Читать книгу A Friend Like Ben: The true story of the little black and white cat that saved my son - Julia Romp - Страница 11

I stopped still as I walked into the bedroom and saw George. I wanted to scream, but knew I had to be silent. Somehow he had opened the latch that locked the window and climbed outside. He was standing on the other side of the glass with his bare feet on the ledge next to the open window. We were on the third floor. I couldn’t move too quickly or else I’d frighten him.

‘What are you up to, George?’ I asked.

He stared silently at a spot just past my head, his hands holding on to the frame.

Slowly I reached into my pocket for my phone and dialled 999. ‘I need help,’ I told the operator.

A voice on the other end took my details and my eyes didn’t leave George as I put down the phone, praying that someone would get here soon. If he moved an inch he would fall. I should have known he might do something like this. George had no sense of danger at the best of times and didn’t seem to feel pain either. If he fell over, he never ran to me or cried; he just got up and walked away, with his knee pouring blood if he had cut it. But lately he’d been jumping up and down a lot when we went for a walk and telling me he was flying.

‘Are you, my love?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where?’

‘Over a big building.’

‘Really? Where else?’

‘A tree.’

I’d told myself George had a wild imagination and I was happy that he could dream. But now as my heart hammered and George looked at me I knew I should have kept a closer eye on him. I wanted to scream – knowing I had to stand still, longing to run at him – for what felt like forever, but was probably just a couple of minutes, until I heard the sound of sirens. I had asked the firemen to be ready to catch George if he fell because I couldn’t let them into the flat. If he saw strangers I was sure he’d let go of the window frame. He just didn’t understand that if he did that, he would fall. George thought he could fly like the birds.

I took a step forward, ready to rush at him and grab him if he let go with his hands. Then I looked at my watch as if it was any other day and I didn’t have a care in the world.

‘We’re late, George,’ I told him. ‘We’ve got to get to Nannie’s because Lewis is waiting to see us.’

George looked at me, as if he was thinking about whether he wanted to move or not.

‘They’ll be wondering where we are,’ I said, trying to keep the panic out of my voice.

Inch by inch, George started shuffling back along the windowsill and my heart was in my mouth with every move he made. But the moment he put a foot through the open window, I gripped it so hard there was no way he’d be able to rock back and I pulled him down into the room with me.

‘Good boy,’ I said, longing to cuddle him, knowing I couldn’t. ‘But you know you mustn’t do that again, don’t you, George?’

He brushed himself with his hands where I’d touched him and looked at me without a shadow of understanding in his eyes. My hands shook as I followed George out of the room and even though I knew that from now on I would lock every window and door in the flat and hide all the keys, I was still at my wits’ end as I talked it over with Michelle that night.

‘We’ve got to show him, Ju,’ she said. ‘George can’t see it himself, so we’ve got to show him what could happen.’

The following morning Michelle arrived at the flat armed with a box of eggs, and we took George to the bedroom, where we opened the window.

‘Do you see this egg, George?’ Michelle asked as she held it in front of his face. ‘It’s you, it is.’

She dropped the egg out the window and George watched as it flew down and smashed on the concrete below.

‘Now you try,’ Michelle said as she handed him an egg.

After throwing half a dozen out the window, we ran downstairs to find the concrete outside the flats covered in bits of yolk and shell.

George looked around with a blank face.

‘You’ll get broken too if you fall – just like you’ll get broken if you step in front of a car,’ I told him, kneeling down to face him. ‘You’re like an egg, George – you’re fragile. Do you see?’

He didn’t look at me or say a word, but at least we’d tried, and I was learning by now that if you said things enough to George they eventually went in. If most mums had to tell their kids a hundred times, I had to repeat it a thousand to George. How else was he going to learn to fit into a world he didn’t understand?

His problems at school were only getting worse and I knew a lot of people thought George was just a naughty child who couldn’t be controlled: he’d climb the fence as the teachers told him to get down, hide under the dinner lady’s sari or push children over. He had to learn, so I’d try to talk to him every time I was called into school, but George just couldn’t see that what he was doing was wrong. He didn’t know the difference between a tap and a grab so rough it ripped another child’s jumper, or even understand how to move around other adults or kids: every time we left school, he’d run through the gates crashing into people, leaving them staring at him. I’d tried everything I could to make him walk with me but he always bolted the moment he got out the school door and as I chased after him, he would roll on the floor screaming the moment I touched him.

