Daniel Isn’t Talking

From the reviews of Daniel Isn’t Talking:

‘A beautifully crafted and immensely touching novel that also depicts the dramatic effects autism can exert on the dynamics of the family’

ADAM FEINSTEIN, Guardian

‘Heartfelt, realistic and informative … Leimbach vividly portrays both overwhelming maternal love and the ins and outs of autism … Thought-provoking writing’

Sunday Times

‘One of the most enchanting and gripping books of the year … Managing to be darkly funny and touching by turns, Leimbach knows how to engage her readers completely, producing a narrative that has an almost filmic quality … From the first page you share in [Melanie’s] fears for Daniel, relish her small victories, and hold your breath when it looks as if she might find romance again. An outstanding novel’

Daily Mail

‘A voice of real authority … sharp and funny … The description of Daniel is raw and compelling’

Independent

‘An unflinching account of the exasperation of raising an autistic child; incredibly, Marti Leim bach manages to find hope’

LIONEL SHRIVER, author of We Need to Talk About Kevin

‘Marti Leimbach’s terrific novel manages to be both realistic and upbeat about a difficult subject and is shot through with wonderful moments of humour’

KATE LONG, author of The Bad Mother’s Handbook

‘[A] tender, involving tale of a family in crisis’

Woman & Home

‘Compelling’

Vogue

‘Leimbach is a writer who depicts matters of the heart vividly …Very readable and extremely moving’

Easy Living

‘A love story that delves beyond the parameters of disability and into human nature itself. An intense read, lightened by some great moments of dark humour’

Belfast Telegraph

‘Beautifully written and refreshingly unsentimental, Daniel Isn’t Talking is moving and totally engrossing’

Irish Examiner

Daniel Isn’t Talking

Contents

Review Title Page Daniel Isn't Talking Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty One Chapter Twenty Two Chapter Twenty Three P.S. Ideas, Interviews & Features … About the Author By The Same Author Copyright About the Publisher

1

My husband saw me at a party and decided he wanted to marry me. That is what he says. I was doing an impression of myself on the back of a motorcycle with my university sweetheart, a young man who loved T. S. Eliot and Harley-Davidsons, and who told me to hang on to him as we swept down Storrow Drive in Boston, the winter wind cutting through our clothes like glass. If I allow myself, I can still remember exactly the warm smell of his leather jacket, how I clung to him, and how in my fear and discomfort I cursed all the way to the ballet.

We sat on the plush red seat cushions and kissed before Baryshnikov came onstage, the whole of his powerful frame a knot of kinetic energy that leapt as though the stage were a springboard. I always insisted on sitting up front so I could appreciate the strength of the dancers, the tautness of their muscles, the sweat on their skin. My lover of motorcycles and poetry once licked my eyeball so quick I hadn’t time to blink, and told me he dreamt of crossing a desert with me, of living on nothing but bee pupae and dates. In warm weather he trod across the university campus in bare feet and a four-week beard, singing loudly in German, which was his area of study, to find me in the chaste, narrow bed allocated to undergraduates. There, while the church bells chimed outside my window, he took his time crossing my body with his tongue.

‘I’m Stephen,’ said my husband, a stranger to me then. Dark jeans, expensive jacket, an upper lip that is full like a girl’s, against a startlingly handsome face. ‘Are you plugged into something?’

My legs were straddling empty air, my back vibrating with an imagined Harley engine, my arms wrapped around the nothingness in front of me. I was laughing. I wasn’t sure at first that Stephen was even speaking to me. I was surrounded by young women – he could have been addressing one of them. But the crowd I was entertaining with this impression seemed to shrink back with Stephen’s approach. Apparently, they all knew him, knew the type of man he was and to back off with his arrival. I didn’t know anything. My lover, now dead, was killed in a highway collision on his way to work one morning. I couldn’t even drive a motorcycle, knowing only to hang on to the boy in front of me, whose head was shielded by a shining black helmet. His precious head.

‘Pretending to be on a motorcycle,’ I said. Suddenly, the whole idea seemed stupid.

‘Do you like motorcycles?’ asked Stephen.

