The Room With No Answers

"A man who calls your child interesting has run out of the other words."

Dr Carmichael's office was not part of the same building as the rest of it. That is not true, of course — it was down the end of the same corridor, under the same flickering tube, with the same cartoon ducks going past at knee height right up to the door frame. But I stepped over the threshold and the whole register of the place changed, the way it changed when the revolve turned under me at the Theatre Royal and put me somewhere else entirely, and the ducks stopped at the door and did not come in.

Dark wood bookcases, floor to ceiling, on three of the four walls, and every shelf of them jammed. Great heavy medical volumes lying flat across the tops of the upright ones because there was no room left anywhere. A brass microscope. A model of a human brain, taken apart into its coloured pieces and not put back together. Things in jars. There was one on the top shelf that I had never once allowed myself to look at directly in six weeks of sitting underneath it, and I did not look at it that morning either, and I still knew exactly what was in it and roughly where in the jar the things were floating.

It was a room built to tell me what he had read.

And behind the desk — an enormous oak thing that must have been craned in through a window — was Dr Carmichael himself, who had never once looked to me like the owner of that room. Early forties at the very outside. Hair gone completely grey a good twenty years before it had any right to, worn short, standing up. Thick black-rimmed glasses that gave him a permanently astonished look. He got to his feet as we came in.

"Jenny, Sammy, good to see you both again," he said. "Please, have a seat."

There was that accent underneath it. Somewhere east — Russian, I had decided in the first week, on no evidence whatever, and had never asked, because it had seemed an absurd thing to ask a man who was looking at photographs of the inside of my son's head. It made his English very deliberate. Every word chosen and set down separately, none of them running into one another, and I had found that soothing once and did not find it soothing at all that morning.

I got Sammy up into one of the big leather chairs. He went in the way he always went in, hauling himself up backwards on his elbows and then turning round and sitting, thoroughly pleased with the manoeuvre, with his legs sticking straight out in front of him and his sandals a good foot clear of the carpet. One of them still on backwards. I did not fix it, and I could not afterwards tell anybody why.

I sat down beside him and put my hand on his shoulder and left it there, and the leather made an obscene noise underneath me that on any other morning of my life would have made me laugh.

Dr Carmichael sat, and put his fingertips together, and looked at the two of us for a moment over the top of them without saying anything at all. It was not unkind. It was worse than unkind. It was a man conducting an assessment and letting me watch him do it.

"Now then," he said, and leaned back. "I've been reviewing the results of Sammy's latest tests, and I have to say, they're quite... interesting."

My stomach went down through the seat of the chair and out the bottom of it.

Because I had stood in front of parents in a school hall for ten years and told them things, and I had learned exactly what a person does with the first word when they have not yet decided how much of the rest they are going to hand over. They go wide. They reach for the word that could mean anything at all — the word that buys the room one second and buys the speaker four — and I had used it myself, in that same soft regretful register, and I had watched a mother's face change while I did.

"Interesting how, Doctor?" I asked, and my voice came out level and pleasant, and I was privately astonished by it.

He leaned forward, and the leather groaned, and he put his forearms down on the desk, and behind the glasses something sharpened.

"As we discussed in our last session, Sammy's nightmares have been increasing in frequency and intensity. And the episodes of sleepwalking and sleep talking—those have also become more frequent, correct?"

Correct.

Correct, Doctor, in the way that a house on fire is warm.

He said it in a level clinical monotone with a full stop on the end of it, and while he was saying it I was standing at two in the morning at the foot of my own bed looking at my son, who was standing at the foot of my own bed, with his eyes wide open and nothing whatever behind them, saying something in a low steady stream, over and over, and not pausing to breathe in any of the places where a person breathes. And I was out in the back garden at half past three in the freezing July dark, barefoot on wet grass with both hands on his shoulders, and he would not come inside and he would not be moved, and he stood there in his dinosaur pyjamas with his head tipped right back looking up at the sky over kunanyi, and he was not frightened, and I was.

"Yes," I said. "It's... it's getting worse."

