When Tim sent off the money to the garage, he remembered that he should also be sending a ten pound note to Helen. He would get an envelope and a stamp from the office when Mr D. went to tea.
Mr D. did not take his tea break. One of his favourite customers, the wife of a famous racehorse trainer, was in the department, doing up a cottage for the stable lads, and Mr D., like a porpoise by the bows of an ocean liner, would not budge from her side.
Mrs Slade came in again. Tim liked her, and she liked him. Her husband hated the bathroom curtains, but she still came in from time to time to pick over the remnant tables or buy a bit of canvas seating. Tim gave her as much time as she wanted, while Gail thudded down another heavy roll of cloth on the table for a demanding customer, and glared at Tim.
By the time Tim and Mrs Slade had parted, mutually pleased, over a sample swatch of quilted lawn, and Tim had cleared up and checked his cash book, he was late knocking off. He missed his bus and had to wait for another, which was full. He did not think again about Helen’s money until he was in bed with the light out, preparing the plot of a dream that he was going to try to explore.
Helen swam into his consciousness, standing meekly in her navy raincoat under the umbrella. Tim watched her walk away through the rain. He would not see her again, could not see her ever, after what had happened. She had been really nice about it, but she must be laughing her head off with the other women in the Hall School kitchen, as they fried mountains of chips and reduced spring cabbage to the consistency of wet laundry.
‘Get a car – get a girl.’ Helen had never been in any way a possible girl friend. How ludicrous. But now there was no one again. No one at all.
‘Don’t give up,’ Pocket Pickups said, in its reassuring ‘I believe in you’ way. ‘You’ll get snubs, sure, but you’ll learn to say, “Your loss, darling,” and go on looking for the woman who’s looking for you.’
The next evening, Tim wrote to Willard Freeman again, just a chummy fan letter, just to stay in touch: ‘Keep those books coming, Bill (that was how Willard had signed off, “All the best, Bill”). Your mate, Timothy (Varth) Kendall.’
The following evening, he wrote to Mary Gordon at the BBC Anything was better than writing to Helen Brown and enclosing ten pounds.
‘It was nice to hear you interviewing that woman who took her children across the Channel in a balloon.’
‘Did you not feel at all nairvous about putting the wee ones through that risk?’ Mary had asked, so sympathetically that the rather bold woman had broken down and admitted, ‘Of course I did. I probably shouldn’t have done it, really.’
Every day, Tim meant to send off Helen’s money, and every day he didn’t. Like walking back and forth past a crumpled paper on the floor and not being able to bend and pick it up, it had become one of those things he could not do. It wasn’t the money. The ten pound note was already in the envelope and needed only a stamp.
An author had talked to Mary Gordon on the radio about having a writer’s block. Tim had poster’s block. The longer he left it, the harder it was.
Consulting the dictionary at h again, for Helen, he got the word ‘healing’.
The money would heal her regret, anxiety, annoyance – whatever it was she felt about lending it. No. The healing would happen to their friendship, that’s what it was. That was why he had not posted it yet, because the omens said that he was meant to take it to her himself.
I can’t. You can. I can’t. You must. She won’t want to know. Yes, she will, with ten quid in your hand. Tell her you couldn’t trust it to the post, see? All these sorters’ strikes. You’ve got to make sure she gets it. And then – honest, chivalrous you – you can thank her for being so nice about Buttercup.
But it was too far to get to Helen’s place without a car. No, not too far, too boring. From Tim’s side of town, it meant changing buses twice.
The school kitchen staff probably came out at the same time as the children, so that mothers working there could take theirs home. On the afternoon of his next day off, Tim went to the Hall School.
It was raining again. Was the combination of him and Helen a rainmaker? They should hire themselves out to Ethiopia. Come to think of it, it had been raining the night they went to the musical show. Helen had put a gruesome plastic bonnet over her head as they splashed from the pizza place across the ill-drained terracing of the new theatre.
Outside the school, women waited with toddlers sealed into pushchairs with plastic covers, like pork chops in the meat display. A school crossing lady held up her lollipop sign in the driving rain, and hustled large children across the road. No sign of any grownups coming out of the school. No sign of Helen Brown.
Tim hung about, head sunk into shoulders hunched against the rain, until most of the parents had walked away. A few children were still straggling out. The lollipop lady waited for them, shrouded to the ground in an enormous shiny white coat, with a sort of hood down the back of her neck and sticking out over the high peak of her hat. She looked totally ridiculous.
Tim went up to ask her when the kitchen staff came out. She turned, in the stiff heavy coat that seemed to stand up by itself, and a cold, pinched face looked up at him under the hood. It was Helen.
