Enchantment (24 page)

‘No, that's all right, really.' Here came guilt again. ‘I'd like it.' Sacrifice his freedom. The hero with a heart of gold.

‘Too late.' His mother told him that she had already decided to sell the inconvenient house and live in a flat.

‘Well, don't worry. I'll come round a lot.'

‘I hope so. I'll need someone to cook for.'

‘I mean, to do odd jobs and that. When I get my own car, I'll take you out.'

‘We'll go to the sea. Could we go to Scotland? Your Dad would never go over the border.'

‘Go anywhere you like. Isle of Skye … West End theatres …'

They were off again, painting pictures in which they did not have to believe.

‘I love you, son,' she told him when he left.

Helen gave him quiet praise for his great feat, in a few short rushes of words. Then she changed the subject, which he liked, because you couldn't go on and on about it for ever.

‘What can I give you, brave Tim? I want to give you a treat.'

‘Let me come with you when you go to Julian's school next week.'

He wanted to see the boy. In his new disguise as hero, he wanted to lay his deed at the feet of the prince, as if the boy could enter into the legend, and knight him Sir Galahad.

‘But it's a Wednesday.'

‘I'll get the afternoon off.'

Mrs Barber was not exactly putty in his hands, but she was a lot less sharp and spiky.

There were about twenty children at the school, all of them autistic. Tim and Helen found them at dinner, bigger boys crouched or sprawled over a normal-sized table by the wall, the smaller ones at low tables and chairs.

Helen saw Julian at once, but it took Tim a moment to recognize his arrogant rebel prince. He was sitting so quietly at the corner of the table, one hand combing his hair with a knife, the other eating mashed potato with a fork, which he never did at home. Mashed potato was for the hands.

Helen took Tim over to sit at Julian's table.

‘All right?'

Tim nodded and smiled at her, as if he were comfortable on the low chair; but he was as embarrassed as if everyone were looking at him, which no one was, because autistic children don't look at people, and the staff were busy helping, correcting, feeding small children who opened their mouths like baby birds, then jerked their heads away, and chatting cheerfully to children who did not answer.

Someone was looking at Tim. A pale girl with a drooping mouth, the ends of her long hair wound round her neck like a scarf, was staring through him with mournful grey eyes. Unexpectedly, she clapped her hands and whistled.

‘Eat your dinner, Megan.'

She clapped again, then screwed her eyes shut, crumpled her chalky face into a crying shape, dumped her head into her plate, and put her hands on the back of it to cover her ears.

The middle-aged woman at the table pulled the plate out from under her face, but left her alone.

‘It's not you.' She smiled at Tim. She had two homely brown moles on one cheek. ‘She does that to shut out everything, when she can't deal with something new.'

Julian scrambled up and knocked over his chair.

‘Pick it up,' said the bearded young man next to him. Some hope, mate. But the child did pick it up. ‘If you want to get up, Julian, what do you say?'

The wilful boy, Tim's untamed wild boy, put up a hand and patted his mouth for ‘please'.

‘What do you want?'

Helen watched with her deep frown, as Julian lifted a cupped hand to his mouth.

‘Go ahead.'

Julian went to the serving hatch for a glass of water.

‘I'm ashamed,' Helen said. ‘It's very humiliating. I can't get him to do any of those things at home.'

‘That's why he's here,' the teacher said. ‘And I bet you feel guilty about that too.'

‘How did you know?'

‘All the parents do. But you'd feel guiltier struggling to cope with him all the time at home, and failing, and going bonkers.'

Julian came back with the water.

‘Sit down, Julian.'

He sat. He drank some water, and then began to lick all round outside the plastic glass. He spilled a drop and licked it off the
table, again and again. Spill a drop, bend, lick it up, spill a drop more. He was busy, and unnaturally peaceful. It was almost a relief when he suddenly hurled the glass across the table, and screamed and threw himself about, and had to be restrained by Helen and the imperturbable young man. Tim sat like a bump on a log, and the pale sad girl kept her head down on the table, with her hands over her ears.