Dr Carmichael nodded and made a note, and then he did the thing he had done at every single appointment, and which I had come to be grateful for, whatever else I thought of him. He turned in his chair and addressed my son directly, and his voice came down and softened, and he waited for an answer as though he had the whole morning.

"Sammy, can you tell me about your recent dreams? Have you seen the shadows again?"

Sammy shifted in the enormous chair. He looked at his hands for a moment. And then he nodded, once.

"Yes," he said. "They're... hiding now. But I can still feel them. They whisper sometimes, but I don't know what they're saying."

I did not move at all.

I remember making that decision, in that chair, with my hand on my son's shoulder — not to move, because if I moved, if I so much as breathed the wrong way, he would stop. Three years old, and I had already learned that much about him. He would tell me a thing if I was very quiet and looking somewhere else, and the instant he felt the whole weight of my attention come down on him he closed up like a hand.

So I sat there with my face doing nothing whatever, giving the finest performance of my life to an audience of one small boy who was not even looking at me, while my child explained to a man behind a desk that things whisper to him and he cannot understand them.

"I see," said Dr Carmichael quietly, and wrote.

Then he looked up at me, and something had come into his face, and I could not read it, and I am supposed to be able to read faces.

"Has he mentioned this kind of whispering before?"

And here is the truth of it, and it is not a good one. He had. Not in those words, and never all at once — in fragments, in half-sentences, at bath time and in the back of the car, in that easy unremarkable way children have of handing you the most extraordinary things while looking out of the window. And I had heard every single one of them. And I had taken every single one of them and put it away somewhere at the back of the house where I would not have to walk past it, and I had gone on making the dinner.

"Not in detail," I said. "But he... he's mentioned hearing things. And the shadows—they're always there, in his dreams."

He nodded, and tapped his fingers on the desk, and did not tell me a single thing about what he was thinking, and turned back to Sammy with a small warm smile.

"Thank you for telling me, Sammy. You're very brave to share your dreams with me."

Sammy did not answer him. He leaned sideways into my ribs instead, and his hand came up and found mine and gripped it hard, the whole of his small fist closed round two of my fingers, and squeezed, and would not let go — and I squeezed back and tried to put into it a strength that I did not have anywhere about my person.

"They're always there," he whispered.

He said it so quietly that I had to bend down towards him to get it.

"In the corners, in the dark places. They watch. They wait."

The room went absolutely still. The clock on the wall behind Dr Carmichael's head went on and I could hear every stroke of it, and the leather creaked under me as I bent lower, and I could smell my son's hair — mint, and strawberry soap, and the warm biscuity smell of the back of his neck that had been the smell of my entire life for three years.

Dr Carmichael leaned forward.

"And what are they waiting for, Sammy?"

It was the right question. It was the only question. It was the question I had not been able to make myself ask in a corridor eleven minutes earlier, and a man with a notepad asked it in a perfectly reasonable voice from behind an oak desk.

And my son came apart.

He shook his head — violently, the whole of him going with it, side to side, so hard that his curls whipped across his face — and threw himself into my side and drove his face into my ribs and stayed there. I could feel him shaking through the front of my jumper. He had got two fistfuls of the wool and he was pulling on it.

I got both arms round him and pulled him in and put my chin down on the top of his head, and I started to move my hand between his shoulder blades, round and round, and I said the things. The old things. The three-in-the-morning things, in the warm voice — the voice that had never once failed me and had never once been the slightest use.

"It's okay, sweetheart," I said. "You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to."

And over the top of my son's head, holding him against me while he shook, I looked at the wall.

Dr Carmichael did not push. I will give him that as well. He sat back and he let the room be quiet, and he wrote something down — and he took a very long time over it, a great deal longer than the writing of it could possibly have needed, and the sheer deliberateness of that, the care of it, put more fear into me than anything he had said out loud all morning.

"Mrs Triffett," he said at last, "have you noticed any new behavioural changes since our last meeting?"

And I sat there with my son's face pressed into my ribs and I thought: how much.

