‘He has frequent ear infections,’ says Stephen. Apparently, we are being asked questions again and I’ve missed my cue to speak. I feel my mouth is full of elastic bands – I cannot seem to make it work properly. I rely on Stephen, who seems all at once to be solid and defined while I float up to the ceiling, watching us all as though from a great distance. Tell them about his fevers, Stephen, I think. Tell them how often he is unwell. ‘And he gets high temperatures and swollen glands around the neck,’ adds Stephen. And his stomach, tell them, please darling. Tell the doctor how many nappies we get through each day, then about the constipation. Four days and nothing, sometimes five. ‘He’s got problems with his bowels,’ says Stephen.
Dr Dodd adds these facts to the file. Then she has a quick word with her colleague, who has finished her evaluation of Daniel’s speech and language. He is being returned to me, my boy, and is clasping his disc-shaped objects, his Thomas and his mother all at once. I clutch him to me – too hard – and he squirms away, then settles with his back on my chest, using me as a chair. The report on his speech is that he has almost none. Functionally, he is less than six months old. I hold him and all his collection carefully in my arms, my head pounding, my heart fluttering inside my chest, every breath a heavy weight inside me.
‘Well, thank you very much,’ I hear Stephen saying, then his hand on my arm lifting. I leave the chair, walk the corridor, wait for the many locks and codes to be sorted so we can get back to the car. I am unsteady as though I’ve been drinking. The walls come at me all at once; I’m not ready for the kerb. Thank God it is Stephen driving because I would not be able to. My nerves are threadbare like antique cloth. My hands are cold and yet I am sweating. As we travel home it is as though we are driving through a strange land; the shops and signs and banks of houses feel as though they are designed for people other than ourselves, as though we don’t belong. When we stop at a light it feels too sudden. The cars beside us and in front of us appear too close. On the motorway I would swear we are speeding out of control, close to crashing, yet when I check the dashboard it reports that the car is well within the speed limit. Stephen drives carefully, both hands on the steering wheel, his eyes forward and alert. I am unable to sit still. I squirm and feel my breath coming unevenly. My leg is shaking. I pull my knee up to my chin and hold it. I keep checking Daniel, who is in the back seat staring out the window, moving his train’s wheels over his lower lip.
We have a favourite nursery rhyme CD and usually I put it on, singing the songs along with Emily. Without her here the silence is palpable, dire. I realise all at once that it has been Emily’s exuberance, in part, that has shielded me from the knowledge of Daniel’s condition. She always talks enough for two; her interests keep me busy answering questions, telling stories. It was easy to imagine that Daniel was part of all that, but now I see that he might not have been, that I have missed the obvious. He does not seem anxious for the CD to play; he does not seem to notice his father and me in the car. He’s always been like this – of course he has – a diagnosis, a label such as autism, does not change the child. And yet I feel that a change has taken place. I cannot help feeling as though I started the journey this morning with my beloved little boy and am returning with a slightly alien, uneducable time bomb.
Dr Dodd explained to us that Daniel will improve in some ways, but in others he will deteriorate and become noticeably more ‘autistic’, whatever that means. We were urged to understand that autism is genetic and that a history of depression on both sides of the family (Stephen’s father, Bernard, is also given to depression) is proof that this is evident in Daniel’s case. Indeed, the consultant seemed very satisfied when she heard my father had killed himself. The suicide absolutely decided it for her – Daniel’s predicament was clearly the result of unfortunate genetic coding. The fact that there was no history of autism itself was irrelevant to her, and the idea that my son might have some immediate treatable medical issues was never even acknowledged. If I could have willed my mouth to speak, I would have emphasised that he was terrifically unwell within weeks of receiving his MMR vaccination and that the photographs of him from that day forward plainly show him in marked decline.
It wouldn’t have mattered, of course. She has a whole slew of reports about the safety of the MMR, and anyway, didn’t my father put a gun in his mouth and shoot while his children slept upstairs?
Yes, I might have replied, if I had dared to reply, if I could have gotten words out, if I wasn’t entirely in shock. But my father could laugh and joke, put us on his shoulders and dance. He had a wit that could lay someone out if they tangled with him and a smile that swept a room. He was not dysfunctional, not unable to read emotions, and certainly not autistic. He was forty-eight with an inoperable tumour that made him feel his head was going to explode. Though I don’t pretend to know the details of what happened in that basement, I can assure you it wasn’t exactly his life he was aiming for with that gun.
* * *
At home I find Emily with Veena, sitting in front of the fireplace enacting the scene from Dumbo in which the ringmaster, the fierce monkey with the blue-painted coat and hat, forces the poor elephant to jump from a great height into a pail of oatmeal. We made Dumbo from Febo clay and baked him in an oven, paying special attention to his large ears so that they did not crumble. He has enormous eyes and an innocent expression. It isn’t just those ears which set him apart from the others, which are the sort of plastic animal you buy at Early Learning Centre and are very correctly moulded, though far less beguiling until Emily painted circus blankets on them all.
‘Where is your husband?’ Veena asks. Remarkably, after the announcement of Daniel’s diagnosis, Stephen dropped us back at the house and went on to work. I have a meeting, he said. Try not to worry, he said. Take a pill if you have to, and let Veena look after the children.
In this numbed, surreal post-diagnosis state, I could think of no objection. Except to the pills. I fed the toilet with them, then filled the vial with aspirin.
Veena says, ‘I believe British imperialism to be a kind of genetic coding. Your daughter requests that I take her to India so she can ride an elephant like a royal person.’ She shakes her head, smiles. She smells of orange tea and has her hair braided down her back in a single, weighty rope.
‘It’s the Dumbo influence,’ I tell her, ‘not the British.’
‘Same thing,’ she says, tucking a lock of loose hair behind her ear.
‘No, Dumbo,’ I say. ‘The elephant.’
‘Dumbo the elephant? What are you talking about? The child says she needs a palace.’
We give the children lunch and Veena sets about sucking the dust from the drapes with the long hose of the vacuum cleaner. The whole of our downstairs is just one big room, so I follow her with her Hoover, keeping an eye on Daniel to see that he eats the food and doesn’t just roll it between his fingers. Over the noise I try to explain to Veena that Daniel is autistic, and that he is going to get worse unless we do something, but we don’t know what to do. Even as I say this it doesn’t seem real to me. It’s like being in one of those movies where they’ve discovered the world is going to end in ten days unless a solution is found. But there is no solution.
‘What a silly you are,’ she says, aiming the hose. ‘Your boy is fine. It is only that he is a male and destined to grow up to be a male.’
‘No, no, nooo,’ I say. ‘As bad as that sounds to you – you, in particular, Veena – this is actually very much worse.’ I have a need to push the information at her, to press it into her and force her to take hold of it. It’s a feeling that will not go away and that, I believe, will visit me often and with everyone, guaranteeing the end of many of my friendships. Whispering