the fine edge of his tongue. ‘Other people don't have children with autism,' he says. ‘They are not entitled to an opinion.'

Veena and I are going through what used to be her home with the soldier, collecting her things. He isn't in the flat, of course. She never would have come if he'd been here; she even refuses to speak to him on the phone. With a suitcase and a duffel bag we go through the flat like thieves, taking back what is Veena's. She is very quiet during this time, as though we are stealing. She puts her glasses in her shirt pocket, her hair in a knot, pushes her sleeves up, gets down to work.

The flat is in a modern brick building with a stairway that echoes. The banisters are cold steel, painted yellow on one floor, orange on another. The doors are decorated with bright numbers just below the peephole, which is apparently standard in this building.

‘Ours was thirteen,' says Veena. ‘I should have known then.'

We leave the bags on the street beside the taxi driver, who chews gum and leans against his cab watching us. He doesn't offer to help bring the bags out or even to put them in the taxi. He looks bored, as though it is trouble
enough to wait for us. We come first with the clothes, then with the books. There are so many books we dig out some old Tesco bags from what was once Veena's kitchen and place the books inside them, bringing these to the kerb as well.

‘What is this, a house move?' says the driver impatiently. His eyes skim his watch. He spits his gum into the road.

Veena glances at him, scowling. ‘Have some money,' she says, holding out a bill.

Back in the flat we finish with the books, then go to the CD collection and take from it Veena's music. On a table by the phone is a small picture of the two of them together, Veena and the soldier. I put the picture in my bag, not letting Veena know that I have done so. She would only say she doesn't want it, but she may change her mind later. I will keep it for her, just in case.

When we are finished, the flat looks tidier, but empty. The soldier has papers and clothes and tamps and oddly matched chairs. He has a flat-screen television on a chrome-and-glass stand, a swanky CD player with thin towers for speakers.

‘I think we should take something of his,' I tell Veena. ‘Something valuable.'

Veena looks at the television, the stereo, telephone and fax machine. The computer, some hi-tech model with a swivelling screen.

‘There's nothing of value here,' she says.

It is one of those hazy late summer evenings in which the light stretches on and on. There has been no rain for many days and the air smells bitter, choking, with the sharpness of industry plugged into every breath. It is not warm,
however. Over my T-shirt I wear a flannel shirt, unbuttoned; jeans, a pair of socks.

Veena says she cannot study. Her mind has been taken over by the soldier, she says. Occupied, as though in war. So instead she discovers a programme on the radio to listen to and takes the radio to the children's bedroom, where she curls up next to my sleeping daughter, finding her a comfort as I have often found. Children and hot-water bottles, warm cocoa and radios. All these things make it possible to sleep when your mind is whirring. Even though she has her own clothes now, she prefers a nightgown I lent her. It is way too long, of course, trailing behind her like the train of a wedding gown.

Downstairs is Andy. He has fashioned a bed from greatcoats and sheets. He has arranged all the toys neatly along the walls, stolen a pillow from my bed, the extra duvet from the top of the closet. His jeans are so threadbare I think I hear them tearing even further at the knees as he moves over this nest he has made, which looks like a place you might give an animal to bed down and is not in the least bit appealing.

‘I am not proposing a thing,' he says, when I find him there. ‘Just want someplace more comfortable to sit with you other than those hard fockin' chairs you have. And I know you won't let me anywhere near your bed.'

‘Daniel is in my bed.'

‘Of course he is. And that's fine –' He pauses, lets out a breath. His crosses his jaw, smiling as he does so, shakes his head. He looks both perplexed and wrung out, but also a little amused. ‘Look, I've made no vows of celibacy. When I was younger I'd give a girl two chances. If she didn't kiss me the second time, she was out. I just moved on. And if she didn't sleep with me
within, say, a week or two, I moved on. Imagine what more of a prick I'd be if I were good-looking like your sodding husband.'

