‘Show them,’ Eve would tell Billy. ‘Show the class what you can do.’ No one would believe her if he didn’t.
He showed them during one circle time, the children gathered round.
The teacher said, ‘What song shall we play today?’
Class favourites included ‘The Wheels on the Bus’ and ‘Old MacDonald’. One of the boys, by the name of Arthur, wanted ‘The Ants Go Marching’. This was the umpteenth time this month that the class would hear it. Perhaps Arthur was better at putting his hand up and requesting. Or perhaps the teachers just happened to know all the words to sing along.
Billy dropped his head at the thought of the music starting.
The ants go marching one by one, hurrah, hurrah.
Music wasn’t the problem. He liked music plenty and listened to all sorts of songs: he had an ever-expanding home collection of CDs, he listened to pop and gospel and to Louis Armstrong. Repetition wasn’t it, either. Sure, there were songs in his collection that were good for one listen, but plenty more repaid replaying. He’d simply had enough of this particular song. He’d been patient, he’d listened and listened and now he was all listened out. So he managed to point to his device, left his chair for it, navigated to the page he wanted and clicked a button.
‘I don’t like this,’ said Billy in the device’s voice, the nasally synthetic voice that had replaced his brother’s.
And with that he navigated back to the homepage and put down his touchscreen, not without a certain flourish, Eve imagined later when the teacher told her.
She knew then she had to keep his machine up to date. You could do that far more straightforwardly than with the Macaw. You could add new icons and the computer would do all the talking. She had to anticipate Billy’s appetites, his shifting moods and preferences; she had to adjust to circumstances as they changed. To her son as he changed, sometimes in ways she and her family could not predict.
✲
‘It’s us,’ shouted Eve as she and Matt came through her parents’ front door. She was a little out of breath from the evening jog – an expiation for the Yuletide calories – and the house’s fireside warmth flushed her cheeks. Returning the keys to her wallet and carrying the smell of chill a step or two towards the living room, she called out, ‘Where’s Billy?’
‘Upstairs with the boys,’ Eve heard her father say. The boys being Ben and their cousins.
‘He’s had his bath,’ she heard her mother say. ‘I helped him into his pyjamas.’
Eve took off her shoes and went up to see the boys.
Ben was there and the cousins, in the middle of some complicated-looking game, but not Billy. They had figured he was downstairs with nana and papa.
She headed to the bathroom and tried the door and turned on the light. No Billy. She went from room to room but there was no Billy behind the curtains or under the beds or in the closets.
Matt, who had been putting on some coffee, heard the sounds of pacing and fumbling – bedsheets, blankets? – and went up. ‘Eve?’
‘I can’t find Billy.’
He had to be somewhere. She looked unthinkingly in the laundry hamper. Billy’s clothes – discarded before his bath – were in there.
They returned to the rooms, hoping against hope that Eve had missed him the first time. Then they went and searched downstairs. The back door in the kitchen was unlocked.
‘He’s outside,’ she shouted.
Her mother called 911. ‘Missing child. My grandson. Yes. Nine years old. He’s autistic.’
His hand had managed to turn the lock, then pull the door shut behind him – and in his bare feet and pyjamas, his hair damp still from his bath, he had lit out into the dark.
And before she knew it, she was back in her shoes and out the door and running, running as hard as she could. He might be lying in a frozen ditch somewhere, catching hypothermia, and she could never get to him in all this darkness. Not that there were many ditches to fall in, not around these parts, sense and logic might have objected – but they did not object, for the good and simple reason that she had not summoned them. There was no time for that. And the thrust of the thought was valid. Her son was out on his own, God only knew where, in the cold and dark. ‘Billy!’ she shouted at the parked cars and the stray cats but they did not answer to that name.
There was silence, only silence, and she did not like the sound of it.
On and on she ran through the silent streets and the freezing gloom, glimpsing herself run, some madwoman beside herself with panic, frantic knees up, elbows pumping, going every which way and not a one of them the right. Not minding the risk of ice, or skidding on slushy snow, the nasty fall and the broken wrist or leg or worse she was courting. In her peripheral vision she saw Christmas lights coming on, limning gates and fences and hedges, green and silver and yellow, and just beyond these, on the outermost edges of her mind, she feared she saw something else: a black, frozen and crumpled heap lying somewhere she would never get to.
Then she saw more lights, different these ones, not small and twinkly, they were red and blue and flashing. They were travelling in the direction of her parents’ house and slowing as they neared it. Eve ran up to the police car and to the boy in pyjamas on its back seat. He was wet and cold and safe. Someone opened the car door and Billy leapt into her embrace.
He resembled her more than she had known, resembled the boy in The Snowman less than he had thought. This was what Billy’s aborted flight taught them.
✲
In thirty years Billy has gone through his fair share of devices. These days, he speaks through a Toughbook in tablet mode. Eve tells me it’s called that, Toughbook, on account of its resilience; it can survive nasty drops and spills – and Billy. Though, to tell the truth, he’s much less hard on his devices than he used to be, his fingers now so accustomed to the pages and icons that you can scarcely keep up.
Eve keeps up. She is in what she might reasonably expect to be the Indian summer of her life, still full of energy, still overtaking men and women half her age on the sidewalk. These people. Move any slower and they’d stop!
‘Talk me through Billy’s adolescence,’ I say.
‘Oh boy,’ she says. ‘Those were bleak years.’
She remembers nights opening her eyes on her disappointingly dark bedroom, only thirty minutes or an hour lighter than the last time she had opened them, and climbing out of bed because she’d hear Billy up and about, thumping his teenage feet the width and length of the corridor. He could continue like that for hours, it seemed, over miles of corridor. How much further before he reached her wits’ end? So frazzled, in those instants, she didn’t know up from down. Nothing else for it but to wait for the sound of footsteps to recede. Or for sleep to reclaim her first.
He’d started having pain some months before, when he was sixteen, inexpressible, unlocatable pain, and she and Matt had had no rest, taking him to this and that medical department. It might be his wisdom teeth, they had thought. Or his periodic acid reflux. The dentist’s X-ray, though, had come up blank, as had the Ear, Nose and Throat man’s examinations. The doctors might have hoped Billy’s device could tell them where exactly he was hurting. But Billy didn’t seem to know where to press or point.
The pain was mysterious. It came and went. When it came and stayed it could walk him for hours at night along the corridors or in the kitchen.
Who sleeps much anyway? Eve mused on those exhausting nights. (Aside from Matt, the lucky log.) Not babies who wake in raging tears or young lovers in the throes of passion. Certainly not insomniacs or the elderly. Or those with something on their conscience. Maybe, just maybe, there wasn’t enough sleep in the world to go round. These night thoughts hardly soothed her then, they only caused her to fall even further behind on her fractured sleep. Forget beauty – her sanity sleep was what she needed. But there was never time. Darned if she remembered the last morning she had pushed snooze.
To think she had once feared a life of boredom.
✲
