Chapter 23: Up
I want to put him down properly now, because so far he has mostly been a thing on a floor and an arm in a cast.
Ethan Blackwood on the twentieth of September 2026 was fourteen months and eight days old.
Nineteen pounds four ounces.
Six teeth, with a seventh coming through on the bottom left.
He had walked since the twenty-eighth of July and he could get up two stairs and no more.
He was left-handed and he had one word and it was up.
He used it for lift me.
He used it for I dropped something.
He used it for the light going on.
He used it for a car on the drive, and for the moon out of the landing window, and once, at eleven months, for a helicopter.
He used it as a question.
He would look at a closed door and say it with the end going up.
He used it as a complaint, flat and low, when the vacuum cleaner started in the room below.
Nine tones.
I could tell them apart.
I have been asked, under oath, to prove that, and you cannot prove a thing like that.
What he reached for was circles.
The red ring first and always.
Nine centimetres, hard plastic, off a stacking toy that had five other rings he had never once touched.
But also: jar lids.
Bath plugs.
The rubber grommet on the cot rail.
The O of a keyring.
Coasters.
He would take a circular thing and turn it over in his left hand and look at the edge of it, on and on, for four or five minutes.
Dr. Moreno told me that is completely ordinary and I wrote it down anyway.
And he reached for the neck seam of whatever I was wearing.
Not my hair, not my face, not my hands.
The seam at the collar, right side, and he would take it in his fist and hold on.
There is a stain on all three of my uniforms in the same place and it never came out.
He slept on his front with his knees drawn up under him and his left arm straight out above his head.
Face turned right, towards the door. Always the door, never the window, and I have no idea why.
He went down in eleven minutes if the door was open a hand’s width and the landing light was on.
He went down in twenty-six if it was shut. I know because for two weeks in June I tested it, like a person with nothing better to do.
He woke once a night, usually at ten past four, and he did not cry. He stood up in the cot and held the rail and waited.
He laughed like a cough. Two short sounds from low in his chest, and he only did it if you blew on the side of his neck.
He ate banana, toast, yoghurt, chicken cut small, and every green thing that has ever been grown was an insult to him.
He would eat anything at all off my plate.
Anything. Including the green things.
And here is the one that is only mine.
He brought me things.
One at a time, across a room, in his left hand, and he put them into my hand and then he waited.
A sock. A wooden spoon.
A piece of a jigsaw. Once, a leaf, from the landing, which I have no explanation for.
He did not do it with Roz, who had been holding him since he was three weeks old.
He did not do it with his father. He did not do it with Miss Dunbar and he did not do it with his grandmother.
He put a thing in my hand and waited for me to say what it was, and I would say it, and then he would go and get another one.
And the other thing, which I have described once and will not describe again: the crown of his head into the hollow under my collarbone, and stillness.
That is a fourteen-month-old boy. That is the whole of him and it is not very much and it is everything.
He was not a case number and he was not a headline and he was not somebody’s estate.
He was a person who liked circles and hated the vacuum cleaner and slept facing the door.
In eleven months’ time a man in a very good suit would stand up in a room with a stenographer in it and say that a child of that age has no preferences.
He said it pleasantly. He said that attachment at fourteen months is indiscriminate, and that a child of that age settles with whoever is holding him.
He had two experts and forty years of practice and a voice you would trust with your own children.
And I sat there with my hands in my lap and I could not prove one single word of what I have just written down.
You cannot put a leaf in evidence.