Out in the playground, one of the teenagers went off to sit on a tree stump in a hedge, another did a silly walk on the tips of his toes, and another big boy took a small tricycle away from a little one, and rode it round and round, with his jacket on backwards and his knees up to his chin.

The bigger ones were more distressing. Helen worried, ‘What shall I do when Julian is that size?'

Tim shook his head. He had got used to being with the one strange little tyrant. Seeing this assorted group, each one self-absorbed, ignoring the others, except to hit out at random, baffled him into silence.

A stout girl with a fixed grin kept up a monotonous chant. ‘Where's Angela why's Angela where's Angela.' She laughed at nothing, and droned, ‘Lo house lo trees lo person lo Simon. All right, Simon? Lo Simon all right?'

‘All right, thanks,' the unruffled young man answered, ten, twenty, thirty times, as many as was necessary.

The sad girl was lying inside a big plastic play tube, like a sewer pipe, with the hood of her jacket pulled down over her face and her hands over her ears, rolling from side to side.

When Helen sat down on a bench, Julian came and climbed on to her lap. Tim sat down, but Julian would not come to him. This was disappointing. Tim wanted to impress the staff.

Oh, you're so good with the boy, a real natural. Ever thought about going in for this kind of work? Tim the teacher. Loved and trusted. He could have another go at that moustache and beard.

Julian ignored him completely, would not climb up, jabber and dribble over him, try to pull out his teeth and hair. Tim felt low. He felt out of it and useless.

He felt better when the teacher with the moles knew who he was.

‘I recognized you from your picture in the papers. Took the law into your own hands, didn't you? We need more of that. Listen, Julian.' She stood the boy in front of her and knelt on the damp playground to look into his angelic, uncaring face. ‘This is your friend Timothy and he was very brave. He's come to see you.
You
. Because he's your friend and he's a brave man, and he loves you. Right, Timothy?'

‘Right.' Tim's heart lifted with pride. He galloped out at the head of a posse of vigilantes, mowing down the muggers and scum.

‘Right, Julian?'

The boy pulled away from her – he could be amazingly strong, and slippery – and ran behind the playhouse in the far corner, hitting out at a smaller child who ambled into his path without looking at him.

‘He doesn't understand,' Tim said glumly.

The teacher got up and brushed off her sensible tan trousers. ‘But it may get through. Like talking to someone under an anaesthetic. You never know. And he understands love. They all do.'

Everyone was called inside. The big boy on the tree stump stood up, turned round, and bent to smooth and pat the stump, as if it were a sofa cushion. He came out of the hedge, then went back and made the identical movements with his hands, left the hedge, went back again, like a woman compulsively checking her stove.

Julian was the last to go in. He waited behind the playhouse, then made a dash for a corner of the building, where he clung on to a drainpipe, licking it, until he was taken inside.

‘We'd better go,' Helen said to Tim. ‘I hope you – oh well. I'm sorry.'

‘What about?'

‘You know. He usually behaves better here, and I begin to think he's improving. Then I think he's not.'

She looked tired, and bitter. Tim could have taken her hand or
her arm, but there were people about in the hall. They went towards the door, and were saying goodbye to Simon, when the amazing thing happened.

They saw Julian streak into the hall from somewhere, and zigzag between grown-ups and children to the far wall where pictures were pinned up. He pulled a small picture roughly down, and streaked back to the door, put the picture in Tim's hand, and walked away without looking at him.

It was a torn, scribbled-over picture of a swan cruising out of a clump of reeds.

‘He tore it out of a book,' Simon said. ‘He insisted on having it put up on the wall. Does it mean something special?'

Earlier, in the playground, Simon had told them that it had taken him two and a half years to teach one boy of fourteen to dress himself, and added, ‘I was as pleased as if I'd taught a three-year-old to do it in one day.'

You're easy to please, mate, Tim had thought. Now he understood.

On his next free Saturday, Tim turned up at Helen's flat. She had nothing for their supper, so she asked Tim to go out. ‘I can't face taking Julian.'

‘You go,' Tim said. ‘I'll stay with him.'

‘Are you sure?'

‘Nothing to it.' Tim wanted to try some of the things he had seen at the school.

