Neglect Takes the Form of the Recovery Position

The young boy was floating, three feet above the end of his bed, except he was not. He was just perched on the edge of the mattress, ruler-spined, his toes on the floor, his sketch pad on his lap and a charcoal stick in his hand.

But he might as well have been floating, because it was two in the morning and the woman watching him, his mother, found him still being awake at this hour, so upright and corpse-still, most alarming. The sight of her son, wide awake and upright, with an iridescence in his eyes in the middle of the night, a steel pin; her heart, a butterfly.

On her own way to bed, she’d gone to check on her son and had seen him there, staring at the wall. Motionless, she’d stood in his doorway, not crossing the threshold, and had watched him for over an hour as the night ticked on and increasing darkness ate away at his edges.

She had not wanted to disturb him—she’d heard things about children sleepwalking with their eyes open, how it was dangerous to wake them, so, steadying her tired self against her son’s bedroom door jamb, she quietly observed, waiting, thinking about what was best to do. Perhaps he had woken from a bad dream? No, she thought, he is not one for bad dreams.

At one point, he cleared his throat. He did not seem asleep. Something else must have unsettled her son.

A slice of moonlight from a gap in his curtains cast an elongated shadow of the boy on the wall. The boy stared at his shadow as the woman, hidden in darkness, stared at her son.

Something is wrong, she thought. Or something is more than wrong—something dreadful has happened.

She became sure of this, convinced. It would explain her poor son’s blank stare, the wan vacancy on his face.

A noise. A car backfiring or a fox in a bin—something from beyond the house—broke the silence, and the boy flinched. He turned his head, saw his mother at the door. “Mother,” he said, the vowels in this word played out too long. The woman approached him, moving like a trepidatious mouse, not wanting to distress him further. His face was as pale as his shadow was dark.

***

She should never have let him go to the other boy’s house for tea. What a fool she had been to allow this to happen. But she’d wanted her boy to fit in, make friends. The small village she’d moved to with her son a few months back had not welcomed them as warmly as she’d hoped. Her boy had come home from school in tears, the last picked for paired activities most days despite words with teachers and interventions. After a nasty divorce, she’d wanted to escape, make a fresh start—an anonymous new beginning would’ve played in both their favours.

Consideration of what terrible events might have occurred at the playdate with the farmer’s son dropped a rock in her stomach. The farmer had been so persuasive, coercive almost, and the cadence of the farmer’s gait alone had been unnerving. Why had she let herself be pressured into it?

They’d spoken at the school gates on several occasions, the woman and the farmer, each conversation initiated by the farmer, his glare slightly off-centre, several inches to the side of her left ear as if watching out for something that might be creeping up behind her, but their discussions had not breached small talk until their last interaction. He had insisted her son go over for tea after school. The farmer had mentioned he lived just with his son and his elderly father, who he cared for in between tending to his dairy herd. And she had presumed he had meant he did not have a wife. The woman was a single parent herself, so she tried to reserve judgement and had agreed to a playdate. But something about the farmer was most disquieting. She couldn’t place her finger on precisely what, could not pick out the words to describe it—like an image from a dream washed too deeply into the brain to ever retrieve.

He had remarked, the other boy’s father, the farmer, how similar the two boys were. Uncannily so. He’d said her boy was like an echo of his. And the woman had commented on how the farmer and his own son also looked alike, although, being from the other side of the country, she felt there was hardly any chance they might be related. Just a strange coincidence, she thought, a genetic déjà vu.

What was it he had said to her—she strained to remember—the pair, he’d said, were of a similar breed. She’d laughed, although inside she’d felt unsettled. She’d made an attempt at a joke, about how all his dairy cattle must look the same. He’d said he knew each of his girls, Friesians, like the back of his hand, told her how each had distinct markings, unique as a snowflake, all the while never quite meeting her eyes with his.

***

What frightful thing has happened on the farm? she thought. She sat at her son’s side, wrapped an arm around his shoulder. “Why are you still awake, darling?” she asked.

“I couldn’t sleep. Thought I’d try and sketch something, but nothing’s coming to mind.” In his hand, he squeezed the stick of charcoal, the top page of his pad below, empty.

“How can you not be tired? We’re in the early hours of the morning.”

“I spent so long in bed at the farm—I’m just not tired now, I guess.”

Her heart battered. She took the pad from his lap, prised the charcoal from her son’s grip, placed them to her side, and returned her arm tight around him. She pulled herself closer to his side.

“In bed?” she asked.

She hugged her son tightly and pressed his cheek against her chest. It suddenly made hideous sense what Matthew, the farmer’s son, had said to her when she’d arrived a little early to collect her boy: “One moment, madam. He’s just putting his trousers back on.”

