Enchantment (11 page)

‘No, I'm afraid he –' On the landing, she stopped to catch her breath. ‘He's a bit funny with strangers.' At the top, she put the child down, and he ran into the flat on perfectly good legs.

‘If I let him walk up and down the stairs,' Helen told Tim, ‘he sometimes sits and screams and screams and won't move, and the people in the other flats don't like it.'

In the corner of the room, the boy had tipped all his toys out on to the floor and was sitting with the basket upside-down over his head.

‘Come on, Julian.' Helen knelt and lifted off the basket, which he grabbed at fiercely and pulled down again. ‘This is Tim,' she said to the basket.

The boy lifted the basket and hurled it against the wall. Tim noticed that the ornaments and pictures that had been there were gone. A blanket had been put over the television, and the mirror taken down.

The child had a beautiful face and romantic golden curls. With his head up, listening to something, he looked like a little prince.

‘You're a nice chap, aren't you?' Tim felt very self-conscious, but he could not ignore the child in this small room, and Helen was watching him. He had to say something. ‘How old are you?'

‘He's autistic,' Helen said. ‘I'm afraid he can't respond to you.'

‘Aut – autistic?' Tim had not heard the word before. It sounded rather catchy, like something made up by people like Willard Freeman and Kevin Sills. The Auts could be a band of changelings. They were protected by their magical autistic armour.

‘It's a form of brain damage,' Helen said, in the quick, clipped way she used for imparting information. ‘In his case, caused by abnormal chromosomes.'

‘I see,' said Tim, not seeing.

‘He can hardly communicate, and he's very hard to control. That's why he has to be away at school. Didn't Valerie tell you? He was in her group when he was smaller, but they couldn't cope with him.'

Tim shook his head.

‘I'm surprised.'

So was Tim. Val usually liked to spread any bad news. Helen frowned at him. Did she think that Val had not told this because it was so awful?

‘I suppose she didn't think I'd see you again.'

‘She didn't?'

Helen thought. Conversation with her tended to be in fits and starts. She said something, and you said something, and she thought about it. Then she said something, sometimes so short and quick that you could hardly catch it.

Julian was playing with a big coloured top on the floor. When it was spinning, he leaned far forward with his tongue out.

‘Here – won't he hurt his tongue?' Tim saw the long, flexible tongue licking the top as it went round.

‘He has to taste everything. I'll go and make some coffee, since he's occupied, if you'll watch him for a moment.'

Tim watched. Julian stopped the spinning top with a savage hand and chucked it against the table leg. When Tim went to pick it up and give it back to him, he saw that the legs of the table and the chairs were scarred and scratched. He also saw, from under the table, that the wire running from an outlet to the television was encased in a sort of rubber hose.

He crouched, and held out the top to Julian. The boy stared. Not at him. Not past him. Through him, as if Tim really were the invisible man. He watched, fascinated and horrified, as the child worked up a large amount of spit in his mouth, and then ejected it like a bullet on to the stained carpet.

He did it again. Tim got up and went into the kitchen.

‘Can I have a cloth?'

‘Oh, you are good.' Helen did not ask, ‘What for?' She just gave him a damp cloth.

In the moment that Tim had been out of the room, Julian had taken off his clothes, all except a large nappy and plastic pants, which were tightly fixed on. He had a thin, agile body and long legs and lovely, healthy skin. He looked like a dream child.

He snatched the cloth from Tim and sucked it savagely.

‘Here, give it to me.'

‘It to me.' It was the first time Julian had spoken.

‘No, to me.'

The naked child came towards Tim, legs apart in the ballooning plastic pants. Kneeling on the carpet, Tim held out his arms. Julian came close to him. Helen came in with the coffee mugs.

‘Look, he likes me.' Tim felt triumphant.

Staring, the child stabbed out his fingers, and Tim jerked his head back only just in time to avoid having his eye poked out.

‘He could probably see that light on the wall reflected in your eye,' Helen said. ‘Things like that fascinate him. For a moment.'

Already the boy had backed away from Tim and was sucking hard on his own bare arm.

‘How do you – er, sort of manage?'

‘Search me.' Helen sat down with her coffee. ‘I just do. I get some help, of course, in the holidays, but weekends I can manage. Spend most of the time cleaning up, and stopping him from wrecking the place.'

‘Why do you have that wire covered? Does he suck that too?'

‘He bites it.'

‘
He bites it?
'

‘He could chew right through it.' She laughed at Tim's shocked face, one of her brief, snorty laughs and blew out her pale lips, without a smile.

‘Helen, I-I really, I mean, you're amazing, how you cope.'

‘You get used to it. His father never did. That's why we split up, really. He couldn't stand me coping and him not.'

She spoke very fast, but Tim thought that was what she had said. No abusive drunken sailor then? It didn't sound like that.

‘Will he get any better?'

Helen did not answer. ‘Oh dear, Julian.' She made a face, and put down her mug. ‘Come on, let's go and change you.'

‘Change you.'

Washed and dressed again, he was still a lovely-looking child. He sat in a chair opposite Tim, jiggling his feet, winding up his hands, crooning to himself, a brief repetitive refrain, over and over.

‘Julian,' Helen said lovingly. ‘Julian.'

‘Such a noble name.' Tim told her what he had thought. ‘Such – such handsome looks. He ought to be a prince.'

‘A sleeping prince,' Helen said. ‘But no princess can wake him.'

Why couldn't I?

Julian rocked back and forth and appeared to ignore them both, but haltingly, Tim began to tell the child a story.

