Daniel Isn't Talking (7 page)

So who found the boy?

In America a young autistic man went into the bank and yelled, ‘Stick 'em up!', his finger pointing like a gun. He was shot during his arrest, because he wouldn't put down his weapon.

In court, the parents have been told that it is nobody's fault. Nobody is to blame. Their son was shot for having a finger gun and the parents have been told ‘these things happen'.

Stephen's voice on the message tape says, ‘Look, Mel, I'm sorry …'

But when I pick up the phone he says, ‘I just didn't want you to blow it for Emily –'

‘Not sorry then,' I say, and hang up.

Later he calls and says, ‘But
you
hit
me
!'

‘Still not sorry,' I say, and down the phone goes.

But that night I am tearful, upset, not wanting a fight. I sit on the doorstep with Daniel, who has a thing about the iron railing in front of our house. He scans it with his eye, drops down as though doing a deep knee bend and then pops back up all at once like a jack-in-the-box. You might not think that's so bad, except he's been doing it for an hour now. Judging by the enthusiasm he still shows for the pattern of parallel lines that make up the railing, he'll be at it for another hour if I let him. I've been sitting here thinking that maybe Emily needs some doors open to her. That if the pre-prep is a place that will do that for her, then maybe that's a good thing. Maybe she should go. This thought disturbs me, depresses me. But so does the thought of Emily stuck in a house with nobody but her mother and her autistic brother.

Down the road I see Stephen. He's talking on his mobile, balancing his case, walking in long, determined strides. When he sees me on the step he stops, stares at me.

‘What are you doing sitting there?' he says.

‘I'm sorry about the umbrella attack,' I tell him.

He shakes his head.

I tell him, ‘I'm sorry about everything.'

Almost midnight and I still cannot sleep. The alarm clock glows. The refrigerator hums; the muddied sound of distant cars rumbles in the air. I am alert to everything, to the gentle rising of Daniel's chest, the warmth of his breath upon my cheek. I watch him steep and I have only one wish for him. A wish that should never need be: that he was normal. Just normal. Just an average child. Not a superstar, not a genius, just a kid.

I watch the sweep of the clock's second hand, hear the distant chime of bells. Even though he cannot hear me, I find myself speaking to him. ‘Here comes tomorrow,' I say.

My shrink has brand new trainers, bright yellow, like two giant bananas tied to his feet. His dark tracksuit is in contrast to the trainers, which are distracting and odd. He has come to our house because I called him just before he went to the gym and I could not speak, not even to tell him my name. I just held the phone to my ear and listened to him say ‘hello, hello' over and over again, and could not bring myself to interrupt his day, his scheduled appointments, his tidy life. The way he figured out it was me was by comparing the number on his caller ID screen with his patient list. Then he put down the phone, got into his car and drove to my house.

Now he sits on the couch and looks at me as I rock on the floor. Veena has taken the children to the park and I feel guilty I am not with them.

‘I can't even do
that
!' I sob.

‘Right now, this minute, at 3 p.m. on this Wednesday,' says Jacob, ‘no, you cannot.'

‘Why am I so useless?'

‘You are not useless. You are in shock. Frankly, I am in shock. I had no idea what was wrong with your son. Melanie, please, I have to say this. I am so sorry.'

What I want him to say is that he disagrees with the diagnosis. He saw Daniel on his way out the door with Veena, walking on his toes, looking at the wall, being strung along by Veena, whose hand held his wrist. But Jacob doesn't say he disagrees with the diagnosis. Nothing like it.

‘Tell me why you are not disagreeing with the diagnosis,' I say. He says nothing. I wait for him to speak and he doesn't. ‘Tell me!' I say, but all he does is shake his head.

Then I say, ‘Then explain what you thought was wrong with me before you found out what was really happening. With Daniel, I mean.' It is not too late to join the children at the playground. Except I still can't seem to get off the floor.

‘Anxiety disorder. I suspected perhaps marriage problems,' says Jacob.

‘Oh my God, my marriage!' This sends me into a new episode of unretractable tears. We wait through that, both he and I. I have a sore muscle just below my ribs from all the crying, and I've broken some blood vessels just beneath the surface of skin on my cheek. I saw them in my reflection when I went to pee: a blotchy patch of tiny red dots. Who knew you could cry that hard?

‘What
is
wrong with me then?' I ask Jacob. ‘Now that we've gotten the initial impressions out of the way.'

‘You are grieving,' he says. ‘You are experiencing a very serious loss.'

‘But Daniel's not dead,' I say, remembering Veena's words.

‘The boy you thought he might be is lost, however,' says Jacob.

