You, Me and Him (15 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

‘Happy Birthday to me!’ George shouts on his new bicycle, the pedals turning furiously. Finn and I watch him. His monkey, Einstein, is dressed up in a leather jacket and helmet and sits between the handlebars, about to fall off. ‘Don’t go far!’ we both shout together. Finn starts running to catch him up. ‘Turn round!’ he calls. ‘GEORGE!’

*

Mrs B and Clarky help me put up Happy Birthday banners and balloons. We cover the table in a bright blue cloth and load it with cucumber sandwiches, crisps, chocolate fingers, Mrs B’s mini-Scotch eggs and sausage rolls. ‘I wish Finn could be here today,’ she sighs then turns to Clarky. ‘Still, never mind.’

Clarky has told me he’s terrified of Rose. ‘Those blue eyes look as if they can see right through you, like an X-ray.’

‘Not working at the moment, Justin?’ she asks, lips pursed tightly.

‘It goes like that, Rose. Sometimes I have a lot of concerts and …’

‘Right,’ she cuts him off.

‘Anyway, I wouldn’t miss my godson’s birthday.’

‘I forget you’re his godfather.’

‘What’s her problem?’ Clarky asks when she’s out of earshot.

I know. The only man she has ever trusted is her husband, Michael. ‘I’ve never been able to have a close male friend,’ Mrs B once told me. ‘I once knew a lovely man called Timothy but I discovered, much to my chagrin, he’d always held a torch for me. He became quite aggressive in the end, very unpleasant.’

George is sprawled on the floor playing with his Lego in the new bright red hooded top that Grandfather Nicholas, and Angela, the new woman in his life, sent him all the way from America. Wrapped in pink tissue and placed in the hood was a white crystal. ‘Why’s she given me a stone?’ George had asked, giving it a shake in case a secret bank note fell out of it.

I met Angela for the first time when we went out for lunch with her and Nicholas last year. She was wearing a long purple dress. We’d already learnt that she was a leading expert in ‘life training’, running her own enterprise from home.

‘Drugs give you cancer!’ she had gasped when we told her George was on Ritalin. She proposed some healing instead. Back at home she laid him down on the ground, saying she was going to take him back to his birth to start the healing process.

Of course, George couldn’t keep still. ‘Birth is extremely traumatic,’ she was telling him, ‘a rude awakening after being cosseted in Mummy’s tummy …’

‘What’s she saying?’ George sat up and she pushed him back down again like a puppet.

‘Relax. Close your eyes.’

‘What’s that weird smell?’

‘Incense.’

‘Mum, she’s a weirdo.’

‘I’m going to take you back to your birth, George.’

‘Nothing’s happening,’ he’d said eventually, sitting up again. ‘I’m bored out of my brain.’

Finn likes Angela because she makes his dad happy. When I met Nicholas for the first time at our wedding, he was painfully quiet, standing five feet away from everyone else, head bowed. I couldn’t relate this awkward shy person to Finn. After Gwen had left him the second time he became a recluse, Finn told me.

Clare, the entertainer, arrives early with a large brown suitcase bulging with party equipment and a guitar. She tells me that when the children arrive she’ll gather them in a circle to sing ‘Happy Birthday’.

Half an hour later George is running up and down the stairs waiting for his classmates to arrive. He sticks his hands to the wall and pretends he can climb.

Mum and I smile awkwardly at Clare. How long is she going to sit and wait? She picks up her cup of tea. ‘Let me get you another?’ I take the cup before she has time to answer.

My mobile rings. ‘How’s it going?’ Finn asks.

‘It’s not,’ I whisper loudly.

‘What?’

‘No one’s turned up yet.’

‘Shit. Where’s George?’

‘Around. What do I do if no one turns up?’

Finn draws in breath. ‘They will, they’ve got to. Don’t panic. I’ll call later.’

‘Where is everyone?’ George asks, coming up to me. Mum decides to hand him her present. It’s a black plastic case with a red cross on it. George unclips the fastener. Inside are a play stethoscope, thermometer, gauze mask, roll of bandages, plastic blue cap, green apron, and finally a personalised badge saying Dr George Greenwood.

‘I think you’d make a smashing doctor just like your father, a real hero,’ Mrs B says. Clarky pulls a face behind her back.

I hear some footsteps outside and my heart lifts. ‘Hello! Come in.’ It’s Mrs Heaven clutching the hand of her daughter, Imogen, who wears a stripy blue dress with a pink ribbon tied around her waist. ‘Am I early? I thought I had the wrong house.’ She starts to laugh, followed by a pert, ‘Where is everyone?’

