Metamorphosis of the Monstrosity

Gwen and Martin didn’t believe in wedding present lists. “There’s something clinical about it,” said Gwen. “And cheeky,” said Martin. Of course that didn’t mean that they ruled out a certain judicious dropping of hints – some of them with the best of intentions, like making sure a friend who was in a pretty parlous financial position knew that they would really love a couple of nice bright mugs, and some of them were “Cynical,” said Martin. “Pragmatic,” Gwen countered. And it was true that Dan, who worked in a carpet showroom and could get “mate’s rates” off the owner did look rather relieved when they happened to mention that there was nothing like a nice bright rug on a chilly winter night. 

     But there was still the element of spontaneity and surprise and they liked that.

     Well, they thought they did.

     Until Martin’s cousin Philomena presented them with The Pig.

     “Well, it could be worse,” said Martin. “It could have been a real one.”

     “Could it have been worse? Poor Piggy could have – ahem – gone down with some ailment and kept us in sausages for months,” said Gwen.

     “You don’t mean that,” said Martin, and didn’t wait for an answer.

     It was not that they had any especially deep rooted objection to ornaments in porcine form. “Lynda at work has a little crystal pig on her desk that’s ever so sweet,” Gwen said.

     But this pig was not little, was not made of crystal (it was some sort of grainy resin that made you feel you had to wash your hands every time you touched it), and it was doubtful if even its mother would have deemed it sweet. Even vaguely sweet, let alone ever so sweet. Somehow it managed to be both scrawny and obese. To be a shade of pink that made bubble gum look subtle but had a muddy grey tinge to it. You couldn’t even say it had character. They desperately wondered if it might be a talking point but weren’t at all sure they’d have liked the conversation.

     It wasn’t even as if Philomena lived at a safe distance that meant they could put The Pig into cold storage and only bring it out if she said she was coming to visit. She only lived in the next town and though, to be fair, she wasn’t generally the kind of person who popped in uninvited, you could never be sure. 

     The Pig became like an unpaid bill or one of those symptoms you’re always supposed to tell the doctor about. You could try to ignore it, but you knew it was there. 

     Still, as they reminded themselves, people had worse things to worry about. And they had something very nice (if also a bit worrying) to think about. Gwen was expecting. They’d meant to wait a bit longer before starting a family, but were still very happy about it. The official “due date” was Easter Sunday, and they affectionately called Gwen’s bump the “Easter Egg”. But as it turned out, Oliver intended making them wait, and was born the Tuesday after Easter. He was a healthy, cheerful baby, though he didn’t appear to know that babies were supposed to sleep most of the time, and the minute he could crawl he was what Gwen’s mum, his doting Nanna Ruby called into everything. 

     He met all his milestones on time or ahead of it. To nobody’s surprise he was a very early talker, and after he had mastered all the Mamma and Dadda stuff the most frequent phrase in the household was What Dat?   Nobody had any peace until they had told him what Dat was and then there was a spell when What Dat?  was replaced for a while with Babel (his word for table) or Teddy or Flippers – in other words, slippers. He was quite fascinated by a pair of faux fur mules that Gwen often wore about the house.

     “What Dat?” he demanded – pointing to The Pig, that was currently sitting in a corner of the hall.

     Toying briefly with telling him monstrosity and wondering what he’d make of that, Gwen said, “Piggy!”

     “Piggy!” he echoed.

     Gwen and Martin weren’t doctrinaire or dogmatic on the subject of baby-talk when it came to expanding their son’s vocabulary. Sometimes they used it and sometimes they didn’t. Their neighbours’ chocolate Labrador, Vince, who had the eyes of a doe in overdrive and the patience of a canine saint was a firm friend of his and was most definitely a doggy. But he had recently developed a fixation on the Micey Waste. Gwen and Martin didn’t know what worried them most; that their friends thought they had a rodentine infestation (which wasn’t true) or that they were far too fond of ready meals in the microwave (which was, though they tried at least most of the time to be stricter when it came to Oliver’s food, although he was well-acquainted with both the name and taste of Chocky and though he was a precocious child, it was nothing to do with John Wyndham). 

