Ralph’s Children (7 page)
Authors: Hilary Norman
They loved Sam at Rudolf Mann House, and Sam was easy to love; a sweet-natured boy with considerable learning difficulties but with little tendency towards tantrums. Compliant for the most part,
like his mother, who worked now, when bidden, at his grandparents’ stables (not that Sam knew who his grandparents were), who painted more or less to order, seldom for pleasure, unless it was
a gift for Sam.
Laurie knew by now, had known for a long time, that her parents had lied, that of course Sam could have come to live with them, the way thousands of children with Down’s syndrome were
taken care of by their families even if it was harder teaching them simple skills, even if their lives could be a battle. But all the fight had gone out of Laurie long ago, and she supposed they
probably thought of her with contempt at the home – she knew that one of them did, at least; a woman who had come out to speak to her one Saturday afternoon when she was bringing her son back
after their day together.
‘You mustn’t worry,’ she had told Laurie. ‘He never frets after you’ve left him.’
Bitch
, Laurie had thought, though she knew she ought to be glad, because she never wanted Sam to be unhappy for a second, and this woman – who had to be extra worthy because she
had a disability herself, which meant that she’d not only overcome, but was giving of herself to God knew
how
many children, while Laurie, who had nothing wrong with her,
couldn’t manage to give her own son more than one day a fortnight – was surely right to think badly of her.
Bitch.
Laurie supposed her fight would come back if someone were ever to want to hurt Sam in any way. But that was never going to happen so long as he lived in his safe haven.
Safe and sound near the hamlet of Barford St John, southwest of Banbury. Far enough away from his mother’s home to be virtually sure that no one from
their
world would ever spot
Laurie coming to call at Rudolf Mann House, let alone identify Sam as anything to do with the Moon family.
Laurie didn’t hate them any more.
Just herself.
‘At least,’ Shelly had said to her when Sam was about five and Laurie was showing her a photograph of his smiling face, ‘you’ll always know you’ve done right by
him.’
The photographs Laurie used to give her parents were never displayed in frames like Andrew and Sara’s children’s photos. Sam’s pictures always disappeared, and Laurie had once
decided that her parents either cut them up or burned them in case someone went through their rubbish.
She had stopped giving them his photos a long time ago.
That was not important.
They
were not really important any more. Except that they paid Sam’s bills because she could not, because she had not listened to them when they wanted her
to become a lawyer or doctor, which meant that the time would never come when she could begin to take on what they did for her son.
But Sam was alive and well, and Laurie was able to see him once a fortnight.
That had been laid down in the ground rules made after Provence, along with the law of ‘absolute secrecy’. They had negotiated a little, had suggested at first that Laurie see Sam
only once monthly, but with what was left of her will she had dug in her heels, and they had given way.
After that it was take it or leave it. So she took it.
She was pleased with the picture she’d completed in time for her next visit. She couldn’t wait to see the look on Sam’s face when he realized it was the memory of their day out
at the funfair in Banbury. Couldn’t wait for one of his wonderful hugs.
‘They’re so loving,’ people often said about children with Down’s syndrome. Most of them knowing so very little about the realities of their everyday problems.
Just like Laurie.
I
n the beginning, the group’s pretend games were always set in their imaginary, greatly restricted version of Golding’s wild, fictitious
island, the two boys and two girls continuing to swap characters till they felt they had the right fit. When that much had become clear to them – who was playing who – they’d
junked the rest of the characters and plot, but each of them had held tight to their own role as if they really needed it, almost in the way that younger children sometimes needed battered stuffed
bears or a night light.
I find it remarkable
– Ralph had written in the private journal in which she’d begun to set down her observations on the children and their metamorphoses –
how
snugly their characters do seem to fit them. And where they didn’t exactly fit, the manner in which they’ve adapted to their new alternative selves.
Easy enough to see why they needed imaginary identities, since anything was likely to be happier than their own, real lives, and though Ralph had not been officially privy to their files, she
had found opportunities to read them.
Sad stories. Their collective pasts even worse than their present.
Since beginning her friendship with the children, she had found herself wishing for the first time in her life that she had persisted with her studies, perhaps become a psychologist, a person
really up to
helping
these extraordinary children.
Though if she had, of course, she would probably not have come to Challow Hall at the right time. Would not have been able to follow their lights and find them.
She began to write her journal in a manner she felt a trained psychologist might; told herself this was a kind of personal further education, that she was conducting a sociological exercise. She
tried to analyse her motives in befriending the children, and concluded that there was nothing at all reprehensible in it. She simply wanted to be their friend; wanted to be among them and playing
their games, partly because it was the most fun she had ever known, but mostly because she hoped she might be the kind of person they needed on their side. An adult as much on their wavelength as
it was possible to be.
From the beginning of her notes, she used their adopted names for anonymity’s sake, in case anyone else found the journal; but as time passed, she realized she had actually begun to think
of them by those names, found it interesting how little the gender of the names mattered – girls renaming themselves Roger and Simon.
Even beginning to think of herself as Ralph.
‘JACK’. Our boy, with his red hair; sharp green eyes and straight, too grim mouth, unlucky from the off, dumped as a newborn in a Bristol shopping
centre car park without so much as a note from his presumably desperate mother. In care from the start. No adoption for Jack, just a string of foster homes, his behavioural problems
reportedly ending each attempt. Deep abiding anger described by families and social workers, along with an inability to love or be loved.
Supposed
inability. I am not convinced
about that.
