My child has never entered his room. I papered his walls with lemon chicks and powder-blue pandas. Now they stare at me, monstrous beasts, rearing up and out of the walls. The beaks are sharpened to points driving through my soul. The claws scrape out my heart. A room filled with hope, infused with love, has become a tortuous chamber of silence.
His body is in there. It is a thing of beauty with dandelion-clock hair fluffing in a platinum halo round his peachy head. His eyes are the sea at sunset. But his tiny pupils are the blackest of full stops. The world stops spinning when I look at his eyes. There is nothing behind them. It is the same as staring at a photograph. My little boy's eyes are as blank as a timid author's virgin sheet of blue paper. Smooth and perfect, unsullied and undefiled. Flat.
I want to seize a decrepit pen, an ancient one that leaks ink like a gargoyle condemned to spew cascades of water on to stone. I want that pen to be defective, with a split nib that stabs at that paper, making manic blots, jubilant patterns, pools of ink that spill into each other and bring the page to life. Drenched with ink, I could then hold that paper in my hands and let them be smothered with colour, with blotches, with stains. I want my hands to bear the signs of movement, of knowledge. It doesn't need to be words soaking into me. I just long to absorb a connection, a flow from his brain to mine that I can feel in my soul.
But his body lies there in the lamb-smothered blanket. The lambs chase each other relentlessly round. The chicks and pandas prowl and snarl. The Tank Engine on the rug steams round in circles.
And, as one, every bear, brick and ball comes to life. The top spins into a sickly whirl of melting colours. The soldiers march in wooden ranks. The tiny cars begin endless circuits. The room lives while my child stares silently. I beg him silently to meet my eyes, to break the frozen barrier that lies. cruel with ice, between us.
The heater clicks on. The clock hands clank forward another minute to the hour. The cuckoo leaps out to mock me and my little boy, whose body is solidly here. Warm and soft as toasted marshmallow.But whose mind is a block of ice.
Copyright © 2008 Rob Richardson. All Rights Reserved.