MARTI LEIMBACH is the author of several novels, including the international bestseller Dying Young, which was made into a film starring Julia Roberts, and the acclaimed Daniel Isn’t Talking (2007), inspired by the story of her autistic child. Her latest book, The Man from Saigon, a love story between news reporters during the Vietnam war, will be published in 2009. Born in Washington DC, she moved to England in 1990; she lives in Berkshire with her husband and two children.
WE THINK WE KNOW HIM because we know his label, and this informs all our thoughts. He is meant to be aloof, preferring his own company to that of his classmates, for example. But when the birthday invitation arrives, he presents it to me in the envelope with his name, Alex, in another mother’s florid script, and I think I see him smile.
‘You’ve got mail,’ he says in a perfect imitation of our computer.
‘Go on, open it,’ I tell him.
‘You could already be our grand prize winner!’
Television speak. He can sing jingles, reel off 0800 numbers, imitate beer commercials, and tell me with perfect commercial inflection that past performance is not a reliable indicator of future performance. So I am unsure if it is the birthday invitation that intrigues him or the opportunity it affords to parrot yet another slogan. Just as I have this thought, he seems to change. Instead of smiling, he tenses, then cranes his neck. He’s about to run off but I loop my elbow through his so he cannot escape. ‘See what’s inside!’ I urge.
‘This is for me,’ he says, and now it is his own voice, Alex’s voice, telling me to mind my business.
‘All right, but wouldn’t it be a good idea to see what is inside?’
He seems perplexed, turning the envelope over several times. When finally he uncovers the invitation, he lifts it gently by the corners as though handling a film negative. On it is the name of the birthday boy, a time and date. There is also a location, a farm park, and I can tell exactly the moment Alex realises that this party will take place among donkeys and ducks, sheep and miniature ponies, none of which he can stand. He looks at the invitation as though it is the foul excretion of one such animal, then places it on the bulletin board next to his rail schedule.
‘Three o’clock is 15:00,’ he says. ‘It is when the Great Western train leaves Reading station from Platform 5. I cannot go to this party.’
‘Fifteen-oh-oh’ is how he says it. He goes to school at eight-three-oh. His bedtime is twenty-one-oh-oh.
I point out that there will be a lot of children from his class there and that he will miss out on the fun.
‘Cows smell,’ he says.
‘But they make milk. Don’t you want to try to milk a cow? Or feed the chickens?’ I am duty-bound to bring a tide of enthusiasm, hoping some of it will rub off, but frankly it never does. Alex twirls his school tie, a knotted bit of synthetic blue on an elastic cord. Twisting the tie around his finger, he rocks his weight from one foot to another, staring at the invitation, and then touching it with his nose.
‘No,’ he says.
‘What if you come at the end, maybe just for some cake and juice?’
‘I think I would rather play on the computer,’ he says. This is true, of course. And the fact that it is true now, and that it is almost certainly going to be true at three o’clock on a Saturday two weeks from now, is part of what is wrong.
‘But this is the first birthday party you’ve had all year.’ My voice is a careful mixture of gentleness and persuasion. What I am saying is that he will go.
He rocks a little harder, glances at me, then at the invitation. He untacks his rail schedule, his favourite possession aside from his computer, and re-tacks it so that it covers the whole of the invitation, although there is a little corner where the ‘Y’ from the word ‘party’ can still be read.
Now he looks at me, scanning my face. ‘You don’t see that,’ he says.
Our house is a brick box in a row of brick boxes. The front door is a stained mahogany colour, but otherwise it is as close to feature-free as you can get while still having windows. When I first saw the house with Richard, my architect husband – now my ex-husband – he said, ‘It is like a dentist’s office, without magazines.’
‘Yes,’ I said, holding up a finger, ‘but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.’ It was all we could afford. I saw no reason to disparage it. ‘We have nice furniture. That will make a difference. And we’ll play Monteverdi’s Vespers in the mornings. We’ll create – you know – atmosphere.’
