Daniel Isn't Talking by Marti Leimbach

‘It’s all part of the programme.’
    Daniel has given up on the rainbow and wanders now into the kitchen where we are talking. I go to hug him but he refuses my body, rolling his shoulders to evade my grasp. Tiptoeing across the kitchen floor, he arrives at the refrigerator, expertly tackling the child lock, to remove two pints of milk. Emily adds a blue jacket to the monkey, who I suppose she wants to look like the circus ringmaster for Dumbo. He’d be more authentic if he didn’t have his fangs bared.
    â€˜Then what’s going to happen when they test him ?’ I say, meaning Daniel, who is now pouring the milk straight on to the floor, without even looking up to see if anybody is noticing.
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    When finally Stephen and I slept together, it was not in his flat but in Cath’s, which she’d left empty while on holiday in France. I didn’t quite understand why we were there (he’d said that he had to stop by to water the plants) or whose flat it was, and I must report that I felt a bitlike a hooker. Things I couldn’t help noticing: how we made love on the floor, not the bed; how he washed out the coffee mugs we used and put them away so it seemed nobody had ever been there. When he told me he loved me I didn’t believe him. I judged him to be the sort of half-nice fellow who thinks he has to love a girl to sleep with her, and I didn’t answer back. You might think that would be the end of things, as I was meant to return to America anyway – I was only in Britain 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.
    â€˜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