George just could not see that he was the one who was different, and every time I tried to talk to him about what he’d done wrong, he would tell me that he hadn’t. What I was trying to teach him just didn’t make sense and he was sure it was the other children who were the problem. But although I knew that I had to keep trying to help him understand the way the world worked, it felt more and more as if his school was almost giving up on helping me to teach him that.

In the December of George’s second year at school, when he was about five and a half, I was told he couldn’t join in the Christmas concert because it might spoil things if he had one of his outbursts. I knew George wouldn’t notice if he wasn’t at the concert, but I would because that’s what mums do, isn’t it?

Teachers don’t spend twenty-four hours with children, though. They didn’t know George as I did and see all the tiny details of his behaviour – the good bits that were mixed in with the not-so-good ones. For instance, he might not seem interested in most of his lessons, but the one that always made George listen was history. So I’d started taking him to all the places I could think of – Hampton Court Palace and the Tower of London, Windsor Castle and old aristocratic houses – to give him the kind of days out that I’d had as a child when Dad and Mum had told us all about London’s old buildings and I’d learned to love those kinds of places. My favourite had always been Hampton Court Palace; whenever I walked into the huge hallway with its marble stairs, old paintings and enormous chandelier, I’d imagine that it was my house.

It wasn’t easy, of course. George didn’t like all the people and I had to work out what he could and couldn’t cope with. Going on the Tube was just too frightening, but we just about managed if we went in the car and I let him hide when the place we were visiting got too busy. George never talked about what we saw but I knew his favourite place was Windsor Castle because his eyes would open in wonder when we went in winter and the castle walls shone as the huge lights were turned on at dusk. Water, shiny things and lights were his true obsessions.

So although George wasn’t getting on at school, I knew he was intelligent. He showed that he picked up on everything that went on around him by the things he did. When Mum mentioned in front of him one day that my nan used to throw salt over her shoulder out of superstition, he started doing the same; and when something interested George, whether it was Windsor Castle, trees and birds or water and fishes, he couldn’t get enough of it.

But all his teachers seemed to see was a little boy who wouldn’t do as he was told and was disruptive, not interested in learning and sometimes aggressive. In a class of about 40 children, they just didn’t have the time to spend on him and I was worried sick that George would never get any help. That’s why I agreed to see two counsellors when I was asked to go back to the clinic where George had had his hearing tests, because the second set had also come back normal and someone somewhere had obviously decided that George’s problems were down to me.

For the first few sessions with the counsellors, George came with me and would hide behind my chair as they talked.

‘What do you do when George lies on the floor and won’t get up, Julia?’ the women asked, all soft voices and knowing looks.

What did they think I did? Drag him up by his hair? ‘Do you tell him “No” when he smashes a toy?’ I was asked.

Did they think I was afraid to say a word when he bashed up Buzz Lightyear?

‘Why do you think he doesn’t eat with a spoon?’

‘How is George’s relationship with his father?’

‘Do you have a boyfriend?’

There was one word for those women and it’s this: patronising. All they saw was a single mum with an out-of-control child, and it didn’t matter what I said to try to tell them any different.

‘Why don’t you talk to the school?’ I’d ask again and again. ‘They can tell you more about George and all his odd behaviours. This isn’t about discipline. I know there’s something more.’

The answer was always the same. ‘George is still very young, Julia. This is an assessment and it takes time.’

So I’d go into the school and ask them why they couldn’t do something more for George.

‘You’re being assessed, Julia. It takes time.’

I wanted to bang all their heads together, because the longer this went on the worse it was getting, and I felt even more frustrated when I was sent to a group for parents whose children had behavioural problems. It was the first time that I thought I might go to the top of the class because the advice was so basic.

When your child’s been put in the box marked ‘naughty’, it’s hard to get anyone to see past it, and sometimes I wished the school could just let George be a bit. For instance, he was still very specific about what he would and wouldn’t eat, and while he didn’t tell me in words, I realised over time that he couldn’t eat food that touched: he liked eggs, he liked baked beans, but if they were together on a plate he would just stare at them. It was as though George had the Berlin Wall of food inside his head because things always had to be divided. So I started giving him everything in separate bowls when I realised that it was the only way he’d eat.

