Daniel Isn't Talking (8 page)

‘Have the biscuits,' I say finally, stabbing through the packet with my thumbnail, spilling out dozens of disc shapes into his lap. He's so delighted. Discs he can eat. He takes them in his hands without looking at me, stacks them neatly and licks the surface of each in turn as though instilling his own mark.

‘What about me?' whines Emily.

Emily! Of course! I grab a biscuit from where it rests on Daniel's thigh, which is covered in crumbs now, and she makes a face like she might cry.

‘He licked it!' she moans. So I grab another, and then the first one drops, breaking into pieces at my feet. Emily stares in horror, then looks up to Daniel to see if he's noticed, to see if he'll start to scream again. But he doesn't scream – thank God – and Emily accepts the next biscuit I give her, though I think it may have been licked, too. Out of the corner of my eye I see other customers
watching us. They may have been watching the whole time or maybe just this last bit, where I indulge what they imagine to be a spoilt child with all the biscuits he can hold. I stare back at them. I think,
Damn you, you
have no idea
. Gradually, they turn away as I try to sweep up the broken biscuit with a tissue, stuffing it now into my coat pocket. Oh, this is pathetic. I just want to go home, but I cannot, because of course I have to pay for all this shopping, which means somehow I have to get through the queue. I can only hope I have enough biscuits to do so.

And that is when a woman in a bright green coat walks up to me with a smile. She has a halo of greying hair, soft eyes behind thick plastic frames. She wears stylish earrings and lipstick but no other make-up. I am used to people making comments about my kids – or rather about Daniel – and I prepare myself for what she might say. I just wish I was in a better frame of mind to hear it. That I had some witty or insulting remark I could make back. But my throat is full of pepper and my eyes feel like they are boiling. I just want to run. If she'd get out of the way now I might do just that. But instead she stops before me and looks at Daniel, then me.

‘He's lovely,' she says.

There's a beat of silence between us. Her eyes lock with mine. I shake my head back and forth, feeling a pressure in my skull as though a dam is breaking.

‘He's
not
lovely!' I splutter. I am crying now, crying in front of this stranger, in front of the whole shop. People are looking, then turning away. ‘He's not lovely at all!'

‘Mummy!' says Emily, holding me around the thigh, her face tilted toward mine, puzzled. ‘You're not crying,'
she says, and it is a statement not a question, as though she is calling it into being.

‘He reminds me of my boy,' says the woman. She has a whispery voice, expressive eyes. She seems so desperate to tell me something. I have to listen, though really I'd rather she just left, too, like the other shoppers who have the good sense to abandon this aisle. She says, ‘You know, at McDonald's he used to go around all the tables and take one bite – just one – out of every burger he could get his hands on. People just … well. I thought they'd kill us!' She laughs now, steps closer to me. ‘And once he was having such a tantrum in the car that the police pulled us over because they thought he must be being abducted.'

I rub my eyes on my collar, look up at the ceiling, at the signs that tell you the contents of aisles, at the long strips of overbright lights. My head is throbbing like a wound. I look at Daniel, who is getting increasingly upset because he cannot hold all the biscuits he insists on holding. Some are crumbling; some are falling to the floor.

The lady says, ‘He wouldn't go into a public lavatory. The hand dryers just threw him.'

I nod, look down. I know what she is telling me.

‘I had to take my husband with me whenever we went into a public place, especially one with food!' she says. ‘I think you are very brave.'

She won't use the word because she's too nice. And she's afraid of hurting me. So I say it instead. ‘Your son is autistic?' I ask, knowing the answer already.

She nods.

‘Can he talk?' This feels to me the only thing that matters. That one day I will hear Daniel speak. I cannot tell you what it would do for me, just to have his words
in my ears, the sound of his voice. If I could hear it, it would be music.

‘Talk? Oh, sweetheart,' she says, looking a little sad for me, looking the way my mother used to when she wished she could cheer me up over some issue that upset me, but that she knew would come out all right. ‘Of
course
he can talk. And so will your little boy. He will talk.'

