or a sudden, inexplicable collapse. My mind is a kaleidoscope of unspeakable images: small, still limbs; eyes like marble, like glass. He is dying, my baby, and I cannot find him no matter how fast I run through the house or how loud I yell his name.
‘Daniel! DANIEL!’ I still can’t find him, but now it’s Emily who has my attention. She wears an expression as though she’s been scolded, sticks out her lower lip, preparing for tears. I scoop her up, balance her on my hip and keep searching. After many minutes I find Daniel inside the shower, rolling his Thomas the Tank Engine along the ledge of the pan. His face does not register surprise when I fling open the shower door. Parking Emily on the sink ledge, I reach into the shower for Daniel. When I pick him up he does not look at me, but stretches toward the train, his hands clasping and unclasping.
‘You said you’d talk to me, so talk to me!’ I tell Stephen. I’ve sat both children in front of the television to watch Teletubbies, an inane programme that I am sure is not good for them, but Emily likes the way the custard machine flings pink glop, not to mention all those oversized French rabbits. Daniel, on my lap, sits with a fixed expression, staring at the television, often leaning forward so that his face is way too close to the screen. Emily, taking my advice to sit further back, occupies the armchair along with a dozen or more plastic ponies from her collection. Between episodes she sings the Teletubbies theme tune while her ponies dance in her hands.
‘I don’t understand the problem,’ says Stephen, speaking to me from his office. ‘You looked for him, you found him. He was in the shower but there was no water running, so no danger of drowning –’
Among my many fears is that our children will drown in the tiny, ornamental pond in our garden. Before I consented to move into this house I insisted workmen arrive and cover it with three layers of metal wire. They did as I asked, but kept sneaking glances at each other. When I made cups of tea for them they said, ‘This is just tea, right? Nothing in it?’ Similarly, I had the lid for the septic tank in our summer cottage buried under half a dozen paving stones. I was told by the septic tank emptying service that this was not folly on my part. It would take thirty seconds for a child to die in a septic tank, the lid opening easily with one finger. He, the man from the septic tank service, drank his tea without any questions at all.
‘Please,’ I beg Stephen. ‘Come home now. Turn off the computer, get up from your chair, put on your coat.’
My socks don’t match and there’s a split in my jeans, along the seam of the crotch. I haven’t washed my hair in two days and my eyeglasses are so gunged up that the world through them seems to have grown a skin. Meanwhile, Daniel needs a new nappy, but I’ll have to change it in here because if I take him away from Teletubbies now he may not get back into it, which will mean I have to chase him around the house to keep him from endlessly flushing the toilet, which he will only play with like a toy but will not consider sitting on. Then I will have to stop him climbing up the curtains, or stacking the books like a ladder so that he can reach the glass-encased clock on the fireplace mantel. He will not play with me, although every day I try. I get out books in bright colours, push matchbox-sized cars up and down garage ramps, hide from him then appear like a vaudeville clown, leaping before his eyes. He turns from me. His preoccupations are a barrier between us, a sheet of glass through which I cannot reach him.
‘I know how to come home,’ says Stephen.
‘What did you say?’ My head is a sound machine; the singing girls still won’t go away. Daniel is leaning forward, straining in my lap. If I allowed him, he’d have his nose against the screen. ‘I don’t like these pills you gave me,’ I tell Stephen. ‘I don’t like what’s going on here at all.’
* * *
I make him speak to me while he’s standing on the platform at Paddington, while sitting on the train. Even though I cannot hear him and the phone cuts out continually, requiring frantic redialling, I ask him, beg him, plead with him not to go away. As he walks down the road, turning the corner leading to our street, he must speak to me. Good things, I say, please tell me good things.
By the time he reaches our house he is fed up, his face vaguely disapproving as he enters the house. Emily, rushing to his arms, asks if something special is going to happen today. Is this a holiday? Is that why you are here in the daytime, Daddy? Daniel has given up on cartoons and is now staring at the pattern on the carpet, tracing it with his finger.
‘I’ll play ponies with you,’ says Stephen to his daughter. ‘But then I have a very important call.’
‘My ponies are having a nap,’ says Emily. Her eyes move to the sofa cushion where a whole cavalry of plastic ponies sleep beneath a dish towel. ‘And they have a very important call, too. So you will have to play with me.’
Stephen moves across the room to Daniel, who is quietly sitting on the carpet. ‘He seems fine to me,’ he says.
‘He disappeared,’ I say. I am cutting the crusts off a sandwich for Emily. Daniel won’t eat sandwiches. He will eat cookies and crackers and milk and cereal. But no meat and no fruit and no vegetables. I give him vitamins each day and I make cakes with carrots in them or with grated zucchini. ‘I called for him for ages but nothing happened. It was as though he didn’t hear me.’
‘Daniel, were you hiding?’ Stephen teases. Daniel looks up, meets his father’s gaze, but does not smile back at him. ‘He was playing a game, Melanie, why don’t you just calm down?’
‘A game?’ I say, and toss the knife into the sink so hard it makes a dent.
But Stephen isn’t worried about Daniel. He’s worried about Emily because she is four years old and not yet in school.
‘She’s going to be behind,’ he insists now.
‘Behind what?’
‘Behind the others.’
Everyone else we know sent their children to daycare, then to nursery as soon as they could get them out of nappies. But Emily shows no interest in school. When I walk her past the busy playgrounds, full of rushing children and squeals of laughter, the barking shouts of the footballers, the rhythmic chants of the girls with their jump ropes, she gives me a look as though to warn me off even the suggestion she be imprisoned in such a place. Rooms filled with primary colours, desks stocked with jars of coloured pencils, will not attract my daughter. Emily prefers instead to fax to her father’s office pictures she makes of Pingu, the penguin from the Swiss cartoon. She weighs bananas at Tesco’s, mashes bread for the ducks at Regent’s Park, visits pet shops where she names each and every animal, even the crickets, which are only there as food.
Stephen does not approve of this no-school business. The government has recently issued some kind of report indicating that children who go to pre-school perform better throughout their primary years. The day of the announcement, Stephen brought home the newspaper and flung it on to the kitchen table, which was being used as a Play-Doh factory, covering up all our good monsters with the Independent.
‘Hey, don’t wreck our stuff,’ I said.
‘Your stuff,’ he laughed.
‘Well, Emily’s stuff, I mean.’
‘Have a look at this,’ he said, pointing at the article.
The googly eyes came off one of the monsters and I stuck them back on. I glanced at the headline on the newspaper and nodded, then found another monster to adjust.
‘Read,’
