for a year, completing a kind of ersatz degree at Oxford on an exchange basis. Not a proper degree, you understand, just something they fling at Americans so they can get their own students over to the States for free. I’d said on the application that I had a sincere interest in British literature, which wasn’t entirely untrue. But having completed my undergraduate degree and having no idea what else to do with myself now that I was supposed to be out in the world doing something, I thought Oxford sounded nice. Pleasant. Cultured. I had the image of streets laced with coffee houses and obscure specialty shops, crowded with bicycles and peoples of every nation, of dazzling young men in greatcoats and wire-rimmed spectacles, of tweedy professors searching second-hand bookshops in their slippered feet. And it was exactly like that. A great place to hide from the world, so long as you didn’t trip over the drunks or fall headlong through the windows of one or other topless dance bar.
‘Stay with me,’ Stephen urged. ‘I adore you.’
I didn’t know how torn up he was over Penelope’s sudden exit from his life; I was still floating in the aftermath of my mother’s death, then my motorcyclist’s death. In the wake of such events, his seemed an appealing proposition. The truth was I didn’t want to go back home. It felt easier to live freshly in England. So for many months I lived in London among Penelope’s musical instruments, her bizarre tapes of chanting monks and crashing metal and homemade pan-pipes from distant lands. One only had to flip a switch to hear drums that seemed to whip up the blood inside you, mouth harps that extolled the loneliness of mountains. I never intended to fall in love with Stephen, just to bide some time and think of what I should do next. It was a strange, uncontrolled period in my life. For the first time ever I had no place I was meant to be, nobody to whom I owed an account for my time or an explanation for my whereabouts. For hours each day I lay on the couch listening to tiny violins played by equally tiny men who hailed from Chiapas, Mexico. I read all of Martin Luther King’s writings, and discovered that I would be quite capable of believing in God if anyone ever cared to mention Him any more. Toward the end of the summer, just about the time I thought I’d better return to America – for surely there is a reason to live in one’s own country? – I discovered as though by accident that I’d fallen in love with Stephen.
We were in his muddy blue Volkswagen driving out to South Wales. There was a particular beach we liked that made only a pathetic nod toward tourism and was more or less vacant most of the year. I looked at his profile as he sang along with a Van Morrison song, his hand on my knee, and I realised I loved him dearly, the way you do a great friend or a member of your family. He had a knack for making me feel good, bringing me tea in bed and reading me jokes from a book just like my brother used to do when we were kids. He was an expert camper and knew, for example, how to pitch a tent in the wind and cook an entire breakfast using only a tiny gas cylinder. One day we saw a rosewood vanity box in the market on Portobello Road. He brought it home and made it into a record player, that old-fashioned relic of a machine, with speakers so small we could tuck them on the window sill behind the bed. Even now, when we make love, he moves over me silently and thoroughly and selflessly, kissing me afterward, his hands in my hair.
‘And that is how often each week?’ asks my shrink, his notepad on his thigh, his mechanical pencil hovering above.
‘That isn’t the problem either,’ I tell him.
He sighs, shakes his head. Slaps his pen on the clipboard.
But this session, session number two zillion, we hit on it.
‘What am I scared of?’ I say, whimpering. One hour, sixty-five pounds, thirty minutes of London traffic each way, a splitting headache, no workable drugs, and all I’ve done is cry. ‘What am I scared of?’
He nods. Says nothing. Fixes his lips into a serious expression. Another time, not now, I might wonder what Jacob thinks about during the session when all that happens is a lot of crying. But I’m not thinking about Jacob.
‘There’s something wrong with my baby,’ I say, sputtering through the sentence, all snot and tears, my ears ringing, a stabbing pain in my throat.
‘What is wrong with him?’ asks Jacob slowly.
I feel my child is slipping away from me. It is as though he’s lost, or hovering distantly along the horizon, even when he is right up close, even when he is in my arms. I don’t know why I feel this way, or what to do to hold on to him. Somewhere in the world, right now, a new baby has been born and everyone is celebrating that he is just so perfect. All around me spring is bursting forth. There’s flowers and birdsong and mothers with babies. All of this depresses me, and I cannot stand to admit it.
‘I don’t know what’s wrong with him,’ I say. Daniel uses my hands like tools, opening my fingers and putting them on to his train so I will roll it. He spins on the wooden floor until he falls down, laughing, paces the edges of the garden so that there is a balding path, will eat nothing at all except biscuits and milk, has one stupid toy.
‘He’s got one toy!’ I say. ‘It’s like he’s hypnotised by it.’
‘What’s the toy?’ asks Jacob. This is typical and what I love about Jacob. He doesn’t say, ‘Then buy him another toy.’ He knows I’d have already bought him half the shop.
‘A train.’
Jacob considers this. ‘I used to have trains. My son had trains. I can remember the track took up the whole dining-room table and we built a station out of shoeboxes.’
‘Exactly!’ I say. ‘But Daniel doesn’t build the track or care about the station. It’s just this one stupid train!’
‘Have you taken him to a neurologist?’
That word – neurologist. I hate that word and all it signifies. It seems to me that once you are talking about neurology you are talking about sealed fate.
‘He’s going in two weeks to a paediatrician,’ I say. ‘The ENT consultant who gave him the hearing test said he was normal.’
‘What exactly did the consultant say?’ asks Jacob carefully.
So I tell him. ‘They put him in a soundproof room and had him build a tower out of coloured bricks. They wiggled things that made noise and flashed lights. They took some kind of photograph of the inside of Daniel’s ear. Then they said he was normal, take him home.’
Jacob nods, rubs his finger over the hair on his lip, pokes his pale tongue into the corner of his mouth and says, ‘So then what?’
‘I took him home.’ I took Daniel home and he stood on the table, trying to reach the light bulb, screaming because he could not. Then he laid the videos out across the living-room carpet with all their edges in perfect alignment. Then I tried to get him to look at me by stealing his train and holding it at the end of my nose. I took him to the park and let him sift sand through his fingers, which is all he would do. No playing tag, no feeding ducks. He used to love to feed the ducks. I went home and thought about how he used to chase them, laughing, how he used to throw balled-up pieces of old bread into the water and watch the ducks skim the surface with their bills. I got out photographs of him at that same duck pond, his face alight, his hands raised to throw more bread. I cried all night so that Stephen had to sleep on the living-room couch. In the morning I threatened to kill myself, which is how I ended up in Jacob’s office now, and why I am afraid to leave.
Do