‘I used to.’

‘Would you like a drink?’ he asked, nodding toward the bar. ‘A glass of wine, perhaps?’

I said no, I don’t drink. This wasn’t actually true, but I had no idea I was speaking to my future husband. He was just some guy. None of my answers were supposed to matter.

He smiled, shook his head. He wasn’t easily dissuaded. ‘Let me guess, you used to drink,’ he said.

He was the first man that night who looked right at me instead of slightly over my shoulder, who didn’t make me feel he was comparing me to a whole list of others. And the first man who had offered me a drink, I might add. ‘I’ll have a glass of white wine,’ I told him.

He nodded. And then, without a shimmer of uncertainty, he reached out and touched my hair with his fingertips as I searched the floor with my eyes.

‘Canadian?’ he asked.

‘American.’

‘What brings you to England?’

A combination of circumstances, that was the truth. But it was far too much to explain. ‘I don’t really know,’ I said.

He laughed. ‘Yes you do.’ He was so confident, his eyes steady on me as though he’d known me all his life. ‘You didn’t just get lost.’

‘Yes, that’s exactly it. I got lost.’

He put his hands in his pockets, pushed his face a few inches closer to my own, then away again, smiling. He behaved as though we’d just concluded some tacit agreement and I found myself unwilling to challenge him. ‘I’ll get your wine,’ he said, and disappeared into the crowd.

‘Give me a time frame for this,’ says the shrink. He has a clipboard and a mechanical pencil, a reading lamp that shows his skin, dark and smooth, like an oiled saddle.

‘Six years ago. Spring. On windy days the flowering trees sent blossom through the air like confetti.’

* * *

Now we are to talk about my mother.

‘She died,’ I tell the shrink. He waits, unmoving. This is not enough.

So I explain that it was cancer and that I wasn’t there. When later I saw the time indicated on the death certificate, I realised that I had been at an ice rink, looping circles in rented skates in a small town near Boston. What does that say about me? About my character? The truth is I couldn’t have watched it happen. I mean, the actual moment of death – no. She’d lost both breasts, had a tube stuck into the hollow which would have been her cleavage, shed her hair and her eyebrows. Even her skin peeled in strips. I’d been through all that with her, but this final part was different. There was no helping her.

The worst part, she once told me – this was before things got too bad, before she was entirely bedridden – the worst part, other than the fact that she was dying, was the humiliation of having to go around in maternity clothes. Her belly, its organs swollen with cancer, gave the impression that she’d reached the third trimester of pregnancy. Shopping with her amid the fertile exuberance of expectant mothers had been for her a macabre, debasing affair. We did it. Somehow.

‘I should be buying these things for you,’ she said, holding her credit card in the checkout line. I was twenty-two and looked more or less like all the other women in the shop trying to figure out how big a bra to buy now that they’d outgrown all their others. Except I wasn’t pregnant, though secretly I would have liked to be.

‘I could only give birth to an alien,’ I said. ‘We’d have to buy Babygros with room for three legs.’

‘You will have the most beautiful babies,’ said my mother. ‘You are the most beautiful girl.’

I remember there was a jingle that kept playing in the shop, a nursery rhyme tapped out on a toy piano. I smiled at my mother. ‘Yeah, but cut me and I bleed green,’ I said.

Just before I left for the airport she said, ‘Let me see you again one last time. Who else can make me laugh?’

I promised her that. I promised her in the same manner with which I made her meals she could not eat, took her to the bathroom in the middle of the night, called the ambulance, sat with her as she lay in bed, exhausted, the telephone on one side of her and photographs of her children (now grown) on the other. I promised I’d be back in no time at all, but the afternoon she died I was gliding along a frozen rink in my woolly socks, my mittens.

The fact is I had no intention of being there when she died. I could not face it. I am a woman of great energy, compulsively active, given to fits of laughter, to sudden anger, to passionate and impossible love affairs. But the truth is I am a coward. Or was a coward.