I smiled. Richard grunted. I didn’t know it but already he was falling in love with Carla, a draughtsman at his firm. A draughtswoman. Another woman, anyway.
‘I like our old house,’ he said. Alex, then three years old, was in the car just outside the front door. I could see him perfectly through the window, strapped into his car seat, silent, with that same studious, slightly worried expression that had taken over every other expression he’d once had.
We’d already received the offer we hoped for on our old house. We needed that money for Alex’s intensive speech and language therapy. I was thinking practical. I was thinking Alex. Anyway, I’d already bought the little house, a fact I withheld for a time.
It has been so many years since Alex learned to speak that now I take it for granted. Sometimes his language arrives in disordered fragments – verbs at the end of a sentence as though he is translating from German, or the answer ‘yes’ to every question, like a new immigrant who finds the native tongue hard to decipher but wants to please.
Tonight, at dinner, Alex is very clear. First, he states that he does not eat green things, as I ought to know, and second that he does not eat fruit. He tells me this while folding his homework in half, then quarters, then eighths, then sixteenths. All over the house are pieces of paper that he has folded and then unfolded in various fashions. He likes patterns of diamonds and squares and triangles. For years, I have had to iron his homework each morning before school.
‘Alex, there is no fruit on your plate,’ I tell him now.
He holds up a biscuit, one of the homemade ones I have sweetened with dates and honey.
He says, ‘Fruit is like an excretion from earth. I can’t eat it.’
I shrug my shoulders. ‘Where do you see fruit?’
‘Hidden.’
‘I don’t see it.’
‘Something is here,’ he says. ‘I don’t know. But it is from a tree.’
He returns to his homework page, which he unfolds, showing an elaborate pattern of diamonds and parallel lines. I smile at his creation because he is so proud. He thinks he has made something beautiful, though I know the teacher will be less impressed.
‘So let me get this right,’ I say. ‘Nothing green and nothing from a tree.’
He nods, then places the biscuit onto the plate and covers the plate with his napkin.
I say, ‘Oranges are from trees.’
This makes him cross. He loves orange juice. He looks at his glass, perhaps deciding whether he can permit himself to drink juice now that this fact about the orange has been brought to his attention.
‘No bits,’ he tells me sternly. ‘Smooth style only. Tropicana only.’
‘Okay, but even Tropicana is made from oranges, which are a fruit, and come from trees,’ I say. I want him to understand that, despite how much he denies it, he is as reliant on the facts of nature as the rest of us.
‘Just the juice, not the bits. None of these.’ He pushes the plate of biscuits, shrouded in their napkin, to the centre of the table. Years ago he’d have hurled them to the floor, but those days are over. We have this other thing – his rigid ideas, what would be obstinacy in another child – but not destruction.
‘What do you eat when you visit Daddy?’ I ask him.
‘Nothing,’ he says. Then, after a moment, he says, ‘Meat.’
Richard now lives in a Victorian flat outside Ealing. It has huge windows and a vaulted ceiling and sealed wooden floors; everything solid, no aluminium. He was the third casualty after the house, and after Alex, himself, who changed at about twenty months, the first symptom being that he stopped smiling.
Two years ago, when Alex was six, I took him to Richard’s flat for their first weekend together. He walked the perimeter of the place, his ear cocked as though listening to the waves of traffic below, then threw himself onto the floor, his fists clenched, his face screwed in concentrated agony, screaming in protest as though some invisible force were holding him down.
‘But you will have a great time with Daddy!’ I said, trying to reassure him. His shirt rode up his middle, his shoes hammered the varnished floor and, when I tried to stop him kicking, he caught my thumb and bit it. I heard a little gasp, then realised it was my own. A phone rang and Richard’s voice came on, announcing that Carla and he were not at home.
‘AHHHH!’ Alex yelled. I dropped my head, closed my eyes, trying to absorb this moment like so many others, feeling it enter me, unlock my heart, tattoo a little mark right there.