How much of this could I say in that room without becoming, myself, the answer? Because I had watched it happen. I had sat at a parent evening five years earlier and listened to a woman describe what she was absolutely certain was going on with her daughter — and I had seen the exact moment, the precise sentence, I could still tell you which one it was — at which every adult in that room quietly stopped hearing a witness and started hearing a symptom. She never knew. Nobody told her. She went on talking, and we went on nodding, and she left that hall believing she had been listened to. And there was a version of that morning in which I said all of it, every last piece, and Dr Carmichael wrote down the word mother and underlined it twice.

And then Sammy's fists tightened in the wool of my jumper, and I thought: you did not come here for your own good name, Jenny.

"He's become... even more withdrawn," I said. And then, because I had begun, and because beginning is the whole of it: "He spends hours in his room, talking to himself."

I stopped. Dr Carmichael waited.

"Or... not to himself. It's like he's having conversations with someone I can't see."

There. Out loud, in a room, with a witness in it.

"Can you elaborate on that?"

I swallowed. My mouth had gone completely dry and my tongue had turned into something belonging to another woman.

"The other day, I was passing by his room, and I heard him say, 'The stars are aligning. The gateway will open soon.'"

I had not said those words aloud to one single living person. Not to Nial. Not to my mother. I had carried them about in my head for four days like a stone in a shoe, and I heard myself put them into that room in my own voice, in my own perfectly clear diction, and they sounded exactly as insane as I had always known they would.

"When I went in to check on him," I went on, because there was no stopping it now, "he was sitting in the middle of this... this pattern he'd made with his toys. It wasn't random. It was intricate, almost like a mandala."

And it was. That was the part I could not get across that desk, and could not have got across to anybody. I stood in the doorway of my son's bedroom and looked down at it, and my first thought — my very first, ahead of the fear, ahead of anything — was that it was beautiful. Concentric. Balanced. Every dinosaur turned inward, every car spaced out along its ring at an interval I could have measured with a ruler, a small terrible symmetry of them laid across the carpet — and I stood in the doorway of a room whose skirting board I had helped to paint and understood, with a clarity that emptied me out, that a three-year-old could not do that. Could not conceive of doing it. Could not hold that shape in his head long enough to put it down on a floor.

"When I asked him about it," I said, "he just looked at me blankly, as if he didn't remember saying or doing anything."

Dr Carmichael's posture changed.

It was nothing at all. It was less than nothing — a very slight straightening, a small settling back through the shoulders, the adjustment a man makes when a chair has become uncomfortable. Anybody else in the world would have missed it. But I had spent the whole of my adult life at the back of a hall watching for the exact instant at which a body gives away what a face has decided not to, and I saw it, and it went through me like cold water down my spine.

He knew something.

Whatever it was, he put it away again immediately, and folded his hands on the desk.

"Mrs Triffett," he said, and his voice had changed as well, gone careful in a new way, "has Sammy experienced any new physical symptoms? Any changes to the nosebleeds or bruises we discussed last time?"

And I heard myself say it.

I had not decided to say it. I had spent nine days deciding, very carefully and very deliberately, not so much as to think it — I had looked at my son's arms in the bath and taken my eyes off them, I had done up the buttons of his pyjamas and turned out the light and gone downstairs and poured a glass of wine — and a tired man in glasses asked me an ordinary question in an ordinary voice and my mouth simply opened and handed him the truth.

"The bruises are... different now," I said, and my voice had gone down to almost nothing at all. "They're not just random marks anymore."

I could feel my son breathing against my ribs.

"They... they form patterns. Shapes. Like the ones he makes with his toys."

Dr Carmichael did not say anything.

He looked down at his notepad, and he nodded — not at me, at himself, one small private confirming nod, a man ticking a box that he had already drawn — and then he turned to his computer and began to type, fast, and the clatter of that keyboard went on and on and on in the silence while I sat holding my child and waited to be told what it was that I had just told him.

