'Living with Cally' by Penny Feeny
There was no need, in Theo’s view, for another person in their family. It seemed to him that two parents and one child was a good arrangement, especially when one of the parents spent all day in a laboratory so there was just himself and his father at home. His father was on something called a sabbatical. It wasn’t like being on a horse or a bicycle: you couldn’t ride it. He was supposed to be writing a book. When the baby came home, they told him her name was Cally. They said that Cally meant beautiful in Greek, just as Theo meant god, but he couldn’t see anything beautiful about her at all. She had spots and no hair and no teeth and wrinkled skin and fuzz on her shoulders. When he pointed this out, they told him the spots and the fuzz would go away and the hair and teeth would grow and in no time she’d be walking and talking and playing with him. Theo was not convinced. Cally showed little interest in moving about or listening to his stories or laughing at his practical jokes. Don’t be so impatient, his father said. He had to go back to work and Theo missed having someone to help him construct his Lego spaceships. His mother exchanged her starched white lab coat for old tracksuits that smelled of baby vomit. She had bags under her eyes and her voice was cross because she wasn’t getting enough sleep. In the evenings lying in bed, stroking the satin binding on his blanket, Theo heard them arguing.‘Developmental milestones vary,’ his father said. ‘You can’t compare her to Theo all the time.
‘I’m not. I meet other babies too, you know.’
‘Well I don’t see why we can’t carry on as a normal family.’
‘Please don’t use that word.’
‘What word? Family?’
‘You know exactly which word I mean. Normal.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it’s meaningless. Because – and you know as well as I do – there’s no such state as normal.'
‘There’s abnormal,’ his father pointed out. ‘Like a mutation or a translocation…’ Theo heard a crash like somebody dropping a saucepan or banging some lids about. ‘…well anyway, maybe we should get another opinion. Or run some more tests.’
Theo started school. His mother sent Cally to a childminder and went back to the lab. He liked visiting her there. It was warm and bright and hummed with soft furry animals. Rats mostly: white rats that he would occasionally be allowed to fondle while they nibbled his finger and thrashed their tails. Sometimes they had wires sticking out of their heads like spacemen and sometimes he’d see bodies flopped into a bucket, waiting to be burnt. His mother would have gone wild if she’d known he’d seen the dead bodies, but they didn’t bother him. There was no blood and anyway they were only rats. His mother’s job was measuring things and writing them down, labelling test tubes. She had to be very precise.
At the weekends they took Cally to the park in her buggy. She was just learning to walk. She climbed out of her straps when they were on the path that circled the lake. They stood watching, the three of them – Theo and his parents – as she toddled straight off the path and into the black shining water. It closed over her red button shoes and sucked at her ankles. Before she could open her mouth and scream, his father rushed forward and picked her up. Theo had never really seen Cally look surprised before.
‘She thought it was solid like tarmac,’ his mother said. ‘She didn’t realise.’
Theo didn’t see how she could make a mistake like that. You couldn’t see your reflection in the path and surely even a baby who wasn’t yet two would know you couldn’t walk on water.
Cally went for hospital appointments. She had blood tests and brain scans. They were looking for a syndrome. Apparently Cally had things in common with other children who had syndromes – like not talking or walking properly, like eating too much or laughing at things that weren’t funny. Theo thought Cally was probably a bit of a freak. She used to yell really loud sometimes when he was being picked up from after-school and everyone would look and he’d be embarrassed. Or else she’d do something sneaky like pull a dog’s ears (she was always trying to pull dog’s ears) or steal an apple or a chocolate bar. And she liked to collect things – dusters one week, socks the next – and she wouldn’t let you take them off her, not even at bedtime.
It turned out that Cally had something called autistic spectrum disorder. She was on a spectrum like his father had been on a sabbatical, but it was different for Cally because she couldn’t get off it. She might slide up and down a bit but she was going to stay there. She wasn’t going to get any better. Theo was puzzled, because she didn’t seem to be ill. She was more like a cuckoo than a baby. There was nothing frail about her. She was greedy and destructive and she didn’t understand when you told her not to do stuff. She liked to put things (blankets, bins, buckets) over her head but she couldn’t play hide-and-seek. Once she rocked so hard on her chair it fell to pieces.