‘He’s going to take you to see rockets at the Science Museum. And stars at the Planetarium!’ I promised. The caller began to leave an elaborate message for Carla, something about where the wine bar was located and what time they would all meet. Meanwhile, Alex looked like he’d been put on a stretching rack, his legs tensed, toes pointing, his back arched so that his stomach rose like a table in front of me. ‘It’s – not –’ He couldn’t quite get his words out. But he had words – that was the point. The sale of our old house bought us his ability to speak. After hours and hours of therapy; I’d say it was a bargain.
‘It’s – not – !’
‘It’s not what, Alex?’ I said gently.
But he cannot talk when he is upset (this is still the case). He gave up, pounding the floor, pressing his eyes with his fingers, groaning. Richard stood over us, a giant, angry scarecrow. ‘What is the matter?’ he asked Alex, a little sharply.
‘It’s – not – square!’ Alex yelled. And then I realised that it wasn’t the thought of being in a new place that bothered him, or the thought of being with his father for the weekend, or having Carla there instead of me. It was that the walls were not true in the flat. The shape was not geometric, being neither rectangular nor square.
‘Okay, okay, it’s not square, but …’ I thought for a moment. ‘It’s still a quadrilateral,’ I said.
Richard turned and went to the window. ‘Let him cry,’ he said.
I looked up. ‘He’s only six.’
‘If he’s old enough to know what is square, he’s old enough to stop crying.’
This kind of logic had been the wrecking ball of our marriage.
What I learned that day was important. Not about my exhusband being a jerk – I already knew that. Carla could have him. Being an architect herself, maybe she could remodel him into something more spacious, more inviting. What I learned was the importance of changing my house around, not letting Alex get too stuck on ‘sameness’. I can’t do anything about the walls, which are all perfectly aligned, but I can alter curtains so that they don’t hang exactly right, swap around colours and furniture. Make a bedroom into a study, the living room into a bedroom, then switch it back again.
Alex hates this. But I notice that he accepts such changes now with resignation. Tonight, after a dinner during which he eats nothing green and nothing from a tree unless it is orange juice, he climbs the steps to his bedroom. There the computer waits for him, his faithful companion, purring like a cat.
The first thing he sees is that I have painted his door.
‘It’s green!’ he calls down. ‘It should be white!’
‘It’s still a door,’ I say in a chipper sort of way.
‘And there is a tree on it!’
‘Yes, an oak,’ I tell him. ‘I painted some acorns at the bottom.’
Inside his room is a rug with one corner cut out of it – another part of my cunning plan to combat inflexibility. But I noticed this morning when I was putting away clothes that he had filled in the missing corner with permanent marker, which he drew across the floor.
I deserved it, I suppose. But the door is a bushy green English oak now and I can hear his sigh from all the way down here.
‘Stupid door!’ he says. ‘Stupid, stupid, stupid!’
The week before the birthday party, I uncover the invitation from its place behind the railway schedule, securing it with strong tacks at each of its corners. The next day I check to see whether he has hidden it again, but it is still in full view. It is there the day after that. And the next.
‘This is a great invitation,’ I tell him.
‘It has balloons,’ he says, then sucks his lips so that his mouth seems to disappear.
‘You’ll be nine soon, too,’ I say, inserting a measure of intrigue into my voice, like his turning nine is a splendid new thing. ‘Maybe you’ll have a party.’
‘I like eight,’ he tells me.
But the invitation remains. I am hoping that the fact he allows it to remain means he has brought the birthday party into his horizon, expecting it, maybe half looking forward to it. I think the party excites him and frightens him. He looks at the invitation, wringing his hands like a racetrack punter, occasionally standing for many minutes with it inches from his nose. Throughout the day he checks the rail schedule and then glances at the clock, calculating perhaps the number of minutes it will take before the Bedwyn train stops at Newbury, our local station, or how many London trains are scheduled that hour. Then he looks at the invitation. I see his eyes move with the words he reads. I see him smile and then put his hand over his mouth.
