Tim (24 page)

"You don't understand!" Mary wept, her head in her hands, her fingers wreaking havoc upon the orderly strands of her hair.

"Oh, I understand better than you think," he said, more gently. "Tim loves you, with every corner of his being he loves you. For some reason, out of all the people he's ever known, he fixed his affection on you, and with you it will stay. He's not going to grow bored or jaded with you, he's not going to throw you over for a younger, prettier woman in ten years' time, he isn't after your money any more than his father is. You're certainly nothing to write home about now, so it's not as though you've got any beauty to lose, is it? Besides, he has more than enough beauty for the two of you."

She lifted her head and tried to smile. "You're nothing if not honest."

"I am because I have to be. But that's only the half of it, isn't it? Don't tell me you've never admitted to yourself that you love him every bit as much as he loves you?"

"Oh, I've admitted it," she answered wryly.

"When? Recently?"

"A long time ago, before his mother died. He told me one night that I looked like his picture of Saint Teresa, and for some reason his saying that knocked the wind out of my sails. I'd loved him from the first moment of seeing him, but it was then I admitted it to myself."

"And are you likely to grow tired of him?"

"Grow tired of Tim? No, oh, no!"

"Then why can't you marry him?"

"Because I'm old enough to be his mother, and because he's so beautiful."

"It isn't good enough, Mary. All that appearance business is crap, and I'm not even going to be bothered arguing with you about it. As to the age objection, I think it's worth discussing. You're
not
his mother, Mary! You don't feel like his mother and he doesn't think of you as his mother. This isn't an ordinary situation, you know; this isn't two people fully grown in mind and body but with a disparity in age casting doubt on the genuineness of the emotional ties between them. You and Tim are unique in the annals of man. I don't mean that a spinster in her middle forties has never married a man young enough to be her son before, even perhaps a mentally retarded one, I mean that you're a completely odd couple from every standpoint and you may as well accept your uniqueness. Nothing holds you together except your love for each other, does it? There's the difference in age, in beauty, in brain, in wealth, in status, in background, in temperament-I could go on and on, couldn't I? The emotional ties between you and Tim are genuine, genuine enough to have transcended all of these innate differences. I don't think anyone on earth including you yourself will ever be able to discover the reason why you fit together. You just do. So marry him, Mary Horton, marry him! You'll have to endure an awful lot of sniggers, leveled fingers, and conjecture, but it doesn't really matter, does it? You've had a fair bit of that all along, I'd say. Why not give the old biddies something really worthwhile to talk about?
Marry him!''

"It's-it's indecent, it's almost obscene!"

"I'm sure that's what everyone will say."

Her chin went up. "I don't care what other people say, I'm only concerned with its effect on Tim, how people will treat him if he marries me."

John Martinson shrugged. "He'll survive speculation a lot better than separation, I assure you."

Her hands lay clenched in her lap, and he put his own over them strongly, eyes glittering.

"Think about this one, Mary. Why shouldn't Tim marry? What's so special about Tim? You can protest all you like that you think of him as a man, but I disagree. The only times you've thought of him as a man, you've almost died in horror, haven't you? That's because you've made the mistake everyone makes with mentally regarded people. In your mind, Tim is fixed as a child. But he's
not
a child, Mary! Like normal people, retards are subject to the growth and change which comes with maturation; within the limited scope of their psychic development, they cease to be children. Tim is a grown man, with all the physical attributes of a grown man and a perfectly normal hormonal metabolism. If he'd been injured in the leg he'd walk with a limp, but because his injury is to the brain he limps mentally, and that kind of handicap doesn't prevent him being a man any more than a maimed leg would.

"Why should Tim have to go through life deprived of the opportunity to satisfy one of the most driving needs his body and his spirit know? Why should he be denied his manhood? Why should he be sheltered and shielded from his body? Oh, Mary, he's already deprived of so much!
So much!
Why deprive him of yet more? Isn't he, a man, entitled to his manhood? Honor the man in him, Mary Horton! Marry him!"

"Yes, I see." She sat silently for a while, thinking. Then she lifted her head. "All right, then, if you think it's the best thing under the circumstances, I'll marry him."

"Good girl!" His face softened. "You'll both get more out of it than you think, you know."

She frowned. "But it's so fraught with difficulties!"

"His father?"