I can't quite picture him as anything but sweet, patient, earthy, himself When he says ‘prick' it comes out ‘preck', an accent I've come to adore. He's flustered, uncertain. I've never seen him quite like this. He's always so sure of himself, as though he's got the world in his pocket. ‘What are you asking for?' I say.

‘I'm wanting you to know I understand … the circumstances.'

‘You mean that I'm weird, don't you? You mean that I'm strange.'

Now he looks at me squarely, purses his lips in thought the way I've seen Jacob do countless times, speaking slowly, willing me to listen.

He says, ‘You're not strange, Melanie. You're an autism mum. I see them all the time. I saw you that first day we met, how you agonised over your boy, mute in his pushchair while all the other pre-schoolers made their clever observations about the world; I see how you worry now over his odd way of walking, the animal noises he will sometimes make instead of words. And I see how no amount of pain in the experience of caring for your son will put to death the fire of love you have for him. It wouldn't matter even if he
couldn't
talk – which he can, and will, I promise he'll speak beautifully. But if he always ignored you, pushed you out of the way, evaded your kisses, ran from your grasp, even so you would be his champion. Autism mums have in common with God this ability to love the unlovable. What the world sees as unlovable. Not that I agree with the world,' says Andy. ‘Nothing like that.'

Embarrassed, I turn away.

‘Melanie,' he says. He rises, comes toward me, touches my shoulder. Then, as though leading a blind lady, he brings me to the bed he's made on our floor, sits me down, kneels in front of me. He's such a slim man, about my height. I could wear his jeans, I realise. We could swap belts and shoes. As he kneels before me I can see the spidery lines his smile has etched at the corners of his eyes, the dark shadow of his beard stubble just barely visible against his pale, freckled skin. He is not as young as I always think he is. He is a man who has had love affairs and dreams, whose career has been fashioned out of the desire to help fix broken children and who lives, if I am to believe him, in a bedsit not much larger than the inside of a London cab, surrounded by walls of psychology books.

I realise all at once that I would like to see this room. To see his clothes in their drawers or boxes or wherever he keeps them, to see the intimate details of his life: his photographs, his notebooks, what he keeps on his shelves, in his wardrobe, near his bed. Apparently, he spends most of his day doing work for free. There is a father whose wife has died of a rare neurological disease, a kind of early Alzheimer's. This father spends what he has on a mediocre nanny and has nothing left for therapy for his daughter, who is five and autistic. An Asian mother whose husband insists she look after his two parents and produce another child for him, even though the third child has severe attention deficit disorder, is moody and belligerent, and when Andy met him, had no capacity for play. The fourth child, autistic, would only jump on the beds and play killer games on the PlayStation. He could speak but would not follow simple directions, and repeated aloud
the schedules for favourite First Great Western trains throughout the day.

Those who can, pay. Those who can't, receive Andy's charity. He makes it easy for them by insisting he is very rich. Nothing could be less true.

‘I tell them my dad has a horse farm in West Cork,' he explains to me. ‘I tell them that and they think I have money. But the situation is quite the opposite, though we do have a lot of horses.'

‘Where I come from, a horse farm would mean you were loaded,' I say.

‘Yeah, well. We've got a few things in Ireland. One of them is grass.'

We are stretched out on the makeshift bed. On his back, his hands behind his head, he tells me the horses are a big, thick, hairy sort with patches of black and brown, ‘Cobs, they are. With cloddy hooves and bushy tails. Solid as houses, and kind. When I was no older than your daughter, I'd lead around the baby foals, and my brothers would push me on to the two-year-olds, get them used to being ridden. He'd set them to plough, my father, even though of course he had a tractor; we weren't that primitive. If you don't give them work they get simple, he explained to me. Though, frankly, they seem simple to me anyway. He only did it so he could say they were trained to harness at the sales.'

I can imagine Andy in a blue-green field on a summer day, strolling barefoot across the wet grass, finding the poking nose of a spring foal pushing its way through the fence wire. Around him the laughter of his brothers and sisters, enough of them to make up a football side. I picture him on the way to a horse fair, sleeping in the back of his father's truck on feed bags and horse rugs. A
life of open air and peat fires. Why on earth would he choose these days to spend his time shut into bathrooms with children and their worried mothers, setting wooden tracks in the cramped living rooms of families in London?