‘There will be cake,’ he says to no one in particular.
The cuckoo clock was always his favourite toy. It always cuckooed, or whatever you call it, exactly on the hour.
Film times, listed in bulleted lights across a black screen, held him for ages. He danced beneath them, memorising the times for any number of films he had no interest in seeing, preferring always to watch videos.
A single video will wear out after about 150 viewings; this I have learned.
The first song on the album must be the first song you listen to. The last song on the album must be the last song you listen to. When I program the CD player for random selection, he says, ‘Uh-oh,’ then shakes his head and reprograms it.
‘That’s not right,’ he says, like he’s talking about ethics. About truth. ‘That’s not right,’ he says, when I mix Tomy trains with a Bob the Builder machine.
It is as though he wishes for more order. The things he loves – computer games, music playlists, the building of robots – all function within a closed, static system.
But I am not a static system. When I speak, I go off on tangents, or change my mind, or change the subject, or pause too long. I might sneeze, cough. My facial gestures, my gaze and movements, are too random for Alex. He looks away.
‘Talk to me,’ I beg him, speaking to the side of his neck.
‘It’s good to talk,’ he says, Vodafone-style.
In the car, on the way to school, I try to hook him into conversation. ‘Look, an alien from outer space!’ I say, pointing at a cloud. He tells me, frankly, that it is only a seagull. ‘But the alien was riding the seagull!’ I say, to which he announces that I am annoying him. ‘I like to annoy people,’ I tease. ‘If you want me to stop, you better call the Silly Police.’
‘Silly Police,’ he repeats.
‘They will stop me,’ I assure him.
A few minutes later, I say, ‘The alien was riding a seagull with green feathers.’
‘Silly Police!’ Alex says. ‘And there was no seagull.’
I try several other manners of engaging him during the journey. All he wants to do is sit. Finally, somewhat apologetically, he confesses, ‘You are confusing me.’
I nod. I tell him, ‘I know. But I am confused, too.’
‘It is because I am autistic,’ he announced once after a prickly meeting with his classroom teacher. Both Richard and I attended the meeting, which was about how Alex was not socialising enough, was not assimilating, to use her words.
Richard exploded. ‘Who the hell taught him that?!’ he shouted as Alex clasped his ears.
‘One of the other children at school told him,’ I explained. I cleared my throat, looking straight ahead. It hadn’t been another child; it was me. Alex sometimes cries silently, sitting in bed, staring ahead as at a film only he can see. A few nights earlier he said, ‘I am not like the other boys.’ And then those odd, quiet tears. So I told him.
‘You can’t expect other children to follow your ideas,’ I said to Richard. ‘If he goes to a mainstream school, kids are going to talk. That’s just the way it is.’
‘Bloody school,’ said Richard.
I sighed. I hated myself for lying. ‘It’s not such a bad thing that he knows.’
‘It is 19:14,’ Alex told his father. ‘Your train is at 19:31.’
I shouldn’t be relieved when Richard leaves, but I always am.
‘Shall I walk on my hands?’ I ask him, ‘Shall I eat with my nose?’ I pretend to be a bird, pecking spaghetti from my plate. Alex cannot stand it, of course. ‘Stop that,’ he says.
I iron his homework and he tells me, ‘That’s not clothes.’
I brush my hair with a toothbrush and he shakes his head.
‘Rule violation?’ I tease.
His lips lift in a half-smile. ‘I’m calling the Silly Police,’ he says.
This is progress.
Most of the time it is a question of intrusion.
‘I want to go on the computer,’ he says. It’s like a sign on the door saying ‘No Entry’.
‘I want to go on the Alex,’ I tell him.
‘You can’t go on me,’ he says. ‘I’m not a machine.’
This is the thing I am counting on. That he knows he is not a machine, and that he is willing – now or someday – to take risks, to enter into the complex, broadband style of communication the rest of us have. That he will not want to remain always within the safety of the predictable – videos, timetables, computer games, Lego instructions – but will seek out the erratic, shifting world of social exchange. Seek it out, not be pushed into it.