I call my shrink, Shrink. Not to his face, of course. I also call him Jacob. He seems as fascinated by me being American as I am by him being black, a Londoner, and having almost no visible hair on his body at all except this one thing, his greying moustache, which he is often seen poking at with a slim forefinger. He has the delicate hands of a surgeon, but everything else about him is stocky, compact. His leather chair is faded where his head rests, and there are cracks around the edge of the cushion where his legs bend.

‘So that’s it, that’s all you want to say about your mother?’ he says. He sighs, crosses his legs. His laconic air is in direct contrast to my own pulsating, nervous energy. He says, ‘She died and you weren’t there. OK, how about before that? What about when you were growing up?’

My shrink is a man who wants to reveal me, and yet I know nothing about him. I am sure this is the right and proper way for a patient and therapist to operate, but it feels cold to me. I cannot think of anyone in my life now who wants to see inside me for what is good and right, only those who want to find what is wrong. And that’s so easy – everything is wrong. I tell Jacob, ‘My mother was at work. I don’t remember. It doesn’t matter.’

‘Run that by me again?’ he says.

‘What about how I feel right now?’

It is as though I’ve eaten a vat of speed; my mind races along trailing incoherencies and half-finished thoughts. There’s a continual restlessness in all four of my limbs; I am hungry almost all the time, except when I eat. Two bites and I feel sick. All this has come upon me gradually over the past months. That confident, breezy woman who Stephen saw at a party all those years ago is not me any more. I am her shadow.

‘Jacob,’ I sigh. ‘Be a pal and medicate me.’

He says, ‘Melanie, you’re going to need to relax about all that or else we won’t get anywhere at all.’

But I can’t relax, which is why I am here. I used to read books by the score but now I am unable to concentrate. I go to the library, trying to find a book that might help me, but even the self-help books seem indecipherable. I’m lucky if I can remember a phone number. So instead I wander. I visit all-night cafés on the Edgware Road where teenagers suck sweet tobacco from hookahs; I go traipsing round the New Covent Garden Market, picking lonely flower stems from the shiny cement floor. I’ll be at a train station at midnight with no ticket. I might be writing a list on a notepad held in my palm. Or staring at the blank walls of the station or wherever I am, which is anywhere you can linger instead of sleep. During the day, my hands sometimes tremble with fatigue. I squint at sunlight, splash cold water on my face, review the notes I have written to myself reminding me what to do. I set the alarm on my ugly electronic watch, a watch I found in a public toilet at Paddington, in case I fall asleep by accident. I have children to look after, to sing to, play with. I regard them as one might the Queen’s largest jewels. They receive my best – my only – real efforts.

‘I’m just after some help,’ I tell Jacob. ‘I am worried all the time.’

‘I’m trying to help you,’ he says. He smiles and his teeth are like piano keys, his lips like a sweet fruit, tender and large. His children are grown now. That is all I know about him. ‘Tell me what troubles you,’ Jacob says. I am meant to pour myself into him as though he is an empty jug. This I cannot do.

At home I frantically organise clothes and toys, collect the sticks from ice lollies, the interesting wrappers from packets. Egg cartons turn into caterpillars; jam jars become pencil holders, decorated in collage or made garish in glass paint. Setting out the paints and crayons and shallow dishes of craft glue, I prepare for when Emily wakes, my little girl who loves animals and art. Daniel will not draw, will only break the crayons in half, rip the paper. I tell myself he is young yet. A voice inside me says, Wait and you’ll see! But the voice isn’t real and the boy won’t even scribble on paper. This is part of the trouble.

‘My son,’ I tell Jacob. He nods. I am meant to continue.

Every morning I take the children to the park, hanging on to them as though someone might snatch them from me, drug them and spirit them away from me for ever. This is a great fear of mine. One of my fears. The only reason I haven’t been to the doctor for Prozac is that I am convinced that the doctor would alert social services who might then come and take the children away. This is a completely ridiculous idea and I know it – but that’s why I’m at the shrink’s. Although I have to admit I’m not getting anywhere here.

I say now to my shrink, to Jacob, ‘Medicate me or I will fire you.’

‘What’s that mean?’ Jacob says. ‘Fire?’