‘You call yourself a
shrink
!' I say, sobbing out of control now. I pick up Duplo bricks and a coffee mug, hurling them across the room. The mug ricochets off the fireplace surround and I'm so mad at it for breaking that I throw a book, a tub of crayons and, finally, my eyeglasses. Luckily, the eyeglasses don't break, so I stop throwing things. I sit still and don't breathe. This is on purpose. I sit with my head on my knees and I don't let in a single breath. I am drowning, I think. But Jacob won't let me drown.

‘Melanie,' he begins.

Later, still sitting on the floor, my head inches from Jacob's silly banana shoes, I whisper, ‘Jacob, what happens if Daniel dies?' I say that several times in a row, and without a pause between the questions. Even to me, I sound weird.

‘He won't die. He's going to live, and so are you.'

‘But I want to die. But I can't die. Because if I die who will help him? Jacob, please listen to me. Please, don't go away or look at your watch –'

‘I didn't look at my watch –'

‘Just in case you were going to look at it, don't look. At the watch, I mean. Jacob, I have to describe this to you. You know how when you have a baby, a little child, you think how if you die that the child will be broken- hearted? I mean, this is a tiny soul who cannot stand to be away from you for more than an hour and who, if he should fall, needs you to hold him and
only
you?'

Jacob nods, although I doubt he ever thought about such a thing as dying when his children were young. Anyway, his children are grown up now. And I have a
feeling that nobody other than me imagines such events. It is because I have watched such great, unthinkable things. My mother died in pieces – it seemed to me they were always carving more from her body. My lover, my best friend, hit the asphalt of a Massachusetts highway at sixty miles an hour one morning because someone in a four-by-four didn't bother to look.

I say, ‘OΚ, so you know if you die it's going to tear him up. So you cling to every shred of health you have and you take careful pains to ensure that you get through each day. If only on a subconscious level, you think you better not take any risks. Life insurance won't be enough. Savings accounts won't be enough. He needs
you
because
you
know how to tuck him into bed and which stories he likes and how long to hold open the book and where to take him on a Saturday morning. You love him and he loves you. No, it's more than that. He's part of you, like your arm or your face. He lays claim to you and counts you as his, as he might his own foot. But if you
should
die, you know that some day he will grow up anyway. He'll grow up and he'll drive a car and make love to his wife and have friends he laughs with, collect books or go to football games or whatever. You know that he won't stay that hurt, desperate, devoured child who is told his mum won't come back. Now, Jacob, let me tell you what happens to Daniel, to my baby. My baby who does not grow up because he's autistic. You see, when I die, he is not grown up yet, is he? He is not driving a car or turning over in bed to hold his wife or being a man in a world full of men. He is still that tiny child who cannot understand why his mother isn't here any more. What happened to her? Who took her away? This is not a
possibility
that he will be
that broken-hearted boy, but an inevitable
fact
. Because I cannot live for ever.'

That's all I can get through. That's it. For an hour or more Jacob stays with me, however.

The first I ever heard of Bruno Bettelheim was in a sociology class at university. We were given his paper on how victims of Nazi concentration camps would sometimes come to emulate their captors, so that within the camps existed a kind of secondary Nazi force, Jews controlling Jews. Bettelheim spent some time describing how bits of the Nazi uniform were coveted by many prisoners, and how some were said even to march among their fellow prisoners hurling abuse and anti-Semitic remarks.

‘I don't think I believe this,' said Marcus. He was sitting on the edge of my bed wearing a pair of boxer shorts and waiting for the aloe vera gel to cool the sunburn he got riding his motorcycle with his shirt off. He kept making faces as he read, which may have been because his shoulders hurt so much or may have been because he thought Bettelheim was greatly exaggerating what he claimed to have witnessed in concentration camps. He kept shaking his head. ‘It just isn't true,' he said.

I didn't think much about Marcus's comment and probably would not even remember him saying it except that
since Daniel's diagnosis I have become feverishly interested in anything to do with autism. Bettelheim, it turns out, not only embroidered stories about the Jews in concentration camps, but was the famous inventor of the idea that childhood autism was caused by poor mothering. It is this second fabrication that grabs my attention.

So I find out a few things. I read some articles and discover that by 1939 Bettelheim was in America creating a whole new life for himself as an expert on autistic children. That would be OK, except there was no reason to believe he knew anything about autistic children. He falsely claimed to have received training as a psychoanalyst when all he did was receive some psychoanalysis himself. He said he'd published books on children with emotional difficulties and had been part of an organisation in Europe that studied such children, but there seemed to be no actual evidence for either of these claims. From what I have read, the only training Bettelheim had was a Ph.D. in philosophical aesthetics, which has to do with questions like,
What is art?

