Genius, Page 2

CHAPTER 2

  It was probably psychosomatic in origin, Eldred explained to Mr Jennings, Mr Abdul, Dr Prakash, Dr Suleiman and a crowd of medical students. ‘Very difficult for you to diagnose,’ Eldred said sympathetically, ‘especially as the resultant symptoms are typical of at least three types of pathological pulmonary disease.’

  Eldred’s doctors were not delighted with him. ‘We arranged an appointment for you with one of the most eminent child psychologists in Europe,’ Mr Abdul pointed out. ‘Why didn’t you speak to him?’

  ‘I didn’t want to speak until I was sure of my findings,’ Eldred said. ‘An article in the October 1973 issue of Clinical Psychologist warned against prematurely publicizing the results of insufficient research.’

  One or two of the medical students stifled giggles. Mr Jennings’neck pinkened above his red and white striped collar.

  ‘If you are going to be a psychologist, sonny,’ he said, ‘one thing you will have to learn is the value of the expert’s superior knowledge. If you had answered Jason Wilbrahim’s questions he would have arrived at these conclusions years before you.’

  Eldred looked reproachfully at him. ‘Would you confide your unconfirmed pre-birth memories to a man who made sexual overtures towards a male student nurse in the presence of a child?’ he enquired.

  The media loved Eldred. The hospital authorities were not so loving. Within a week Eldred was giving interviews not from his familiar oxygen tent in the fifth floor ward but from his parents’home on a south London housing estate. Asked how it felt to be home at last, Eldred replied, 'Psychologically it will require a period of adjustment but physically I am suffering no ill-effects, since my symptoms abated as soon as I had identified the source of my condition.’

  It turned out that Eldred, while he was living in his oxygen tent, had regularly disconnected himself and escaped at night to scavenge the hospital for reading material.

  He had educated himself with the aid of medical textbooks, scientific periodicals, psychology students’unfinished theses, biographies, travel books, novels, puzzle books, computer users’journals, newspapers, women's magazines, children's comics and men-only magazines.

  Back in his tent, wheezing and gasping after these forays, he would reconnect himself to the apparatus and allow himself half an hour to recover his breathing rhythm before devouring the contents of the papers and books, using a speed-reading technique learned from a self-help book he had borrowed from a patient's locker. Then he would detach himself again from his cocoon and return each book to its rightful place (having memorized this by visualization techniques perfected in five days from a book called A Photographic Memory in Only Six Weeks).

  Eldred's picture appeared in every national newspaper, with features in a range of magazines. The journalists had no need to follow their normal practice of plumping up the quotes or converting them into artificially grammatical language, as Eldred spoke fluently and grammatically on any number of subjects.

  The only topic on which he was uninformative was the pre-birth memory that he claimed had caused the trauma that led to his lung damage.

  'This is now irrelevant, since the condition is cured,’ Eldred told the press politely but firmly. 'I have already erased it from my memory bank.’

  Eventually public interest was sated and died down. Eldred's life settled into a new routine. He attended school, joining the six to seven year olds’class rather than the five year olds’as a concession to his advanced standard of education in some areas.

  At school he learned to join in activities that didn't interest him, such as the class project (a Plasticine model of the Lake District), playground fights, organized games (running along benches and throwing beanbags), and homework (a list of six objects found in a kitchen and ten sums involving numbers under twenty-five).

  Eldred found this good training for joining in activities which didn't interest him at home - going to the launderette with his mother Mildred and watching children's TV with his parents rather than the Open University programmes he had video-recorded.

  He was no trouble at home. Edgar and Mildred, who had been afraid that their child prodigy would be a handful, were relieved to see the child accept a normal life.

  ‘All that funny high-falutin’talk was only because he was stuck in that oxygen tent’Mildred told her husband. ‘I wouldn't wonder if all that pure air didn't hype up his brain. It's not natural for a child, is it? Now he's home he'll become normal. Have you seen this lovely picture of a house he's brought home, Daddy? The teacher said he couldn't do it at first, kept asking her peculiar questions about architecture, but when she showed him the other children's drawings and told him to copy them he managed fine.’

  All in all, the Joneses were satisfied that little Eldred, despite his five years of deprived childhood, would be able to keep up with his parents’ lifestyle.

  Edgar even began to consider moving back to his native Ipswich, now the family no longer needed to be within visiting range of the big London hospital. But here Eldred unexpectedly put his foot down.

  ‘If it wouldn't be too much trouble to you and Mum,’ he told his father calmly but with a determined expression on his five-year old face, ‘I would prefer to continue living here, within easy reach of adequate reference-library facilities.’