Tim Parks - Goodness

‘Why?’

‘Because it means cheerful, apparently. Like us.’

There is a taboo about handicapped children of course. I’ve had time and occasion to think about this. Either they are wept over by social-consciousness mongers who want to show the government’s not spending enough, or they are simply not mentioned at all. Except perhaps in jokes of the worst taste. Their parents are generally perceived as angels who love them against all the odds, or devils who abuse and abandon them. Martyrdom and brutality make good copy. Another focus of occasional interest are the ones who overcome horrendous difficulties to paint Christmas cards with a brush gripped between the second and third toes. Maybe the TV’ll show you about thirty seconds of their sad and twisted bodies (not that I’m saying they should show more). Then there are the tabloid fables of what genetic engineering may be able to do in the future, and of course the emotive question of whether the severely mentally handicapped girl should be sterilised regardless of consent, that’s an interesting old chestnut. But the day to day business of working, nursing and cleaning, while all the time facing that enormous sense of loss, of no hope, of no way out. . forget it. I certainly would if I could.

I was kissing Shirley’s wet cheeks, she was squeezing my hand hard, sobbing for joy. The child was born. Our child. It was a girl. And so Hilary. We felt extraordinarily whole, fulfilled as a couple, we really did. I was truly happy. When the young doctor, examining the child on a white cloth, says in the kind of regional accent one has come to associate with sit-com and soap opera: ‘It’s a right mess this one I’m afraid. Never seen anything like it.’ Doctors, I’ve discovered, have quite a way with the handicapped.

How things happen and one is tricked into getting used to them! My mother, bringing flowers and baby clothes, says she’s sure it’s nothing they can’t put right. They can do such amazing things these days and we must all pray. Deliberately, I sense, she keeps calling the child by her name, as if she were already a person, picking her up, kissing her, celebrating, as if everything were perfectly normal. Immediately I’m aware of an undercurrent of pious persuasion, to accept this child on any terms as one of the flock, which immediately, instinctively I resist. Then resist the resistance. She is my child. So that I too say, ‘Darling little Hilary,’ while my mother kisses and fondles her.

But Shirley is listless. She keeps her baby completely swaddled and leaves it to the nurses to change her. She doesn’t seem to want to touch or look at her. She doesn’t want to talk about the problem, nor to hear all the rumours of syndromes, cures and prospects that I am rapidly gleaning. I sense that in her silence she is simply willing for it not to be true. She is waiting to wake up into a different reality. Breastfeeding, she weeps quietly, smoothing the child’s thin damp hair. The little face is strange, and strangely endearing.

Mrs Harcourt arrives at last. She bustles brightly but keeps her camera in her case. She doesn’t ask to see the girl’s body. Mr Harcourt comes, phoning first to make sure he won’t find Mrs Harcourt. He is grave and distant. There have been, he says, no cases, to his knowledge, of handicap in the Harcourt family. In the corridor he tells me confidentially that any way he can help financially not to hesitate to ask, and he claps me on a shoulder and says if anybody is equipped to deal with a problem like this it is me. I am so straightforward and sensible. I have my head so firmly on my shoulders.

Shirley’s brother Charles surprises us with a first visit in ages and says he’ll check up what benefits the government has left intact and we’d better grab them before they disappear. Shirley flares up and tells him to get lost. I feel this is a positive development, though when she goes to the bathroom I tell him by all means to do all the checking up he likes. We’d be grateful. ‘The whole game,’ he says, ‘with the Welfare State, or what’s left of it, is knowing what’s due to you.’ I remember the waiting room of the clinic where we attended our pre-natal course and above plastic pigeon holes, the sign: KNOW YOUR BENEFITS. These brief imperatives. Somehow it reminds me of my mother saying: ‘Couunt your blessings.’

They are doing tests, so Shirley has to stay in hospital. They have moved her and the child to Great Ormond Street. They take X-rays and do scans. They are trying to decide, they say, whether maybe an operation wouldn’t put it right. But they have never seen a child with its feet the wrong way round before. Also the thighs are disjointed.

I tell Shirley I suspect we are being drip-fed the bad news at the speed they imagine we can handle it. Whereas I want to know everything now. She shrugs her shoulders. She says she has enough to cope with without my paranoia.

I take a few days off work to think. Already I am aware that I must decide on some strategy, some plan, not just let events take over, especially with Shirley withdrawing into herself. But to make plans I need information. I get on the phone and bother the specialists, the doctors, the ward sister. For God’s sake, it’s been ten days and still no sign of a diagnosis! Coming back from visiting, I stop at Dillons and spend half an hour picking up two hundred quid’s worth of medical books. When I come out into heavy rain they have put the old yellow boot on the car. One thing you soon discover about personal catastrophes is that they don’t excuse you from any of the other rules.

Shirley whispers: ‘At least we’re close to each other, Georgie. At least we’re close.’ I storm out of the room to demand some information from somebody.

The doctors stall me. They say our child is perfectly healthy, eating well and moving her bowels, and there is no hurry. Later I wonder if this isn’t all part of a strategy. By not telling me anything they offer me the role of relief, of he who has to busy himself bothering other people and their secretaries. They slot your shock into their little routines. They have a way of getting you through. Which you hate and cling to.

Peggy comes. She is leaving the hospital as I arrive and we have a coffee together in the cafeteria. She keeps waggling her big knees under the table so that our coffee slops. I ask if she is cold, and I ask: ‘So what does Buddhism have to say about the handicapped? Are they reincarnated dinosaurs?’

She says: ‘You know there’s nothing I can say, George.’

‘Mother’s praying,’ I say, ‘so that’s one angle covered.’

She says: ‘So am I as a matter of fact. Aren’t you?’

I say I thought the Oriental brigade didn’t go in for that direct request kind of prayer. I thought it was all meditation and inward illumination.

She says: ‘I may not do it very often but I’ve always prayed just how I like, thank you very much.’

She is wearing a loose lilac jump suit, an old fashioned blue spotted foulard tied under her plump square chin. She has let her hair grow a bit and it’s chunky and messy. She looks slightly overweight, jolly, attractive, a very normal London mother. I think: her career has always been just being herself, rather than doing anything, achieving anything. She has no direction, no thrust. Warming her hands round her coffee cup, she tries to look into my eyes and smiles. I look at my Jaffa Cake. I say: ‘I always knew you were the lucky one, Peg. Fancy being able to pray.’

‘You couldn’t lend me fifty quid?’ she asks.

Driving home that afternoon I stop at a Tempo discount warehouse and picked up the best videorecorder they have, plus half a dozen films to watch. I dream that I have lost my leg. It has been torn from my thigh. And I look in the fridge, in the airing cupboard, under the bed.