Daniel Isn't Talking Read Online Free Page A

out books in bright colours, push matchbox-sized cars up and down garage ramps, hide from him then appear like a vaudeville clown, leaping before his eyes. He turns from me. His preoccupations are a barrier between us, a sheet of glass through which I cannot reach him.
    â€˜I know how to come home,’ says Stephen.
    â€˜What did you say?’ My head is a sound machine; the singing girls still won’t go away. Daniel is leaning forward, straining in my lap. If I allowed him, he’d have his nose against the screen. ‘I don’t like these pills you gave me,’ I tell Stephen. ‘I don’t like what’s going on here at all.’
    * * *
    I make him speak to me while he’s standing on the platform at Paddington, while sitting on the train. Even though I cannot hear him and the phone cuts out continually, requiring frantic redialling, I ask him, beg him, plead with him not to go away. As he walks down the road, turning the corner leading to our street, he must speak to me. Good things, I say, please tell me good things.
    By the time he reaches our house he is fed up, his face vaguely disapproving as he enters the house. Emily, rushing to his arms, asks if something special is going to happen today. Is this a holiday? Is that why you are here in the daytime, Daddy? Daniel has given up on cartoons and is now staring at the pattern on the carpet, tracing it with his finger.
    â€˜I’ll play ponies with you,’ says Stephen to his daughter. ‘But then I have a very important call.’
    â€˜My ponies are having a nap,’ says Emily. Her eyes move to the sofa cushion where a whole cavalry of plastic ponies sleep beneath a dish towel. ‘And they have a very important call, too. So you will have to play with me.’
    Stephen moves across the room to Daniel, who is quietly sitting on the carpet. ‘He seems fine to me,’ he says.
    â€˜He disappeared,’ I say. I am cutting the crusts off a sandwich for Emily. Daniel won’t eat sandwiches. He will eat cookies and crackers and milk and cereal. But no meat and no fruit and no vegetables. I give him vitamins each day and I make cakes with carrots in them or with grated zucchini. ‘I called for him for ages but nothing happened. It was as though he didn’t hear me.’
    â€˜Daniel, were you hiding?’ Stephen teases. Daniel looks up, meets his father’s gaze, but does not smile back at him. ‘He was playing a game, Melanie, why don’t you just calm down?’
    â€˜A game ?’ I say, and toss the knife into the sink so hard it makes a dent.
    But Stephen isn’t worried about Daniel. He’s worried about Emily because she is four years old and not yet in school.
    â€˜She’s going to be behind,’ he insists now.
    â€˜Behind what?’
    â€˜Behind the others.’
    Everyone else we know sent their children to daycare, then to nursery as soon as they could get them out of nappies. But Emily shows no interest in school. When I walk her past the busy playgrounds, full of rushing children and squeals of laughter, the barking shouts of the footballers, the rhythmic chants of the girls with their jump ropes, she gives me a look as though to warn me off even the suggestion she be imprisoned in such a place. Rooms filled with primary colours, desks stocked with jars of coloured pencils, will not attract my daughter. Emily prefers instead to fax to her father’s office pictures she makes of Pingu, the penguin from the Swiss cartoon. She weighs bananas at Tesco’s, mashes bread for the ducks at Regent’s Park, visits pet shops where she names each and every animal, even the crickets, which are only there as food.
    Stephen does not approve of this no-school business. The government has recently issued some kind of report indicating that children who go to pre-school perform better throughout their primary years. The day of the announcement, Stephen brought home the