Chapter 4
I stopped still as I walked into the bedroom and saw George. I wanted to scream, but knew I had to be silent. Somehow he had opened the latch that locked the window and climbed outside. He was standing on the other side of the glass with his bare feet on the ledge next to the open window. We were on the third floor. I couldn’t move too quickly or else I’d frighten him.
‘What are you up to, George?’ I asked.
He stared silently at a spot just past my head, his hands holding on to the frame.
Slowly I reached into my pocket for my phone and dialled 999. ‘I need help,’ I told the operator.
A voice on the other end took my details and my eyes didn’t leave George as I put down the phone, praying that someone would get here soon. If he moved an inch he would fall. I should have known he might do something like this. George had no sense of danger at the best of times and didn’t seem to feel pain either. If he fell over, he never ran to me or cried; he just got up and walked away, with his knee pouring blood if he had cut it. But lately he’d been jumping up and down a lot when we went for a walk and telling me he was flying.
‘Are you, my love?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where?’
‘Over a big building.’
‘Really? Where else?’
‘A tree.’
I’d told myself George had a wild imagination and I was happy that he could dream. But now as my heart hammered and George looked at me I knew I should have kept a closer eye on him. I wanted to scream – knowing I had to stand still, longing to run at him – for what felt like forever, but was probably just a couple of minutes, until I heard the sound of sirens. I had asked the firemen to be ready to catch George if he fell because I couldn’t let them into the flat. If he saw strangers I was sure he’d let go of the window frame. He just didn’t understand that if he did that, he would fall. George thought he could fly like the birds.
I took a step forward, ready to rush at him and grab him if he let go with his hands. Then I looked at my watch as if it was any other day and I didn’t have a care in the world.
‘We’re late, George,’ I told him. ‘We’ve got to get to Nannie’s because Lewis is waiting to see us.’
George looked at me, as if he was thinking about whether he wanted to move or not.
‘They’ll be wondering where we are,’ I said, trying to keep the panic out of my voice.
Inch by inch, George started shuffling back along the windowsill and my heart was in my mouth with every move he made. But the moment he put a foot through the open window, I gripped it so hard there was no way he’d be able to rock back and I pulled him down into the room with me.
‘Good boy,’ I said, longing to cuddle him, knowing I couldn’t. ‘But you know you mustn’t do that again, don’t you, George?’
He brushed himself with his hands where I’d touched him and looked at me without a shadow of understanding in his eyes. My hands shook as I followed George out of the room and even though I knew that from now on I would lock every window and door in the flat and hide all the keys, I was still at my wits’ end as I talked it over with Michelle that night.
‘We’ve got to show him, Ju,’ she said. ‘George can’t see it himself, so we’ve got to show him what could happen.’
The following morning Michelle arrived at the flat armed with a box of eggs, and we took George to the bedroom, where we opened the window.
‘Do you see this egg, George?’ Michelle asked as she held it in front of his face. ‘It’s you, it is.’
She dropped the egg out the window and George watched as it flew down and smashed on the concrete below.
‘Now you try,’ Michelle said as she handed him an egg.
After throwing half a dozen out the window, we ran downstairs to find the concrete outside the flats covered in bits of yolk and shell.
George looked around with a blank face.
‘You’ll get broken too if you fall – just like you’ll get broken if you step in front of a car,’ I told him, kneeling down to face him. ‘You’re like an egg, George – you’re fragile. Do you see?’
He didn’t look at me or say a word, but at least we’d tried, and I was learning by now that if you said things enough to George they eventually went in. If most mums had to tell their kids a hundred times, I had to repeat it a thousand to George. How else was he going to learn to fit into a world he didn’t understand?
His problems at school were only getting worse and I knew a lot of people thought George was just a naughty child who couldn’t be controlled: he’d climb the fence as the teachers told him to get down, hide under the dinner lady’s sari or push children over. He had to learn, so I’d try to talk to him every time I was called into school, but George just couldn’t see that what he was doing was wrong. He didn’t know the difference between a tap and a grab so rough it ripped another child’s jumper, or even understand how to move around other adults or kids: every time we left school, he’d run through the gates crashing into people, leaving them staring at him. I’d tried everything I could to make him walk with me but he always bolted the moment he got out the school door and as I chased after him, he would roll on the floor screaming the moment I touched him.
George just could not see that he was the one who was different, and every time I tried to talk to him about what he’d done wrong, he would tell me that he hadn’t. What I was trying to teach him just didn’t make sense and he was sure it was the other children who were the problem. But although I knew that I had to keep trying to help him understand the way the world worked, it felt more and more as if his school was almost giving up on helping me to teach him that.
In the December of George’s second year at school, when he was about five and a half, I was told he couldn’t join in the Christmas concert because it might spoil things if he had one of his outbursts. I knew George wouldn’t notice if he wasn’t at the concert, but I would because that’s what mums do, isn’t it?
Teachers don’t spend twenty-four hours with children, though. They didn’t know George as I did and see all the tiny details of his behaviour – the good bits that were mixed in with the not-so-good ones. For instance, he might not seem interested in most of his lessons, but the one that always made George listen was history. So I’d started taking him to all the places I could think of – Hampton Court Palace and the Tower of London, Windsor Castle and old aristocratic houses – to give him the kind of days out that I’d had as a child when Dad and Mum had told us all about London’s old buildings and I’d learned to love those kinds of places. My favourite had always been Hampton Court Palace; whenever I walked into the huge hallway with its marble stairs, old paintings and enormous chandelier, I’d imagine that it was my house.
It wasn’t easy, of course. George didn’t like all the people and I had to work out what he could and couldn’t cope with. Going on the Tube was just too frightening, but we just about managed if we went in the car and I let him hide when the place we were visiting got too busy. George never talked about what we saw but I knew his favourite place was Windsor Castle because his eyes would open in wonder when we went