‘SIMON’. Our girl is soft and fair, but they say she’s prey to depression. Her early history was dire, even pre-birth. Her teenage mum, terrified
that her own violent parents would find out if she sought abortion, punched herself repeatedly in the hope that she might kill her foetus. But it survived – Simon survived –
born with internal injuries, needing surgery, after which her wretched mother committed suicide and left a note of confession. Simon’s scars are invisible, but her inheritance weighs
upon her. She fears, according to Dr Lindo, that she may be a wicked person.
‘PIG’. When our boy was three, his parents were jailed for child cruelty and his baby sister adopted, but he was placed into care. Described as
generally placid, with periodic flashes of temper, always followed by acute shame. If there is blame to be apportioned, Pig usually takes it on himself. He’s
rake-thin,
freckled, not special looking perhaps, but certainly not unattractive. He has a kind heart.
‘ROGER’. She came into the care system aged seven, while single mum was having chemo and unable to cope with her two kids. Her half-brother went to live
with his dad, but there was no one to take Roger. Her mum was afraid a foster family might give her more than she could match when she recovered, so Roger came to Challow Hall. According to
her file, Roger showed no emotion when told her mother had died, though another note refers to ‘a display of apparent grief’ at the funeral home – as if this was
disbelieved. It’s true to say that our Roger is a fine actress.
Over time, as Ralph had observed and participated in their evolving games, she had come to understand more about the bond that had formed between the four even before
role-playing had reinforced their mutual trust and interdependence. Much of what they had in common, they shared with many children at Challow Hall and other homes; kids who nurtured feelings of
intense bitterness against authority figures, do-gooders and parents who had, for whatever reasons, caused them to be placed in care. Ralph wrote:
These four, however, all appear to have particularly powerful feelings either for or against
mothers.
Whether their own, or foster mums, or bad mothers in
general, or beloved lost mums. Fathers, it seems, don’t really count in their experience; their own either weren’t there to begin with, or pissed off, or got sent down –
and face it, no one expects much of dads, but mums are meant to be different. Better.
And two years later, by which time they were all inextricably bound together, she had added to her theme:
They have developed strong feelings about the ‘glory’ of motherhood or, conversely, the Philip Larkin approach: ‘They fuck you up . .
.’
Ralph never wrote a word about her own parents. About her father.
Still shut away, closed off, that part of her life.
Better things – at last – to occupy her now.
Their games always revolved around ‘the Beast’.
They were children, after all, taking the parts of other children in an adventure setting, with a beast that had to be slain if they were to survive. The kind of metaphor commonly employed by
children in pretend games all over the world. Yet these children had swiftly developed a more sophisticated slant to their games, nominating actual people whom they disliked as Beast.
A certain harshness in their play even then.
Innocent, though, at heart –
Ralph wrote.
‘Shirley’s the Beast today,’ Jack nominated one week.
Meaning Matt Shirley, a kid who had brought him down in a football game the previous day.
They didn’t attack the
real
Shirley in their game, because Ralph discouraged violence. Pig was chosen by Jack to play the part of Shirley, and that was the way the games all went;
each one in turn chose a Beast and which member of the group was to act him or her.
Harmless back then, but undoubtedly complex and unusual. A springboard to mental and physical freedom, as Ralph saw it, enabling, even empowering them and increasing her urge to protect what she
saw as a healthy outlet for their fantasies.
She was well aware, in those early days, that they had tolerated her because they felt they had little choice, yet still she felt honoured that they had let her stay amongst them, on the outer
edges of their play – though it had always, if she was truthful, been more intense than child’s play.
She had been, at the time, thirty and alone. No siblings, her mother long dead of an embolism, her father remarried and vanished from her life, wholly indifferent to her by then. Her own flawed
psychology buried deep along with her past sufferings, leaving her, she felt, as a blank canvas on which these children –
her
children, as she had begun to think of them –
could paint with personal creativity, gradually bringing her, as Ralph, to life alongside them.
A secret life, of course. One which would, had it been discovered, have brought her dismissal, perhaps worse. But the fact was, she had felt truly alive and filled with potential for the first
time in her own sad existence, and nothing could have made her want to give that up.
There seemed a purity about it all then which she had no idea would change.
She never expected to lose herself in her new identity as their leader.
Chief.
Never expected to guide them into the mire, to taint their souls, ruin their lives.
Not to mention her own.
C
aisleán – Gaelic for castle, so Rob had told her when he’d chosen the name for their converted barn – was less than an
hour’s drive from home but small and isolated enough for tranquillity.
All Kate had wanted, on leaving her father and Delia’s place in Maidenhead, was to reach the retreat as rapidly as possible. But by the time she’d got back to the cottage to pack a
weekend bag and her laptop, it was after three; and then she’d had to go back to Reading to pick up some notes at the
News
– and luckily, Fireman was in his Friday afternoon
meeting, so there was little risk of an encounter, though she had mustered the common sense to shoot off a swift email telling him she was going to the barn to rewrite her Christmas column –
and Lord knew she needed a few brownie points after her awful tantrum.
After that, she’d stocked up at Waitrose in Church Street – more than enough ready meals and bread, cheese and wine for the weekend, plus some Belgian chocs and mince pies
and
cream – but by then it was ten past four, which was a pity because winter darkness meant she’d be deprived of the beauty of her journey – half the pleasure of going
up there – and also because if she was on her own, she preferred arriving at Caisleán in daylight, being settled and cosy, with a nice fire lit, before dusk fell on the Downs.
Leaving that message for Fireman meant – she reflected, leaving behind Reading’s built-up area and bright lights – that she was now committed to working for at least part of
the weekend, but she’d remembered to stick her new Anne Tyler in her bag, and a couple of classic DVDs, too, in case there was nothing that appealed to her on TV, and the Radio Berkshire
weekend forecast was colder, which suited Kate too, because there were few things she liked better than walking in the wind over the Downs before snuggling in front of the fireplace.
