Overheard in a Dream (22 page)

“Leaving my father’s study that night, I felt isolated in a way I never had before. He’d been warm and, in his own way, supportive, but he didn’t have the slightest insight into my dilemma. I don’t think he was even able to perceive there was a dilemma.”

“Y
ou
told!
” Morgana cried angrily. The door had hardly been closed to the playroom before she rounded on James. “You said in here I could tell you secret things! You said in here I could do just what I want. You
said!
And then you
told!
”

“Here. Here, why don’t you come over here and sit down and we’ll talk about it,” James replied.

“That was
my
secret, about me and the Lion King. I told you that. I said it was secret. But you told.”

“You feel I shouldn’t have done that.”

“I’m not ever going to tell you anything again, that’s for sure. Not
ever.
” She folded her arms across her chest, pushed out her lower lip and glared blackly into the space between them.

“I’m sorry,” James said. “I can see you’re very angry with me.”

“You lied
bad
,” she muttered.

“I think you heard something slightly different from what I said,” James replied gently. “I said in here it was all right to
tell secrets. But I didn’t promise that I would never tell anyone else. I keep secrets when I can, but you see, sometimes when children talk to me, I have to make hard decisions about what I hear. Because I’m older and I’ve learned more things, sometimes I realize something they are doing might be dangerous. When that happens, I have to decide whether or not it would be best to tell other people. I’m really sorry if I gave you the impression that in here I would always keep your secrets. I think what I actually said was that in here you could decide what you would tell me. But I’m sorry there was a misunderstanding. I’m sorry too that I hadn’t realized until now how important keeping this private was to you. If I’d understood that, we could have talked first about my telling.”

“I’m never going to tell you anything.”

“I was concerned, Morgana,” James said, “because the things you’ve told me about the Lion King make him sound like an unusual little boy. You’re still little and so it’s your mum and dad’s job to take care of you and keep you safe. It’s important for them to know what you’re doing when you’re out playing. I didn’t ‘tell’ on you. I simply asked them if they knew the Lion King’s family, because I was concerned for you. I wanted to make sure that you were safe.”

“But they don’t understand.”

“Yes, I can see you feel strongly about that.”

“Now they don’t want me to see him. My dad says I have to stay home in the yard. He won’t let me go play at the creek. I haven’t been able to go since last Thursday and I haven’t seen the Lion King in all that time and he won’t know why I haven’t come,” Morgana said. She was close to tears. “He’s the only friend I got.”

“What about friends at school?” James asked gently.

“Not anybody like the Lion King. And I was teaching him to read. I brung home two books for him last week and now my dad won’t let me go down to the creek with them.”

“Why don’t you invite the Lion King to come to your house instead?” James asked.

“He wouldn’t come.” The tears began to roll over her round cheeks. Lifting a hand, she pushed them back. “So why did you have to tell? The Lion King wouldn’t ever hurt me. He wouldn’t never have done nothing to me in a million years because he’s my best friend.”

“I really am very, very sorry, Morgana. I can see how upset you are.”

A moment or two passed in silence as Morgana stanched her tears. Finally she looked up. “The only way I can go out to play with him again is to tell my folks he’s just pretend. And that’s what I’m going to do.” A defiant tone crept in her voice. “And from now on I’m going to tell you that too. The Lion King isn’t real. I just made him up.”

“Painting” wasn’t quite the right term for what Conor had started doing during his sessions. At the easel, he would load the brush with paint and then push it against the paper to watch the excess run down. This seemed to give him enormous pleasure. His body would go rigid with excitement and he would then slap the brush against the paper with increasing fervour.

On that morning Conor had started off with particular enthusiasm and the first sheet was soon sodden. James rose and helped him change to the next. Then the next. Then the next after that. Conor filled half a dozen sheets with slashes of dripping yellow paint.

All his concentration was focused on the act of painting. As always, he kept the toy cat tucked tight under his armpit to free both his hands, so he held a paintbrush in each and splashed first streaks of yellow, then ran a broad stroke of blue across the top of the paper. “Green,” he murmured, more to himself than James. Using both brushes, he smeared the two colours together to turn them into a proper, if murky green.

