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.
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,