Daniel Isn't Talking (6 page)

In this numbed, surreal post-diagnosis state, I could think of no objection. Except to the pills. I fed the toilet with them, then filled the vial with aspirin.

Veena says, ‘I believe British imperialism to be a kind of genetic coding. Your daughter requests that I take her to India so she can ride an elephant like a royal person.' She shakes her head, smiles. She smells of orange tea and has her hair braided down her back in a single, weighty rope.

‘It's the Dumbo influence,' I tell her, ‘not the British.'

‘Same thing,' she says, tucking a lock of loose hair behind her ear.

‘No, Dum
bo
,' I say. ‘The elephant.'

‘Dumbo the elephant? What are you talking about? The child says she needs a palace.'

We give the children lunch and Veena sets about sucking the dust from the drapes with the long hose of the vacuum
cleaner. The whole of our downstairs is just one big room, so I follow her with her Hoover, keeping an eye on Daniel to see that he eats the food and doesn't just roll it between his fingers. Over the noise I try to explain to Veena that Daniel is autistic, and that he is going to get worse unless we do something, but we don't know what to do. Even as I say this it doesn't seem real to me. It's like being in one of those movies where they've discovered the world is going to end in ten days unless a solution is found. But there is no solution.

‘What a silly you are,' she says, aiming the hose. ‘Your boy is fine. It is only that he is a male and destined to grow up to be a male.'

‘No, no,
nooo
,' I say. ‘As bad as that sounds to you – you, in particular, Veena –
this
is actually very much worse.' I have a need to push the information at her, to press it into her and force her to take hold of it. It's a feeling that will not go away and that, I believe, will visit me often and with everyone, guaranteeing the end of many of my friendships. Whispering so that Emily and Daniel don't hear, I say, ‘He's autistic. That's what they've said. He will not grow up like a normal child. It is the worst thing that can possibly happen!'

She shakes her head. ‘Where I come from,' she says, ‘they burn women.'

‘Vee
na
,' I say, begging with my voice.

‘Eat something before you die,' she tells me.

But I cannot eat. I cannot sip the tea or even the water that Veena sets before me. It is a condition of my existence now that the simple, keep-alive activities of eating and drinking and sleeping are beyond me. I sit with my cheek against the wood of our dining table, my hands hanging down, my eyes half open, staring.

Veena watches me for a moment, then shuts off the Hoover and comes to me, taking my hand. What I notice right away is how dry and small her hand is in mine. And how her eyes are so deep a brown I have to search for the pupils. And how sad she looks. I realise now that this is my fault; that I have made her sad by telling her what has happened. She looks across the room at Daniel, at Emily, and I register at once that she is thinking how it is worse for them. With a single confirmed diagnosis their whole lives are different. And then I see something else in her face. An awareness. A resolve. She lets go of my fingers and sits up straight, then says to me steadily, ‘I am a philosophy student and an Indian woman. This makes me a very dark person in many ways. Each day I see around me a world falling about like a stumbling drunk. They hold prisoners of Muslims and say they are not racists. They let the white skinheads terrorise the blacks and say they are not racists. I have come to this country as an escape from my own, worse country, where people are still considered untouchables and where it is known that boys are kidnapped and castrated and made to live as eunuchs. I am sorry, dear Melanie, but you are a white woman living in a white paradise. This is not the worst thing that can happen.'

‘Untouchables?' I say.

‘Gandhi tried to rename them Children of God, but they call themselves the
Dalit
, which means depressed.'

‘Veena, I'm depressed.'

She nods. She has heavy glasses that slide down her boxy little nose. She breathes in deeply, then lets the breath go all at once. ‘I understand,' she says. ‘But right now he lives, and so do you.'

Strangely, Veena's words are a comfort to me.