“There is green,” he said and turned, actually looking at James. “Yellow and blue make green.”

“Yes, you’re right. You’ve made green there.”

Conor filled the brush again with blue paint and ran a broad stroke across the paper. He watched it run. Then he took the brush out of the red paint holder with his other hand and painted a heavy slash over the top. The red ran down through the other colours. He turned, his expression a mixture of excitement and fear. “Look. Blood.”

“Yes, it does look like blood, doesn’t it?”

Quickly, Conor added streak after streak of red across the paper until it was so wet it ran off the easel onto the floor. James noticed him becoming agitated, anxiety taking over from excitement. Slap, slap, slap went the brush.

“You are beginning to feel worried,” James interpreted. “At first painting was exciting but now it’s starting to feel frightening.”

“Ehhh-ehhh-ehh-ehh-ehh! Ehhh-ehhh-ehh-ehh-ehh!” Conor cried. He let the red paint brush drop back into the paint container as if it had suddenly become too hot to hold. Snatching his toy cat out from under his armpit, Conor pressed it over his eyes. “Meow! Meow!”

James rose and quickly crossed over to him. Kneeling down, he put an arm around the boy’s shoulders. “You’re
feeling very frightened,” he murmured softly. “But we’re safe here. The playroom is safe.”

“Plug it in!” Conor cried. “Plug it in! Plug it in!”

Plug what in? James wondered.

“Ehhh-ehhh-ehh-ehh-ehh.
Ehhh-ehhh-ehh-ehh-ehh
.” Conor grappled with his cat, clutching it tighter to his face, as if trying to block everything out.

James reached over and pulled one of the small chairs out from the table. “Here. I’m going to sit down. I’ll sit near you until you feel more comfortable. The playroom’s safe. I’ll show you by sitting near.”

Very cautiously, Conor lowered the cat. He looked at James, made genuine eye contact and took a slow, deep breath. Then he bent down and lifted up one of his trailing, foil-decorated strings. Stepping over to the nearby wall, he knelt and pressed the end to the baseboard. It didn’t stick, of course, because it was just ordinary string but he laid it very straight and pressed it to the baseboard a second time, as if it might.

“I understand now,” James said. “You’re plugging your wires in.”

Conor straightened out the other trailing strings and pressed them to the baseboard too. He made louder mechanical noises as he did so, sounding like rusty cogs turning, grinding.

“You’re all plugged in now,” James observed. “All four wires are against the wall.”

“Whirrr. Whirrr.”

“Ah. Have you turned yourself into a machine? I hear it now. I hear your motor running smoothly,” James said.

“Zap-zap,” Conor said. “Electricity, zap-zap. Strong. Kill you dead.”

“You feel like you’ve become a mechanical boy, is that right? Mechanical Boy has electricity going through him,” James interpreted. “Mechanical Boy is stronger than Conor. Conor is just a flesh-and-blood boy, but Mechanical Boy is made of wires.”

“And metal. Strong metal. Galvanized metal. Metal alloy.”

“Mechanical Boy is made of wires and strong metal,” James reflected. “And I can see he is no longer frightened.”

“Yeah. Red paint like blood. Blood dripping down the wall. Mechanical Boy can laugh. Ha-ha. Ha-ha, you can die, red paint like blood. Mechanical Boy is a strong machine made of metal alloy. Machines don’t die.”

The next session was taken up with finger-paints. Lifting a big dollop of red out of the jar, Conor smoothed it over the paper, pushing it around and around with the flat of his hand. He added more, squishing it up between his fingers. Throughout the activity, he said nothing. He whirred and buzzed and ratcheted, a robot boy with turning cogs and fizzing circuitry, but he used no words.

What was going on? James wondered. Why did he feel he needed the protection of turning into a machine before he could allow himself the freedom to use the paint?