‘You hope you’re going to get another child like Theo,’ he heard his mother say, ‘But you end up with Cally.’ Cally had just finished such a screaming fit that she’d fallen asleep on the sofa. Theo had his jigsaw puzzle spread out on the table. There were 250 pieces showing a combine harvester and he was busy separating the blue of the sky from the yellow of the corn.
His father said, ‘You should know as well as anyone that’s the way the genes work.’
‘It’s different when you’re a parent,’ his mother insisted. ‘You don’t want hazy hypotheses. You want somebody to say, yes, we’ve done it, we’ve identified the deletion or some anomalies on chromosome 11… Only…'
‘Only then what?’
‘Well it’s one step at a time isn’t it? You have to identify the problem first, before you can find the solution.’
To Theo she had already explained that scientists were like detectives. They were searching for information and if they could gather enough they could see a pattern. And the pattern of clues would lead them, they hoped, in the right direction. One of the problems – and it was a pretty big problem actually, Theo could see that – was that even if you followed the trail of clues, even if you could find out how one gene got switched off or clashed with another or messed up somehow, you still didn’t know why. The why was totally random. So far. People were working on it though, people like his mother and Artie’s dad.
Artie’s dad was her boss and most weekends, when Theo wanted to get away from Cally, he would go to play at Artie’s house. Both sets of parents encouraged this friendship. Artie was the youngest in his family. His older brothers had the kind of exciting toys Theo had not yet been given for his birthdays: laser guns and radio control helicopters and super fast Scaletrix. Theo could spend hours in their games’ room, mesmerised by the cars speeding around the looping tracks, spinning off at the corners. He’d pretend not to notice his mother in the doorway waiting to take him home.
One Saturday morning his mother answered a call from Artie’s dad and squawked, ‘Oh my God. Oh my God!’ She shot out of their front door and looked up and down the road. When she came back to the phone again she said, ‘What are you going to do?’ Then she put on her coat and picked up her car keys.
‘I want to come too,’ Theo said.
‘Not today,’ said his mother.
Theo didn’t throw tantrums because that was what Cally did. He put his head on one side and looked miserable. He rubbed the toe of his trainer along the line of the kitchen floor tile. ‘But I always play with Artie at the weekend.’
His father came into the room with Cally in her pyjamas. She still wore a nappy and you could see it was soaking wet because it sagged in a lump between her pyjama legs.
‘Sabotage,’ his mother said. ‘The police are there.’
This made the visit even more interesting to Theo. He envied policemen the flashing lights on their cars, the walkie-talkies strapped to their chests, and their guns, of course. ‘I want to come,’ he said again.
His father said, ‘Best to keep to routine. They’ll probably be glad for the kids to be occupied.’
His mother said, ‘This could be really serious.’
Artie’s house was set back from the road with a gravelled drive leading to the front door. Two police cars were parked on the verge, but the car in the drive had its windows smashed and angry words written all over its body in red paint. Theo couldn’t read the words but he could hear his mother’s sharp intake of breath. One of the policemen was bending his head, talking into a crackling mouthpiece and Theo watched him with a thrill of pleasure.
Artie didn’t want to play any of their usual games. The boys sat with the two older brothers in the porch while detectives photographed the car from all angles and took notes.
‘There’ve been one or two incidents at the lab before,’ Artie’s dad was saying, ‘But they’ve never targeted our personal space.’ His wife was crying and Theo’s mother was comforting her.
‘The trouble is,’ said the detective, ‘These campaigns can be orchestrated over quite a period of time. We’ll stay alert of course, but I have to warn you that things might get worse.’