After Helen left, Julian was scudding about like a crazed beetle. Tim caught and held him, and went down on his knees like the woman teacher, and talked into his face.

‘I'm your friend,' he said. ‘Your friend, Tim. I'm going to tell you a story.'

When Helen was there, he supposed he was talking half to her. Now it felt odd to be speaking into a vacuum, but there was one thing about a boy like this. You didn't have to feel shy, since he did not take any notice of you.

‘Let's sit on the floor and I'll tell you some more about the sleeping prince. Here, I'll build you a castle.'

Chattering away in a moronic manner that surprised himself, Tim began to pile up light plastic blocks to make a castle keep. A piece of cardboard was the drawbridge, with Helen's knitting wool (kept on top of the cupboard) to pull it up.

‘This is a castle. It's ours. We're going to live in it. And have swans on the moat.' Tim made a long, curving-neck gesture with his hands. ‘Here – do like this.
Swans
, Julian. Swans.' That was the simple, patient way they talked to the children at the school.

While Tim added to his castle, Julian wandered out of the room. ‘If he's quiet, go and see what he's doing,' Helen had said.

He had done it. He had messed himself, and the bottom of his bedroom door. Tim ran a shallow bath, and dumped him into it. Although Julian struggled, once he was in the water, it was impossible to get him to come out. He fought to stay with the plastic toys and wooden spoons, but Tim wanted him to be dried and dressed before Helen came home.

Julian would not leave the bath, so Tim pulled up the plug and let the water out. Screams and gnashing of teeth, and a struggle to stop him getting to the tap to turn the water on again. Tim wrapped him in a ragged towel – all the towels and teacloths were bitten and torn – and carried him to the sofa.

For a moment, Julian let Tim hold him in the towel, clean and flushed, with damp golden curls. Then he was off and gone, naked and long-legged.

Tim folded the towel and went to find clean clothes. While he was at the laundry basket in the kitchen, flushing sounds were coming from the bathroom. Helen had said, ‘Don't forget to keep the bathroom door locked. He puts in the basin plug and holds his hands on the overflow, and the people downstairs get a waterfall through their ceiling.'

She did not say that Julian would also put the end of the toilet roll into the pan, and flush and flush, as the paper unrolled down the pipe.

He had already stopped it up. Where's my doughty sniper's rifle/toilet plunger? Better get him dressed first. How does she
do
this four or five times a day? ‘Hold still, you little bugger.' Tim got trousers and a vest on him, and was exhausted.

Julian climbed on to a chair at the table, and screeched like an owl.

‘What do you say?' Tim put his hand to his own mouth, in the ‘please' sign.

Julian did nothing, but Tim gave him a mug of milk anyway, and a biscuit. Pandemonium. Chaos. Wrong mug. Wrong kind of biscuit. No banana. Banana in wrong place.

‘If you're clever enough to know what you want, you're clever enough to behave,' Tim said, not tolerantly, like Simon, but with a rather hysterical severity.

Julian looked at him.
He looked at him
. He was so beautiful. Tim bent down and kissed him on the perfect curve at the side of his mouth.

‘Have you killed each other?' Helen came in with her shopping-bag. Julian slid under the table.

‘He's been fine.'

‘That's why you gave him a bath and changed his clothes.'

‘We managed all right. Have you got a toilet plunger?'

Later, Tim sat on the child's bed and finished the story of the kiss that woke the sleeping prince, and what happened after he had been asleep for a hundred years.

Silver-tongued, he sat by the great hearth at the inn, firelight and shadows playing on his strong, wise face. Blch, the lone wandering minstrel, teller of tales. Julian could not follow him. The warlord's faithful followers were lost, trapped in the stark tundra.

He travels fastest …

But you've got to have someone to tell the tales to.

‘Helen,' Tim called to her. ‘Are you divorced?'

‘No, just separated.'

‘Well, we wouldn't have to be married.'

‘What do you mean?' she called from the other room. ‘Live together?'

‘We might do.'

Julian picked busily at pills of wool on Tim's green sweater, a monkey grooming a monkey. It occurred to Tim: I have never really loved anyone before.