My knees can barely hold me. Daniel is screaming again because too many of his disc-shaped biscuits have fallen now. He's angry, throwing some down, picking others from his lap and trying to stack them. Emily is pulling at me, wanting me to pick her up. Can I hold her without falling over? I can barely keep myself from shaking. ‘How do you know?' I say, rather harshly. I don't want it to sound harsh, but it does. ‘How do you
know
he will talk?'

This woman … oh, God, I hope she doesn't walk away … she says, ‘Because your son is not as bad as you think. He's really not so bad. I've seen a lot of them – not that I'm an expert, just a mother. Your boy will talk. And one day you'll be able to take him in here and he won't make a scene. All sorts of things will change for the better – you'll see.'

I nod, but I'm not sure I believe any of what she is saying. She writes her phone number on a bit of notepaper and I fold it carefully into the front pocket of my jeans. That's where I keep every important thing that I don't want to lose no matter what. My car keys are there, for example, my credit cards. And now her number. And her name, too. She is Iris, like the flower.

My father-in-law, Bernard, only cares about his own son, Daniel's father, my husband, Stephen. Stephen is a man perfectly capable of talking, dressing himself, working, laughing at a joke, driving, attending parties, flirting, dancing. These are just a few of the things Stephen can do which Daniel cannot and may never do – but Bernard is worried about Stephen.

‘You
do
know your father is a git,' I tell Stephen. He's just returned from a day at his parents' house trying to reassure Bernard that all is well, even though all is not well. All is more or less in the toilet.

‘What do you want me to do about it?' he says unpleasantly. Then he plugs himself into his MP3 player and is away.

Bernard believes, but does not say, that Daniel's autism is in part a judgment from God. During the brief time Stephen and I lived together unmarried he used to lament that we were ‘living in sin'. One afternoon, at the age of seventy-six, Bernard drove to London to have lunch with Stephen in a restaurant near Stephen's office. There, in the
middle of a room full of business lunches, he took Stephen's hands in his own and asked, almost tearfully, if living together meant we are were having ‘relations'. This was the bit he could not bear to imagine, that his thirty-year-old son was having sex with a woman to whom he was not wed. When Stephen admitted that yes, he was having sex with me, his father slumped on the table with the weight of this awful news.

‘What kind of perfect life has this man led that the thought of his grown son having sex is such a tragedy?' I hollered, hearing Stephen's account of the lunch. ‘In America, parents are
relieved
when their thirty-year-old son is having sex with a woman!'

Anger. Outrage. Resentment, Stephen didn't feel any of what I felt. He had in his mind the sad, tearful face of his elderly father, how he'd driven through the London traffic, how he'd taken his hand across the table.

‘It's your fault,' I told him, ‘for hiding five years of rampant, crazy sex – as in underwater-type crazy sex – with
whatsername
.'

‘Penelope,' said Stephen.

‘I know her name! Why didn't you tell him about
her
?'

‘What? Tell my father I was having sex with Penelope?'

‘Well, yes. When you came up for air, I mean.'

This time Bernard is worried about Stephen because he thinks that Daniel will ruin Stephen's life. He keeps saying, ‘To have a child like that is an awful thing.' Being a relative newcomer to the world of parents of disabled children, I don't yet have the exact parlance to describe how this remark offends me, but it does. Plus this issue of a judgment from God, which is not visited directly upon us but skirts along the edges of every conversation and report from Stephen's family. Bernard is suffering with
matters involving Christianity, morality, sins of the fathers, all that. And is very worried about Stephen … oh yes, and Daniel, too, although they keep saying Daniel will never ‘know' so he'll be happy. As though Daniel is not quite fully human or something. Meanwhile, I am supposed to be ‘supportive' of Stephen's parents.

David calls and wants something – I don't give him the opportunity to explain – but it has to do with ‘the family', meaning himself, Stephen, Cath, Daphne and Bernard.

‘Look,' I say, ‘I do understand and it isn't that I don't care about your dad,' although frankly, I do not, ‘only that your dad isn't my first priority right now.'

David says nothing in reply, but then he might have been watching the football anyway. I certainly can hear it in the background. And I think he is a little in shock. Stephen's parents have always been everybody's first priority. I have no idea why.

‘Try to get Stephen to visit his dad,' urges Tricia, wresting the phone from her husband, who apparently has been mesmerised by a pivotal moment in the game. ‘He's going into another of his depressions.'