‘I’m not going to the birthday party,’ he tells me. ‘I don’t like mammals.’
For the birthday party he has a new pair of combat trousers I picked up at Marks and Spencer’s. He has chosen a shirt he has used a clothing marker on, drawing the exact places on the shirt beneath which you would find his inner organs. He thinks it is cool, this shirt, but I doubt the other children will agree.
He combs his hair straight down with a damp comb, brushes his teeth, smiles into the mirror and then lets his smile fall.
‘What is our departure time?’ he says.
‘Fourteen-four-oh,’ I tell him.
The invitation has been folded so tightly that the patterns seem infinite, like those of a crystal. He sits in the car with his gleaming hair, his clear brown eyes. Every so often he makes an odd grimacing smile that looks neither natural nor joyful.
‘Birthday parties are boring,’ he says. He has undoubtedly heard this said by someone in his class about maths or train times. His tone and his expression as he says it seem as though they come from someone else, another child, not Alex.
On the way to the birthday party I tell him that I can stay with him or I can go – it’s up to him.
He says nothing; I don’t even know if he has heard me. He licks his lips over and over. Below his lower lip is a chafed area the shape of a crescent moon.
‘I can chat with the other mothers,’ I say.
He closes his eyes, then shudders, licks his lips again. I would ask him to stop but I know he can’t help it. He is doing his best, I tell myself. He is trying.
‘You’re doing great,’ I tell him.
Then he starts to cry. His tears are silent, falling one at a time in a steady stream down his cheeks.
‘Oh sweetheart,’ I say, searching the kerb for a place to pull over, feeling that same unlocking that I have become so familiar with. I am marked like a dartboard. As I pull to the side of the road, Alex opens his mouth to speak, but all that comes out is a single, long moan.
He was not always like this. In our old house, the one Richard mourned so much, he chased me across the cherry wood floor, laughing as I hid from him, springing out from behind doors to surprise me. He made baby sounds and touched my lips as I imitated back to him his mysterious cooings. We have photographs of him dancing with a stuffed bear, turning sand with a shovel, testing his skill with a tricycle. And we have the other photographs, too, in which his eyes seem heavy, his gaze vacant, his expression dulled. Autism has taken from us and we are not the same. Like people in a country that has suffered a long and brutal war, we have lived under its siege, uncertain of our future, facing daily the great and menacing spectre before us as though with one eye.
‘I’m tired,’ Richard said when I called him about the party. ‘I can’t have him this weekend. Carla wants to go away.’
Richard sounded worse than tired. He sounded depressed. Or drunk, or perhaps a mixture of the two. Sometimes I remind myself that this is hard: for me, for him, for Alex.
‘That’s okay; he has a birthday party anyway. I’m happy for him to stay home – I mean, with me.’
‘A birthday party? He’ll hate that.’
‘It will be fine,’ I said. Richard coughed, then laughed unpleasantly. He said Alex wouldn’t make it through a party. And that I was crazy.
‘Of course he’ll make it through,’ I said, trying to sound confident, trying to sound like I know my son.
‘Don’t call me all tearful when it goes to shit,’ he said.
‘I won’t call you.’
In the car I stroke Alex’s hair. I tell him it’s just a party. We don’t have to go. On his lap is a present he has chosen for the birthday boy, a train that you can take apart and put together again with a plastic screwdriver. It is exactly the sort of thing Alex loves and he has chosen it for another boy. This is a step forward. Some ridiculous and practical part of me wants to move the present from his lap now, as his tears are making the wrapping soggy. But he clasps it tightly, hanging on as though to a ledge from which he might fall.
‘We don’t have to go to the party,’ I tell him.
‘I’m a silly boy,’ he says.
‘No, not silly. Wonderful. A wonderful boy.’
‘Silly, useless boy!’ he says. And still the tears, one after the other, following the same track.