"I think not. No, I imagine Ron will be pleased, though he may well be the only one. But Tim and I, we're equally inexperienced in this, and I'm not sure I'm competent to deal with all the problems involved."

"You're worrying unnecessarily. The trouble is you're a thinker, you try to contend with things that have a habit of solving themselves when the time comes. Where Tim's needs are concerned you're very well attuned, I'd say."

Suppressing her urge to squirm, Mary managed to appear composed. "I shouldn't have children, should I?"

"No, you shouldn't. Not that Tim's deficiencies are hereditary, it doesn't seem there's much chance of that. But you're getting into an age group where it's possible that you won't live to see any offspring through to their maturity, and Tim's condition precludes him from fulfilling your role should anything happen to you. Besides which, you're more than old enough to repeat his mother's misfortune, and if you did that it would be life's greatest irony. Statistically speaking, if you start having children past the thirty-five mark your chances of having a normal child go right down, and the farther you are past thirty-five when you begin, the lower your chances get."

"I know."

"Do you think you'll regret not having children? Is it likely to color your life with disappointment?"

"No! How could it? I never expected to get married, or yearned to get married. Tim is more than enough for me."

"It won't be easy."

"I know."

John put down his pipe and sighed. "Well, Mary, I do wish you all the luck and happiness in the world. It's up to you now."

She rose, gathering her bag and gloves together. "And I thank you very much, John. You've put me deeper than ever in your debt, and I give you my word that I'll work to help your cause in whatever way I can."

"You owe me nothing. The pleasure I'll get from just knowing Tim is happy is more than enough reward for me. Just come and see me from time to time."

Instead of simply dropping Tim off in Surf Street, Mary came in with him. Ron was sitting in the living room with the television blaring a late-night sports roundup.

"G'day there, Mary! I didn't expect you'd come in this late."

She sat down on the sofa while Tim busied himself putting her bag and gloves in a safe place. "I wanted to have a talk with you, Ron. It's rather important, and I'd like to get it over and done with while I've still got the courage."

"Right you are, love! How about a cuppa tea and a bit of fresh cream sponge?"

"That sounds nice." She looked up at Tim, smiling. "Do you have to work tomorrow, Tim?"

He nodded.

"I don't want to push you off, then, but I think it's bedtime for you, Charlie. Your Pop and I have something to talk about, but I promise I won't keep it a secret from you, I'll tell you all about it this weekend. All right?"

'All right. Night-night, Mary." He never requested her to tuck him up in Esme's house.

Ron spread cups and saucers and plates on the kitchen table while the kettle heated, watching Mary keenly out of the corner of his eye. "You look real done-ih, love," he observed.

"I am, rather. It was an exhausting evening."

"What did the teacher bloke say about Tim?"

Her cup was chipped; she sat rubbing her fingertip back and forth across the pitted rim, turning ways to tackle the subject over in her mind. When she looked up at Ron she seemed old and tired.

"Ron, I wasn't exactly truthful about why I took Tim to see John Martinson tonight."

"No?"

"No." Round and round the cup edge her fingertip moved; she lowered her eyes to it, unable to continue speaking while she looked into those wide blue eyes, so like Tim's in form and so unlike Tim's in expression. "This is very difficult for me, because I don't think you have any idea of what I'm going to tell you. Ron, did it ever occur to you that it's going to be hard for me to take Tim if anything happens to you?"

The hand holding the teapot trembled; tea slopped onto the table. "You've changed your mind, right?"

"No. I won't do that, Ron, unless you don't like my solution to our problem." She folded her hands together in front of her cup and managed to .look at him steadily. "Tim and I have always had a very special relationship, you know that. Out of all the people he's ever met he likes me best. I don't know why, and I've given up even wondering about it. It isn't far wrong to say he loves me."

"No, it isn't. He does love you, Mary. That's why I want you to be the one to take him after I'm gone."

"I love him, too. I've loved him from the first instant I ever saw him, standing in the sun watching the concrete truck emptying cement all over Emily Parker's oleanders. I didn't know he was retarded then, but when I found out it didn't change anything, in fact it only made me love him more. For a long while I never attached any importance to the difference in our sexes, until first Emily Parker and then your daughter gave me some pretty rude shocks on the subject. You've always kept Tim sheltered from that sort of thing, haven't you?"

