Daniel Isn't Talking (16 page)

‘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 bob.'

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.

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.

Stephen told me on occasion all the little things he thought weren't quite right about me. I swore too much, wore the wrong kind of perfume and needed to do something to get my hair up off my face. When I protested that the
perfume was what he bought me, that my hair would never stay entirely off my face as it was two feet long and very fine, such that it slid out of a hair clip no matter what, he sighed. There was also the matter of my American clothes – those annoyed him. He didn't think leather should be any colour other than black or brown, so my lemon-yellow bag with lots of brass buckles was out. He had a problem with dresses that were too short, telling me I looked like Wilma Flintstone in my gauzy summer skirt with a varied yoke. He particularly hated clothes that suggested a Pacific influence or anything with a decorative border. My favourite suede, cowboy-style jacket with a Western fringe was regarded as a kind of relic that needed quiet removal, and he managed not only to persuade me to get rid of it, but to do so unasked. Nothing is so powerful as the English understatement. Wordlessly, it seemed, he'd transformed me, never reducing me to the point of wearing grey skirts with floral patterns, but I found myself looking for more sensible shoes and rather more dowdy colours at Marks & Spencer's, rather than what I'd have preferred to buy, found only in places like Ghost.

I realise upon reflection that it wasn't that Stephen had a problem with my clothes, but rather a problem with my accent, my class, or lack thereof. I think it was a matter of identity. Unlike Penelope, with her trained musical ear, he couldn't quite place me in a particular stratum, and that disarmed him. Penelope, it seemed, could get away with bizarre, unusual clothes – animal-print skirts and clinging chiffon that made you wonder if she was wearing any underwear – but then she was a cousin to the Huxleys and the daughter of a dame. She was
who
she was, regardless of her attire. By contrast, I was nothing. I'd rather
fooled him by appearing a serious student, situated as I was at Oxford. But when my mother died, when Marcus died, all I really wanted was a family.

‘Well, you have a fair start here,' says Andy, nodding at the children, who are watching a
Spot
video. We are sitting behind them, whispering our conversation as they watch the video on cushions we've placed on the floor. It's sort of like a date, his being here. And sort of like he belongs here anyway.

‘You come from a big family?' I ask.

‘Not so big,' says Andy. ‘I'm number four.'

‘That's nice,' I say. ‘Four.'

‘Of eight,' says Andy. ‘There's my three small sisters and one wee brother.'

It is time I got up and did something useful, put away the dishes, do some washing. I cannot remember sitting down for so long. But then, just as I have this thought, I feel Andy's hand on mine. He takes my wrist, turns it over and kisses my palm, watching my eyes as he does so. Then he lets go, touches his finger to my lips, then his own. It is as though he has placed a message inside me, spelling out desire. He will wait for me to turn to him, knows that I will move slowly in his direction, changing as the seasons change. His love lies before me like the new pages of a diary. One day he will fold me in his arms, for he has touched a part of me that was dying and brought it to life once more. This belongs to him.

When I was at university I studied poetry, among other things. It fascinated me how the words looked so dry and lifeless, like seed husks or stringy bits of cut grass, sitting on the page. Almost lonely they were, starkly articulated against a whole page of white. And yet when I read them,
they came alive inside my mind. I liked to hear the words in my head, flowing through me in a melody that is not exactly sung. If I read a poem now, for example, I find myself reading a stanza, then turning away from the printed page, listening.

I am listening with my eyes turned away, hearing the words, thinking of my own thin frame, my own wedding ring, which I now remove. I should have sold it when I sold my engagement ring, but it's hardly worth much, being just a gold band. And now I am thinking something else, about autism. Autism, of course, because the subject is never far from my mind, hovering as it does at the edge of every thought, squatting on my shoulder like a hideous second head.

I consider that this listening and turning away that I do when reading poetry is because I cannot truly glean the words while staring directly at them. I must consider them in quiet, and so I cast my gaze away from the page. Perhaps this is what Daniel does when he turns away from me as I speak. He cannot hear and look at the same time. He must choose.

So I stop asking him to both listen to me and look at me, which I can see pains him in a mild way, as though staring into a bright light. I think I understand. I promise him, kneeling before my child of three, that I will let him be Daniel, and that I will let him turn away.

With his eyes focused over my left shoulder, he asks for new shoes.

‘I want buckle shoes,' he says. Four words together – this is unprecedented. With his eyes toward the ceiling he says, ‘I want shoes with buckles.' And now five.

Alone in the living room, drinking the Guinness that Andy left me from its heavy amber bottle, I hold my face still in front of the hand mirror we use to encourage Daniel to make certain facial expressions, or to help him get his mouth into the right shape to create a particular sound. I can see now that my hair is getting thicker, my skin gaining in colour. Every Saturday morning while Stephen takes the children to the park, I go to the pastry shop and they give me a little sack containing the home-made tomato sauce Max's wife has made for me, this woman whom I have never even met. I heap as much sauce as I can on to Daniel's gluten-free pasta, but he is suspicious of it, refusing as he does to eat vegetables. Somehow he knows tomatoes are involved with this sauce, and he eyes the specks of basil with disdain.

‘Burger,' he says. He always wants burgers.

‘I want a burger,' I say, because if he's going to get what he wants, he's going to have to use as many words as possible to get it.

‘I want a burger,' says Daniel.