‘What they don’t realise, these idiots,’ burst out Artie’s dad, ‘Is that they’re turning the clock back on years of research. Just wait till their loved ones start suffering from Alzheimer’s or leukaemia. It’s absurd. We can’t give in to them.’
‘Keep a low profile,’ advised the detective. ‘That’s the best solution. You need to protect the family.’
Theo had other friends at school beside Artie but he missed him when he moved away. He missed the scent of a house full of boys, the back-chat, the football sessions. You couldn’t chat to Cally, you couldn’t play football with her. When he went round to Artie’s house for the last time and saw all the games and toys stacked inside wooden crates, he burst into tears. For days he was inconsolable. For weeks he sulked. He knew his parents were worried about him. He’d had to escape into the hall because Cally was spinning round and round making him feel dizzy. He sat just outside the sitting room door with his back against the wall and the skirting board digging into his spine.
‘He misses Artie terribly,’ said his mother.
‘He needs a brother.’
‘God, I don’t know if…’
‘We should think about it at least.’
The word somersaulted in Theo’s brain. He wasn’t at all sure. He’d envied Artie his brothers but that was because they were older. They offered excitement and fun. When his parents started reading books about new babies to him, he tried to steer them away – he’d rather have pirates, magicians, firemen or astronauts any day.
Then his father brought the subject up, face to face. He’d taken Theo to the cinema and afterwards they had an ice cream together, just the two of them. At least, Theo had the ice cream and his father had a cup of tea. He kept stirring and stirring it, even though he hadn’t put any sugar in. ‘Look mate, what I’m going to say now is a bit tricky to explain, but well, me and mum, we hope you’ll understand.’
Theo dug his spoon to the bottom of the glass through all the different layers: there was a squirt of strawberry sauce on top of nuts on top of whipped cream on top of scoops of pink and white ice cream and maybe at the very bottom, if he dug deep enough, there’d be an actual strawberry.
‘We know living with Cally is a bit difficult. For all of us. We know you’d like to have a baby brother to play with.’
The spoon was stuck. He’d have to ease it out very carefully or his ice cream would spatter everywhere. It didn’t look like there was a strawberry at the bottom after all.
His father said, ‘Are you listening to me?’
Theo nodded.
‘You have to imagine,’ said his father, ‘a long chain of connections. At one end we’ve got the work your mother’s doing and at the other end we’ve got Cally. And one day we’ll be able to follow the connections right along the line so that we know what causes things to go wrong. It might not happen in my lifetime. It might not happen in yours, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep trying to find out. But, in the meantime, we have to work with the information we’ve got. We’ve been trying to calculate the odds.’
Theo frowned. The long-handled spoon was almost free and required his concentration, but his father thought he was frowning because he didn’t understand.
‘What I’m saying is that we don’t know yet which are the faulty genes that have made Cally the way she is, but we do know that if it happens once in a family, there’s a high chance it could happen again. We’d love to have another little boy like you Theo, but we daren’t take the risk. I’m sorry.’
The huge lump of ice cream would fall off the spoon if he didn’t push it into his mouth right away. The cold hit his teeth, sent shivers around his gums and then melted deliciously on his tongue.
‘I hope,’ continued his father, ‘That you don’t mind too much.’ He looked sad and Theo would have told him no, he didn’t really and, anyway, Cally could be quite funny sometimes. But he was too busy swallowing.
When Theo moved up to the juniors, he sat next to a new boy called Sanjay and they often played together in break and at the after school club. Cally started going to a special school of her own where they taught her to sit still and match shapes and point at pictures. The new childminder would pick her up first and then come to fetch Theo. Cally wasn’t in the buggy anymore. She could walk pretty well although you had to hold onto her hand very tight to make sure she didn’t run away.
‘Is this your sister, Theo?’ said Sanjay’s mother. Cally looked up at her. She couldn’t speak of course, but her eyes were incredibly blue, like pieces of summer sky, and when she smiled it was like the sun coming out. ‘Goodness gracious, isn’t she beautiful?’
