Читать книгу Daniel Isn’t Talking - Marti Leimbach, Marti Leimbach - Страница 10

6

Our house is tiny, fourteen feet wide, two levels. It used to be the garage to a very grand house next door. It has a small garden stocked with ornamental roses and tons of lavender. In the summer the bumblebees, big as mothballs, hum outside the window. I love that the plaster is smooth and cool even in August. That in the winter, when you wake up, the air smells like frost and it smells like coal. To me, our house seems palatial, a miracle in the middle of this dense city. When we first moved here, shortly after Daniel was born, I used to lie in bed with the two children and look outside the windows, where the float glass is different in each of the panes so that the tree branches don’t appear to align correctly, watching as the sun fired the sky with colour. Stephen got dressed for work and we spoke in hushed tones so as not to wake the children. I liked to watch him get dressed. He’s tall, with enormous presence. Barrel- chested, big wrists, broad hands, thick neck. I looked at our perfect babies, sleeping one on either side of me, and my handsome husband and I thought nobody has ever been so lucky as me. No one has ever been so content with what she has.

But I didn’t know what I had. You see, Daniel seemed completely normal. You might think that a baby with autism gives you some warning so you won’t love him quite as much as you do your normal child. Maybe he doesn’t cling to you or hold his arms round your neck, or laugh when you give him piggyback rides or reach for the swing seat. But he did all those things. I was Daniel’s trampoline and his hammock; he made my hip bone his seat and opened my heart with his laughter. There are hundreds of pictures of Daniel sliding down a slide at the playground, stomping puddles with his new wellies, riding his toy train, putting on the eyeglasses for Mr Potato Head and dancing. The change is gradual; the symptoms devious in the way they come and go. You don’t love him any less because he doesn’t speak to you. Or when he cannot seem to get the hang of the new garage and all the shiny new cars you buy him, or has no interest in the games you try to play. When he won’t let you touch his head, let alone wash his hair, or when he cries almost all day and you have no idea why. You don’t love him any less – you just think you are failing.

Stephen will not talk to me at all about him. He goes to work early, comes home late, retreats into his laptop and is unavailable for comment.

‘This, what you are doing here, is not helpful,’ I tell him. I am lying face down on the couch while he sits at the other end, poking his keyboard, answering emails.

After a very long while he says, ‘If you knew there was something wrong, why didn’t you get help?’

‘So it’s my fault?’

‘I asked why you didn’t get a doctor. Sooner Obviously, you knew.’

And now I wish he’d go back to not speaking to me. Email somebody in Hong Kong or whateverthefuck he does.

When I wake in the morning there are a few seconds’ reprieve before a sense of doom and anguish alerts me again to my son and my predicament. It would appear that he is to fail to attain any of the normal milestones of childhood growth, will likely become more remote and wilful, possibly even dangerous to himself and to others. To Emily? Yes, possibly. I have been told that for the sake of the siblings one must sometimes find alternative accommodation for the autistic one – but not to worry, that would be many years from now. Not to worry? Not to worry? As for right now, I am to accept as fact that he will need special education in a school designed for children who cannot learn like other children. There is apparently nothing I can do but gently escort him through his childhood until one or another institution or, if we are lucky, sheltered community assumes his care as an adult. The unfortunate truth of autism is that it cannot be cured, or even effectively mitigated, and that the condition is a genetic mistake for which we will for ever pay the consequences.

‘Stephen, please, don’t go to work today. Stay here with us. Please,’ I beg him now. What day is it? Tuesday, I think. All my concerns tumble around my mind like clothes in a dryer. I toss one up, then another, the next, and so on. I tell him this. I tell him that the day seems inordinately long and that I cannot see how to navigate it, that I am lost.

Stephen understands, pats my arm, nods his head. But he does not stay.

Stephen’s uncle Raymond, that dear man, rings to tell me not to regret giving Daniel the MMR. His voice is loud in the receiver; he speaks as one who has endured early efforts at telephonic communication, who has shouted into tortoiseshell receivers fixed on wall phones, gone through operators in order to place calls. Now he tells me that in his time he has seen children die of measles; they died in droves when he was a boy. Temperatures of a hundred and six, their brains burned inside their skulls. I mustn’t regret a thing.

