Daniel Isn't Talking (13 page)

I mean to have him back is the point. No argument about his shoddy response to Daniel's autism, about marital treason, about his general aloofness can shelter me from the yearning I have to return to my children their father.

When I come into the house I see the glow of Daniel's musical lamp shining from the children's bedroom. It taps out a lullaby while turning slowly round, projecting images of coloured animals across the blank walls. I love this lamp. I have photographs of the children staring into it, amazed at its mystical qualities, how it brings alive their whole room with the dreamy images of giraffes and toucans. Removing my shoes, I tiptoe into the bedroom,
finding Stephen in the wicker armchair set in the centre of the room between the twin beds. His arms are folded across his chest, his chin resting on them; perhaps he is asleep. I think how he will be some day, an old man in a chair. Who will sit beside him then? Surely it is not an insignificant thing that I have promised to be that person, who will not need him to be handsome or young. But will need him.

‘You are late,' he says.

I say, ‘Have the children been happy – happy to see you, I mean?'

‘I thought perhaps you'd decided to go on one of your midnight jaunts,' says Stephen.

‘Only for a minute. I went to a bookshop, to the medical section. I want to know more about how the brain develops.'

‘It won't matter what you learn,' he says. ‘It's not going to make a difference.'

‘I couldn't afford the book anyway. It was eighty pounds.'

‘You can't go around buying eighty-pound books, Melanie,' he says.

‘Well, I didn't. And your shirt costs eighty pounds,' I tell him.

In the Bible somewhere – is it the Book of James? – we are warned about the words that we speak.
Consider
what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark
. Quickly, before it is too late, I change the subject. I say, ‘I do not, of course, leave them in the middle of the night on their own.'

‘I should think not,' says Stephen. He knows perfectly well I'd never leave them. I won't even leave them at the supermarket crèche.

‘Daniel says the word “crash.” And he plays with his trains,' says Stephen. ‘Plays, not just holds one in front of his eyes. I want to meet this man who you say is teaching him.'

I nod.

He says, ‘Cath gave me a book on child development and it says he should have several hundred words in his vocabulary by now. Full sentences, questions that begin “Who”, “What”, “How”.'

‘One step at a time,' I say.

He stands. His hair is pushed back so that it flops to one side. His chin is thick with stubble. It appears that among the new changes in his appearance, a different way of combing his hair, a new shirt, Stephen is now going in for facial hair. So perhaps he
will
some day turn up with clinging clothes and a mossy beard. Chuck in a few tattoos and put a bull ring through his nose and I would be most happy never to touch him again. Unfortunately, he looks good in his new facial hair. Doesn't that just take the piss?

He says, ‘I can't help but think we are holding him back by not allowing him to go to a special school. And that you cannot continue as you are. At this rate we will most certainly go bankrupt. And for what? We have been told he cannot attend regular school, or be like a regular child.'

I shake my head dumbly. I wonder, has Stephen ever
been
to a special school? Has he seen how impossible it is to learn language in a group setting, surrounded by others who either cannot speak at all or repeat the same dismal, senseless phrase over and over? Does he not realise there is no way to model your own behaviour on normality when there is nothing normal happening around you? Has Stephen looked at the rate of improvement among these children who get so-called ‘special' help? Because the
morning I went along to check out the special school that the Local Education Authority would like Daniel to attend, I thought to myself he could be there all his life and never learn a single word.

‘You're out of your mind,' I tell him.

He stands close to me, too close. His face is menacing. With this expression in his eyes and his new beard, he looks plain mean. I don't know what happened to the guy who taught me how to waltz, laughing as I clambered all over his toes, who sat patiently – and really, rather bravely – in the passenger's seat as I screeched through London in his car, trying to figure out how to drive on the left side of the street. This man, towering above me, is nothing like the one who made me a record player out of a rosewood box, told me in his perfect French that my body was like a garden – he saw in it everything beautiful. Now he looks at me with a mixture of pity and disdain. He says, ‘You just came back from your psychiatrist and
I
am out of my mind?'

