Genius



  Genius

  A Story of Ordinary Uniqueness

  by

  Clare Nonhebel

  “One of the most versatile storytellers

  of her generation”

  The Times

  Copyright 2015 Clare Nonhebel

  Cover by Shirley Walker

  For Clare Nonhebel’s other books

  see website https://clarenonhebel.com

  CHAPTER 1

  Even though the media said, and everyone agreed, that the beginning of the new decade marked the onset of a wonderful technological era, the best that the health professionals could do for Eldred Jones in the early1980s was to keep him in hospital in an oxygen tent for the first five years of his life.

  It enabled him to breathe without turning blue round the mouth and gasping like a little fish but it didn’t, apparently, give him the power to talk. By the age of five he still had not spoken a single word.

  Mr Jennings the lung specialist urged Eldred’s parents, Edgar and Mildred, to focus on the positive. Eldred would survive, he would outgrow his need for the oxygen tent, his resistance to infection was increasing and there was every reason to believe he would turn out to be a normal healthy child.

  ‘But why isn’t he talking yet?’ Mildred repeatedly asked Mr Jennings the lung specialist, Mr Abdul the paediatrician, Dr Prakash the registrar, Dr Suleiman the house doctor, the day and night ward sisters, nurses, auxiliaries, cleaners, hospital porters, other patients, everyone she met on the bus or in the launderette, and anyone else who would listen to her. ‘He has quite an intelligent look in his eyes,’ she said. ‘I’m sure he’s taking in most of what we say. Why doesn’t he speak?’

  The nurses talked to Eldred, read him stories about talking animals and creatures from outer space that learned to communicate with humans. They sang him nursery rhymes, clapping and miming the words while five-year old Eldred watched them with solemn dark brown eyes.

  A retired teacher came to the ward three mornings a week and brought Eldred alphabet cards and counting games and showed him how to make red and blue dinosaurs out of non-allergenic modelling clay. Eldred watched politely but didn’t join in. Miss Dalrymple wondered if the child was autistic or deaf but he had been tested for everything under the sun and appeared to have no incapacities, apart from the hard-to-diagnose lung condition that mysteriously left him choking and struggling for breath.

  Once, reading Eldred a story about a wriggly worm that ate everything in its path and turned into an outsize worm whose wriggly mum had to put him on a diet, Miss Dalrymple glanced up and caught Eldred watching her with an expression in his eyes that she couldn’t fathom. She searched for a word to describe it, out of her teacher’s wide vocabulary, and failed.

  Only later, while a solitary Miss Dalrymple was eating her mushroom omelette in front of a Survival programme on mountain gorillas, did the answer appear in her brain like one of the flash cards she used to use for her reception class. The word was pity.

  It was during the following week that Edgar Jones, making his routine Sunday visit to his silent little son, heard Eldred speak.

  Despite the 1980s era of wonderful technology, the hospital lifts were out of order and by the time Edgar had climbed the five flights of stairs to Eldred’s ward, he was wheezing like Eldred himself.

  So he entered the ward short of breath and approached Eldred’s oxygen tent without his usual greeting – the hearty, embarrassed, ‘Hello there, son; how goes it today?’ that announced his weekly half-hour attempt to find something to say to his child.

  Eldred didn’t hear his father coming. Inside the oxygen tent, his thin shoulders were hunched over a thick volume that one of the medical students had left behind that morning when he was called away suddenly in the middle of sounding Eldred’s chest.

  The child appeared so absorbed in the text that Edgar, forgetting his bedside manner, said in the tone he would have used for an adult, ‘What’s that you’re reading?’

  ‘Pulmonary malfunction,’ murmured Eldred, without thinking.

  The shock hit them both at once. Father and son, each suddenly aware of the other’s real existence, stared into an identically startled pair of eyes.

  ‘You spoke,’ said Edgar stupidly. He sat down, pulled out a neatly ironed handkerchief and wiped his brow. Then, ‘You can read,’ he said. Eldred didn’t reply.

  ‘You can read textbooks on lung disease,’ Edgar said accusingly, reaching into the tent and examining the title of the five year old’s reading book. His eyes filled with tears. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Why this book? We’ve given you piles of storybooks.’

  Eldred hesitated, his expression anxious and compassionate. ‘They didn’t interest me,’ he said finally.

  ‘And this one does?’ Edgar said, turning the pages in perplexity.

  ‘Oh, very much,’ said Eldred. ‘I’ve found the remedy for my disease.’