Daniel Isn't Talking Read online

  We have a favourite nursery rhyme CD and usually I put it on, singing the songs along with Emily. Without her here the silence is palpable, dire. I realise all at once that it has been Emily’s exuberance, in part, that has shielded me from the knowledge of Daniel’s condition. She always talks enough for two; her interests keep me busy answering questions, telling stories. It was easy to imagine that Daniel was part of all that, but now I see that he might not have been, that I have missed the obvious. He does not seem anxious for the CD to play; he does not seem to notice his father and me in the car. He’s always been like this – of course he has – a diagnosis, a label such as autism, does not change the child. And yet I feel that a change has taken place. I cannot help feeling as though I started the journey this morning with my beloved little boy and am returning with a slightly alien, uneducable time bomb.

  Dr Dodd explained to us that Daniel will improve in some ways, but in others he will deteriorate and become noticeably more ‘autistic’, whatever that means. We were urged to understand that autism is genetic and that a history of depression on both sides of the family (Stephen’s father, Bernard, is also given to depression) is proof that this is evident in Daniel’s case. Indeed, the consultant seemed very satisfied when she heard my father had killed himself. The suicide absolutely decided it for her – Daniel’s predicament was clearly the result of unfortunate genetic coding. The fact that there was no history of autism itself was irrelevant to her, and the idea that my son might have some immediate treatable medical issues was never even acknowledged. If I could have willed my mouth to speak, I would have emphasised that he was terrifically unwell within weeks of receiving his MMR vaccination and that the photographs of him from that day forward plainly show him in marked decline.

  It wouldn’t have mattered, of course. She has a whole slew of reports about the safety of the MMR, and anyway, didn’t my father put a gun in his mouth and shoot while his children slept upstairs?

  Yes, I might have replied, if I had dared to reply, if I could have gotten words out, if I wasn’t entirely in shock. But my father could laugh and joke, put us on his shoulders and dance. He had a wit that could lay someone out if they tangled with him and a smile that swept a room. He was not dysfunctional, not unable to read emotions, and certainly not autistic. He was forty-eight with an inoperable tumour that made him feel his head was going to explode. Though I don’t pretend to know the details of what happened in that basement, I can assure you it wasn’t exactly his life he was aiming for with that gun.

  * * *

  At home I find Emily with Veena, sitting in front of the fireplace enacting the scene from Dumbo in which the ringmaster, the fierce monkey with the blue-painted coat and hat, forces the poor elephant to jump from a great height into a pail of oatmeal. We made Dumbo from Febo clay and baked him in an oven, paying special attention to his large ears so that they did not crumble. He has enormous eyes and an innocent expression. It isn’t just those ears which set him apart from the others, which are the sort of plastic animal you buy at Early Learning Centre and are very correctly moulded, though far less beguiling until Emily painted circus blankets on them all.

  ‘Where is your husband?’ Veena asks. Remarkably, after the announcement of Daniel’s diagnosis, Stephen dropped us back at the house and went on to work. I have a meeting, he said. Try not to worry, he said. Take a pill if you have to, and let Veena look after the children.

  In this numbed, surreal post-diagnosis state, I could think of no objection. Except to the pills. I fed the toilet with them, then filled the vial with aspirin.

  Veena says, ‘I believe British imperialism to be a kind of genetic coding. Your daughter requests that I take her to India so she can ride an elephant like a royal person.’ She shakes her head, smiles. She smells of orange tea and has her hair braided down her back in a single, weighty rope.

  ‘It’s the Dumbo influence,’ I tell her, ‘not the British.’

  ‘Same thing,’ she says, tucking a lock of loose hair behind her ear.

  ‘No, Dumbo,’ I say. ‘The elephant.’

  ‘Dumbo the elephant? What are you talking about? The child says she needs a palace.’

  We give the children lunch and Veena sets about sucking the dust from the drapes with the long hose of the vacuum cleaner. The whole of our downstairs is just one big room, so I follow her with her Hoover, keeping an eye on Daniel to see that he eats the food and doesn’t just roll it between his fingers. Over the noise I try to explain to Veena that Daniel is autistic, and that he is going to get worse unless we do something, but we don’t know what to do. Even as I say this it doesn’t seem real to me. It’s like being in one of those movies where they’ve discovered the world is going to end in ten days unless a solution is found. But there is no solution.

  ‘What a silly you are,’ she says, aiming the hose. ‘Your boy is fine. It is only that he is a male and destined to grow up to be a male.’

  ‘No, no, nooo,’ I say. ‘As bad as that sounds to you – you, in particular, Veena – this is actually very much worse.’ I have a need to push the information at her, to press it into her and force her to take hold of it. It’s a feeling that will not go away and that, I believe, will visit me often and with everyone, guaranteeing the end of many of my friendships. Whispering so that Emily and Daniel don’t hear, I say, ‘He’s autistic. That’s what they’ve said. He will not grow up like a normal child. It is the worst thing that can possibly happen!’

  She shakes her head. ‘Where I come from,’ she says, ‘they burn women.’

  ‘Veena,’ I say, begging with my voice.

  ‘Eat something before you die,’ she tells me.

  But I cannot eat. I cannot sip the tea or even the water that Veena sets before me. It is a condition of my existence now that the simple, keep-alive activities of eating and drinking and sleeping are beyond me. I sit with my cheek against the wood of our dining table, my hands hanging down, my eyes half open, staring.

  Veena watches me for a moment, then shuts off the Hoover and comes to me, taking my hand. What I notice right away is how dry and small her hand is in mine. And how her eyes are so deep a brown I have to search for the pupils. And how sad she looks. I realise now that this is my fault; that I have made her sad by telling her what has happened. She looks across the room at Daniel, at Emily, and I register at once that she is thinking how it is worse for them. With a single confirmed diagnosis their whole lives are different. And then I see something else in her face. An awareness. A resolve. She lets go of my fingers and sits up straight, then says to me steadily, ‘I am a philosophy student and an Indian woman. This makes me a very dark person in many ways. Each day I see around me a world falling about like a stumbling drunk. They hold prisoners of Muslims and say they are not racists. They let the white skinheads terrorise the blacks and say they are not racists. I have come to this country as an escape from my own, worse country, where people are still considered untouchables and where it is known that boys are kidnapped and castrated and made to live as eunuchs. I am sorry, dear Melanie, but you are a white woman living in a white paradise. This is not the worst thing that can happen.’

  ‘Untouchables?’ I say.

  ‘Gandhi tried to rename them Children of God, but they call themselves the Dalit, which means depressed.’

  ‘Veena, I’m depressed.’

  She nods. She has heavy glasses that slide down her boxy little nose. She breathes in deeply, then lets the breath go all at once. ‘I understand,’ she says. ‘But right now he lives, and so do you.’

  Strangely, Veena’s words are a comfort to me.

  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 an
d 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.