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