Our house is tiny, fourteen feet wide, two levels. It used to be the garage to a very grand house next door. It has a small garden stocked with ornamental roses and tons of lavender. In the summer the bumblebees, big as mothballs, hum outside the window. I love that the plaster is smooth and cool even in August. That in the winter, when you wake up, the air smells like frost and it smells like coal. To me, our house seems palatial, a miracle in the middle of this dense city. When we first moved here, shortly after Daniel was born, I used to lie in bed with the two children and look outside the windows, where the float glass is different in each of the panes so that the tree branches don't appear to align correctly, watching as the sun fired the sky with colour. Stephen got dressed for work and we spoke in hushed tones so as not to wake the children. I liked to watch him get dressed. He's tall, with enormous presence. Barrel- chested, big wrists, broad hands, thick neck. I looked at our perfect babies, sleeping one on either side of me, and my handsome husband and I thought nobody has ever
been so lucky as me. No one has ever been so content with what she has.

But I didn't know what I had. You see, Daniel seemed completely normal. You might think that a baby with autism gives you some warning so you won't love him quite as much as you do your normal child. Maybe he doesn't cling to you or hold his arms round your neck, or laugh when you give him piggyback rides or reach for the swing seat. But he did all those things. I was Daniel's trampoline and his hammock; he made my hip bone his seat and opened my heart with his laughter. There are hundreds of pictures of Daniel sliding down a slide at the playground, stomping puddles with his new wellies, riding his toy train, putting on the eyeglasses for Mr Potato Head and dancing. The change is gradual; the symptoms devious in the way they come and go. You don't love him any less because he doesn't speak to you. Or when he cannot seem to get the hang of the new garage and all the shiny new cars you buy him, or has no interest in the games you try to play. When he won't let you touch his head, let alone wash his hair, or when he cries almost all day and you have no idea why. You don't love him any less – you just think you are failing.

Stephen will not talk to me at all about him. He goes to work early, comes home late, retreats into his laptop and is unavailable for comment.

‘This, what you are doing here, is not helpful,' I tell him. I am lying face down on the couch while he sits at the other end, poking his keyboard, answering emails.

After a very long while he says, ‘If you knew there was something wrong, why didn't you get help?'

‘So it's
my
fault?'

‘I asked why you didn't get a doctor. Sooner Obviously, you
knew
.'

And now I wish he'd go back to not speaking to me. Email somebody in Hong Kong or
whateverthefuck
he does.

When I wake in the morning there are a few seconds' reprieve before a sense of doom and anguish alerts me again to my son and my predicament. It would appear that he is to fail to attain any of the normal milestones of childhood growth, will likely become more remote and wilful, possibly even dangerous to himself and to others. To Emily? Yes, possibly. I have been told that for the sake of the siblings one must sometimes find alternative accommodation for the autistic one – but not to worry, that would be many years from now. Not to worry? Not to
worry
? As for right now, I am to accept as fact that he will need special education in a school designed for children who cannot learn like other children. There is apparently nothing I can do but gently escort him through his childhood until one or another institution or, if we are lucky, sheltered community assumes his care as an adult. The unfortunate truth of autism is that it cannot be cured, or even effectively mitigated, and that the condition is a genetic mistake for which we will for ever pay the consequences.

‘Stephen, please, don't go to work today. Stay here with us. Please,' I beg him now. What day is it? Tuesday, I think. All my concerns tumble around my mind like clothes in a dryer. I toss one up, then another, the next, and so on. I tell him this. I tell him that the day seems inordinately long and that I cannot see how to navigate it, that I am lost.

Stephen understands, pats my arm, nods his head. But he does not stay.

Stephen's uncle Raymond, that dear man, rings to tell me not to regret giving Daniel the MMR. His voice is loud in the receiver; he speaks as one who has endured early efforts at telephonic communication, who has shouted into tortoiseshell receivers fixed on wall phones, gone through operators in order to place calls. Now he tells me that in his time he has seen children die of measles; they died in droves when he was a boy. Temperatures of a hundred and six, their brains burned inside their skulls. I mustn't regret a thing.

