Daniel Isn't Talking

Daniel Isn't Talking by Marti Leimbach

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Authors: Marti Leimbach
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Daniel. What’s it mean to be an expert if you can’t make anything better? I mean, what are you getting paid for ?’
    The doctors look at each other. Salt and Pepper, these two, standing beside each other like two dolls in their white coats.
    â€˜I think we’re done here,’ I announce now, taking Daniel’s hand.
    Â Â Â 
    But I can’t always be so tough. I fall apart in the silliest places – playgrounds, supermarkets. I think the supermarket is the worst. The only way to get Daniel through what is (for most people) an ordinary shopping trip is to give him a heap of sweets to keep him still in the trolley seat. If he doesn’t have the sweets he screams, undoes the flimsy seat belt, and tries to throw himself out apparently without any thought about the physical damage he’d suffer by doing so. He would succeed at throwing himself out, too, except I use my own belt, buckled snugly around his middle, to keep him in place. So when he tries to hurl himself over the rail he can’t get very far, although he does scream and look completely weird if not the victim of some kind of parental abuse. Comments from me to the other shoppers (‘This is just to keep him from falling’) only serve to make me look like a freak and exactly the sort of person who would make any child miserable enough to want to drop from a height onto his own head.
    There is an alternative, of course. I can chase himthrough the aisles as he speeds like a dervish, his hands reaching for whatever he might wish to investigate, to open, to eat, to smell. It means I won’t actually accomplish any shopping, or at least not much, and I will probably find myself with a fair bill to pay for items hurled from shelves as Daniel makes room for his feet so that he can climb up to the really good stuff.
    What I want is a third option, though I know this is just too ambitious, which is to let him have a little treat while seated in the trolley. One ice lolly, for example, or a few biscuits.
    I cannot see this working.
    Right now he is leaning toward the rows of chocolate biscuits, seeking with his nose the way a dog might, finding just the ones he wants and then pressing his face right against the packet, his eyes open, staring into the ballooned lettering, his lungs filling themselves with the smell of McVitie’s chocolate digestives. He seems to get immense pleasure from this, a sensual delight greater than I can understand. Even Emily watches him, her expression one of fascination. I suppose, like me, she seeks to discover what delight Daniel finds from this activity of sniffing and staring. And now he takes the packet into his arms and holds it in much the same way a child holds a teddy bear. Then he grabs another packet and tucks it under the opposite arm, his hands turned inward and across his chest, his elbows fanning out as though they are wings.
    I pick him up and place him into the trolley seat. He gives me no help whatsoever with this procedure. He won’t bend his knees or look down to where he needs to place his legs. All his concentration is focused on the biscuit packets. I push his thighs gently through the seat. Emilyhelps guide him in by pulling on his shoe until it comes off in her hands. Then she drops the shoe like it’s a live toad so that I have to retrieve it from the floor.
    And now comes my next choice. Do I let him have the whole packet of biscuits – and yes, I mean the entire packet as he is gnawing his way through one of them already – or do I bargain, try to get him to have just one or two of the biscuits?
    Today, I am going to bargain.
    I take an identical pack to the ones he is holding, thumb the red tab on the wrapper, lifting it gently, until part of a chocolate cookie is exposed. Because I am becoming attuned to the things that make Daniel unusual, set him apart, I notice the aroma of the cookies as he might, a mixture of flour and butter, sugar and chocolate.

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