Daniel Isn't Talking Read online

  Stephen’s face barely registers the assault on his ankle. In a different mood I could not only admire but actually be mildly attracted to him for being able to endure so much physical pain without allowing it to show on his face. The problem – for him – is that he cares very much how we come across. He can’t actually move away, nor can he tell me to stop attacking him with the umbrella – unless he wants to look really weird.

  ‘You have nothing to worry about with Emily – she will fly through,’ says Cartwell, as the drama of the umbrella continues under the table.

  Stephen glances briefly at me as though to say, I Mean Business. This annoys me so much that I remind him of the umbrella by rapping his shoe with its steel point. ‘Even at the pre-prep level we do not accept children with any special needs or behavioural problems,’ says Cartwell as Stephen kicks with some force to fend off a blow to his ankle.

  The sound of this causes Cartwell to pause.

  ‘Did you hear something?’ he asks.

  ‘Like what?’ I say. ‘Like a man kicking an umbrella?’

  Now Stephen is even more irritated. He knocks my boot with the edge of his shoe while Cartwell continues his speech about the quality of his school’s pupils. I land the umbrella once more against Stephen who, with amazing self-control, gives no sign whatsoever that he has just had a rather serious knock on his ankle bone. I watch him nod, agreeing with the sage counsel of Cartwell, who explains that children with problems are to be avoided, of course. That is what we are buying. One of the things we are buying.

  ‘You’ve indicated you have another child,’ says Cartwell now. ‘Daniel is his name? How old is Daniel?’

  ‘He’s three,’ says Stephen.

  ‘Marvellous,’ says Cartwell. ‘He’ll be ready to join his sister here shortly, then.’

  I’m about to explain that Daniel is exactly the sort of child who is apparently wholly unwelcome by his school when Stephen, risking serious injury, puts his foot back on mine again. I turn my head to him, catch his eye, and then get him so hard across the shin that he has a sudden intake of breath.

  ‘I’m sure I heard something,’ says Cartwell. ‘Did you hear anything?’

  ‘I thought so too,’ I say. ‘Almost like the sound of bone cracking.’

  Cartwell begins an unsteady laugh, then looks uneasy. Then he arranges Emily’s file so that the edges of the test results line up perfectly, glances back and forth at Stephen and myself.

  ‘Perhaps we had better let you go,’ says Stephen, rising.

  All the way out of the school Cartwell and Stephen compare notes about their own prep-school days, chuckling about the way things have changed. I see that the deal has been clinched. I trail behind them as we are led out of the school building. Inside, I feel myself shrieking objections to everything associated with this pompous and, it must be said, really very strange headmaster. I’m thinking, how can we send our daughter to a school in which the headteacher puts boats in bottles? And makes promises that he will shield children from having to have contact with any child like my own son? But I can see I will lose this one. Stephen shows only a slight limp and he’s determined – oh yes – that Emily will go to this school.

  The autistic teenage son of a man in Buckinghamshire bit through his father’s thumb. I read it in the newspaper on the way back from the interview with Cartwell. They had to find the thumb and sew it back on. Meanwhile, the boy ran out of the house.

  So who found the boy?

  In America a young autistic man went into the bank and yelled, ‘Stick ’em up!’, his finger pointing like a gun. He was shot during his arrest, because he wouldn’t put down his weapon.

  In court, the parents have been told that it is nobody’s fault. Nobody is to blame. Their son was shot for having a finger gun and the parents have been told ‘these things happen’.

  Stephen’s voice on the message tape says, ‘Look, Mel, I’m sorry …’

  But when I pick up the phone he says, ‘I just didn’t want you to blow it for Emily –’

  ‘Not sorry then,’ I say, and hang up.

  Later he calls and says, ‘But you hit me!’

  ‘Still not sorry,’ I say, and down the phone goes.

