The Enumerations Read online

  ‘Edward’.

  The name has been written beneath the photograph.

  Gabriel remembers Dad’s other laugh, the loud and not really happy one. Good old Edward, Good old Dad, and Mum saying, But surely he could help us, Joe?

  Is this him? Good old Dad? Gabriel can’t imagine the old man being a little boy. He turns the next page. Maybe he’ll see him again. But there’s nothing on the next page or the next. Just near the back, though, there’s a bigger photograph. A woman with a soft white face and two chins. She’s dressed in a black dress with a white lace collar. Standing next to her is a man with dark hair, his eyes gleaming silver. In front of them are three children, a boy and two girls. Mama, Papa, Edward, Lucy, Abigail, the same writing says. Gabriel bends closer to the photograph. The boy is older here, but his body is still tense, his jaw a hard, angry angle. He stares out as if he would like to rip the camera out of the photographer’s hands.

  The man with the silver eyes is grasping a cane. It’s thin, whippy looking. His large hands cover most of the head but they don’t hide its lolling tongue, its fearsome teeth.

  Gabriel has learnt the word ‘heirloom’. He heard it the first day they moved into this house. No running around mind, the old man’s voice, crusty and cross. Don’t want you breaking the family china now, do we?

  Old plates with blue patterns, silver knives and forks, crystal glasses and bowls. Gabriel has to be careful of them all. They’re family heirlooms, Mum says. All of this belongs to your grandfather and his father before him and back and back. One day it will be yours, Gabriel.

  Gabriel looks back down at the cane. He doesn’t want any heirlooms, thank you. He doesn’t want anything that belongs to the old man he refuses to call Grandfather.

  There’s the sound of footsteps in the passage, thudding on the wooden floor. Gabriel quickly closes the album and slides it back onto the bottom shelf. He’ll be in trouble if the old man catches him scrabbling around in his past.

  63.

  Day 11 / 21:52

  It’s a 3-month programme. Or, to be precise, 12 weeks. 84 steamy, sticky days and for the first 13 days there’s no visiting. But in 3 days’ time Noah’s family will be here to see him.

  14.30–16.30. He’ll be ready. His meds are working better now, the anxiety’s subsiding. He’ll be waiting to welcome his mom, his father, his little sister, ward them, build safety around them.

  64.

  Dominic’s still out in the garden; Kate can hear the hard crunch of the shears from here. He needs to stop now. He won’t have time for a shower, but he does need to change his shirt.

  ‘Maddie, it’s time to go!’ she calls out.

  Maddie will be ready. She’s been talking about this visit non-stop, meeting Noah in his room, not the Visitors’ Lounge where they’d all had tea on the day they’d dropped him off.

  ‘It’ll be so good to see him there,’ she’s said, over and over again. ‘I bet it feels like home to him now.’

  Kate thinks back to that first day, in his room. How he’d sat upright in the blue armchair and stared out of the window, willing them to leave his strange new space. That was how it had felt, anyway. She’d asked him questions like, ‘Do you want your rug here, darling?’ and ‘Should I get Dad to hang another corkboard for you?’ But she was met with a wall of silence. Not even Maddie could get through to him. Kate had felt a surge of anger so sharp, so violent, that she’d wanted to shake her son and say, ‘It’s not only you. Look at your sister. Can’t you see how hard this is for her? Look at me. What sort of mother would ever want this? Why should we only feel sorry for you? What about us?’ The hurt goes everywhere.

  And Dominic? Kate doesn’t want to think about how hard it was for him. That’s because she’s angry with him too.

  She opens the window and calls, ‘Dominic, we need to leave.’ She doesn’t care if Audrey Parfitt is having a nap or that ‘Sunday afternoons are sacrosanct, so could you please ask the children to keep the noise down, Kate?’

  She leans out again, calls even louder. ‘Dominic!’

  If he doesn’t get a move on, they’ll be late and their son will be pacing up and down, counting steps and watching the seconds tick by on his huge wall clock.

  65.

  The shears are heavy and Dominic’s shoulders ache from holding them above his head to chop away at the bougainvillea. He could have done this yesterday, so why choose to start such a large job less than two hours before visiting time?