In my dream I am walking down a street on a wet night. Winter leaves form clumps at the kerb; the trees have that skeletal look, as though they could never again bud flowers. Suddenly I remember that I have left the children in the house alone. It is impossible that I would ever do such a thing, but in my dream I have suddenly remembered that they are all alone in that house. I rush through the city now, panic rising in my chest. It seems the streets are all tangled up; I cannot find my home. Then all at once I am there, running for the door.

Inside there is a man I think I recognise. Bettelheim. He's small, weasel-like, with heavy glasses. He sits in the armchair – Stephen's favourite chair – and points to Daniel,
who stands in a corner turning round and round, focusing on nothing. Daniel doesn't even look fully alive as he spins slowly in a circle.

‘Look what you've done!' shouts Bettelheim. His face is the mask of an accuser. I recognise him more by this fact about him than any other, and the thought that I am to blame stuns me, silences me.

I rush for Daniel, the blood pounding in my ears, but when I reach him he feels like wood in my arms.

‘Look what you've done!' Bettelheim taunts once more.

When I wake there is orange light flooding through the window. I have forgotten to draw the curtain, so the street lamp shines through the window in the manner of the glowing bulbs of certain terrariums and fish tanks. I feel I am being observed. Outside, the morning sun is hovering low in the sky. When I open the window, the air smells like coal and it smells like rain. The man in my dream is gone now, as is the man in my life.

I have a book of all Daniel's new words. Among others, he can say ball, Thomas, egg, button and balloon. Except he doesn't say the whole word, of course. That would be too hard for him. ‘Balloon', for example, is more like ‘bah-ooh', but that's fine. That's beautiful. At first I was afraid to keep a record of his words, for fear he would lose them. That is what seems to have happened all through his babyhood, which I am at pains to remember is over now. At three and three months he is a little boy.

‘We have time,' Andy assures me, but all I can think is that Stephen will insist Daniel go to nursery school by four. And where will he go if he cannot speak?

‘He
can
speak, woman,' says Andy, then swigs back some tea. He drinks his tea sweet and strong, ‘the way the brickies like it' is what he has said. His two brothers, who also work in London, build walls all over the city. ‘What are you writing in your book about him if not all his good words?'

On the days that Andy is here, I find myself a bit simpering, a bit quiet. I rely on him to reassure me that
Daniel won't return to mute, won't become one of these children who must move from nappies to adult diapers, the sort that go round as incontinent old men. No, he will develop into a boy who pulls on his jeans and races shirtless to the garden with a bat and ball. He will find friends to compete with on hillsides, battle on playgrounds. Easter will bring egg hunts; he will dream of racing cars and piloting hot-air balloons. He will be normal – or close enough. He will be happy.

Andy tells me that Daniel's progress is steady, controlled. He says it's magic compared with that of other children he has, and that I am lucky. Lucky, the word sticks in my throat, but as Andy speaks I begin to understand why he says that, and why it is true. One of the children Andy works with, an eight-year-old, used to run through the house repeating, ‘Have a Break. Have a Kit Kat. Have a Break. Have a Kit Kat.' Hundreds and hundreds of times he uttered this same slogan, often under his breath until it was only a hoarse whisper. Yesterday he came out with ‘Have you been hurt in an accident? Call 0800 treble five treble nine. That's 0800, treble five, treble nine.' And he hasn't mentioned KitKats since.

‘Verbal stimming,' says Andy. ‘Worst kind of stim.'

I ask him if he can help this child, wait for his answer to be no, some cases are well out of his ability.

‘Oh, sure,' says Andy, snapping a rolling paper from its cardboard wallet. He dumps in a clump of tobacco that smells wet to me, like freshly cut summer grass mixed with leather. Rolling the paper back and forth in his fingers, he says, ‘It's best, however, not to let a child get that old without useful language.'

As though he has to convince me.

‘Will you help my friend Iris? She has a teenager. He
can talk, but I get the impression there are other problems. Quite bad ones.'

