LA PROFESSOR ADMITS, ‘WE’RE HAVING A DESIGNER BABY’.
80
Mr Pineapple Head wore striped trousers, huge shoes, a red nose and a leather hat shaped like a pineapple. He was going down a storm, at any rate for the four children who had come to Luke and Phoebe’s third birthday, who were in fits of laughter. John and Naomi, her mother and her sister, Harriet, and Rosie were also finding his antics extremely funny.
Luke and Phoebe were the only ones who didn’t. They sat on the floor, staring at the man in stony silence, rejecting all his attempts to get them to join in doing tricks with him.
It had been a struggle for John and Naomi to get any other children to come to this party. Jane Adamson, Naomi’s friend in the village, had dutifully delivered her son Charlie, who had come in with evident reluctance, clutching a present in one hand and holding on to his mother with the other, eyeing the twins nervously. Naomi had also enlisted a timid girl called Bethany, whose parents had only moved into the village this week and didn’t yet know anyone. Rosie had brought her youngest, Imogen, and a colleague of John had brought her spirited four-year-old son, Ben.
Suddenly, halfway through the performance, Luke and Phoebe stood up abruptly and walked out of the room.
Exchanging a glance with John, who was standing to one side, busily taking photographs, Naomi followed the children out into the hall and closed the door behind her. ‘Luke!’ she called. ‘Phoebe! Where are you going?’
Ignoring her, they trotted upstairs.
Louder, now. ‘Luke! Phoebe! Come back down at once! It’s very rude to leave your friends! You absolutely cannot do this!’
Angrily, she ran upstairs after them, calling their names again. She saw them entering the box room and followed them in.
The computer she and John had given them for their birthday sat on the floor, where John had temporarily set it up after they had unwrapped it this morning. Both children squatted beside it.
‘Luke!’ Naomi called.
Ignoring her, Luke touched the keyboard, and the monitor came alive with a blank Word document.
Phoebe said something to her brother, then tapped several keys in rapid succession with the competence of a touch-typist. For an instant Naomi was too amazed to be angry. Then she walked over to the wall and yanked the plug out.
Neither child looked at her.
‘It’s your party, Luke and Phoebe,’ she said. ‘You have friends here. Mummy and Daddy have got you Mr Pineapple Head as a special treat, it was very rude to walk out on him, and very rude to leave your friends. Now get up and come back down at once!’
No reaction at all.
Furious now, she grabbed Luke and Phoebe each by an arm and hauled them up onto their feet. Still there was no reaction. They just stood, sullenly.
‘DOWNSTAIRS!’ Naomi bellowed.
It produced not the slightest response.
She tried to pull them towards the door, and to her shock, found she could not. They were resisting with a strength that was more than a match for hers.
Releasing Phoebe’s hand, she pulled Luke as hard as she could, jerking deliberately to try to unbalance him. But he stood his ground, his polished black lace-up shoes slipping just a fraction on the carpet pile before digging in.
Close to losing it, she yelled, ‘If you don’t come downstairs right away, you’re going to bed, both of you. No computer, nothing. DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?’
John, camera in his hand, was standing in the doorway. ‘What’s going on?’ he said.
‘Dr Michaelides is right,’ she said. ‘We should put them in a bloody institution, miserable little sods.’
She released Luke’s hand. John knelt down and stared at him, then gently but firmly took hold of both of his hands. ‘Listen, little fellow, you and your sister are having a birthday party and you’ve got friends here and a great clown. I want you to come down and behave the way a host and hostess should behave. OK?’
Naomi watched Luke. In his navy trousers, white shirt and tie, black lace-up shoes and serious face he looked more like a miniature adult than a child. And Phoebe, in a floral dress with a lace ruff, had an expression like ice. You’re not children, she thought, with a shudder. You’re bloody-minded little adults.
God, just what the hell are you?
John stood up. Luke and Phoebe gave each other an unreadable look. Then, after a moment’s further hesitation, Luke walked after his father back out into the landing. Tight-lipped, Phoebe followed.
They re-entered the living room. Luke and Phoebe walked solemnly to the front of the little group and sat back down on the floor, crossed their arms and fixed their eyes on Mr Pineapple Head, who had engaged the help of Ben in spinning plates on sticks.
‘Everything all right?’ Harriet whispered to Naomi.
No, she wanted to say. Not all right at all. Instead she just smiled and nodded. Fine. Absolutelysodddingfine.
*
That night, after her mother and Harriet had both gone up to bed, Naomi stood wearily in the kitchen, unloading the dishwasher and passing plates to John, who stacked them back in the cupboards. Fudge and Chocolate were wide awake, both pressing their faces against the bars of their hutch, making their funny little chamois-leather-polishing-glass squeaks.
Naomi poured herself a large slug of wine. ‘This residential facility that Dr Michaelides mentioned – maybe we should think about it after all. I’m at the end of my tether, John, I don’t know what to do any more. Maybe they’d respond better to discipline if it comes from someone they don’t know. Perhaps after a couple of weeks they’d start to see reason.’
She picked up her glass and drank half the contents in one gulp. ‘I never thought in a million years I’d say that. But that’s how I feel. I don’t know what else to do.’
‘They were bored today,’ John responded. ‘That was the problem, I think. That’s what Harriet thought, too.’
‘She doesn’t know anything about children,’ Naomi said, a little acidly. ‘She dotes on Luke and Phoebe.’
‘Does she ever say anything to you about them? About how they don’t respond to her?’
‘She thinks it’s a phase they’re going through.’ He concentrated for a moment on finding a place to put a jug, then said, ‘Let’s hope Dr Michaelides is right, that more intellectual stimulation is needed. Maybe we made a mistake having a clown, perhaps we should have had an astrophysicist talking about the molecular structures of rocket fuels, or climate change.’
She gave him a wan smile. ‘That’s almost funny.’
81
At six in the morning John was wide awake after a restless night. Naomi had tossed and turned continually, and he’d twice been woken by the rustle and popping of a blister pack as she took paracetamols. Now she was sleeping soundly, as usual right over his side of the bed, leaving him almost hanging over the edge.
He extricated himself as gently as he could, trying not to wake her, padded across the floor and peered out of the window into the darkness. It was still the best part of an hour before daybreak. Pulling on his dressing gown, he dug his feet into his clogs and tiptoed downstairs in the darkness.
Someone else was up, he realized, hearing the sound of voices on television, and seeing light seeping under the living room door. Was it Naomi’s sister, he wondered, although Harriet was normally a late riser. He opened the door and peered in.
Luke and Phoebe, in their dressing gowns, squatted on the floor, backs against a sofa, utterly absorbed in a television programme. But it wasn’t any of the kids’ shows Naomi would ordinarily have put on for them; it was an adult science lesson, something to do with the Open University. A teacher, standing in front of a three-dimensional model of a complex atomic structure, was talking about the formation of halogen. He was explaining how a quartz halogen headlamp on a car worked.