She swallowed hard, knowing she’d never forgive herself if the terrible things her darkest thoughts proffered were true. “Why were you in bed. At the farming house. During the day?”

“They wore me out.”

The woman gripped her son’s shoulder so tight he recoiled, pushed her away, as her nails dug into his shoulder.

“Wore you out? Whatever do you mean?”

“I ran around so much, rounding up the cows. Matthew had wanted to draw, but I said I didn’t. I told him I’d never been to a farm before and wanted to explore. Matthew got cross and told his dad. His dad got cross too, but then his dad said we should go and run around outside instead, said he’d make a different plan for us, for our playdate, so we went up to the fields. I pretended to be a sheepdog and helped get the cows back inside. When we got back to the farmhouse, Matthew’s dad asked if I wanted to do drawing before dinner, and I said I didn’t, I was too tired, so he told me I should rest a while. He took me upstairs, into Matthew’s bedroom, and told me to get undressed for comfort, lie on the bed, and shut my eyes. I must’ve dozed off. Matthew woke me when your car pulled up, and now, I’m not tired at all.”

The boy looked to his lap as if searching for his soul there and toyed with the cord of his pyjama waistband. His mother resisted the urge to buckle forward and cry, furious with herself for letting whatever might’ve happened happen. A pain not dissimilar to childbirth bit into her heart.

“Are you cross with me, Mummy?”

“No, no darling, no. Not at all.” Each word she forced out stung, but each word had to come. “Do you remember anything else?”

“Not really, Mummy. I had a good time. I think I’ll just get under the duvet now.”

The boy rubbed his eyes and crawled under his sheet.

Perhaps the fresh air, the exercise, the new experiences on the farm had worn him out. Maybe he had needed an afternoon nap. The things she told herself to make herself feel okay.

She tucked her son in. His face looks more angular, she thought. Could it be the shadows? The way the moonlight falls? Or has my baby lost a little more of his puppy fat?

“Would you like me to get in with you, sleep in here with you tonight?” she asked.

“No, Mummy, there isn’t room.” And he was right. She knew it. A pang of deep sadness. Her boy was growing up.

“If you’re sure,” she said and kissed him on his forehead. The boy yawned and nodded and closed his eyes. “Goodnight.”

The woman returned to the vastness of her own room. She fumbled in a drawer, took out a sleeping pill, popped it in her mouth, and swallowed it dry. In her own bed, her mind raced over all the what ifs, the possibilities, of what may or may not have occurred on the farm. I will visit the farmer in the morning, she thought. If he has laid one finger on my son, I’ll not be held responsible for my actions.

***

“Stay in the car.” The woman left her son in the back of her Peugeot and marched down the muddy path towards the farmer’s house. She knocked hard on the door until it swung open. The farmer answered the door, his eyes bloodshot. Has he been drinking? Crying? she thought. The farmer pulled out a hanky and blew his nose.

“Sorry for the state of me,” he said. “My father is declining.”

The woman offered up polite condolences but had come with the intention of finding out what had happened the day before. Why had her son been made to undress, sleep in the day?

“Let me explain.” The farmer ushered her in. Hesitant to enter the building, her boy sat at the end of the drive in her car, she reassured herself he’d be okay for a short while. Her son had pens, pads, books to read. Safer outside than in the farmer’s house.

The farmer pulled out a chair at the kitchen table for the woman and offered tea, which she declined.

“Where do I begin?” the farmer said, scuttling around the kitchen, spilling water, milk, piling spoonfuls of sugar into a mug. “My father. He requires great attention, you see.”

“I don’t see. What has this to do with my son?”

“My father requires I draw him every night,” the farmer said with sincerity, his accent thick with countryside. The woman tapped her foot against the table leg. Had she misheard?

“At first, my efforts were poor, mere puerile caricatures of the old man, cartoons, but as I paid attention to his lines, noted where light and shade fell on his face, focused on the rise and fall of skin and bone, my artwork improved.” He passed the woman a sketchbook from one of many obelisk-shaped stacks of pads in the corner of the room, flicked through its pages for her.

She could see his work had improved over the years. The recent drawings were clarion, a true likeness to what she imagined an older version of the farmer himself would look like if arranged horizontally, splayed into a capital letter K.

“But what has this g—”

“Please, madam,” the farmer interjected. “Take pity and hear my story.”

“Go on,” she said. She sighed and folded her arms.

“At first, I resented it, the time it took each night, the bind, the isolation of it all, but as my craft improved, I started to create quality sketches. And now, even if my father says not a new thing, repeats the same stories again and again, each one perhaps more disjointed, more fictitious, fantastical, than the night before, and often forgets my name, I have learnt to tolerate the task.”

“He has dementia?”

