It was madness, of course. A desperate attempt to control our environment, at a time when we were still insisting to ourselves that Jackson was rambunctious or spirited or headstrong. Those five simple rules offered reassurance that our chaotic lives were amenable to order, somehow, if only we tried harder.
‘Everything’s okay, hon.’ I put my arm around Jackson and escort him down the hall and up the stairs to his bedroom. ‘Just take a moment for yourself, until you’ve calmed down.’
Closing the door behind me, I brace for the barrage of objects Jackson usually hurls against it. Remarkably, all is silent bar the cooing of the top-knot pigeons nesting in the branches beyond his window.
Loitering a moment, I lean my ear to the door.
‘Mum?’ Jackson calls out softly. ‘Are you still there?’
He’s listening too.
Gently, I push open the door.
Jackson hails me from his bed. ‘I’m calm already, Mum.’
‘You are,’ I agree, smiling in spite of myself. ‘What upset you, Jackson?’
He fingers his nostril for a moment. ‘Are angels real, Mum?’
Over the years, I’ve learned to adapt to the sometimes startling directions of conversations with Jackson.
I move into the room again.
‘Well, I’ve never seen an angel myself, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t exist.’ I sit down on the edge of his bed. ‘I’ve never seen oxygen either, but I’m breathing it now, right?’
Jackson’s eyes encourage me to keep talking.
‘Granny believed in angels; do you remember? Her family had seen so many bad things during World War Two, she decided to believe in the good things.’
After her parents escaped the horrors of the holocaust, my mother had been happy to turn to all and any symbols of luck, prosperity and spirituality.
Jackson nods. ‘She told me about St Jhudiel, my birth angel. The guardian angel for Friday.’
‘Did she?’ I’m surprised by this detail.
Jackson looks wistful. ‘Granny gave me a little statue of St Jhudiel wearing a green cloak. He had a halo and a golden sash. He was holding a big bunch of flowers.’
I have no recollection of my mother ever giving such a statue to Jackson.
‘It was beautiful,’ he continues. ‘But it was so little that I… lost it. On New Year’s Day in Erskineville. It fell down the drain in the gutter outside our old house.’
‘Which New Year’s was that, Jackson?’
Jackson’s eyes are dejected. ‘When I was three.’
I raise an eyebrow. Jackson often ‘remembers’ things that simply cannot be corroborated. While I’ve always considered it an imaginative by-product of his unusual brain chemistry, Andy suspects Jackson of out-and-out lying.
‘Granny told me St Jhudiel has special powers to help me if ever I’m in trouble. I should never have lost that statue.’
He looks so upset that I reach for his hand.
‘Have you been thinking about… Granny and Grandpa and the accident again?’
Jackson throws his arms around me, hugging me tightly. I stroke the back of his neck, until I feel his body beginning to relax.
After a while, he slumps down onto the bed again.
‘Why don’t you go back to sleep?’ I whisper. ‘It’s still really early.’
‘I want to start today over,’ he murmurs. Then, like a much younger child, he closes his eyes and rolls over.
‘You can, hon.’ Gingerly, I tiptoe out of the room.
Downstairs, I pause in the kitchen doorway to watch my eldest daughter write.
‘You’re amazing,’ I observe. ‘Thanks for being so patient with Jackson.’
Milla sets her notebook aside. ‘Ditto, Mum. Jackson’s tough. You never give up.’
A wave of gratitude washes over me, for the sympathy of a sensitive daughter.
‘How’s the poetry?’ I ask. ‘Finished your competition entry yet?’
She shakes her head. ‘I’m still working on it.’
‘Can I read it?’
‘Not yet.’ Milla looks conflicted. ‘But I’ve finished three haiku for Dad, for when he comes back from New York.’
She flicks through the pages in her notebook.
‘I’m sure he’ll love them, Millsy.’
Milla’s face crumples. ‘Why can’t he stay home for a change? When’s Dad going to… come back to us?’
I sense she doesn’t mean just from New York.
Resisting tears, I move across the kitchen and take her in my arms. My eldest girl, almost as tall as me now, poised on the cusp of womanhood. Old enough to understand the complications of adult life, but young enough to crave a happy-ever-after.
‘His job is… really important. For him and for us,’ I say. ‘But it’s hard when he’s gone so long.’
When Andy’s been away for a while, I even start to miss the minor irritants of married life; debating politics over dinner, raking up nuisance palm berries in the back yard, arguing over whose turn it is to take out the rubbish.
‘It’s still dark outside, Millsy, so…’ I glance towards my bedroom. ‘I’m going to lie down again. I’ll be up in about thirty minutes, okay?’
‘Sure, Mum.’
As an almost daily witness to Jackson’s early-morning shenanigans, Milla doesn’t need an explanation. She smiles wanly and returns to her poetry.
Wandering back into the bedroom, I pick up the photo frame on the bedside table, containing a family portrait taken on Jackson’s second birthday. A much younger Andy, with a handsome head of salt-and-pepper hair and a relaxed smile, cheerfully restrains Jackson from plunging his hands into the birthday cake. Five-year-old Milla sits on my lap, wriggling with delight as a still energetic version of myself kisses her cheek.
In those early years, when our good humour was still intact, Andy and I referred to Jackson’s differences as NQR – not quite right. Jackson’s chainsaw-like cry as a baby was NQR. The way he resisted nappy changes – smearing faeces across the wall, between his fingers and often on us – was definitely NQR. As a toddler, his capacity to scale bookshelves, benches and fences was within developmental parameters, but still NQR.
It was his kindergarten teacher, Mrs Craig, who queried whether Jackson had ADHD after he started biting his classmates. While the child psychologist we consulted dismissed the ADHD theory, she was more alarmed by Jackson’s response to a Rorschach inkblot test.
‘What do you see, Jackson?’ she prompted, pointing at a black-stained page.
‘A prison,’ he replied.
‘Who’s inside?’
‘People who hit other people’s heads with hammers.’
‘Why do they do that, Jackson?’
‘They want to find out where the memories are.’
This interaction catapulted Jackson into a consultation with a paediatric psychiatrist who, after conducting his own assessments, proceeded to apply various labels to parts of Jackson’s experience.
Multiple tic disorder, for the nose-fingering and blinking. Vulnerability to intrusive thoughts, describing the unusual ideas that assaulted Jackson’s brain, prompting him to cackle with glee or weep with despair. Sensation-seeking, explaining his tendency to climb higher, dive deeper and stay upside down longer than any of his peers.