Daniel Isn't Talking by Marti Leimbach Page B

consultant who gave him the hearing test said he was normal.’
    â€˜What exactly did the consultant say?’ asks Jacob carefully.
    So I tell him. ‘They put him in a soundproof room and had him build a tower out of coloured bricks. They wiggled things that made noise and flashed lights. They took some kind of photograph of the inside of Daniel’s ear. Then they said he was normal, take him home.’
    Jacob nods, rubs his finger over the hair on his lip,pokes his pale tongue into the corner of his mouth and says, ‘So then what?’
    â€˜I took him home.’ I took Daniel home and he stood on the table, trying to reach the light bulb, screaming because he could not. Then he laid the videos out across the living-room carpet with all their edges in perfect alignment. Then I tried to get him to look at me by stealing his train and holding it at the end of my nose. I took him to the park and let him sift sand through his fingers, which is all he would do. No playing tag, no feeding ducks. He used to love to feed the ducks. I went home and thought about how he used to chase them, laughing, how he used to throw balled-up pieces of old bread into the water and watch the ducks skim the surface with their bills. I got out photographs of him at that same duck pond, his face alight, his hands raised to throw more bread. I cried all night so that Stephen had to sleep on the living-room couch. In the morning I threatened to kill myself, which is how I ended up in Jacob’s office now, and why I am afraid to leave.

5
    Do everything you can in life to avoid ever visiting a developmental paediatrician, particularly one in the NHS. It is not that they are wholly incompetent, nor that they will state flatly everything wrong with your baby, although either one of these may be the case. It is first that you must arrive at a car park lined with tall, rusting chain-link fences set into the untidy grounds by means of cement posts. You then put yourself through a gate that has a tricky lock placed high on a wall so that none of the children can escape, and pass through a series of anonymous hallways with cheerless chipping paint, linoleum floors that smell of disinfectant, posters about various sorts of conditions – dyslexia, Down’s syndrome, schizophrenia – until you enter playrooms full of badly damaged children. These children do not often smile, cannot easily speak, play not with each other but with objects that are not toys. And if you are there for the same reason as I am, today, you see in every one of these children the shadow of a person you love more than you can describe, and who is just three years old and has only this to look forward to in his life.
    Daniel has begun to collect disc-shaped objects, which at first I thought was a good thing because it meant less attention to Thomas the Tank Engine. He has taken to balls and balloons and coins and draught pieces. Milk bottle tops and metal washers and clockfaces, the lids of mayonnaise jars and shining CDs. He holds as many of these objects as possible along with his Thomas as we walk through the nursery at the Frilman Centre, where we are to visit Dr Margaret Dodd about what is being called a ‘developmental delay’. Daniel keeps dropping a coin or a lid or a marble, which means we have to stop, retrieve the object, give it back to him and toddle along again, until he next drops something else. At this excruciatingly slow pace we make our way through the car park and the cement garden that leads on to the main building. By the time we reach the nursery, I have to pick him up in order that his revered objects do not get pilfered by the other children, who seem similarly disposed to carrying around useless items, or at least behaving very oddly toward their toys. One girl has a plastic Barbie she keeps hammering against a table, then flinging through the air, then hammering on to the table again. A boy with remarkably quick movements