So now the preoccupation for Stephen's family is this: what will happen to Bernard if he gets depressed again. He is too old to take much more of this. He has a weak heart, a problem with circulation, with his lungs, with sleep, with getting through the day.

‘Well, me too,' I say to Tricia.

‘Yes, but you're young,' she says.

‘And what about Daniel? Doesn't anyone care about him?'

‘They all do. They are grieving.'

But I don't quite see it that way. Daphne, who is caught up with small issues like how to get her hair just right or
keep her ugly carpet from staining, regards more obvious, larger problems in life with considerably less concern. She calls, looking for Stephen, and then tries to find something to say to me, whom she regards as a kind of unfortunate fact of Stephen's life, the way the mothers of teenage sons regard such intrusions as pop music and big muddy trainers that lie ponging in the hallway. She tells me now she knows the diagnosis is bleak, but isn't it ‘marvellous' that nowadays they have such lovely homes for children like Daniel. And they can do such wonderful things.

‘
What
wonderful things? He's already got a home,' I say. It is a favourable condition for her that she reports this to me by telephone. If I'd been in her presence and actually watched her say such a thing to me with her bright smile and stinging eyes, I cannot tell what might have happened.

‘Well, I know he does, of course he does …' says Daphne. But it is no good, I see where she sits on the subject of Daniel. Tricia says they are grieving people, but I don't see grieving people. What I see is an old man more concerned about his own son than he is about mine. Well, OK, I won't blame him for that, but
grieving
? And what about Daphne, who thinks Daniel should be in a home, if such things still exist? She's imagining a stout white building with pleasant gardens and a name like ‘Little Springs Centre' or ‘Magnolia House'. In her mind she is travelling by car down the smooth, soundless drive shaded by oak trees, surrounded by discreet tall fences. ‘Isn't it
marvellous
how beautiful it all is!' she is saying, as though the residents in this opulent prison are luckier than the rest of us.

‘Your mother rang,' I whisper to Stephen. We are all sitting on the floor watching
Sesame Street
and eating pizza.
Emily giggles at the Cookie Monster and watches the letter Q do a ballad about how great it is to be the letter Q. Daniel seems to like the letter Q as well. He's looking at the television anyway, I say to Stephen, ‘She wants to put Daniel in a home.'

‘Don't be ridiculous. She never said that,' he says.

‘I heard her.'

‘She's just worried about how we'll cope –'

‘How
you
will cope.'

‘She didn't mean anything by it,' he says.

‘So she told you, too, right? She said the same thing to you?'

‘I'm not talking about this,' Stephen says. And he means it.

But things get better because Daniel likes Elmo. He looks at Elmo and laughs. He bounces up and down, his fingers in his mouth, his eyes shining. I take his hand and make it so that he is pointing and then hold it, pointing, at the screen until he is almost doing it on his own.

‘That is what is missing,' says Stephen, rising to his knees, and staring open-mouthed at Daniel. ‘What you are doing there.
That
.'

Daniel's chubby hand is just about able to point at Elmo, and his face is bright. He looks like any other child and so, for the time being, we are all laughing. Emily loves the pizza, making long strings of the cheese. Stephen is delighted with his boy. Right now, this second, I'd say we are the happiest we've been in a long time. Because Daniel is pointing. Or trying to.

We've been asked by Emily's new school to enrol her in a pre-school before she arrives in the autumn at their pre-prep. This is to ‘prepare' her. So, if I understand correctly,
we are meant to prepare her for the school that is meant to prepare her for the school that prepares her for the school from which she will eventually go to university. It seems a bit much to me, but when I protested to Stephen that I felt this was overkill for a child not yet five years old, he looked at me impatiently and said, ‘Don't stand in her way.'

‘
Don't stand in her way?
' I said. I followed him out of the house, still in my pyjamas, my hair flying every direction. ‘In her
way
?'

But Stephen isn't the sort of man who will engage in an argument on a city street. ‘I'll see you tonight,' he said in a perfectly even tone, as though there was nothing wrong at all.

So now, at everyone's request except Emily's, I get her ready in the mornings for eight thirty. I strap Daniel in the pushchair, take Emily by the hand, and we walk half a mile to the pre-school, where Emily gets to use glue and glitter to make us cards, sing songs during circle time, and argue about who gets what toy at playtime.