What I must remind myself of now – what I must tell myself – is that it is good that Alex wants to share how he feels. This moment, however painful, signifies a change. Because it is all the things he is not doing that matter. He is not having a tantrum. He is not hitting his head against the dashboard, kicking his legs out straight, biting his own hand. What he is doing is so normal. He is telling me how he feels and with that he is showing an expectation, I think, this somehow communicating his feelings will make it better. Surely we are getting now to the real problem, the very core of the autism that holds him back, that hurts him.
‘Right now, in other cars, are boys like you,’ I tell him. I have no idea where this is going, but I keep talking. ‘They are nervous that nobody will like them. That at the party they will be afraid … of the animals or the noise or … or that there will be too many colours—’
‘And the balloons might pop!’ he cries.
‘Exactly,’ I agree. ‘The balloons might pop. They are concerned about that.’
‘And that’s a horrid noise!’ he says. ‘And the children running in all directions!’
I nod. ‘Yes,’ I say. I take his hand and he squeezes my fingers; I am amazed by how hard.
‘They might be worried,’ he says, shaking. There is a heat rising from him; he’s on fire with worry, it seems. How do I stop this? How do I make him happy again? Do I return him to his computer? Do I take him to the railway station and let him watch the trains?
‘Yes, they might be worried,’ I say. With emphasis I add: ‘But they don’t have to go.’
Now he moans as though in terrible pain. ‘Yes they do!’ he says. The T-shirt on which he has marked his pancreas and large intestines, his stomach and heart, is getting wet. All the ribs are beginning to blur; both his lungs. ‘Yes they dooooo!’
‘Okay, but they don’t have to go today,’ I tell him.
For a long while we are like this. He cries; I hold his hand. His carefully combed hair stands up straight with the heat of his body. Cars pass us, some with families aboard. None of them know why we are pulled over at the bus stop. Not even this bus, angling behind us, has any clue why we are here.
The windows are steamed up. Alex’s crying slows, now stops, but the windows shed drops of moisture in long, slow streams.
‘Are you okay?’ I ask him.
He shakes his head sadly, his mouth turned down.
‘Let’s go home,’ I say, and turn the ignition.
‘No,’ he says.
I don’t think we should stay here much longer – the bus driver wasn’t too pleased with my blocking him – and there’s no way we can go to the party now. Richard was right. Mrs Whatsit, his teacher, was right.
‘Are we late?’ Alex asks. ‘Is it 15:00 yet?’
It is already ten past three, but Alex doesn’t look at the clock, perhaps because he doesn’t really want to know. He hates to be late to anything. He might find it impossible to go at all if he knows he would be late. ‘Not yet,’ I tell him.
‘Go now,’ he says. ‘To the party.’ He sniffs, rubs his eyes with his shirt, the one with the parts of the body, the one he thinks is cool. When I hesitate he looks at me, his mouth opening. What he needs is for me to tell him just one more time that he can do this. That he can manage a birthday party just as he has managed so many things. So I do my best to smile as I put the car into gear.
‘Somebody has to be a friend to those boys,’ I tell him. ‘Those other boys in cars right now.’
‘I will be their friend,’ he says. He sets his jaw, looking ahead.
This is the moment I will remember as the turning point, a moment that begins with that change in his expression. He glances at me, then reaches over and takes the invitation from my lap. I had forgotten it was there, so when he plucks it from my lap, it is as though he produces it from thin air. On it are directions that he reads to me now, clearly and slowly and in the manner of a young man reading directions to a driver, who is his companion – a friend, a girlfriend, a wife perhaps. I can see it now. One day he will have a wife. And he will be able to go to such a thing as a party. He will have choices and this, if nothing else, makes him no different than other people. The future is not nearly so bleak as it seemed even five minutes ago. It will be all right, after all. He is making a choice. This is a fact, as palpable as the ledge of his kneecap beneath my palm, or the startling sound of seagulls descending low in the sky, appearing out of nowhere like a cloud, welcoming us forward with their caws.