  He lifts his arm and sniffs. He should shower, get clean and ready to walk in and pat his son on the shoulder and find something to talk about, anything other than the ‘Condition’ squatting dark and depressing in the middle of their lives.

  He lowers the shears to the ground. As he turns from the wall his hand snags on a hanging branch. Shit. A dark red line scores the back of his wrist. Betadine. He’ll have to smear some on, or his hand will get infected. Bougainvillea thorns do that. They carry poison in their curved tips.

  ‘Dominic!’

  This is third time she’s called him – only now it’s a yell, and he glances quickly over to Audrey Parfitt’s house. ‘Nap time, Kate,’ he says, under his breath. Careful now.’ Make too much noise and Audrey will be on the phone. Polite little Audrey with her neat little feet and perfectly pressed clothes, and, of course, her perfectly behaved, perfectly domesticated husband. Even Tigger is being trained to remain silent on a Sunday afternoon after lunch.

  Still, he needs to get a move on. They can’t be late. Maddie’s said this time and again. ‘It’s our first proper visit. He’s going to be waiting and I promised him. I promised we’d be on time,’ her voice louder and more high-pitched than usual. Maddie Sunshine, their happy child who never stresses, never worries.

  She even put a reminder on the fridge, pinned there by two magnets:

  Noah

  Visiting Hours!!!!

  Sunday 2.30–4.30 p.m.

  Some phrases trigger an instant reaction that twists your gut and tightens your sphincter. ‘We need to talk’, for example – his wife’s current favourite, and one of his worst. And now Dominic has another one to add to his list of discomfiting expressions: ‘Visiting Hours. When he’ll need to find something to talk about, for two long and exhausting hours.

  Dominic has resorted to making lists of potential topics. In his head at first, and then on paper.

  Maddie’s school work

  The price of petrol

  The food at Greenhills

  What we had for supper

  The state of the nation

  The state of the planet

  Running

  Running away

  Another life

  Another wife

  Another job

  And then, of course, fool that he was, he’d left that one on his desk and Kate had come across it and come to him, stony-faced.

  He’d laughed it off. ‘Just me being stupid, Kate. Of course I don’t want another wife. Of course I love you, darling.’ And he does. He just wishes Noah’s condition had never entered their lives, carrying poison in its tip.

  ‘Condition’. Another word that sends a spasm through him. And, if he’s perfectly honest, aversion. The moment he hears the word it fills the room and roots him to the spot.

  Worse still, ‘Noah’s Condition’. A nightmarish glob that grows larger and darker and more shadowy each time he looks at it. Soon it will fill their house and whump over the walls and into Audrey’s garden and under her door and it will smother her, and Docile Domestic David too.

  ‘Dominic!’

  Time to get going, otherwise they’ll be late and his son will be in a state, a frothing panic, and all two hours of visiting time will be spent trying to calm him down.

  He pauses. Perhaps that wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. Settling Noah may be exhausting, but it is time consuming. If it takes the best part of an hour, or more, so much the better. Less time to fill, less time to have to ‘chat’.

  Domi
nic is not good at this sort of problem-solving. Give him a column of figures and tell him to make sense of them and he will. Ask him to work out probabilities and possibilities and forecast the future and he can do that too. As long as he has the numbers, he can make them do all sorts of things. His predictions are good. He’s one of the best financial analysts in the country. Dominic more than keeps the firm’s ship afloat. His skills have helped him become a senior partner, raking in a salary many of his subordinates can only dream about. A good thing too. His son’s medical bills are high, and this spell at Greenhills will cost a pretty penny. But there’s plenty of money to keep Noah in comfort, in a clinic that offers private rooms; heaven forbid he should ever have to share space with anyone.

  Dominic is able to pay for every little thing his family needs. Even for a gardener, for God’s sake. But if they had a gardener, where would Dominic escape to when he needs to block out the noise from all the people who demand bits of him, when he needs an excuse to walk out on his wife the moment she says, ‘We have to talk’?

  66.

