Daniel Isn’t Talking

‘Of course I did. I called several.’ This isn’t true but I have no other excuse. He wants us to go to some sort of business dinner party thing tonight and there is no way – no way whatsoever – that I’m going with him. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. And I am sorry, too, but not because I don’t want to go out tonight. The truth is I feel self-conscious. I don’t want people to see how fretful I am, how troubled. I used to love to go out, but now it is as though I’ve lost all capacity to speak to other people at such things as dinner parties. They always seem so well adjusted and normal to me, making me feel even weirder. ‘I’m not myself lately,’ I tell Stephen.

Stephen sighs. ‘What I want to know is what this guy is doing for sixty-five pounds an hour.’

‘Who? Jacob? He listens. I talk to him,’ I say. ‘Don’t blame Jacob because I don’t want to go out tonight. It’s not his fault.’

‘See, I knew it. You don’t want to go.’

Oh damn, I’ve blown it. ‘I do,’ I say, trying to smile.

Stephen gives me a long look, then shakes his head. He works his fingers down his stiff, immaculate shirt, weaving the buttons through their holes. ‘You can talk to me for a lot less than sixty-five pounds an hour,’ he says.

‘I’m getting him to prescribe something. Maybe Valium. Maybe Prozac. I haven’t decided. They keep coming up with new drugs, it’s getting harder and harder to choose among them all.’ I try laughing, but it doesn’t work. I’m so exhausted it sounds like a grunt.

Stephen goes to the closet and extracts a tie, flipping the silk through his fingers until it forms a perfect knot. Then he goes down the short flight of stairs to where his coat hangs on the banister. I can hear him now, pushing his hands in and out of the pockets, disrupting his keys which give off tiny, musical notes as he tosses them in the satin lining of his coat. He comes back upstairs with a small brown vial.

‘I told a friend of mine at work what you’re like these days and he gave me these,’ he says, lobbing the vial on to the bedclothes. ‘Antidepressants or something. Now, are you coming out with me tonight or not?’

‘Not,’ I say, but I stash the pills in my nightstand.

The pills are long and thin and white. Just one sends my head into a fuzz and makes it so the radio song I heard five hours ago is still crystal clear across every thought, raining down into my ears. Like this I cannot play My Little Pony correctly because I cannot make up the stories Emily needs in order to use the ponies’ new kitchen and their new glittery tiaras. I keep saying, ‘They are making a pie to take to the party.’ And she keeps saying, ‘But then what?’

‘Then they make the pie?’

Emily’s big eyes turn to me, heavy under her furrowed little brow. ‘Mummmmy!’ she says impatiently.

‘OΚ, it’s not a pie. Give me a moment. It’s a … uh … it’s a cake?’

I wander off to look for Daniel, but discover I cannot find him. In my ears is a terrible girl band and I cannot make them shut up. Not only do I hear them singing, but I also see them dancing. It’s like a sound and light show inside my head. Poking my fingers into my ears makes no difference, nor does covering my eyes with my hands and spinning, which is exactly what Daniel does when he is distressed. I call for Daniel but, of course, he doesn’t answer. He never answers. I am hoping that he will reappear, drawn by my voice, but he does not. I look in my bedroom, in all the closets and cupboards. It feels as though the house has swallowed him. He is Houdini, disappearing before my eyes. Downstairs, I search behind chairs and curtains. With every second that passes my panic rises. I cannot find him. I am searching for open windows, for some part of his body lying on the floor, dead from choking or poison or a sudden, inexplicable collapse. My mind is a kaleidoscope of unspeakable images: small, still limbs; eyes like marble, like glass. He is dying, my baby, and I cannot find him no matter how fast I run through the house or how loud I yell his name.

‘Daniel! DANIEL!’ I still can’t find him, but now it’s Emily who has my attention. She wears an expression as though she’s been scolded, sticks out her lower lip, preparing for tears. I scoop her up, balance her on my hip and keep searching. After many minutes I find Daniel inside the shower, rolling his Thomas the Tank Engine along the ledge of the pan. His face does not register surprise when I fling open the shower door. Parking Emily on the sink ledge, I reach into the shower for Daniel. When I pick him up he does not look at me, but stretches toward the train, his hands clasping and unclasping.