‘They’ll get here soon,’ I echo back cheerfully. ‘Oh, here’s Tiana.’ I introduce them. ‘What a fabulous surname,’ Tiana says.

‘Thank you. My maiden name was Bliss.’

‘Is that for me?’ George is looking at the present Imogen holds while staring down at her shiny patent shoes. He grabs it from her feeble grasp and starts to rip off the paper.

‘What do you say, George?’ I urge.

‘Thank you.’

When her mother has gone Imogen shuffles towards a beanbag and sits down. We wait another ten minutes and still no one else arrives.

‘Do you want me to sing to these two?’ Clare suggests diffidently.

Finally the doorbell rings and I open it, praying. ‘Is it someone’s birthday?’ the postman enquires, handing us a large parcel.

George promptly forgets Imogen’s offering of a puzzle. ‘Wow!’ he says, planting a cowboy hat on his head. It falls off but he’s lost interest in it already. George needs presents that demand his attention, like model aeroplanes he can build.

We start to sing ‘Happy Birthday’. Clare is playing the guitar and singing as loudly as she can; Clarky, Mum, Tiana, Mrs B and I are belting it out too. ‘I want my mum,’ Imogen says at the end of the song.

I hear a car engine being turned off. I don’t wait until the doorbell rings. ‘Hello, sorry we’re late,’ Aggie calls from the window of her shiny white van. She opens the back door, presses a button and the ramp slots into place. Eliot glides effortlessly to the pavement in his wheelchair.

‘Hi, Eliot.’

‘I’m an outlaw,’ he says with delight. His hair is swept back and tucked behind his large pink ears. He’s wearing a muddy orange-coloured scarf and an old dusty jacket with silver studs down the arm. On his bottom half are combat trousers with rips across the knees and he carries a crossbow on his lap. He must be Robin Hood.

‘One of the tyres got a puncture. Eliot was furious,’ exclaims Aggie, shaking her head. ‘He’s been longing to come to this party, hasn’t stopped talking about it and who is going to be here.’

Aggie takes one side of the chair; I am about to take the other when Clarky joins us. ‘Here, let me help.’

Aggie looks up. ‘Oh, hello, again,’ she says. ‘We met at the pool, didn’t we?

‘Yes.’

There seems to be an overly long pause.

‘Hurry up, will you?’ Eliot demands with a wave of his hand. ‘I haven’t got all day.’

Tiana takes my side.

‘It’s Agatha, isn’t it?’ Clarky asks.

‘Yes, but everyone calls me Aggie. Justin, right?’

‘Yes, but everyone calls me Clarky.’ They both start to laugh.

Tiana raises an eyebrow at me before she and Clarky summon all their strength to lift Eliot over the steps. I need to build a ramp. Eliot is fast becoming George’s only friend at school so I think I should do as much as I can to maintain this.

George insists on taking over once his friend is inside. He pushes Eliot to the table, knocking over Imogen’s present, the puzzle’s box massacred under the wheels. Already he has forgotten that no one else has bothered to turn up. At least there is one advantage to having ADHD. He is unable to dwell for long on one particular thought, instead sailing on to the next obliviously. I wish I could do the same.

‘Mind out, Mrs B!’ George and the chair hurtle towards her and she jumps out of the way, clutching her bright pink plastic hair clip. Wisps of white hair fall loose around her face.

The next hour is the most painful of all. Eliot and George start having a food fight, the chocolate castle pasted onto their cheeks and noses like face paints. Clarky suggests he plays Imogen a tune on the guitar and starts to strum ‘Bright Eyes’ from
Watership Down
. She starts to cry.

‘Try something more upbeat, can’t you?’ I insist.

George now has a whole wing of the chocolate castle topped with a red marzipan flag in his hands and I can see he is about to smack it down slap bang on the middle of Eliot’s head. I gasp with horror and am about to break it up when Aggie pulls my arm back. ‘What are they going to do if they don’t throw food at each other?’ She shrugs her shoulders. ‘It’s only cake.’

‘It cost almost twenty quid,’ I tell her, rubbing my forehead, ‘and a parking ticket. Eliot is covered in it.’

‘Well, thank God for the washing machine.’ She laughs and then pops a sausage roll – well, just the pastry – in her mouth in one neat go. She doesn’t seem to notice that George and Eliot have eaten the juicy sausage part and cast aside the flaking pastry.

‘I want to be like you.’

‘Like me?’ She looks at me incredulously. ‘Why?’

‘You let things fly over your head.’