‘Please come and see us,’ I say to him. Raymond lives on the other side of London. He owns the same house in which he grew up and that he shared with his mother until her death some thirty years ago. He has taken me round the upstairs to show me the scars in the ceiling where a bomb came through the roof during the war. He has stood me by the window and pointed to the areas, now dense with houses, where once there was nothing but craters and buildings in ruins. He’s seen things he will not tell me about, the experiences of being a soldier. ‘I would not wish my memories upon you,’ he once said, then asked me if I could find a use for the cake pan his mother used to bake birthday cakes for him and his brother when they were children. Whether, too, I might like some of his mother’s damask linen.

‘I will come,’ he says now. ‘But meanwhile, you mustn’t blame yourself.’

‘I don’t,’ I tell him, a lie. I am fast becoming a good liar, which I discover is a means of camouflage for the protection of others, those who have not been conscripted into this battle with autism, those who have normal children, for example. Or those like Raymond, whom I feel I am discovering now as one discovers an ancient and magical place. I would like to curl up on his mother’s window seat, admire the large oak tree he planted as a boy, talk to him about the way London has changed in his lifetime, consult the past, disregard the future. Where is that cake pan? I will bake a Victorian sponge, slather it with cream, talk about decoding machines and doodlebugs, battles fought on foreign beaches, places I have visited only in history books, anywhere far away.

‘These things happen,’ says Raymond. ‘Nobody knows why.’

Speculation abounds, however. I thought only hippies didn’t vaccinate their children. And I remember the day I held Daniel’s chubby thigh as the nurse readied the syringe.

The headmaster of the prep school thinks Emily is a delight and is very happy to offer her a place in pre-prep starting the autumn term. He is ultra-blond with a long, effete forehead and a thin, sculpted nose. His face has a dapper, ruddy complexion as though he spends most of his free time sailing, which I guess he does. He sits at a large oak desk surrounded by prints of famous sailing ships, the sort you might find hoisted on a dry dock and visited by tourists. All along a bookshelf are bottles containing models of such ships. I regard them as one might a taxidermy collection, which the headmaster notices.

‘My hobby,’ he says, rather grandly. Cartwell is his name. He has a big brass plate on his desk engraved in swirling, girlish letters so that everyone knows.

‘You do these yourself?’ I am amazed he will admit to such a thing. There’s something distinctly creepy about this man. My mind drifts to thoughts of strange potions in backrooms or remains under floorboards.

Cartwell nods, making a little movement with his hand as though he doesn’t want to boast too much about it. We are invited to sit down in two captain’s chairs at the side of his enormous desk. Turning to Emily’s file, he says, ‘She’s an unusually articulate girl, isn’t she?’ He reels off her test results as though reading a sales report. I notice his peculiar habit of continually rearranging the objects on his desk as he speaks. In the last few minutes, for example, he has moved a paperweight from the lower left corner to the upper right corner, lined up his pencils, wiped the surface of his blotting paper with the back of his hand, stacked a group of Post-it notes and ordered a number of business cards. All I can think, as he outlines for us the results of the diagnostic tests they gave Emily, is how these habits seem somewhat obsessive and unnatural. Also, that I am quite sure he buffs his fingernails.

I say, ‘Have you looked at Emily’s drawings?’

Amid many test reports on Cartwell’s desk are dozens of Emily’s cartoons: Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Pluto, plus several pictures of Dumbo flying through the air. I brought the drawings to show the school because I believe they illustrate something of Emily’s personality, her interests, what makes her who she is. I think she’s a genius, but Mr Cartwell only frowns at the images. ‘Yes, er, they are very nice,’ he says as though staring at a pungent mound of disastrous ethnic cuisine he has no intention of ever tasting. ‘Would you like them back?’ he asks now, handing them over.

I am about to launch into a discussion about how important art is to Emily when Stephen takes his shoe and puts it on top of my boot in a secret communication that means Don’t Say Anything. Stephen does not often try to control me in conversation, although he does have an uncanny way of subduing my opinions. But this gesture at this particular time is a mistake on his part. I am not in the mood for it. There’s something about the way Cartwell keeps assuring us that Emily won’t be held back by children with ‘problems’ because the school carefully screens such children out that has me on edge. Plus all the rearranging of knick-knacks on his desk. I keep thinking that Cartwell himself clearly has problems. His face is grim, serious, as though explaining a procedure for qualifying neurosurgeons rather than talking about children. He keeps clearing his throat in rapid grunts that sound like someone imitating gunfire. Stephen’s foot on mine presses in an annoying manner and it feels to me to be exactly the sort of obstacle that requires swatting away. So while Cartwell goes on about his wonderful school and the screening procedure that makes it so, I take my umbrella, the old-fashioned sort with a long, pointed steel end, and knock it firmly into Stephen’s Achilles tendon.