‘You said you’d talk to me, so talk to me!’ I tell Stephen. I’ve sat both children in front of the television to watch Teletubbies, an inane programme that I am sure is not good for them, but Emily likes the way the custard machine flings pink glop, not to mention all those oversized French rabbits. Daniel, on my lap, sits with a fixed expression, staring at the television, often leaning forward so that his face is way too close to the screen. Emily, taking my advice to sit further back, occupies the armchair along with a dozen or more plastic ponies from her collection. Between episodes she sings the Teletubbies theme tune while her ponies dance in her hands.

‘I don’t understand the problem,’ says Stephen, speaking to me from his office. ‘You looked for him, you found him. He was in the shower but there was no water running, so no danger of drowning –’

Among my many fears is that our children will drown in the tiny, ornamental pond in our garden. Before I consented to move into this house I insisted workmen arrive and cover it with three layers of metal wire. They did as I asked, but kept sneaking glances at each other. When I made cups of tea for them they said, ‘This is just tea, right? Nothing in it?’ Similarly, I had the lid for the septic tank in our summer cottage buried under half a dozen paving stones. I was told by the septic tank emptying service that this was not folly on my part. It would take thirty seconds for a child to die in a septic tank, the lid opening easily with one finger. He, the man from the septic tank service, drank his tea without any questions at all.

‘Please,’ I beg Stephen. ‘Come home now. Turn off the computer, get up from your chair, put on your coat.’

My socks don’t match and there’s a split in my jeans, along the seam of the crotch. I haven’t washed my hair in two days and my eyeglasses are so gunged up that the world through them seems to have grown a skin. Meanwhile, Daniel needs a new nappy, but I’ll have to change it in here because if I take him away from Teletubbies now he may not get back into it, which will mean I have to chase him around the house to keep him from endlessly flushing the toilet, which he will only play with like a toy but will not consider sitting on. Then I will have to stop him climbing up the curtains, or stacking the books like a ladder so that he can reach the glass-encased clock on the fireplace mantel. He will not play with me, although every day I try. I get out books in bright colours, push matchbox-sized cars up and down garage ramps, hide from him then appear like a vaudeville clown, leaping before his eyes. He turns from me. His preoccupations are a barrier between us, a sheet of glass through which I cannot reach him.

‘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. She has a special duster she uses for radiators, one she made herself and which she says she should get a patent for. ‘Such a lot of terrible dust you have,’ she says. If she manages to get beyond polishing the picture frames, she might actually run a vacuum cleaner. ‘You are having need of tile floors and shutters, not all these thick carpets and flouncy fabrics gathering dust,’ she has told me. When I protested to her that in every Indian restaurant I’ve ever been to there are nothing but flouncy curtains with complicated pelmets, she made a face and told me London dust is very nasty stuff, plus nobody bothers to wash such things in this country.

‘Why not a nanny?’ asks Stephen now. He is using his most gentle voice, his most loving hands.

‘No. The only thing I like is being with my children.’

‘Then why are you so miserable?’ he sighs. ‘It’s ridiculous.’

But it is not ridiculous. I have read how animals react hysterically, sometimes even violently, in the event of imperfect offspring. One night, while watching television, I saw the awful spectacle of a wildebeest born with the tendons in its legs too short. The legs would not straighten and the newborn calf buckled under the clumsy disobedience of his faltering limbs. Five minutes was all it took for a cheetah to find its opportunity. The wildebeest cow circled her crippled calf, bucking and snorting and running her great head low at the lurking cheetah, who seemed almost to gloat at this unexpected opportunity of damaged young. She ran at the cheetah, but the cheetah only dodged and realigned itself closer to the struggling calf. The mother then tried distracting the cheetah, enticing it to chase her. Trotting gently before it, inches from its nose, the wildebeest offered in lieu of her offspring the sinewy meat of her own buckskin hock.

‘Turn it off,’ I told Stephen. He was sitting in his favourite chair, his feet resting on Emily’s playtable, his dinner on his lap.

‘What? Right now? Let’s just see what happens to the calf!’

I took the remote control and pressed the button as though it were a bullet to the cheetah’s heart. ‘I know what happens,’ I said.

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