When he turned back, his face was entirely composed. And it was the composure I had spent ten years teaching. I could pick it out of a hundred at forty paces — the kind that is not the absence of a feeling but the deliberate covering over of one.

"I'd like to run a new series of tests," he said. "Some will repeat what we've done before to confirm our findings, but there are a few additional ones I'd like to explore. I've also been in contact with a colleague, Dr Elena Petrov. She specialises in... unusual paediatric cases."

He had done it again. He had gone wide.

"Unusual cases?" I said, and the room began, very gently, to tilt away to the left. "What exactly does that mean, Dr Carmichael? What do you think is happening to my son?"

He took his glasses off.

He had never done that. Six weeks, and he had never once taken them off, and without them his face was younger and smaller and very much more tired, and he put his thumb and forefinger up to the bridge of his nose and pressed hard — and in that one gesture the whole of the room he had built around himself, the jars, the brain in its pieces, the brass microscope, all those shelves of everything he had ever read, stopped being of the slightest use to him.

"Mrs Triffett... Jenny," he said.

Nobody in that building had called me Jenny in six weeks.

"I want you to understand that what's happening with Sammy is... highly unusual. The combination of his symptoms—the nightmares, the behavioural changes, the physical marks—they don't align with any standard diagnosis I've encountered."

The clock went on behind him. Out in the corridor, somewhere, a trolley went past.

"Are you saying..." I said, and had to stop, and start it again, because the sentence would not go through the middle of my throat. "Are you saying you don't know what's wrong with him?"

"I'm saying we're dealing with something... unique," he said. "Something that may require a more specialised approach."

And I sat in that leather chair and understood that I had brought my son all the way to the top of the mountain. That this was it. This room, this desk, this exhausted grey-haired man with his glasses in his hand — this was the summit of everything that Hobart had to offer me. This was where the road ran out. And the man standing at the end of it was telling me, in the politest and most carefully chosen language available to him, that he had never in his life seen anything like my child.

And then Sammy sat up.

He came away from my ribs and he sat all the way up and back into that great leather chair, straight-backed, both hands laid flat on his thighs, and his face turned and settled on Dr Carmichael and stayed there. There was no transition in it. None. He did not surface. He did not blink himself back from anywhere. He simply arrived — upright, composed, and looking across a desk at a consultant paediatrician like a man about to open a meeting.

"The stars are falling," he said.

And it was not his voice.

I could not put that down at the time and I have not managed it since. It was not a different voice, exactly. It came out of my son's mouth and it sat where my son's voice sat, and anybody standing out in that corridor would have said, quite reasonably, that a little boy was speaking. But it was too slow. It was too level. Everything that lived underneath it had gone — the small wobble, the hurry, the rising delight that my three-year-old could not keep out of anything he said, the breath taken in all the wrong places — and what was left came out of him with a flat, patient, enormous calm, as though he were reading it off a page and did not much care what it said.

"The shadows are growing."

Every hair on my arms stood up. I felt it go over my shoulders and up the back of my scalp, and I did not move, and I did not look at my son.

I looked at Dr Carmichael.

I looked at him because I had to know. Because there was a version of that morning in which a frightened, sleepless, unravelling woman sat in a paediatrician's office and heard her exhausted little boy say something odd, and heard it wrong — and I had been living inside that version for a fortnight, and I was living inside it as I turned my head.

Dr Carmichael's eyebrows had gone up.

It lasted less than a second. It was the single most human thing I ever saw that man do, and he hauled it back in and put it away almost before it had finished happening — but it had happened, and I had seen it, and I sat back in my chair with my hand on my son and thought, with a relief so violent that it very nearly took the top of my head off: you heard it too.

And a full second behind the relief, walking in quietly after it, the other thing.

You heard it too.

Dr Carmichael cleared his throat.

"Yes, well," he said — and there was something wrong with the middle of it, a small catch, a place where the machinery did not quite engage — and he put his glasses back on. "I think we should proceed with those additional tests as soon as possible. And I strongly recommend bringing in Dr Petrov for a consultation, assuming you're agreeable."