‘I think you try too hard sometimes. You watch George all the time, like you know something’s about to go wrong.’

‘But if I don’t watch, he’s about to take a flying jump out the window or …’

‘If George hurts himself, hasn’t he learnt a valuable lesson? Eliot says he has ADHD, although he doesn’t have a clue what that is. Sorry if this sounds silly, but aren’t all children hyper?’

This question usually makes me want to kick people in the teeth. However, Aggie is a new friend so I practise self-restraint. ‘There are normal children who play up from time to time and then there’s George. I swear on my life it’s not a made-up condition. It’s a chemical imbalance in the brain that affects the parts controlling concentration, attention and impulsivity.’

‘So he acts without thinking, like running across a busy road?’

‘Exactly. George finds it impossible to filter all the messages his brain receives so he’s constantly being distracted.’

‘El says he takes a pill at lunchtime?’

‘Ritalin. It’s a central nervous system stimulant.’

‘Fuck, he’s on an amphetamine?’

‘Yes, and believe me, it’s the hardest thing giving your child a drug, but without it he’d never get
anything
done.’

Aggie nods thoughtfully. ‘So how was he diagnosed?’

‘We were about to leave for school, but George had forgotten his PE bag. I told him to go and get it …’

*

‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘There’s something up there.’

‘Upstairs, now.’

‘There are fumes.’

I laughed nervously. ‘Don’t be silly.’

‘There are fumes coming from the radiator, they’ve burnt my Lego.’

‘George, I was in your room five minutes ago, it was fine.’

‘Can’t you smell the burning?’ His arms were violently shaking; his forehead covered with sweat. Scared, I picked up the phone to talk to Finn.

‘Tell the GP it’s an emergency. I’m on my way home, now.’

George was shaking as if he had a terrible fever. ‘What’s wrong with him?’ I whispered down the phone.

‘I don’t know, but everything’s going to be fine.’

‘Sit with me, George.’ I wrapped us both in Baby. ‘Daddy’s coming.’

‘There are chemicals on my hands.’ He was hitting my arms. ‘Get them off me!’

I rocked him, telling him everything was going to be fine while I had a sinking feeling that this was only the beginning.

*

‘Shit. Then what happened?’ Aggie asks.

‘He was seen by a leading child psychologist and diagnosed with ADHD. There isn’t a formal test as such, diagnosis is widely based on behavioural and psychological questionnaires that parents fill in.’

‘Sod it. Must have been awful.’

‘Yes, but right from the start I knew something was wrong. “He is irritable baby,” his Indian health visitor used to say. She always wore red lipgloss which stuck to her two front teeth.’ Aggie laughs at this. ‘At playgroup he sat in the corner doing his own thing.’

‘Eliot says sharks only eat you if you annoy them,’ George calls out. ‘Is that true, Mum?’

‘They might eat you if they think you’re a turtle,’ Eliot adds.

They go back to their food fight. ‘I feel bad. Here I am complaining about George when you have El.’

‘He has Muscular Dystrophy,’ she says. ‘His muscles don’t work properly. It’s a rare genetic disorder in which muscles degenerate to such a point that, well, they can’t function anymore. Eliot used to be able to walk, he used to be able to swim, but now …’ Her eyes are watering.

I touch her arm. ‘I’m sorry. Life’s not fair sometimes, is it?’

‘Josie, shall we save our woeful tales for another day? We’re supposed to be at a birthday party.’ She picks up the rabbit puppet Clarky gave George who for some weird reason has called it Mr Muki.

‘Who gave this to him?’

‘Clarky.’

‘Now, that’s much more interesting.’ Her eyes widen. ‘How do you know him?’

‘We grew up together.’

‘Talk about dishy too.’

‘Dishy?’

‘Fuck, yes.’ She slaps a hand over her mouth again, as if telling it off.

I smile. ‘I’m not questioning whether or not Clarky is dishy, I’m questioning the word itself.’

‘He looks artistic, like a writer or a musician. You know, one of those attractive but elusive types?’

‘Possibly.’

‘Did you ever go out?’

‘Not really.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘No.’

‘Is he single?’

‘Yes, think so. There was some girl called Kelly on the scene but he didn’t seem that keen.’

‘Can you set me up with him? You see, I don’t get out that much,’ she confides, ‘what with, well, you know …’ She glances at Eliot. ‘So I need all the help I can get.’

‘Who are you talking about?’ Tiana joins us.

‘Clarky.’ Aggie nods eagerly. ‘I think he’s dishy.’

‘Why don’t you ask him out?’ Tiana suggests.