‘Hullo,’ she said, as if Tim were a father she saw every day.
‘I didn’t know you – what are you –’
The lollipop raingear had been made for somebody twice her size. Even the pole and the sign overpowered her.
‘Excuse me.’ She hoisted it up to stop a car, and shepherded two girls across the street. ‘I do this as an extra,’ she said when she came back, ‘after we’ve finished in the kitchen. You’re soaking wet.’
‘I know. I’ve got your money.’ The envelope was folded in his hand inside his pocket.
‘Oh, thanks.’ She looked surprised. ‘That’s nice of you.’
‘Didn’t you think I’d pay it back?’
She frowned and set her mouth. She looked so plain and pitiful inside the stiff white hood that Tim said, ‘Do you – would you like to go out somewhere at the weekend? I won’t have the car yet, but–’
‘No, I can’t. I’ll have Julian with me.’
‘Oh yes, I forgot.’
‘But I’d like you to meet him. Look, don’t give me the money now. The insides of these pockets are wet. Come up on Saturday and you can give it me then.’
When Helen opened the door to him, she was carrying, with difficulty, a boy of about seven, who was much too large to be carried.
Crippled legs?
‘Should I take him for you?’ Tim asked uncertainly, as Helen started to struggle up the stairs with the boy.
‘No, I’m afraid he –’ On the landing, she stopped to catch her breath. ‘He’s a bit funny with strangers.’ At the top, she put the child down, and he ran into the flat on perfectly good legs.
‘If I let him walk up and down the stairs,’ Helen told Tim, ‘he sometimes sits and screams and screams and won’t move, and the people in the other flats don’t like it.’
In the corner of the room, the boy had tipped all his toys out on to the floor and was sitting with the basket upside-down over his head.
‘Come on, Julian.’ Helen knelt and lifted off the basket, which he grabbed at fiercely and pulled down again. ‘This is Tim,’ she said to the basket.
The boy lifted the basket and hurled it against the wall. Tim noticed that the ornaments and pictures that had been there were gone. A blanket had been put over the television, and the mirror taken down.
The child had a beautiful face and romantic golden curls. With his head up, listening to something, he looked like a little prince.
‘You’re a nice chap, aren’t you?’ Tim felt very self-conscious, but he could not ignore the child in this small room, and Helen was watching him. He had to say something. ‘How old are you?’
‘He’s autistic,’ Helen said. ‘I’m afraid he can’t respond to you.’
‘Aut – autistic?’ Tim had not heard the word before. It sounded rather catchy, like something made up by people like Willard Freeman and Kevin Sills. The Auts could be a band of changelings. They were protected by their magical autistic armour.
‘It’s a form of brain damage,’ Helen said, in the quick, clipped way she used for imparting information. ‘In his case, caused by abnormal chromosomes.’
‘I see,’ said Tim, not seeing.
‘He can hardly communicate, and he’s very hard to control. That’s why he has to be away at school. Didn’t Valerie tell you? He was in her group when he was smaller, but they couldn’t cope with him.’
Tim shook his head.
‘I’m surprised.’
So was Tim. Val usually liked to spread any bad news. Helen frowned at him. Did she think that Val had not told this because it was so awful?
‘I suppose she didn’t think I’d see you again.’
‘She didn’t?’
Helen thought. Conversation with her tended to be in fits and starts. She said something, and you said something, and she thought about it. Then she said something, sometimes so short and quick that you could hardly catch it.
Julian was playing with a big coloured top on the floor. When it was spinning, he leaned far forward with his tongue out.
‘Here – won’t he hurt his tongue?’ Tim saw the long, flexible tongue licking the top as it went round.
‘He has to taste everything. I’ll go and make some coffee, since he’s occupied, if you’ll watch him for a moment.’
Tim watched. Julian stopped the spinning top with a savage hand and chucked it against the table leg. When Tim went to pick it up and give it back to him, he saw that the legs of the table and the chairs were scarred and scratched. He also saw, from under the table, that the wire running from an outlet to the television was encased in a sort of rubber hose.
He crouched, and held out the top to Julian. The boy stared. Not at him. Not past him. Through him, as if Tim really were the invisible man. He watched, fascinated and horrified, as the child worked up a large amount of spit in his mouth, and then ejected it like a bullet on to the stained carpet.
He did it again. Tim got up and went into the kitchen.
‘Can I have a cloth?’
‘Oh, you are good.’ Helen did not ask, ‘What for?’ She just gave him a damp cloth.
In the moment that Tim had been out of the room, Julian had taken off his clothes, all except a large nappy and plastic pants, which were tightly fixed on. He had a thin, agile body and long legs and lovely, healthy skin. He looked like a dream child.