“Something more than dementia.” The farmer scratched the rough grey stubble on his chin, all the while not breaking from his thousand-yard stare. “Where was I? Each night, I move Father through the motions, shape his near-skeletal limbs into the recovery position, and pay attention to him as I make the drawing.”

The woman lifted a second sketch pad. “May I?” The farmer nodded. Tens, hundreds of sketches, each near-enough identical to the last, all of an old man, draped on his left side, a skin-and-bone starfish, a corner of sheet draped over his modesty.

“But last week, my eye fell from the ball. It had been a hot day, and my best milker had wandered off. I’d been out for hours, searching for her to no avail. Found her dead, stiff, eyes clouded like skin on pudding, up by the tower on the top field. By the time I’d dealt with her, I was broken. I fell straight asleep, forgetting to draw my father. The next day, the hardening had set in.”

“Of the cow? The cow had begun to harden?” The woman’s brow furled.

“No. Father. A patch of skin above his right knee set, darkened like black walnut bark. He could no longer lift his leg.”

“His leg turned to bark because you forgot to draw him? This is ludicrous.” The woman looked at her wristwatch. “I’ve got to get back to my son. Just tell me, please, what happened yesterday. Why did you make my son get undressed, into a bed?” She was finding it hard to retain civility. The man was deranged. Heavy metal toxicity, she thought. Pesticides, sheep dip—all sorts of chemicals are used in farming. The man has lost the plot.

“Come with me,” he said. “Come and see my father. Then, you’ll understand.”

“You’ve five more minutes of my time. If you don’t explain to me what you did with my son, I’ll have no choice but to contact the police.” The woman reached into her coat pocket and found her car key. With the blade of it poking out between her tensed knuckles, she followed the farmer through the house.

“Father, we have a guest.” The farmer walked round to the side of the bed. The woman pinched her nose with her empty hand. “Father?”

No reply. The farmer peeled back a thin, soiled sheet to reveal the place where the face of his father should have been.

This farmer’s father is no more an old, dying man, she thought, than a wooden artist’s mannequin, free from its stand, with opposable, metal-pinned elbows and ankles and knees. Its face is blank pine and its limbs are as smooth and polished as a licked-clean lamb shank.

The wooden doll lay on the bed, on its side, with the same shape and proportions of a thin old man twisted into the recovery position.

The farmer burst into tears and sank to his knees. “It’s too late. He’s gone.” The farmer wailed. Matthew came running in.

“Grandfather? Has he hardened?” The little boy’s eyes filled with tears, and he ran into the farmer’s arms. The woman felt odd, as if dreaming somebody else’s nightmare, standing there, witnessing this strange outburst of grief.

“Yes, son, grandfather has passed.”

The man comforted his son, then wrapped the wooden corpse up in the cotton sheet on which it rested until it looked no more like a man at all but like swaddled kindling on a stained mattress. He bent and scooped his father’s remains up in his arms and mentioned something about the lightness of what was left now that the soul had vacated. But where had the soul vacated from, and where had it vacated to? the woman worried, but she was too disturbed to ask.

“You must come with us to the tower,” the farmer said to the woman.

“Tower? Why? And what was that on the bed, now in your arms?” She pointed at the sack of wood in the sheet, and Matthew sobbed. What if what I see at this tower is something more, something worse than what I have just witnessed? she thought. Once something has been seen, it is impossible to unsee, to erase.

“Please come,” Matthew said, his pleading eyes so similar to the eyes of her own son she found it hard to refuse.

“Okay. I will honour you this,” she said to the farmer, “for the sake of your child who is caught up in all this madness, and then I must get back to my own son in the car.” She reasoned with herself: she had only been at the farm for ten minutes or so. My own boy will be okay; I have time to take a quick look, she thought. He’s a good kid. She gathered herself, without time enough, perhaps, to gather her thoughts entirely, and went with the man and his son to the tower.

After a brief, steep hike, they reached the building the farmer had wanted to show the woman. Less of a tower, more of a ramshackle barn, she thought, but there it sat, elevated, on the top end of the farm’s highest field.

“The elevated position of the barn,” the farmer said, the sheet-sack of logs swinging over his shoulder, “is the reason for its name.” He went on to tell her that no one ever visited the tower except in situations like the one they were all caught within.

“A panoramic view is good company,” he said, and something about how old age is lonely but does not come alone. “However, the place does need a clean.” The farmer pointed up to a fifty-foot high, small, round window opaque with dirt on the end of the outhouse.

They approached the large door of the barn. The woman, between deep breaths, felt she had been ignored long enough, needed to ask her pertinent question again. “This is all quite tragic, but please—” Heat grew in her cheeks and her belly as she spoke. Her patience had run dry. “What did you do to my son while he slept?”