‘What do you like best about it?' I ask enthusiastically.

‘Going home,' she says.

‘That's a good one. You have good jokes,' I say.

‘I am not joking,' Emily says.

I say, ‘OΚ, but there must be
something
else you like.'

She thinks about this. ‘During milk time you get a biscuit.'

‘Not bad,' I say. ‘I don't get any such thing during milk time. Your school sounds great!'

‘The biscuits are yucky,' she complains. ‘And I only ever
get one
.'

She doesn't want to go. I don't want her to go. But the pre-prep says this is good for her and so she goes.

‘I miss Daniel,' she says, dropping her school bag on the pavement, bending over the pushchair, her lips pursed, kissing the top of his head.

‘You do? You miss him?' We are standing outside the pre-school gates surrounded by mothers and nannies and dozens of tiny, beautifully clad children holding their sugar paper stiffened by wooden sticks and pasted-on seeds. The theme for this week is spring and they've done a study of the germination of beans. ‘Oh, Emily, he misses you, too!' I say, fairly singing my exclamations. ‘He loves you! He loves you so much! He needs you! We all need you so much!'

The mothers and nannies around me have noticed this moment I am having with my daughter, who loves her baby brother, who misses him and lays claim to his affection with a kiss on the head. They are not impressed by my mushy response. Eyes roll. Some of the nannies look as though they might gag.

Around five in the morning or so, when Daniel can't sleep, I take Emily from her bed and tuck her in next to Stephen. If she should wake, I want her to feel at once the comfort of him next to her. Then I put a sweatshirt over Daniel's pyjamas, find his thickest socks, his canvas shoes, and go directly to the Italian pastry shop and sit on their shining stools. Round and round I go with Daniel in my lap. He laughs, holding his hands out, squinting his eyes. Round and round until I am so dizzy I might fall off.

The guys there remind me of wild cats, so young and sleek, looking exactly alike with their dark hair, their dark eyes. They are lean and full of themselves, treating the kitchen like a kind of gym, hurling pans to each other, pivoting on their heels with trays of hot bread. They sing
in English to the radio, stomp around in workmen's boots, their aprons tied loosely, batted by their thighs. They throw bits of uncooked pastry at me to get my attention. Their father or uncle or whatever he is – Max is his name – wipes the sweat from his face with his meaty hands, barking orders to them in Italian to please not throw food at the lady. But they make me laugh, trying to pretend it was all an accident, that the dough just flew from their hands, landing down my blouse. One of them – he couldn't be more than sixteen – gets down on one knee and proposes to me, his apron wadded in his hands as though he is holding a bouquet.

‘I'm already married,' I tell him.

‘But are you
loved
?' he says.

‘This one is especially stupid,' says Max, swatting his son on the head.

A dark January night, rain thumping the window pane. There's been some sort of problem with the boiler and the whole house is steaming hot. On one side of the bed, in a messy heap, is every book I could find on autism, on language in children, on play therapy, on child development. Many of them are from Iris, my lady from the supermarket, who told me that she didn't really recommend the older books. So much has changed, she told me. The books occupy the whole of one side of the bed. On the other side there's myself and Stephen.

‘Don't make me pregnant, please,' I whisper to him. His head is above me, I speak into his chest. ‘Not that you are planning to … I didn't mean that … only just be careful.'

He stops, and there is an awful silence between us. Then he rolls off me and stares up at the ceiling.

‘Is there no place we can go now,
nothing
we can do?' he says, his voice getting louder with each word.

‘Please, don't be angry –' I begin, but it is too late.

‘I'm not
angry
!' he shouts. And now the whole room seems to echo, and I brace myself for whatever he's going to say next, which is that we cannot even make love without me thinking of children – existing or potential – and being worried about them in one way or the other. I am troubled, too, that he will link all this anxiety back to Daniel, to autism, to the mess we find ourselves in, and that he will tell me Daniel has ruined his life, just as his father has declared. But he doesn't say anything. He stares up, glassy-eyed, occupying a place far away and un-reachable. I pull on a nightshirt, run my fingers through my hair. I am all at once embarrassed by everything about me. I want to cover myself up. I want to run.