‘Please come and see us,' I say to him. Raymond lives on the other side of London. He owns the same house in which he grew up and that he shared with his mother until her death some thirty years ago. He has taken me round the upstairs to show me the scars in the ceiling where a bomb came through the roof during the war. He has stood me by the window and pointed to the areas, now dense with houses, where once there was nothing but craters and buildings in ruins. He's seen things he will not tell me about, the experiences of being a soldier. ‘I would not wish my memories upon you,' he once said, then asked me if I could find a use for the cake pan his mother used to bake birthday cakes for him and his brother when they were children. Whether, too, I might like some of his mother's damask linen.

‘I will come,' he says now. ‘But meanwhile, you mustn't blame yourself.'

‘I don't,' I tell him, a lie. I am fast becoming a good liar, which I discover is a means of camouflage for the protection of others, those who have not been conscripted
into this battle with autism, those who have normal children, for example. Or those like Raymond, whom I feel I am discovering now as one discovers an ancient and magical place. I would like to curl up on his mother's window seat, admire the large oak tree he planted as a boy, talk to him about the way London has changed in his lifetime, consult the past, disregard the future. Where is that cake pan? I will bake a Victorian sponge, slather it with cream, talk about decoding machines and doodlebugs, battles fought on foreign beaches, places I have visited only in history books, anywhere far away.

‘These things happen,' says Raymond. ‘Nobody knows why.'

Speculation abounds, however. I thought only hippies didn't vaccinate their children. And I remember the day I held Daniel's chubby thigh as the nurse readied the syringe.

The headmaster of the prep school thinks Emily is a delight and is very happy to offer her a place in pre-prep starting the autumn term. He is ultra-blond with a long, effete forehead and a thin, sculpted nose. His face has a dapper, ruddy complexion as though he spends most of his free time sailing, which I guess he does. He sits at a large oak desk surrounded by prints of famous sailing ships, the sort you might find hoisted on a dry dock and visited by tourists. All along a bookshelf are bottles containing models of such ships. I regard them as one might a taxidermy collection, which the headmaster notices.

‘My hobby,' he says, rather grandly. Cartwell is his name. He has a big brass plate on his desk engraved in swirling, girlish letters so that everyone knows.

‘You do these
yourself
?' I am amazed he will admit to such a thing. There's something distinctly creepy about this man. My mind drifts to thoughts of strange potions in backrooms or remains under floorboards.

Cartwell nods, making a little movement with his hand as though he doesn't want to boast too much about it. We are invited to sit down in two captain's chairs at the side of his enormous desk. Turning to Emily's file, he says, ‘She's an unusually articulate girl, isn't she?' He reels off her test results as though reading a sales report. I notice his peculiar habit of continually rearranging the objects on his desk as he speaks. In the last few minutes, for example, he has moved a paperweight from the lower left corner to the upper right corner, lined up his pencils, wiped the surface of his blotting paper with the back of his hand, stacked a group of Post-it notes and ordered a number of business cards. All I can think, as he outlines for us the results of the diagnostic tests they gave Emily, is how these habits seem somewhat obsessive and unnatural. Also, that I am quite sure he buffs his fingernails.

I say, ‘Have you looked at Emily's drawings?'

Amid many test reports on Cartwell's desk are dozens of Emily's cartoons: Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Pluto, plus several pictures of Dumbo flying through the air. I brought the drawings to show the school because I believe they illustrate something of Emily's personality, her interests, what makes her who she is. I think she's a genius, but Mr Cartwell only frowns at the images. ‘Yes, er, they are very nice,' he says as though staring at a pungent mound of disastrous ethnic cuisine he has no intention of ever tasting. ‘Would you like them back?' he asks now, handing them over.