  It’s afternoon at Greenhills and the oak trees are doing their job, spreading shade over the white benches where mothers and fathers sit and twist their fingers, looking anxiously towards the double glass doors. What will they be like today? Will they be tense, or excited, manic or deeply sad? Will they sit down and talk or will they hover, stand at a distance, stay silent? These are the questions running through their heads.

  There are other trees on another lawn, to the side of the low hedge that borders the driveway. The picture is reversed here. Husbands sit waiting for their wives, children wait for their parents, wives for their husbands, but the watchful expressions are the same on both sides of the hedge. What will visiting hours bring this time?

  Nothing is certain at Greenhills on a Sunday afternoon between the hours of 2.30 and 4.30 p.m.

  Two hours of hope at the thought that someone is, might be, doing better. Two hours spent trying to find something to say. Anything to fill the gaps left by people who can’t speak, no matter how often they have been encouraged to ‘share’.

  A breeze drifts across the lawns at Greenhills, cooling faces made moist by the heat. The leaves rustle, sending light whispers through the hedge.

  67.

  Day 14 / 14:12

  Noah’s sitting in the Visitors’ Lounge, even though Ms Turner said he should meet his family in his room. ‘Entertain them there,’ she’d said, ‘maybe make them a cup of tea.’

  There is a problem with her plan.

  His mugs.

  He has 1 for each day of the week. He remembers his mother asking if he’d still need that many, his father saying, ‘For God’s sake, Kate. They’re just mugs. If he wants them, pack them.’

  Ms Turner wants Noah to make his family tea. This means he will have to use 4 mugs. But he doesn’t have 4 Sunday mugs. And his biscuits? What about them? He does a quick sum. Morning and afternoon, Monday to Saturday, and then tea on Sunday in the Visitors’ Lounge. They provide biscuits here on Sundays. The ones in Noah’s room are for him: 12 biscuits, 2 a day. Sundays are not a problem. Or haven’t been until now.

  Mugs and biscuits. What to do?

  Ms Turner’s spent time talking about his logistical problems, how to reduce the worries that surround them. ‘Think it through, Noah. Step by step, and then ask yourself, what’s the worst that can happen?’

  But you have thought this through.

  Noah has found a solution that suits everyone. And that’s what he’ll tell Ms Turner on Monday.

  They can sit and talk, here in the Visitors’ Lounge. His father can get up and stretch his legs in the garden and not have to talk to him, his mother can look at all the other kids and their parents and share smiles with them and Maddie … Maddie can just be Maddie, and keep them going for the 120 minutes they have to be together.

  There’s a clinking and clanking along the corridor; it’s Amber pushing a tea trolley laden with cups. And 4 plates of biscuits. Enough for everyone. Enough for 2 each, even. The Visitors’ Lounge is the place to be. Definitely.

  But now Mr Bill is at his shoulder, touching him. Noah doesn’t usually like that, but Mr Bill’s touch is light.

  ‘Come along, Noah,’ he’s saying. ‘Ms Turner says you’re all meeting in your room today.’

  Noah steps away from him. ‘I can’t. That’s why I’m here, in the Visitors’—’

  ‘Such a nice man.’ That’s what his mother said after they’d had a look round Greenhills. ‘And he seems to have a knack with Noah.’ She must be right, because he lets Mr Bill steer him out of the Visitors’ Lounge. Amber smiles at them, and Noah’s so surprised to be walking past her that he forgets to count the steps to his door. All he wants is to pull away from Mr Bill and start again, but he’s holding him, just above his elbow.

  ‘Don’t worry, Noah. Settle down inside and your family will be here to see you soon. You can show them what you’ve done with your room.’

  Noah nods, once, twice, quickly, because he has to get his hand to the door before Mr Bill does. Down-up-down-up-down with the handle and … open.

  There it is. His room, the clock approaching 14:30. He has 7 minutes and 25 seconds to deal with the biscuit/mug problem. He needs to go back to his calculations. Mr Bill has to leave.

  ‘Thank you,’ Noah says politely, but Mr Bill has followed him in. He sits in the chair at Noah’s desk, examines the contents of his desk organiser.