He snatched the cloth from Tim and sucked it savagely.
‘Here, give it to me.’
‘It to me.’ It was the first time Julian had spoken.
‘No, to me.’
The naked child came towards Tim, legs apart in the ballooning plastic pants. Kneeling on the carpet, Tim held out his arms. Julian came close to him. Helen came in with the coffee mugs.
‘Look, he likes me.’ Tim felt triumphant.
Staring, the child stabbed out his fingers, and Tim jerked his head back only just in time to avoid having his eye poked out.
‘He could probably see that light on the wall reflected in your eye,’ Helen said. ‘Things like that fascinate him. For a moment.’
Already the boy had backed away from Tim and was sucking hard on his own bare arm.
‘How do you – er, sort of manage?’
‘Search me.’ Helen sat down with her coffee. ‘I just do. I get some help, of course, in the holidays, but weekends I can manage. Spend most of the time cleaning up, and stopping him from wrecking the place.’
‘Why do you have that wire covered? Does he suck that too?’
‘He bites it.’
‘He bites it?’
‘He could chew right through it.’ She laughed at Tim’s shocked face, one of her brief, snorty laughs and blew out her pale lips, without a smile.
‘Helen, I-I really, I mean, you’re amazing, how you cope.’
‘You get used to it. His father never did. That’s why we split up, really. He couldn’t stand me coping and him not.’
She spoke very fast, but Tim thought that was what she had said. No abusive drunken sailor then? It didn’t sound like that.
‘Will he get any better?’
Helen did not answer. ‘Oh dear, Julian.’ She made a face, and put down her mug. ‘Come on, let’s go and change you.’
‘Change you.’
Washed and dressed again, he was still a lovely-looking child. He sat in a chair opposite Tim, jiggling his feet, winding up his hands, crooning to himself, a brief repetitive refrain, over and over.
‘Julian,’ Helen said lovingly. ‘Julian.’
‘Such a noble name.’ Tim told her what he had thought. ‘Such – such handsome looks. He ought to be a prince.’
‘A sleeping prince,’ Helen said. ‘But no princess can wake him.’
Why couldn’t I?
Julian rocked back and forth and appeared to ignore them both, but haltingly, Tim began to tell the child a story.
‘Once upon a time, there was a golden-haired prince, who had a magic top. He could hang on to the top and spin himself away through space, anywhere he wanted to go …’
‘He can’t understand, I’m afraid. Autistics don’t know about fantasy or make-believe.’
But I will teach him. I will lead him by the hand out of the dark enchanter’s forest and into his own shining kingdom.
However, a trip with Helen and Julian to the supermarket was enough to make him decide not to have anything more to do with the sleeping prince.
‘I hope you don’t mind,’ Helen said before he left, ‘but I need a few things from the shops. Would you just come and help me with Julian?’
Getting Julian ready took about ten minutes. ‘He loves to go out,’ Helen said, but he became very agitated about his socks, and practically had a fit when she tried to put boots on him.
‘No boots, no out,’ Helen said firmly.
Tim held the strong struggling child while she forced short red rubber boots on to his feet (it was raining). She carried him down the stairs, and held his hand while they walked down to the main road. When Julian pulled back and tried to bend his knees and sink to the ground, Tim took the other hand and they pulled him along between them, his woollen hat over his eyes.
‘Dragging the poor child along,’ said a woman pushing a trolley towards the door of the supermarket. ‘It’s not good enough.’
‘Can’t she see –?’ Tim asked.
‘They don’t want to know.’ Helen had put Julian into a trolley, and it was Tim’s job to keep him in it, while Helen scooted fast along the shelves to get what she wanted.
Julian threw out his hat. Tim picked it up. Julian threw it out. He pulled off one boot and threw it down the aisle. He let out a high hooting sound which made people look round, and then look away again.
When Helen came back, Tim went for the boot. Helen tried to put it on, but Julian screamed and raged and threw tins out of the trolley. In the queue at the check-out, people edged as far away as they could without losing their place. Nobody helped, or even looked sympathetic. Tim wanted to tell them, ‘He can’t help it,’ but Helen didn’t, so evidently it wasn’t the thing to do. While Tim was trying to stop Julian climbing out of the trolley, the child got an arm free and hit him hard across the face.
You bugger! If people had not been looking, Tim would have hit him back.
‘Here – I’ll take him out. You pay.’ Helen gave Tim her purse and shopping-bag, picked up Julian and carried him out.
The rage that had made Tim almost hit the child merged into a giant blush. He put the shopping on the counter and paid for it and took the bag outside, the back of his neck on fire, feeling eyes on him.