I am about to launch into a discussion about how
important art is to Emily when Stephen takes his shoe and puts it on top of my boot in a secret communication that means Don't Say Anything. Stephen does not often try to control me in conversation, although he does have an uncanny way of subduing my opinions. But this gesture at this particular time is a mistake on his part. I am not in the mood for it. There's something about the way Cartwell keeps assuring us that Emily won't be held back by children with ‘problems' because the school carefully screens such children out that has me on edge. Plus all the rearranging of knick-knacks on his desk. I keep thinking that Cartwell himself clearly has problems. His face is grim, serious, as though explaining a procedure for qualifying neurosurgeons rather than talking about children. He keeps clearing his throat in rapid grunts that sound like someone imitating gunfire. Stephen's foot on mine presses in an annoying manner and it feels to me to be exactly the sort of obstacle that requires swatting away. So while Cartwell goes on about his wonderful school and the screening procedure that makes it so, I take my umbrella, the old-fashioned sort with a long, pointed steel end, and knock it firmly into Stephen's Achilles tendon.

Stephen's face barely registers the assault on his ankle. In a different mood I could not only admire but actually be mildly attracted to him for being able to endure so much physical pain without allowing it to show on his face. The problem – for him – is that he cares very much how we come across. He can't actually move away, nor can he tell me to stop attacking him with the umbrella – unless he wants to look really weird.

‘You have nothing to worry about with Emily – she
will fly through,' says Cartwell, as the drama of the umbrella continues under the table.

Stephen glances briefly at me as though to say, I Mean Business. This annoys me so much that I remind him of the umbrella by rapping his shoe with its steel point. ‘Even at the pre-prep level we do not accept children with any special needs or behavioural problems,' says Cartwell as Stephen kicks with some force to fend off a blow to his ankle.

The sound of this causes Cartwell to pause.

‘Did you hear something?' he asks.

‘Like what?' I say. ‘Like a man kicking an umbrella?'

Now Stephen is even more irritated. He knocks my boot with the edge of his shoe while Cartwell continues his speech about the quality of his school's pupils. I land the umbrella once more against Stephen who, with amazing self-control, gives no sign whatsoever that he has just had a rather serious knock on his ankle bone. I watch him nod, agreeing with the sage counsel of Cartwell, who explains that children with problems are to be avoided, of course. That is what we are buying. One of the things we are buying.

‘You've indicated you have another child,' says Cartwell now. ‘Daniel is his name? How old is Daniel?'

‘He's three,' says Stephen.

‘Marvellous,' says Cartwell. ‘He'll be ready to join his sister here shortly, then.'

I'm about to explain that Daniel is exactly the sort of child who is apparently wholly unwelcome by his school when Stephen, risking serious injury, puts his foot back on mine again. I turn my head to him, catch his eye, and then get him so hard across the shin that he has a sudden intake of breath.

‘I'm sure I heard something,' says Cartwell. ‘Did you hear anything?'

‘I thought so too,' I say. ‘Almost like the sound of bone cracking.'

Cartwell begins an unsteady laugh, then looks uneasy. Then he arranges Emily's file so that the edges of the test results line up perfectly, glances back and forth at Stephen and myself.

‘Perhaps we had better let you go,' says Stephen, rising.

All the way out of the school Cartwell and Stephen compare notes about their own prep-school days, chuckling about the way things have changed. I see that the deal has been clinched. I trail behind them as we are led out of the school building. Inside, I feel myself shrieking objections to everything associated with this pompous and, it must be said, really very strange headmaster. I'm thinking, how can we send our daughter to a school in which the headteacher puts boats in bottles? And makes promises that he will shield children from having to have contact with any child like my own son? But I can see I will lose this one. Stephen shows only a slight limp and he's determined – oh yes – that Emily will go to this school.

The autistic teenage son of a man in Buckinghamshire bit through his father's thumb. I read it in the newspaper on the way back from the interview with Cartwell. They had to find the thumb and sew it back on. Meanwhile, the boy ran out of the house.