And what about that cat? As ever, the stuffed toy never left Conor’s person. It was now tucked up under his left armpit, which hindered the movement of his left hand somewhat, but he was so accustomed to moving with the cat stuck there that he was remarkably adept. What purpose did the cat serve?

Cats, blood, ghosts, death. Symbolism for what? James tried to imagine Conor’s life at the time he began to create this scary view of the world? He was two. He attended
daycare two days a week. His father was overwhelmed by financial problems. His mother was beset by fame and an unwanted pregnancy. What was happening to Conor? Something abusive at day care that he was too young to reveal? A response to his father’s distress? A reaction to his mother’s anxiety over a stalker? A result of developmental stresses? Separation anxiety brought on because his mother was continually preoccupied with imaginary people? A consequence of being a bright, perceptive child in a family upset over a baby they didn’t want? Or was it Morgana’s birth, taking Mum and Dad even further away from Conor? Did his preoccupation with death symbolize this separation?

But then who was the man under the rug? Had Conor perhaps ventured in on Alan and Laura making love and this was the “man under the rug”? “Dead” perhaps in the exhausted aftermath of orgasm? Or “dead” perhaps as symbolism for “weak,” for Alan’s letting Laura emotionally abandon Conor? Was the cat there to protect Conor from the ghosts of memories of an infancy when she was all his? Or from the “dead man” who was his father?

James looked at the boy. It had been much simpler to consider him autistic.

Conor, intent on his painting, did not want interaction. Whatever psychological issues the boy was working out with the paints, it was for himself alone at that point, an internal process being made external, and he wasn’t ready to communicate it with James. James’s only role was to sit quietly and observe.

As so often happened when there were quiet moments in the playroom, James’s mind wandered back to Adam. Adam
playing. Adam painting. Adam chattering in his soft, lispy voice. Adam dead.

My own ghost
, James thought, as he watched Conor.
I’m just as haunted as he is
.

It
had
been James’s fault that Adam had died. The tribunal was right about that. They all were, and the worst of it was that James knew that. If he had spent less time theorizing and more time observing Adam, if he had acted on what Adam said instead of simply watching and “interpreting,” Adam might well be alive today. If
he
hadn’t been negligent. The psychiatrist. The one who should have noticed the signs of brutal abuse and recognized them for the real symptoms they were, not some therapeutic displacement crap.

But he had noticed. That’s what James had found so hard to tell the tribunal. He
had
seen the marks and noticed the weight loss. But abuse –
torture
, really, to give it its honest name – hadn’t crossed James’s mind when working with Adam. He was a five-year-old boy. Of course, he would be struggling with the Oedipal stage. Fantasies of fighting with his step-father for his mother’s love were part and parcel of the expected symbolism of Freudian psychiatry. And theirs was such a respectable family, well off and well educated. Intelligent, articulate and likable. The parents had been the ones themselves to bring in Adam for help. Who was James to question that things weren’t just as they had said, that Adam had inflicted those injuries on himself during his incomprehensible rages?

James never found the words to defend himself, not then, not even now. Despite the perfect clarity everyone had in hindsight, at the time things really had looked uncertain and inconclusive. It
hadn’t
been blatantly obvious what the horrible conclusion was going to be. But, of course, the hard truth
was that even when James had begun to suspect things weren’t as they seemed, it only made him question his own judgement. He never was brave enough to accuse the parents. Because what if he were wrong? What if it were all just part of Adam’s psychopathology? James’s psychiatric training had covered self-inflicted injury far more thoroughly than child abuse. He was so worried he would lose his credibility by causing a big fuss over nothing. He hadn’t meant to be blind or stupid. He was just an ordinary guy who’d got caught up in a truly horrific situation. His only real mistake had been trying to play safe.

So deep in thought was James that he missed the accident when it happened. Conor had leaned far across the table to pick up a new sheet of paper when the stuffed cat slipped out of its niche under his arm and fell with a slurpy splat onto the painting Conor had been working on. There was so much finger-paint on the paper that it splashed up as the cat landed.