And yet he somehow convinced everyone he was an authority on autistic children. He set up a school outside Chicago that claimed to give specialised treatment for them. He denigrated the mothers of these children, declaring that they destroyed their children's personalities, that they were like SS guards in concentration camps, like witches, like infanticidal kings. How could anyone believe this? Had Daniel been born at a different time it would have been understood that I was to blame, that I had destroyed his psyche and dehumanised him, and that in his despair he became autistic. Bettelheim, who invented nearly all his credentials, would say that on a subconscious level I wanted Daniel dead – and he would be
believed. That the world should take notice of and even acclaim this charlatan who made his living by damning the mothers of unwell children, pressuring parents to relinquish their children to him on a residential basis, and then tricking everyone into thinking he could restore them through psychoanalysis, is a humanitarian crime. And yet, this is what happened. If we don't hold in our minds just how easily we were duped by Bettelheim and his ilk, it could happen again.

This is what I tell the doctors at this supposed centre of excellence for autistic children, when they ask me if I would like Daniel to enrol in their programme. This programme, it turns out, is based on the wrongly derived, scandalous notion that autism is a problem that requires psychoanalysis. They want to spend time guessing at what went wrong during a ‘critical moment' of Daniel's psychological and emotional development.

‘ALL moments of a child's life are critical,' I tell them, ‘Your stupid institution here is following the wrong road, one that was paved by an insane and morally criminal man.'

‘Excuse me, Mrs Marsh, I don't think you quite understand,' says a sandy-haired shrink – God, she's younger than I am. Into her hair she has braided a decorated cord of colours. She puts down her notes and gives me a beautiful smile. Must have just gotten the braces off.

‘Understand? I think I have given you a fairly thorough account, Miss,' I tell her. Doesn't she have homework to complete? An exam to study for? Some stubborn acne to medicate? I think,
why
is my son so low on the list of priorities that he gets treatment from her, who cannot have any real expertise as she is just about old enough to be a babysitter. Not that I want this ‘treatment', which isn't
‘treatment', which is only bullshit, in any case. Do they also believe the world is flat?

The junior shrink looks at her colleague, the real shrink. You can tell he is a real shrink because he is older with a hollow chest and soft, white hands as though he's never done a bit of work in his life. The real shrink says, ‘Mrs Marsh, we don't actually think it's your fault about your son.' He has a face like a shovel and a receding hairline revealing scalp moles and what might be a cancer up there. I'm more apt to believe what he says, if only because of the scalp moles. I would tell him so but he might take it the wrong way.

‘That's lovely that you don't blame me. So why psychoanalyse him? Let me ask you this, would you psychoanalyse him if he had something wrong with his heart or lungs or kidneys?' I offer a few additional comments about Bettelheim, their great genius who would claim that I had a secret wish my baby would die. As for charging the National Health Service a hundred pounds an hour to speculate uselessly on what might have caused a developmental crisis in Daniel, I say, ‘I think the taxpayers should know what you are doing here. Certainly, you're not
helping
. Why don't we use the money to find someone who can teach Daniel to
talk
? Surely, even
you
can see that being mute has disadvantages.'

‘We
do
help them to talk,' says the real shrink. ‘We help them to say the difficult things about the way they
feel
.'

‘Is that right?' I say. ‘The difficult things? Well, right now, little Daniel here who is coming up for three, cannot say Mama. In fact, he can't recognise his own name in conversation as far as I can tell. I think you might find yourself hard pressed to get him to express complex phobias.'

‘Mrs Marsh,' he says, ‘we are qualified –'

‘Qualified by
whom
? For
what
? That's my point. There are all these supposed experts around, but they don't seem to be able to do anything to help the person who needs help, which is Daniel. What's it mean to be an expert if you can't make anything better? I mean, what are you getting paid
for
?'

The doctors look at each other. Salt and Pepper, these two, standing beside each other like two dolls in their white coats.

‘I think we're done here,' I announce now, taking Daniel's hand.

But I can't always be so tough. I fall apart in the silliest places – playgrounds, supermarkets. I think the supermarket is the worst. The only way to get Daniel through what is (for most people) an ordinary shopping trip is to give him a heap of sweets to keep him still in the trolley seat. If he doesn't have the sweets he screams, undoes the flimsy seat belt, and tries to throw himself out apparently without any thought about the physical damage he'd suffer by doing so. He would succeed at throwing himself out, too, except I use my own belt, buckled snugly around his middle, to keep him in place. So when he tries to hurl himself over the rail he can't get very far, although he does scream and look completely weird if not the victim of some kind of parental abuse. Comments from me to the other shoppers (‘This is just to keep him from falling') only serve to make me look like a freak and exactly the sort of person who would make any child miserable enough to want to drop from a height onto his own head.

There is an alternative, of course. I can chase him
through the aisles as he speeds like a dervish, his hands reaching for whatever he might wish to investigate, to open, to eat, to smell. It means I won't actually accomplish any shopping, or at least not much, and I will probably find myself with a fair bill to pay for items hurled from shelves as Daniel makes room for his feet so that he can climb up to the really good stuff.