"Yes," I said, before he had finished. "Of course. When can she see us?"

He turned to the computer.

"She can fly in early next week—Tuesday, to be precise," he said, and the professional voice came back up around him like scaffolding going into place, section by section. "I'll arrange for the tests to coincide with her arrival. We'll need the weekend to coordinate the necessary resources and equipment."

"Tuesday," I said.

And I sat there and did the arithmetic, which was not arithmetic at all but a sort of endurance calculation. Saturday. Sunday. Monday. Three nights. Three nights of standing in a doorway at two in the morning listening to my son hold a conversation with the corner of his bedroom, and three days of watching him for a change that I would not be able to describe and would not be able to prevent — and then, at the end of them, a woman I had never met would get off an aeroplane and look at him.

It was so far away. It was three days away.

Beside me, Sammy had slid back down the chair and gone small again, and ordinary, and his eyelids were beginning to go, and he had no more idea of what he had just said than the desk had.

"What kind of tests are we talking about, Doctor?"

"We'll need to do some more comprehensive blood work, another MRI, and a few specialised neurological tests that Dr Petrov has already recommended," he said. "It's quite an extensive battery, but it should give us a clearer picture of what's going on."

More needles. The great white machine again, and the noise of it. My boy in a gown made for somebody twice his size.

I nodded, and heard myself agreeing, and somewhere a long way underneath the agreeing I noticed that at eight o'clock that morning the whole of my life had been a phone call in the dark and a failing marriage and a bruise on a child's arm, and that I was now sitting in a leather chair discussing an international specialist, and that I had gone from the one to the other without crossing anything I could point to.

"In the meantime," he said, "I'd like you to keep a detailed log of Sammy's behaviour. Note any unusual statements, sleep disturbances, or physical changes. The more information we have, the better equipped we'll be to help him."

"Of course," I said.

I already had one. It was in my handbag, eighteen inches from his foot, with three pages at the back of it written out in phonetics. I did not tell him that, and I could not afterwards work out why not.

"Is there anything else we should be doing?"

And he paused.

It was a very small pause. It was the length of a single breath. But I heard it, because I had been listening for that pause since I was twenty-two years old. I could hear it across a hall of two hundred people. I had heard it in a girl at an audition telling me she had always wanted the part, and I had never once been wrong about what it meant.

"Try to keep Sammy's routine as normal as possible," he said. "But... be vigilant. If anything drastic changes, or if you feel at all unsafe, bring him to the emergency room immediately. I'll ensure they're aware of his case."

Unsafe.

I sat in a leather chair in a paediatrician's consulting room in the middle of Hobart on a wet Saturday morning with my hand resting on my three-year-old's shoulder, and a doctor told me to take my son to the emergency department if I felt unsafe, and did not say who it was that I was to feel unsafe from.

My hand tightened on Sammy's shoulder. He did not notice. He was very nearly asleep.

"Mummy?" he said. "Can we go home now?"

"Of course, darling. We're all done here for today."

I got him down off the chair and onto his feet, and he swayed, and put his hand up for mine without looking.

And as I turned for the door, Dr Carmichael came round the end of the desk and put his hand on my arm.

He had never touched me. Six weeks, and he had never so much as shaken my hand except on the first morning — and he stopped me in the doorway of his own office with his hand on my forearm and looked directly into my face, and there was nothing clinical anywhere about him at all.

"Mrs Triffett," he said. "I know this is overwhelming. But please remember, you're not alone in this. We're going to figure out what's happening to Sammy. I promise you that."

I had spent my entire working life teaching people how to sound as though they meant a thing.

I knew where he had put the weight. I knew what he had done with his eyes, and how long he had held mine — a fraction past comfortable, exactly a fraction, exactly the way I had taught it. And I knew, because I had stood at the back of a hall four hundred times and watched a girl do it and known, the difference between a person who means it and a person who has decided to mean it.

I looked up into that tired, grey-haired, frightened man's face, and I did not say one single word to him, and I took my son's hand, and I walked him out.