I shake my head. I feel like a seed husk spent beside a loamy soil, like an emptied wineskin, drying in the sun. ‘It means I stop paying you,’ I sigh.

He smiles, nods. But he does not, at this point anyway, prescribe.

Emily has a mop of blonde curls billowing around her face, smiling eyes, aquamarine. Her baby teeth, spread wide in her mouth, remind me of a jack-o’-lantern, and when she laughs it is as though there are bubbles inside her, a sea of contentment. She carries Mickey Mouse by his neck, and wears a length of cord pinned to her trousers so that she, too, has a tail. Kneeling on a chair beside the dining table, she instructs me on the various ways one can paint Dumbo’s relatives, who wear decorated blankets which require much precision. Unlike most children, who only paint on paper, Emily enjoys painting three-dimensional objects and so, for this reason, we own nine grey rubber elephants, some with trunks up and some with trunks down, that she has decorated many times. She has yet to find an elephant she thinks is a suitable Dumbo, and so we just have the nine so far.

Daniel has one toy he likes and hundreds he ignores. The one toy he likes is a wooden Brio model of Thomas the Tank Engine. It has a face like a clock, framed in black, with a chimney that serves almost as a kind of hat. The train must go with him everywhere and must either be in his hand or in his mouth. Never in Emily’s hand and never washed in the sink, as I am now doing. No amount of reassurance from me, no promise that this will take only one minute, less than a minute, does anything to soothe Daniel, who pounds at my thighs with his small hands, screams like a monkey, opening his mouth so wide I can see down his throat.

‘Daniel, please don’t cry.’ I give him back the train but it is too late. He’s so upset now that he cannot stop. His eyes are screwed shut, his chin tucked as though trying to ward off a blow to the face. I am on my knees in front of him, putting my arms around his shoulders, but this causes him to wrench away, falling with a thud on to the carpet just as Stephen walks through the door from work.

‘I could hear him from the street,’ Stephen says. He’s holding his post in one hand, his mobile phone in the other. Standing at the door, his tie knotted crisply, his jacket folded over one arm, he looks as though he has entered the house from another world, one that is ordered and logical, one that is calm. He steps around Daniel and goes to the back door, waving to Emily who is making towers of blocks on our small patio. She runs to him and I hear the clap of her arms around his waist, her happy chatter as she tells him she made a tower as tall as herself. Stephen brings her over to where I am with Daniel, holding her on his hip.

‘Why is Daniel crying?’ Emily asks.

‘Because I washed his train.’ I try to smile, to make a funny face. ‘He’ll be OK,’ I tell her.

‘Daniel, SHHHHH!’ she says to him, but he pays no attention.

‘Do you think he’s allergic to something?’ Stephen asks.

‘I think …’ I don’t want to tell Stephen what I think. I only had that train for half a minute. It seems to me Daniel cries more and more with each passing day for all sorts of bizarre and inexplicable reasons. And I have no idea why.

‘What do you think?’ Stephen asks. His voice sounds sharp, but it might just be because he is trying to be heard over the noise.

‘That it isn’t normal.’

Stephen puts Emily down, telling her to get her Mickey Mouse. ‘I want a word with that mouse,’ he says mock seriously, which sends Emily into fits of giggles. Then he squats next to me on the floor, putting his arms out for Daniel, who ignores him. ‘It’s the terrible twos,’ he says in a manner that tells me this is not a suggestion but a declaration of fact.

‘He’s almost three.’

Stephen sighs. He is so used to my worries about Daniel that they must feel a burden to him now. I can tell this is the case, but I can’t make myself react any differently. He gets up and goes back to the post, sifting through envelopes. After a moment or two he says, ‘Young children cry. Isn’t that what you always tell me?’

But not like this. I spend every day with young children. I see them at toddler groups. I see them at playgrounds. None of them are like Daniel. ‘That’s not why,’ I say.

Stephen opens his mouth to say something, then smiles and shakes his head. It’s a gesture that is meant to be what exactly? Sarcastic?