     Later on, when Oliver was (at least temporarily) in bed, Gwen said, “You know what happened to Piggy in The Lord of the Flies……”

     But entertaining notions of a pack of feral children descending on them was fanciful!

     Anyway, Piggy rapidly became Oliver’s new world of choice. He chanted and chortled “Piggy, Piggy, Piggy!” blissfully when he saw the plastic one in a striped apron outside the butcher’s shop. Though Gwen and Martin didn’t believe in shielding children, he was, of course, too young to be told about the fate of the flesh and – er – blood – counterparts of the butcher’s piggy, especially when he was coming on apace with solid food and had a decided taste for thin slices of sausage.

     But it was still plain to see that no matter how splendid they might be, others were mere substitutes for his own particular favourite. 

     “It’s bizarre,” Gwen sighed. “Philomena gave him that stuffed giraffe for Christmas that really is incredibly cute – I wouldn’t mind it myself! – and at most he plays with it to be polite!”

     Then, one sweet and sunny April afternoon, not far off his second birthday, for which they’d already planned a little party, all their trivial worries and grouses and grumbles and frustrations turned into a wonderful bygone age that, they feared, could never be recovered. 

     It was one of those terrible accidents that wasn’t really anyone’s fault, and that made people who didn’t believe in fate or God rage at either or both. Oliver was playing happily in their little front garden, making his building bricks into a fantastical construction that made Gwen, who was currently working from home but decided she had earned a little break, was sitting reading on the bench, entertain fantasies of his future career as an architect. 

     They found out later, hearing the words as if they were in some fuzzy echo chamber, that the driver of the van had a heart attack at the wheel. He was only in his forties, and had had a thorough medical, as demanded by the delivery firm he worked for, only a month ago. His license was as clean as a whistle, and he hadn’t consumed a drop of alcohol for the last two days. But he slumped over the wheel, and, out of control, the van crashed through the pretty little picket fence that offered as little protection as thin air.

     Given a chance, Gwen would have taken the impact a thousand times over to save her son. But she didn’t have the chance. It was over in one of those strange time spans that seem to be a nanosecond and an eternity.

     Vince raised the alarm. He had been happily chewing one of his favourite toys in the next door garden, and nobody knew for sure whether it was just the noise of the crash or canine instinct telling him that something awful had happened to his little friend, but he howled as nobody had heard him howl before. 

     Gwen thought she was screaming, but afterwards people told her that she was silent, her face contorted in terror as she held her son in her arms.

     “You must let us take him, or we can’t help him,” the paramedic said, in a quiet, gentle voice, but with a firmness that somehow penetrated to her mind. And she registered the words “or we can’t help him”. Not “We can’t help him” but “OR we can’t help him.” That wonderful two-letter word she clung to like a lifeline, and that brought her, with a wrench that felt physical, to her senses.

     Martin was notified at work and rushed to the hospital. They both were desperate just to sit by Oliver’s bedside, but the doctor, a tall, kind woman called Dr Brent, had a word with them first. “Your son is in a critical condition,” she said. “It would be cruel to pretend otherwise. His left leg is badly broken, but children’s bones heal quickly, and that isn’t a massive cause for concern. He has some internal bleeding, but we’re hoping there isn’t major organ damage. We can’t be sure yet. But – I’m afraid there are indications of brain injury. We are monitoring him very carefully it goes without saying.”

     Oliver was in an induced coma whilst they waited – hoped – for the swelling to go down. He was in hospital on his birthday, of course. Gwen and Martin had not planned to do anything to mark or celebrate it, but Philomena and Ruby (who had their differences, but pulled together when there was a crisis) had other ideas, and attached birthday balloons to his bed (the nurses said it would be fine) and took photos. They had no need to say and no intention of saying some day you may be glad we did this so we have proof that Oliver was a little two year old boy, and not a baby anymore. Gwen had seen such pictures in “heart-rending” (how the publications loved that word!) articles in the kind of magazine she claimed, not entirely truthfully, to only read in the doctor’s waiting room or the hairdressers or only to buy for the puzzles and found them touching but vaguely – well, almost distasteful, exploitative. Now, of course, she saw things differently.