  But that night I am tearful, upset, not wanting a fight. I sit on the doorstep with Daniel, who has a thing about the iron railing in front of our house. He scans it with his eye, drops down as though doing a deep knee bend and then pops back up all at once like a jack-in-the-box. You might not think that’s so bad, except he’s been doing it for an hour now. Judging by the enthusiasm he still shows for the pattern of parallel lines that make up the railing, he’ll be at it for another hour if I let him. I’ve been sitting here thinking that maybe Emily needs some doors open to her. That if the pre-prep is a place that will do that for her, then maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe she should go. This thought disturbs me, depresses me. But so does the thought of Emily stuck in a house with nobody but her mother and her autistic brother.

  Down the road I see Stephen. He’s talking on his mobile, balancing his case, walking in long, determined strides. When he sees me on the step he stops, stares at me.

  ‘What are you doing sitting there?’ he says.

  ‘I’m sorry about the umbrella attack,’ I tell him.

  He shakes his head.

  I tell him, ‘I’m sorry about everything.’

  Almost midnight and I still cannot sleep. The alarm clock glows. The refrigerator hums; the muddied sound of distant cars rumbles in the air. I am alert to everything, to the gentle rising of Daniel’s chest, the warmth of his breath upon my cheek. I watch him steep and I have only one wish for him. A wish that should never need be: that he was normal. Just normal. Just an average child. Not a superstar, not a genius, just a kid.

  I watch the sweep of the clock’s second hand, hear the distant chime of bells. Even though he cannot hear me, I find myself speaking to him. ‘Here comes tomorrow,’ I say.

  My shrink has brand new trainers, bright yellow, like two giant bananas tied to his feet. His dark tracksuit is in contrast to the trainers, which are distracting and odd. He has come to our house because I called him just before he went to the gym and I could not speak, not even to tell him my name. I just held the phone to my ear and listened to him say ‘hello, hello’ over and over again, and could not bring myself to interrupt his day, his scheduled appointments, his tidy life. The way he figured out it was me was by comparing the number on his caller ID screen with his patient list. Then he put down the phone, got into his car and drove to my house.

  Now he sits on the couch and looks at me as I rock on the floor. Veena has taken the children to the park and I feel guilty I am not with them.

  ‘I can’t even do that!’ I sob.

  ‘Right now, this minute, at 3 p.m. on this Wednesday,’ says Jacob, ‘no, you cannot.’

  ‘Why am I so useless?’

  ‘You are not useless. You are in shock. Frankly, I am in shock. I had no idea what was wrong with your son. Melanie, please, I have to say this. I am so sorry.’

  What I want him to say is that he disagrees with the diagnosis. He saw Daniel on his way out the door with Veena, walking on his toes, looking at the wall, being strung along by Veena, whose hand held his wrist. But Jacob doesn’t say he disagrees with the diagnosis. Nothing like it.

  ‘Tell me why you are not disagreeing with the diagnosis,’ I say. He says nothing. I wait for him to speak and he doesn’t. ‘Tell me!’ I say, but all he does is shake his head.

  Then I say, ‘Then explain what you thought was wrong with me before you found out what was really happening. With Daniel, I mean.’ It is not too late to join the children at the playground. Except I still can’t seem to get off the floor.

  ‘Anxiety disorder. I suspected perhaps marriage problems,’ says Jacob.

  ‘Oh my God, my marriage!’ This sends me into a new episode of unretractable tears. We wait through that, both he and I. I have a sore muscle just below my ribs from all the
crying, and I’ve broken some blood vessels just beneath the surface of skin on my cheek. I saw them in my reflection when I went to pee: a blotchy patch of tiny red dots. Who knew you could cry that hard?

  ‘What is wrong with me then?’ I ask Jacob. ‘Now that we’ve gotten the initial impressions out of the way.’

  ‘You are grieving,’ he says. ‘You are experiencing a very serious loss.’

  ‘But Daniel’s not dead,’ I say, remembering Veena’s words.

  ‘The boy you thought he might be is lost, however,’ says Jacob.

  ‘You call yourself a shrink!’ I say, sobbing out of control now. I pick up Duplo bricks and a coffee mug, hurling them across the room. The mug ricochets off the fireplace surround and I’m so mad at it for breaking that I throw a book, a tub of crayons and, finally, my eyeglasses. Luckily, the eyeglasses don’t break, so I stop throwing things. I sit still and don’t breathe. This is on purpose. I sit with my head on my knees and I don’t let in a single breath. I am drowning, I think. But Jacob won’t let me drown.