‘I am not making this up, Stephen!’ I try to stroke Daniel’s back but he pulls away from me. ‘Daniel, honey.’ He will not let me touch him, hold him, and yet he is crying as though something awful is hurting him, as though a bee has just stung him or some other, acute and private pain has taken him over. I have to resist the urge to pull off all his clothes and look at every inch of his body to ensure that nothing is wrong – that there is no swelling or redness or bee sting, for that matter. The only thing that stops me is that I know I will find nothing. You see, I’ve done all this on other occasions, and I’ve never found a thing.

‘Just leave him,’ says Stephen. He studies a bill, turns it over, and I can tell from looking at him that he is tallying the numbers. ‘He’ll be fine,’ he says absently.

‘I can’t leave him. He’s not fine.’

Stephen rubs his hand over his mouth, draws a breath. ‘What is at Toys “ᴙ” Us that can possibly cost two hundred pounds?’ he says, holding up the bill.

‘Toys,’ I say. I look at Daniel. ‘This is all wrong.’

‘He’s crying. It’s what kids do – you always tell me that.’

But this is not what kids do. Daniel is pushing his head against my calf, and now dragging his forehead along the floor.

‘I think we should buy shares in Toys “ᴙ” Us,’ Stephen says, picking a new bill from the pile, slitting the envelope with his car key.

‘Stephen –’ I feel myself panicking a little. I know I ought to have some explanation and some sort of … what would you call it? … remedy for what is happening here, but I do not. Daniel seems to be using his head like a floor mop. What would other mothers do? They all seem so capable, so commanding; but it seems to me that all they ever argue about with their children is why the broccoli is left on the plate, or why the child can’t find his shoes. Nothing like this. Daniel is hysterical and I’m feeling not too far behind him. And now, to my horror, he is not only dragging his head across the floor but pushing it down into the carpet, as though trying to hurt himself on purpose, which only makes him cry more. ‘Stephen, look at this!’

But just then Emily appears at the bottom of the stairs, holding up her Mickey Mouse and smiling.

Stephen says, ‘Daniel has a headache, that’s all.’

But I notice he’s looking at Emily when he says this. It’s as though he cannot bring himself to see what I see. In front of me, Daniel is pushing his head into the corner of the room and pressing it there with every ounce of strength that he has.

2

If Stephen is away – on business, for example – I sleep with Emily on one side of me and Daniel on the other. Like this I can attend to the movements of either of them, can feel the heat of their skin, the stirrings of their dreams. It is the only time I can really sleep, huddled between them, kicked by them, occasionally woken by Daniel who cannot sleep through the night yet. I never complain about the broken night’s sleep. When I wake for those few minutes, the darkness seems a comfort. I feel my heart is a timepiece set in motion by my children’s breathing, and that the bed is our refuge, a place where nobody can touch us. As long as we stay here together, warm beneath the duvet, the darkness is velvet. Thomas the Tank Engine can stay clutched in Daniel’s hand. Dumbo’s family, in their gaudy circus blankets, can watch us from the nightstand.

Because I have been particularly high-strung of late – what Stephen calls unstable and, if I am honest with myself, what I also would call unstable – I slept last night with the children like so, one to my left and one to my right. It’s the only way I could recover after Daniel’s tantrum. I needed him close to me – quiet, peaceful, loving. I needed to feel connected to him. I don’t think Stephen understands this – I don’t think anyone understands – and so I’ve woken this morning feeling slightly ashamed of myself, as though my behaviour makes me feeble and pathetic. Stephen has spent the night in Emily’s bed, which is a proper single bed, quite comfortable, but not where he wants to be. Getting ready for work he is crabby, remote, gathering my attention now as I stretch into this new day, limp in one of his old rugby shirts, not quite able to face the morning.

‘I don’t have a babysitter for tonight, Stephen, I’m really sorry.’

‘Did you call a babysitter?’ he asks, dressing in front of me. He is crisp as a new banknote, his hair springs up from where he’s combed it wet from the shower. He pushes his leg through the elastic of his boxer shorts, gathers his suit trousers at the waist, loops the belt. Bowing his back like a sprinter at the starting block, he turns the laces of his shoes.