Why? I ask him. I want to know.

He flips onto his side now, touches my cheek, my neck, moves his hand down the space between my breasts and lets it rest upon my stomach.

‘When I went to university we studied a man named Bettelheim who set up a school for autistic children in Chicago. He was presented as a hero, this man, like he knew something. I read what he had to say about autistic children, about their mothers, OK, mostly nobody believes him now, but –'

‘I know about Bettelheim,' I say.

‘My eldest brother, Liam, was autistic. Severe. My earliest memories of him are how he'd run through the house naked, bang his head against the fireplace mantel until his forehead went black and blue,' he says. ‘He had a helmet he was meant to wear, but he'd rip that off, make for the mantel.'

In my mind I see a boy not unlike Daniel, but taller, with long, rubbery legs that spring across the floor planks. Across his pale forehead lies a knot the size of your hand, bright red, pulsing beneath the skin like a second heart.

‘My mother is like a spring lamb, shyly trusting, obedient to the herd. When they told her to put him in a home she did so, because they said he would harm the other children, the seven of us, who'd learned to walk while dodging Liam. He was unpredictable in his movements, bouncing apelike across the furniture even in his teens. So that is what my mother did, because she was
told to do so. And my father allowed it, not knowing what else he could do.'

I picture Andy's father, hitching the heel of his Wellington into the bootjack and pulling. His hands are red, calloused, scarred across the joints. He looks through the house he has practically taken apart and put back together again from all the repairs he's made. Standing by the fireplace he thinks, with agony, about the boy who is missing from it now.

‘He died, my brother did. Epilepsy. He had a fit while coming down the stairs and he fell That was only a year or two after he went to this place to live, what they called a school but I can't think they taught him anything. My mother always wished she'd had him home. If he was going to die, she said, let him do it in his own house like a member of a family.'

I shake my head. I cover my eyes with my hands.

‘You know, it wasn't like I was so upset,' Andy says. ‘I was nine, ten. He seemed much older than me and was, anyway, not very communicative, as you can imagine. But my mother. She was never the same. Not seven of us could make up for the boy she lost. She was always sad. Happy for us when things went well, and she did her best always. But inside herself, deep inside, she was sad. You know what that's like, don't you? Don't you, darling?'

I nod. I turn so I lie on top of him, cover him, tuck my face into the crook of his neck and smell the salt on his skin.

‘Maybe you will come with me to see my parents one day, hey? They'd love the children, you know. They'd love you.'

In my mind I see again a picture of Andy's father. I have no reason to think he is wearing trousers the colour of
burlap, or that his wife has a long neck, a delicate face, creased and bony. But in my imagination there they are, just so. They are welcoming me into their house, welcoming my children. To them Daniel is a particular delight. They see him as a miracle, as Lazarus risen from the tomb, conjured by the hands of their son.

Andy kisses me. It seems incredible, given how much he knows of me, how many bizarre and intimate hours we have spent together, that this is our first kiss.

‘I won't ask to stay over tonight,' he says. ‘But one day, yes?'

I nod. I try not to think of how to present such a thing to the children, when to do it, whether or not I should tell Stephen. I try not to think of Stephen at all. I've made up this new defence regarding him. Whenever Stephen pops into my mind I say to myself, ‘He's gone.' That's all I allow myself to think.

He's gone, I tell myself now. Andy wraps his arms around me, kisses me beautifully, slowly, his hands on my waist.

He's gone. I push my arms over Andy's shoulders, my palms into the soft blanket of his hair.

He's gone. I am discovering somebody I was always meant to discover. He's waited for me, this gift, all of my life. If I allow myself, I can love him. And yet every move in that direction feels a little like I'm betraying my children.

‘It seems that lately it has become impossible to feel happy,' I say now to Andy. I am so disappointed in myself. My words sound like an apology, which I guess they are.