The farmer placed the sack containing his father on the ground. With his hands on his hips, he stared at the woman, but not quite. She felt propelled to check behind herself, although she was no longer sure which direction potential danger might spring from.

“My own son has no skill with a pencil at all, you see,” the farmer said, “but he must learn to draw. I have been teaching him. But the two of us, neither with any innate skill, only got so far. My son told me your son was good at art. I figured he could teach Matthew how to draw me while I posed, my father too far gone to be of any use in studying the form of the body.”

“None of what you are saying answers my question.”

“Dear woman, please. Listen to the details. Each night from this point forwards, now my own father is gone, my boy must sketch me, pay me attention, listen to my stories, dull as they are, while I rest in the recovery position, or I will harden too. We are all never any younger than we are in each new moment.”

The woman worried about her son in the car, the farmer clearly mad. Was her boy safe where he was? She shifted from foot to foot. She wanted her question answered but also longed to be with her son in her car but also, oddly, yearned to see what she knew once she had seen she could not unsee: the inside of the tower.

“Your boy wouldn’t draw, said he wanted to play in the fields with the cows,” the farmer continued, “so I let him. Instead of using him as a teacher, while asleep, he became our life model. We shifted him into the recovery position, and there he lay for several hours. My son practised his art, drawing your son’s form instead. I taught him all I know—far easier to teach my son sat by his side, with us both admiring the canvas, than with my son as the model. It’s all about perspective, you see, art. Matthew filled many sketchpads of his own. You may take them if you like. They’re back on the farm, the charcoal images of your son. My son is ready now, thanks to yours. From tonight onwards, Matthew will study me.”

The farmer’s son looked unhappy, the woman thought, unhappier than she had ever seen a child look before.

“I don’t want anything from you,” she said. She stepped back. “I’m going back to my son, and I’m calling the police—”

“Police? On what grounds?”

The woman tried to think rationally and realised there were no grounds. “Please, just look inside. Honour me; honour my son,” said the farmer. The woman looked at Matthew’s sad, wide doe eyes, a doppelganger of her own child.

“You have two more minutes. Then, I’m going.”

The farmer picked up his sack and swung open the tall doors to the barn. “Welcome to the forgetting tower,” he said and tipped out the bed sheet contents onto the floor of the barn. He crouched and began to reassemble the wooden bones into the correct position, Matthew at his side, helping.

“What . . . what is this? Some sort of terrible genetic affliction?” The woman staggered back at the sight. Hundreds of stacked artists’ mannequins filled the barn, all upright, all with their pine limbs fixed in the recovery position. It was as if the wooden corpses were clambering on top of each other, yet motionless, trapped in a freeze-frame, all trying to reach the view from the small, round window.

“No. Not an inherited trait—more of an awakening. A realisation. An awareness.”

The woman spun on her heel, ran to her son in her car, shingle cockerel-tailing up in the air behind her tyres as she pulled away.

***

When the woman and her son got home, she let him watch cartoons while she paced around the house. She needed time to think. Was her son safe? Was she? Had the entire experience been, perhaps, a side effect of her sleeping medication or some sort of group hallucination?

She forbade her child from spending any more time with the farmer’s son in or outside of school. Her son did not understand, he cried, and in her son’s sad eyes, she saw the eyes of the farmer’s son, and the face of the farmer, similar yet older, like an aged counterfeit.

That evening, she insisted her son share her bed. Sensing his mother’s stress, the boy did as asked, although he did so reluctantly, claiming he was too old to sleep in his mother’s bed.

She read to him until he fell asleep, although he protested the story was dull and he would have rather read to himself. “Can I switch the light out, now?” he asked her, as he was feeling tired, but she said no. She didn’t want him to sleep. She made him listen to another story.

If he was asleep, she might feel like she was alone in the house, or trapped in a barn, or made of old wood and ignored. But the boy pleaded with her, said he needed his rest because he was a growing lad, so eventually, she let him drift off.

By the dim light of a candle, with a hand mirror, she inspected the feathered creases around her eyes, examined the way the skin on the back of her hand did not ping back like it used to when she pinched it between thumb and forefinger. She stroked the soft hair back from her baby boy’s face and traced hearts on his cheek while he slept as she cried.

When the heartbeat of midnight was all that could be heard and a dark shade of everything was all that could be seen, she got out of bed, shuffled to her son’s empty bedroom to retrieve his sketchpad and pencil, and then returned to her room. There, she turned on the bright overhead light and shook her son awake. Owl-eyed, he complained, begged to sleep again, but she insisted he open his eyes, wider, wider, enough so to take every detail of her in.

She lifted her son until he was sitting, thrust a pencil in his hand, then lay on her left side and arranged her limbs into the recovery position.

“Draw me,” she said. “Sketch every part of me until sunrise.”