"I had to, Mary. With Es and me being so old, I knew there was a pretty good chance we wouldn't be around when Tim grew up, so we talked over what we oughta do while he was a little bloke. Without us to watch over him, and him being as handsome as he is, it seemed as though he was likely to get himself into a heap of trouble if he ever found out what women were for while he was still young and the urge was strong. It was easy until he got old enough to work, but once he started with Harry Markham I knew it would be hard. So I went and had a talk with Harry, made it clear that I didn't want any of his blokes getting Tim into trouble or trying to wise him up about the birds and the bees. I warned Harry that if they tried anything I'd put the police on to them for contributing to the delinquency of a minor, and a minor who wasn't the full quid into the bargain. It was the only thing I asked, and I suppose they got their fun from tormenting him about other things, but f must say they was good about the sex business, even used to watch out for him and keep the women away. Bill Naismith usually comes most of the way to and from work with Tim, because he lives at the top of Coogee Bay Road. So between one thing and another, it's turned out fine. We been lucky, of course. There was always the chance that something might happen, but it never has."

Mary felt the prickling march of blood suffuse her face. "Why were you so adamant about it, Ron?" she asked, desperate to delay the moment of confession.

"Well, Mary, you've always got to weigh the pleasure agin the pain, ain't that right? And it seemed to Es and me that poor old Tim would end up getting more pain than he would pleasure from playing around with women and sex and all that. Mum and me thought he'd be better off ignorant. It's terrible true that what you never know you don't miss, and with him working so hard laboring it's never been a burden to him. I suppose it might seem cruel to someone on the outside, but we thought we was doing the right thing. What do you reckon, Mary?"

"I'm sure you acted in Tim's best interests, Ron. You always do."

But he seemed to interpret her answer as noncommittal, for he hurried into a further explanation.

"Lucky for us, we had a good example right under our noses while Tim was growing up. There used to be a simple girl down the street from us, and her Mum had awful trouble with her. She was much worse off than Tim, only about fourpence in the quid, I reckon, and ugly too. Some rotten bugger took a fancy to her when she was fifteen, pimples and fat and slobber and all. Some men will hump anything. And she's been pregnant off and on ever since, the poor little dill, had one cock-eyed, hare-lipped ning-nong of a baby after the other, until they put her away in an institution. That's where the law's wrong, Mary, they oughta have some provision for abortion. Even in the state home people kept getting at her, and in the end they tied her tubes. It was her Mum told us whatever we did, not to let Tim get ideas."

Ignoring Mary's soothing murmur, he got up and paced the room restlessly, it was painfully apparent that the decision taken all those years ago continued to worry him.

"There are blokes and sheilas who don't care if a kid is simple. All they're after is a bit of fun, and they sort of like the fact that they don't have to worry about the kid, because it isn't smart enough to chase after them and give them a hard time when they're sick of it. Why should they care? They reckon that the kid's so dill-brained it can't feel anything the way us ordinary people do. They'd kick it the way they'd kick a dog, smirking all over their faces because the silly ding comes back for more, wagging its tail, belly on the ground.

"But dill-brains like Tim and the girl down the street
do
feel, Mary, they ain't that far off the full quid, especially Tim. Good Christ, even an animal can feel! I'll never forget when Tim was a tiny little bloke, about seven or eight. He was just starting to talk as if he knew what the words meant. . . . He come in with this chewed-up kitten, and Es said he could keep it. Well, not long after the kitten turned into a cat, it started to swell up like a balloon, and the next thing we knew, kittens. I was hopping mad, but lucky for me, I thought, she'd had them behind the bricked-up chimney in our bedroom, and I decided I'd get rid of them before Tim knew anything about it. I had to knock out half the bricks to get at her, I dunno how she got in there in the first place. There she was, all covered in soot, kittens too, and I had Es breathing down me neck laughing her head off and saying it was just as well she was a black cat, you'd never notice the soot. Anyway, I grabbed the kittens, took them into the backyard and drowned them in a bucket of water. And I've never regretted doing anything so much in all me life. The poor little bugger of a cat walked around the house for days, crying and howling and looking for her kittens, turning her head up to look at me with them big green eyes so full of trust, like, as if she thought I could find them for her. And she cried, Mary, she cried real tears, they rolled down her face just like she was a human-being sort of woman. I never thought animals could cry real tears. Jesus! For a while there I wanted to put me head in the gas oven. Es wouldn't talk to me for a week over it, and every time the cat cried, so did Tim."