  ‘Melanie,’ he begins.

  Later, still sitting on the floor, my head inches from Jacob’s silly banana shoes, I whisper, ‘Jacob, what happens if Daniel dies?’ I say that several times in a row, and without a pause between the questions. Even to me, I sound weird.

  ‘He won’t die. He’s going to live, and so are you.’

  ‘But I want to die. But I can’t die. Because if I die who will help him? Jacob, please listen to me. Please, don’t go away or look at your watch –’

  ‘I didn’t look at my watch –’

  ‘Just in case you were going to look at it, don’t look. At the watch, I mean. Jacob, I have to describe this to you. You know how when you have a baby, a little child, you think how if you die that the child will be broken- hearted? I mean, this is a tiny soul who cannot stand to be away from you for more than an hour and who, if he should fall, needs you to hold him and only you?’

  Jacob nods, although I doubt he ever thought about such a thing as dying when his children were young. Anyway, his children are grown up now. And I have a feeling that nobody other than me imagines such events. It is because I have watched such great, unthinkable things. My mother died in pieces – it seemed to me they were always carving more from her body. My lover, my best friend, hit the asphalt of a Massachusetts highway at sixty miles an hour one morning because someone in a four-by-four didn’t bother to look.

  I say, ‘OΚ, so you know if you die it’s going to tear him up. So you cling to every shred of health you have and you take careful pains to ensure that you get through each day. If only on a subconscious level, you think you better not take any risks. Life insurance won’t be enough. Savings accounts won’t be enough. He needs you because you know how to tuck him into bed and which stories he likes and how long to hold open the book and where to take him on a Saturday morning. You love him and he loves you. No, it’s more than that. He’s part of you, like your arm or your face. He lays claim to you and counts you as his, as he might his own foot. But if you should die, you know that some day he will grow up anyway. He’ll grow up and he’ll drive a car and make love to his wife and have friends he laughs with, collect books or go to football games or whatever. You know that he won’t stay that hurt, desperate, devoured child who is told his mum won’t come back. Now, Jacob, let me tell you what happens to Daniel, to my baby. My baby who does not grow up because he’s autistic. You see, when I die, he is not grown up yet, is he? He is not driving a car or turning over in bed to hold his wife or being a man in a world full of men. He is still that tiny child who cannot understand why his mother isn’t here any more. What happened to her? Who took her away? This is not a possibility that he will be that broken-hearted boy, but an inevitable fact. Because I cannot live for ever.’

  That’s all I can get through. That’s it. For an hour or more Jacob stays with me, however.

  7

  The first I ever heard of Bruno Bettelheim was in a sociology class at university. We were given his paper on how victims of Nazi concentration camps would sometimes come to emulate their captors, so that within the camps existed a kind of secondary Nazi force, Jews controlling Jews. Bettelheim spent some time describing how bits of the Nazi uniform were coveted by many prisoners, and how some were said even to march among their fellow prisoners hurling abuse and anti-Semitic remarks.

  ‘I don’t think I believe this,’ said Marcus. He was sitting on the edge of my bed wearing a pair of boxer shorts and waiting for the aloe vera gel to cool the sunburn he got riding his motorcycle with his shirt off. He kept making faces as he read, which may have been because his shoulders hurt so much or may have been because he thought Bettelheim was greatly exaggerating what he claimed to have witnessed in concentration camps. He kept shaking his head. ‘It just isn’t true,’ he said.

  I didn’t think much about Marcus’s comment and probably would not even remember him saying it except that since Daniel’s diagnosis I have become feverishly interested in anything to do with autism. Bettelheim, it turns out, not only embroidered stories about the Jews in concentration camps, but was the famous inventor of the idea that childhood autism was caused by poor mothering. It is this second fabrication that grabs my attention.