The trouble with Iris's son, among other things, is the fact he has become a grumpy adolescent. ‘If there is anything worse than a teenager,' she told me, smiling, ‘it's an autistic teenager.' He storms through the house, stomps out to the garden, paces and swings his arms. He wants to go out in the middle of the night. He seems to be fascinated by the lighted windows of people's homes, by the gleaming colours of Piccadilly Circus, the abrupt, moving brightness of night buses. Midnight, one or two in the morning, the later the better. Iris has placed complicated locks on every door and every window. She makes no apology for making her house into a prison from which, sadly, her son is clever enough to escape.

Andy nods, smiles. He can help, he says. But he only has so much time.

Now he shows me how to get Daniel to use language while doing a puzzle. The theme of the puzzle is, of course, Thomas the Tank Engine. It's a wooden one, from the Early Learning Centre, with pull-out pieces. Daniel has the empty wooden tray with the missing pieces. Andy has figures of all the trains, plus the Fat Controller. Daniel has to make a sound like ‘Thom' to get Thomas, a ‘Puh' sound to get Percy, an ‘Eh' to get Edward, etc. Then I have to put my hand over his hand to help guide the pieces into position. It doesn't take him long to figure out the idea, and I am thrilled because I've never gotten him to complete a puzzle before. He usually just tips the puzzle over and watches the pieces fall, then walks over them as though they weren't there, or he's forgotten they are there. What has changed is that we direct every movement, loudly praising him for each effort. And when he completes the
entire puzzle, out comes a battery-operated Thomas with a headlamp, which goes like blazes across the wooden floor. This battery-powered version only comes out at the end of the puzzle – it's a ‘reinforcer', which means that it is only used during therapy sessions. Daniel loves it. He grins with anticipation throughout the whole process of making the puzzle.

‘Five minutes every two hours until I see you next,' Andy tells me. ‘Before he gets bored with that puzzle, get him a new puzzle. Keep him talking, every day, all the time.'

‘This will work?' I ask hesitantly.

‘This will work,' Andy says. And I believe him.

Before he leaves he tells me, ‘If you see Daniel stimming, distract him. I don't care what you are doing – hanging the laundry, making the tea – stop what you are doing and redirect him so he doesn't just sit there and stim.'

A ‘stim' is whatever someone is doing to distract themselves. Jumping up and down, nodding the head back and forth, or humming continually. These are stims you see in autistic people. But we all have stims, of course. I bite the ends of pens, for example.

‘Nose-picking, tapping, biting fingernails, hair-twirling, licking your lips. And eating pens like you're doing now,' Andy explains. ‘And that's my pen, by the way.'

I whip the pen out of my mouth, holding it toward Andy. But I see that I've gnawed off the blue cap, put my teeth marks on the transluscent plastic casing.

‘Put it back in your mouth, Melanie,' says Andy, waving away the slobbered-on pen. ‘I don't want it!'

He makes me laugh and he fixes my kid. In his rucksack he carries clipboards and developmental charts, note
cards and dozens of small gadgets: a top that spins and throws sparks, a wind-up frog that hops across tables, a speaking turtle with a string-pull, lots and lots of things that light up or buzz, plus a great number of trains.

He promises Daniel will enlarge his interest in trains and, just as predicted, a few weeks later I find Daniel latched on to more than just Thomas. He's gotten Annie and Clarabel out of the box on his own, connected them on to the back of Thomas, and is pushing them along the wooden floor, I don't care what the speech therapist said about Andy having no professional qualifications, he seems to understand how to make Daniel more and more like a typical child. Daniel cries less these days; he has things to do other than haul around disc-shaped objects. The discs are useful for teaching Daniel to learn the concept of big and small; a coin next to the lid of a mayonnaise jar. When he gets it right Andy showers him with pieces of round, coloured confetti he's made with a hole-punch. For Daniel it is ecstasy to have a cascade of these circles pouring over him. If he could, he'd wade in a river of geometric shapes.

The Hoover fetched ninety pounds and I really don't miss the carpet at all.