He also had food phases – first it was just crackers, then squeezy yoghurts and then custard creams – and I knew it wasn’t just fussy eating because George got really anxious sometimes as he stared at his plate and breathed deeply. So I gave him what he wanted to calm him down enough to eat. It was during his jam sandwich phase that I wished the teachers might let him alone a bit. George’s sandwiches had to be very particular because he wouldn’t eat them if there was butter peeping out of the side of the bread; and even when I made them right, he often ended up chewing the sandwich before spitting it into his lunchbox. The teachers didn’t like that at all, and although I explained that I’d seen a dietician who’d reassured me that George would be fine as long as he had milk, yoghurt and bread each day and that I would sort out his lunchbox when he got home, they wouldn’t listen. I felt drained by it all. Why did people keep asking questions? Why didn’t they just do something to help?

Part of me said I had to keep trusting the doctors, who told me that George was still too young to be diagnosed with anything if there was something wrong with his development, the counsellors, who told me to count to three, and the teachers, who kept saying that children learned at different speeds. Another part wanted to tell them all to just do something, anything, as one year at school turned into two and then three. After going on his first school trip, I was told George couldn’t go again because he wouldn’t sit on his coach seat; when he went swimming – something Howard had taught him to do that he loved and was really good at – the teachers said he didn’t listen and almost stopped him from going until I pleaded with them; and when I picked him up from school and was told he’d fallen asleep in class again because he’d hardly slept the night before, I’d see the questions in their eyes. George spent more and more time out of the class sitting in a long corridor at a small table with a teaching assistant by his side; it seemed as if it was a case of out of sight, out of mind.

I couldn’t be sure, of course, but I wondered if George was picking up on it all, because while he’d always hidden away from people, he seemed to feel more and more that they were actually against him.

‘He’s watching me,’ George would say as we walked past a man on the way to school.

‘No, he’s not, love,’ I’d tell him. ‘He’s just walking to work minding his own business.’

Or George would pull down his Pokémon baseball cap and tell me the sun was watching him or the clouds were following us. Getting him to the dentist was so hard that I had to take him to hospital for an anaesthetic when he needed teeth removed and he’d told me that the doctor had tried to kill him when he woke up.

I think that’s why I tried to give him as much love as I could when we were at home, so that he’d at least feel safe with me when the world frightened him so much. But however much I gave him, George never expressed any love back, and even though I had a child, at times it almost felt as if I didn’t. I’d find myself staring at other kids running out of school to give their mums a kiss and longing for George to want to hug me, but he never let me touch him or showed any emotion towards me. It was almost as if it was the first time he’d seen me when he woke up each morning and I struggled with it every day, sometimes even wishing I could meet someone and have another baby just to know how it felt to be a mother to a child who loved me back.

The only time George would let me touch him was when we rough played and he pretended to be a Power Ranger as we sat together in one of the tents I’d put up all over the flat because he liked them so much. I had even put one up on my bed, hoping he might sleep in it, because George could sit in a tent for hours on end. Most days I’d climb in with him for anything up to three hours at a time and that was when we’d play fight. As George climbed on to me, I would hold on to him for a few seconds as I felt the chubbiness in his legs or his skinny little chest. I loved those moments together because otherwise George didn’t let me touch him. He did not really speak to me either: he still only talked about very specific things like Power Rangers and Buzz Lightyear. Often he spoke just single words or would chant phrases over and over again.

‘Oh and the plane, oh and the plane,’ he’d cry a hundred times before moving on to something else.

I tried to distract him with puzzles or pots of paints but George would scream if he got anything wrong, which made it hard to play because everyone makes mistakes when they’re six. One of the few things he liked, though, was playdough, which he’d squidge in his hands as I made things for him to look at. So one day I bought him a plastic figure of a man with holes in his head to push the playdough through to make ‘hair’. At first George smiled as he watched me do it but the moment I picked up some scissors to cut the hair, he started screaming. Throwing himself on the floor, he went stiff with rage as he roared. His shouts were so loud and sudden that I wondered if he’d somehow hurt himself and I knelt down beside him.

‘George,’ I pleaded with him. ‘Tell me what’s wrong.’

But I never did find out because George didn’t tell me how he felt. How could he? George didn’t even seem to know who he was. When I’d stood him in front of a mirror one day, he’d cried so much that I’d had to take down all the others in the house. So how was he ever going to explain emotions that poured out of him in tantrums that still came out of the blue? George was like a mystery I couldn’t solve, a puzzle whose pieces fitted together to make a picture I didn’t quite understand, however much I wanted to.