  So I find out a few things. I read some articles and discover that by 1939 Bettelheim was in America creating a whole new life for himself as an expert on autistic children. That would be OK, except there was no reason to believe he knew anything about autistic children. He falsely claimed to have received training as a psychoanalyst when all he did was receive some psychoanalysis himself. He said he’d published books on children with emotional difficulties and had been part of an organisation in Europe that studied such children, but there seemed to be no actual evidence for either of these claims. From what I have read, the only training Bettelheim had was a Ph.D. in philosophical aesthetics, which has to do with questions like, What is art?

  And yet he somehow convinced everyone he was an authority on autistic children. He set up a school outside Chicago that claimed to give specialised treatment for them. He denigrated the mothers of these children, declaring that they destroyed their children’s personalities, that they were like SS guards in concentration camps, like witches, like infanticidal kings. How could anyone believe this? Had Daniel been born at a different time it would have been understood that I was to blame, that I had destroyed his psyche and dehumanised him, and that in his despair he became autistic. Bettelheim, who invented nearly all his credentials, would say that on a subconscious level I wanted Daniel dead – and he would be believed. That the world should take notice of and even acclaim this charlatan who made his living by damning the mothers of unwell children, pressuring parents to relinquish their children to him on a residential basis, and then tricking everyone into thinking he could restore them through psychoanalysis, is a humanitarian crime. And yet, this is what happened. If we don’t hold in our minds just how easily we were duped by Bettelheim and his ilk, it could happen again.

  This is what I tell the doctors at this supposed centre of excellence for autistic children, when they ask me if I would like Daniel to enrol in their programme. This programme, it turns out, is based on the wrongly derived, scandalous notion that autism is a problem that requires psychoanalysis. They want to spend time guessing at what went wrong during a ‘critical moment’ of Daniel’s psychological and emotional development.

  ‘ALL moments of a child’s life are critical,’ I tell them, ‘Your stupid institution here is following the wrong road, one that was paved by an insane and morally criminal man.’

  ‘Excuse me, Mrs Marsh, I don’t think you quite understand,’ says a sandy-haired shrink – God, she’s younger than I am. Into her hair she has braided a decorated cord of colours. She puts down her notes and gives me a beautiful smile. Must have just gotten the braces off.

  ‘Understand? I think I have given you a fairly thorough account, Miss,’ I tell her. Doesn’t she have homewo
rk to complete? An exam to study for? Some stubborn acne to medicate? I think, why is my son so low on the list of priorities that he gets treatment from her, who cannot have any real expertise as she is just about old enough to be a babysitter. Not that I want this ‘treatment’, which isn’t ‘treatment’, which is only bullshit, in any case. Do they also believe the world is flat?

  The junior shrink looks at her colleague, the real shrink. You can tell he is a real shrink because he is older with a hollow chest and soft, white hands as though he’s never done a bit of work in his life. The real shrink says, ‘Mrs Marsh, we don’t actually think it’s your fault about your son.’ He has a face like a shovel and a receding hairline revealing scalp moles and what might be a cancer up there. I’m more apt to believe what he says, if only because of the scalp moles. I would tell him so but he might take it the wrong way.

  ‘That’s lovely that you don’t blame me. So why psychoanalyse him? Let me ask you this, would you psychoanalyse him if he had something wrong with his heart or lungs or kidneys?’ I offer a few additional comments about Bettelheim, their great genius who would claim that I had a secret wish my baby would die. As for charging the National Health Service a hundred pounds an hour to speculate uselessly on what might have caused a developmental crisis in Daniel, I say, ‘I think the taxpayers should know what you are doing here. Certainly, you’re not helping. Why don’t we use the money to find someone who can teach Daniel to talk? Surely, even you can see that being mute has disadvantages.’

  ‘We do help them to talk,’ says the real shrink. ‘We help them to say the difficult things about the way they feel.’

  ‘Is that right?’ I say. ‘The difficult things? Well, right now, little Daniel here who is coming up for three, cannot say Mama. In fact, he can’t recognise his own name in conversation as far as I can tell. I think you might find yourself hard pressed to get him to express complex phobias.’