     It was upsetting to see his chubby little leg in plaster, but they knew the doctor had been right, that would heal. If only that were all! He did have what they called some bruising to the liver which sounded both bizarre and strangely prosaic – they hadn’t realised internal organs could be bruised. But that, too, was treatable and often just rest and time would do the trick. 

     There was no point to pretending otherwise. The brain injury was what tormented them. Tests kept proving inconclusive and they had never realised quite how horrible such a bland seeming word could be. 

     But gradually, the tide turned. There was no dramatic awakening, no mutter of “Mamma” or “Dadda” but bit by bit, they became aware that he was coming back to them. Dr Brent had called in an expert in neurological issues in children from a hospital in the nearest big city, and he was – yes, he actually did use that phrase – cautiously optimistic. “I don’t want to make any promises,” he said to Gwen and Martin. “At the very least, your son will have to do a lot of re-learning. It may be – and I do so hope it is – that by the time he starts school he will have caught up again. But we will monitor him regularly and let you know if – it may be appropriate to think of other ideas for his education. What I will say is that if you feel you can cope with it – and it goes without saying that we will help you out – it would be best for him to go home. If it can be avoided, long-term hospitalisation isn’t good for anyone, let alone a child.”

     For the first time since the accident, Gwen and Martin wept tears of joy. Oliver was coming home. Of course words like other ideas for his education once planted in their minds wouldn’t go away. But they determined to live for the day and to cope with whatever the future threw at them. 

     The trouble was that, of course, life wasn’t that simple. They had been realistic about that at the hospital. But they hadn’t realised, not really, that re-learning meant far more than him being back in nappies for a while, or watching him crawl instead of walk.

     It was as if his whole character had changed. Their cheerful, inquisitive, fearless boy was frightened of everything, angry at everything. He screamed for hours on end, and it was not the boisterous full-lung screaming that had once reverberated round the house and yielded to happy gurgling and later to insistent prattling as soon as it started. They learnt the difference between assertion and aggression and at times he almost seemed to hate them. They had entertained some hopes that Vince might help – you heard such marvellous things about dogs as therapy – but he recoiled in horror and looked at poor Vince as if he were the hound from hell. 

     He was beginning to get his language skills back, gradually, but his colourful vocabulary was replaced with constant angry cries of No! and Stop!   There was no return of the eager, demanding What Dat? 

     Gwen was prepared for another battle royal before she took him out for a walk in his stroller. It was so tempting not to. Did it really do him any good? He would be bound to scream and flail and people would look at him either in frustration or pity, and at her as if she were either a cruel mother or one who never checked her child. She knew she had let herself go. Oh, she still washed her hair and took a shower, and cleaned her teeth, and laundered her clothes, but as if on autopilot, almost as if through muscle memory. She could not remember when she last had smiled, and it was true, your lips did start to get a permanent downward droop. She had thanked Philomena nicely for the under-eye cream she had given her for her birthday, but couldn’t be bothered using it, and she hardly ever looked in a mirror anyway, so what did it matter if she had dark shadows?

     “Ready for your walk, Oliver?” she asked in that false, bright voice she had cultivated and hated. “Ready for your walk with Mamma?”

     She was not expecting a reply. But at least it seemed as if he wasn’t going to start rocking and keening and acting as if she were submitting him to some kind of cruel torture, as if she were his jailer in a prison he couldn’t understand.

     He was almost too quiet. “Good boy, Ollie,” she said, and the minute she said it, she thought, no, don’t say he’s being good just for being quiet. But oh, I can’t help it!

     But something was – well – different! He was rocking, but not in that aggressive, convulsive way – more as if he were excited. I am deluding myself, she thought. There have been false dawns before.

     He was pointing at something. And he was pointing, not jabbing. And he looked – yes, he really did – look happy. “Piggy!” he exclaimed. “Piggy!”

     And that ugly, unwanted, almost but never quite forgotten gift they had never wanted transformed into the most beautiful and precious thing Gwen had ever seen in her life.

     Well, apart from her son, of course!