‘I know how to come home,’ says Stephen.
‘What did you say?’ My head is a sound machine; the singing girls still won’t go away. Daniel is leaning forward, straining in my lap. If I allowed him, he’d have his nose against the screen. ‘I don’t like these pills you gave me,’ I tell Stephen. ‘I don’t like what’s going on here at all.’
* * *
I make him speak to me while he’s standing on the platform at Paddington, while sitting on the train. Even though I cannot hear him and the phone cuts out continually, requiring frantic redialling, I ask him, beg him, plead with him not to go away. As he walks down the road, turning the corner leading to our street, he must speak to me. Good things, I say, please tell me good things.
By the time he reaches our house he is fed up, his face vaguely disapproving as he enters the house. Emily, rushing to his arms, asks if something special is going to happen today. Is this a holiday? Is that why you are here in the daytime, Daddy? Daniel has given up on cartoons and is now staring at the pattern on the carpet, tracing it with his finger.
‘I’ll play ponies with you,’ says Stephen to his daughter. ‘But then I have a very important call.’
‘My ponies are having a nap,’ says Emily. Her eyes move to the sofa cushion where a whole cavalry of plastic ponies sleep beneath a dish towel. ‘And they have a very important call, too. So you will have to play with me.’
Stephen moves across the room to Daniel, who is quietly sitting on the carpet. ‘He seems fine to me,’ he says.
‘He disappeared,’ I say. I am cutting the crusts off a sandwich for Emily. Daniel won’t eat sandwiches. He will eat cookies and crackers and milk and cereal. But no meat and no fruit and no vegetables. I give him vitamins each day and I make cakes with carrots in them or with grated zucchini. ‘I called for him for ages but nothing happened. It was as though he didn’t hear me.’
‘Daniel, were you hiding?’ Stephen teases. Daniel looks up, meets his father’s gaze, but does not smile back at him. ‘He was playing a game, Melanie, why don’t you just calm down?’
‘A game?’ I say, and toss the knife into the sink so hard it makes a dent.
But Stephen isn’t worried about Daniel. He’s worried about Emily because she is four years old and not yet in school.
‘She’s going to be behind,’ he insists now.
‘Behind what?’
‘Behind the others.’
Everyone else we know sent their children to daycare, then to nursery as soon as they could get them out of nappies. But Emily shows no interest in school. When I walk her past the busy playgrounds, full of rushing children and squeals of laughter, the barking shouts of the footballers, the rhythmic chants of the girls with their jump ropes, she gives me a look as though to warn me off even the suggestion she be imprisoned in such a place. Rooms filled with primary colours, desks stocked with jars of coloured pencils, will not attract my daughter. Emily prefers instead to fax to her father’s office pictures she makes of Pingu, the penguin from the Swiss cartoon. She weighs bananas at Tesco’s, mashes bread for the ducks at Regent’s Park, visits pet shops where she names each and every animal, even the crickets, which are only there as food.
Stephen does not approve of this no-school business. The government has recently issued some kind of report indicating that children who go to pre-school perform better throughout their primary years. The day of the announcement, Stephen brought home the newspaper and flung it on to the kitchen table, which was being used as a Play-Doh factory, covering up all our good monsters with the Independent.
‘Hey, don’t wreck our stuff,’ I said.
‘Your stuff,’ he laughed.
‘Well, Emily’s stuff, I mean.’
‘Have a look at this,’ he said, pointing at the article.
The googly eyes came off one of the monsters and I stuck them back on. I glanced at the headline on the newspaper and nodded, then found another monster to adjust.
‘Read,’ Stephen said, and went upstairs to change.
Later, when Emily and Daniel were asleep, he told me he’d made appointments with three different schools and that we were going to visit these schools, ask the appropriate questions and get Emily’s name down on at least one of the registers.
‘She will perform better if we start now,’ he emphasised.
‘You make her sound like a trained seal,’ I said. ‘Anyway, what do school kids learn that make them “perform” better? Certainly they do not know how to use fax machines or make a chair out of papier mâché.’
That was one of our rainy-day projects, the chair. Emily and I made it out of a broken broom handle and chicken wire left over after that rather dangerous – I thought – pond in our garden was covered. We layered the chair with runny glue and newsprint, then painted it pink and yellow. It’s lopsided; it smells a little; it might be a health hazard. But I feel it indicates our daughter’s creative genius, so, even though it attracts a persistent insect I cannot find in my British flora and fauna book, it stays.
‘They learn to read and write,’ answered Stephen.
‘Not at four.’
‘They play with other children.’
‘Emily plays with other children.’
I didn’t tell him that the previous afternoon at the park she kicked a boy in the head because he was rushing her as she climbed the ladder for the slide. Apparently, she stood on his hand, too, which may or may not have been deliberate. The kicked child’s nanny was nowhere to be found and I had to carry him around the playground as he cried, searching for the nanny, which meant I left Daniel in the swing seat on his own. When I returned I found an older child swinging Daniel too hard, as he screamed hysterically. That would have been worth a pill or two, but I wasn’t taking them then.
Now Stephen holds my head in his hands, massaging my temples, squeezing together the lobes on either side of my skull, tracing my hairline with his fingernails.
‘Tell me what hurts you so much,’ he says to me.
‘Those fucking drugs you gave me,’ I say. ‘God, how does anyone in your office work on those?’
I can hear his laugh above me. ‘I’m sorry. That was stupid of me.’
‘I’m so worried,’ I say. ‘Worried about the children.’
‘You just need some help. More than that useless cleaner.’
‘Veena. She’s not useless. She’s my friend.’ Veena is a philosophy Ph.D. candidate. She is terrifically smart, and good company, but is in fact terrible at cleaning a house.
‘Well, the last time I saw her she scrubbed the skirting boards until you could eat off them but left the kitchen sink full of dishes.’
‘Yeah, well,’ I said. ‘Veena doesn’t like dust.’
To be honest, Veena is a little weird about dust. She runs a damp cloth along the tops of doors and the back of chests of drawers.