‘Once upon a time, there was a golden-haired prince, who had a magic top. He could hang on to the top and spin himself away through space, anywhere he wanted to go …'

‘He can't understand, I'm afraid. Autistics don't know about fantasy or make-believe.'

But I will teach him. I will lead him by the hand out of the dark enchanter's forest and into his own shining kingdom.

However, a trip with Helen and Julian to the supermarket was enough to make him decide not to have anything more to do with the sleeping prince.

‘I hope you don't mind,' Helen said before he left, ‘but I need a few things from the shops. Would you just come and help me with Julian?'

Getting Julian ready took about ten minutes. ‘He loves to go out,' Helen said, but he became very agitated about his socks, and practically had a fit when she tried to put boots on him.

‘No boots, no out,' Helen said firmly.

Tim held the strong struggling child while she forced short red rubber boots on to his feet (it was raining). She carried him down the stairs, and held his hand while they walked down to the main road. When Julian pulled back and tried to bend his knees and sink to the ground, Tim took the other hand and they pulled him along between them, his woollen hat over his eyes.

‘Dragging the poor child along,' said a woman pushing a trolley towards the door of the supermarket. ‘It's not good enough.'

‘Can't she see –?' Tim asked.

‘They don't want to know.' Helen had put Julian into a trolley, and it was Tim's job to keep him in it, while Helen scooted fast along the shelves to get what she wanted.

Julian threw out his hat. Tim picked it up. Julian threw it out. He pulled off one boot and threw it down the aisle. He let out a high hooting sound which made people look round, and then look away again.

When Helen came back, Tim went for the boot. Helen tried to put it on, but Julian screamed and raged and threw tins out of the trolley. In the queue at the check-out, people edged as far away as they could without losing their place. Nobody helped, or even
looked sympathetic. Tim wanted to tell them, ‘He can't help it,' but Helen didn't, so evidently it wasn't the thing to do. While Tim was trying to stop Julian climbing out of the trolley, the child got an arm free and hit him hard across the face.

You bugger!
If people had not been looking, Tim would have hit him back.

‘Here – I'll take him out. You pay.' Helen gave Tim her purse and shopping-bag, picked up Julian and carried him out.

The rage that had made Tim almost hit the child merged into a giant blush. He put the shopping on the counter and paid for it and took the bag outside, the back of his neck on fire, feeling eyes on him.

Willard Freeman did not answer any more of Tim's letters, so after a bit, Tim took him off his list of special heroes. Mary Gordon did not answer either, but that was understandable, for a radio star. She stayed on the list.

When Tim got his spring bonus from Webster's, he did not pay Harold back. He paid off the rest of the garage bill, and Buttercup came home to him, gears working like silk. Zara would be thrilled.

Life looked up. The sun came out and Tim drove his mother out for a picnic on the tow-path by the river. She did not want to get out of the car and sit on the grass, so they ate their sandwiches in the car park, and watched the swollen river sliding by, and people walking along the tow-path with dogs and fishing gear.

‘That man is going to catch the biggest perch of the season. Look at his determined face. It will be stuffed and hung over the fireplace in his local pub.'

‘Bad luck,' Tim said. ‘He has to throw it back in the river.'

‘He'll pretend he doesn't know that, and say it came from the reservoir. Look, that barge is full of old ladies from the Silver Threads. I can see them drinking tea.'

‘This summer, I might get a boat.'

‘And we'll cruise down to Henley regatta in style. Not like those two.' A man and a girl were labouring to row a small boat upstream. ‘She's saying to him, “You call this a day out?” and he's saying, “You said the river was romantic.”'

‘I've seen just the boat I want. A little red cruiser in a yard near the wharf.'

But as usual, she was more interested in her invented dreams of strangers than in the reality of his.

Towards the end of April, the repertory theatre, the Boathouse, opened by the river wharf, and Tim was able to do a few jobs for them, as he had last year. Mostly it was selling programmes and showing people to their seats and locking the fire doors after the show.

This year, there was a cheerful, burly young man in the company called Craig Reynolds. It was his first year in repertory, but he performed small parts well, and was very friendly to everyone at the theatre. The ushers usually did not have any contact with the actors, but Tim sometimes stayed late on Saturday to help get out the old set and fit up the new one for next week, and Craig was one of the assistant stage managers.

‘You here again?' Craig said to Tim as they were getting out the set of
Poor Lucy
. ‘You give a lot of time to this place.' Tim signed himself up to usher as often as possible, partly because he did not want to be at home if Harold came round looking for his money. ‘Great to see such enthusiasm.'

‘I saw the play four times this week,' Tim said. ‘I like that bit where you're cornered, but the audience still doesn't know you've done it. “That's right, you fools.”' He lifted a light door off its hinges and put it down to declaim. ‘“Waste your time with me, while the real murderer is probably miles away by now. If you want a – a scape – a scapegoat, look into your hearts to see who really killed Lucy Grainger. You – all of you, with your smothering protection and your pills and therapists that turned a normal, bright girl into a zombie!”' It was so much easier to say someone else's lines than to talk out of your own head. ‘“I loved her, do you understand? I – (Craig's break in the voice) I loved her!”'

‘Jolly good,' Craig said. ‘You should have done the part instead of me.'

Tim put Craig on to his specials list.

Harold had rung him up a few times, and had come round once and made a bit of a scene. Tim had pretended he was shampooing
the rug, and would not let him into the flat, so Harold made the scene on the small platform at the top of the stairs, and Brian had opened the kitchen door and called up, ‘If you break that step again, you can mend it yourself!'

Tim had made up some promises that Harold seemed to believe, and when he had gone away grumbling, Brian came up and said something unsettling about rough trade.