  Noah needs Mr Bill to go, to stop messing with his things. The organiser is at an obtuse angle to the edge of his desk, at least 220°. Mr Bill is up on his feet now and Noah’s chair is sitting at a drunken angle. The clock says 14:27. Noah only has 3 minutes left. They’ll be here on the dot of 14.30.

  ‘Bye Noah – later, buddy.’

  He likes it when Mr Bill calls him buddy, but there’s no time for that now.

  ‘Bye, bye, bye.’

  Noah closes the door and dashes to the desk, pushes the chair right in, as far as it will go, and straightens his desk organiser.

  84 seconds to go and you still haven’t dealt with the mug problem.

  68.

  Finally they’re at Greenhills. How quiet Maddie’s parents are. They’ve not said a word the entire journey. The air in the car is so thick she can almost taste it.

  They drive through the gates at Greenhills, and when they park and get out, they’re met by the smell of hot tar. Above that, the scent of grass is sweet in the air; the lawns at Greenhills have just been cut.

  Up the wide shallow steps at the entrance, pushing open the doors, breathing in. ‘A home from home’, that’s what the NoH brochure says, but Maddie and Noah’s home doesn’t smell like this.

  ‘Come-on-come-on-come-on-come-on.’ Maddie’s galloping down the corridor, heading for the door with the number 8 and under that, on a small card tucked into a neat brass frame, ‘Noah Groome’.

  She’s racing ahead of her parents, checking her watch, making sure she’s not late. ‘Two-thirty on the dot, Noe,’ that’s what she promised. Almost there, ready to knock five times – rat-tat, rat-tat-tat. She can’t have Noah opening the door at two-thirty and seeing no one there. She skids to a stop outside his room and looks at her watch. 2:29:46. She counts down the last few seconds and then raises her hand. Not a second too soon, not a second late. Just as she’s finished her Noah knock, he opens the door.

  He smiles down at her, that open, wide smile that Maddie loves, and says, ‘On the dot, Mads. Thanks.’

  She smiles and moves closer and he allows her to brush his arm.

  Kate and Dominic watch their daughter dash ahead. ‘The sunshine of my life’, Dominic used to sing to her when she was small. When did he stop singing, Kate asks herself now. Noah’s condition has blanked out the sunshine, the house has become cheerless, smothered in gloom. At least, that’s how it feels to her, the failed mother.

  And to Dominic too, probably. A man who can’t even greet his son, let alone meet his eye
s.

  When she catches up with Maddie, Noah is still at the door, holding onto the handle like a life raft. He steps back to allow her in. Dominic is still a few metres away. Jesus, Dominic, get in here now. Kate wants to snap out the words, lasso them around his legs and drag him into the room. Snap, like the way he spoke to her two weeks ago. ‘For God’s sake, Kate. They’re just mugs.’ Well, Dominic, this is just a room. And this is just your son, holding the door open and waiting for you to look at him.

  Noah’s father slips past him with a mumbled hello and Noah closes the door. Then he leans against it and takes a deep breath.

  ‘I have something important – it’s important,’ he says.

  ‘Yes, darling?’

  His mom and his sister look at him, but his father’s already on his way over to the window.

  He clears his throat and says clearly, ‘There will be no tea today, and no biscuits either.’

  There. He had to say that. He had no other choice. In the Visitors’ Lounge, they could have had tea. And 1 biscuit. 2 biscuits even. But not here. Not in his room.

  Tell that woman. Tell her to think these things through before she gets in her car and drives home on a Friday afternoon.

  69.

  Kate stands and looks at the door to her son’s room. How she wishes she could open it, walk back in, tell Noah she understands his worries about fitting them into his space, sorting out tea and biscuits, having her and Maddie perch on the end of his bed, creasing his sheet.

  She wishes she could tell him how sad she is that he couldn’t walk out with them to say goodbye, how the moment it was half past four he had leapt to his feet, ushered them out of his room and immediately closed the door.

  She watches Dominic striding away, Maddie trailing behind him, casting worried looks over her shoulder.

  Kate presses her ear to the door, aching as she hears the scurrying sounds of her son setting his space to rights, erasing any signs that his mother and father and little sister have been there.