What I want is a third option, though I know this is just too ambitious, which is to let him have a
little
treat while seated in the trolley.
One
ice lolly, for example, or a
few
biscuits.

I cannot see this working.

Right now he is leaning toward the rows of chocolate biscuits, seeking with his nose the way a dog might, finding just the ones he wants and then pressing his face right against the packet, his eyes open, staring into the ballooned lettering, his lungs filling themselves with the smell of McVitie's chocolate digestives. He seems to get immense pleasure from this, a sensual delight greater than I can understand. Even Emily watches him, her expression one of fascination. I suppose, like me, she seeks to discover what delight Daniel finds from this activity of sniffing and staring. And now he takes the packet into his arms and holds it in much the same way a child holds a teddy bear. Then he grabs another packet and tucks it under the opposite arm, his hands turned inward and across his chest, his elbows fanning out as though they are wings.

I pick him up and place him into the trolley seat. He gives me no help whatsoever with this procedure. He won't bend his knees or look down to where he needs to place his legs. All his concentration is focused on the biscuit packets. I push his thighs gently through the seat. Emily
helps guide him in by pulling on his shoe until it comes off in her hands. Then she drops the shoe like it's a live toad so that I have to retrieve it from the floor.

And now comes my next choice. Do I let him have the whole packet of biscuits – and yes, I mean the entire packet as he is gnawing his way through one of them already – or do I bargain, try to get him to have just one or two of the biscuits?

Today, I am going to bargain.

I take an identical pack to the ones he is holding, thumb the red tab on the wrapper, lifting it gently, until part of a chocolate cookie is exposed. Because I am becoming attuned to the things that make Daniel unusual, set him apart, I notice the aroma of the cookies as he might, a mixture of flour and butter, sugar and chocolate. I inhale deeply and I have this strange feeling as though I've sucked all the flavour from the air leaving Daniel nothing for himself. But he doesn't appear unhappy about it. Every ounce of concentration is focused on the shiny surface of chocolate that coats the cookie, the crumbs that linger on the wrapper. ‘Say cookie,' I tell him.

Emily throws her hand over her face. ‘They're called
biscuits
, Mummy,' she says.

‘OΚ, fine.' Right, of course. They are called biscuits. How can I expect him to say ‘cookie'? How silly of me. I look at Daniel again. He is reaching for the biscuit, staring at my hand as though it is the grabber in one of those machines at amusement parks that pulls a random toy from a stack of others by means of a mechanical arm. He does not look at my face or appear to be estimating whether he can persuade me to relinquish the biscuit.

‘Biscuit,' I say. But he seems to pay no attention whatsoever to my words. I just want him to try, to make an
attempt, to give some sign that he wants to talk to me. But Daniel does nothing, says nothing. He reaches for the cookie and then kicks out because he cannot have it.

‘Biscuit,' I whisper. Oh, why can't he just try to say it? He strains against the seat belt in the trolley seat, leans over the bar. I take a step back and now he's furious, kicking his legs, pushing the handle of the trolley with both hands while rocking his body back and forth. He's crying so loudly that people are looking, which makes me a little panicky. I move the trolley along with one hand, holding the biscuit packet away with the other. One of the many bits of advice I read in parenting books when I was pregnant was that when a child is having a tantrum the best thing you can do is remove him from the scene. If you are outside, go indoors. If you are indoors, go outside. I can't remember the logic of why this works, though it certainly seemed to work for Emily when she used to tantrum. She was always so interested in the world that moving her to a new spot within it commanded her attention. But Daniel doesn't care that we've moved past biscuits and cakes, past sweets and crisps, and are now skirting the back of the store and turning toward the frozen-food section. His cheeks are red; his hair suddenly sweaty. There's a heat coming from him that is almost as noticeable as the tremendous noise he makes, his eyes tearing, his fists pounding the trolley in a way that really must hurt. It pains me. By the time we reach the frozen vegetables, I am nearly crying myself.

‘This is Tantrum Sindy,' says Emily.

‘Sindy?' I try to smile. ‘Where did you learn that name?'

‘Sindy dolls. I want one,' she says.

‘Of course,' I say absently. My mind is racing. I keep trying to placate Daniel, And I keep asking myself why I
try so hard. Isn't it enough that I get around the shop without staring at all the other boys Daniel's age, sitting in their seats or skipping along beside their mothers? Without watching them as they talk – pointing at the things they'd like to eat, asking questions about whether they can go to see the toys – envying them, sometimes dangerously close to crying out right there in public my own desperate desire to hear Daniel speak? Whenever Daniel produces even the most incomprehensible sound, I drink it in like someone who has crossed miles of desert with no water. I am desperate to hear him. I know what he'll sound like – if he ever decides to talk at all. He'll sound like all the other little boys I know. He'll have the same squeaky, high-pitched voice that I hear all around me. And yet I am desperate for this voice. I am pleading with him now to please stop crying.