Penguin Books Australia

One

When my son Alex was one and a half years old he entered into an autistic regression so severe it seemed to wipe away all he had known, diminish everything he might one day be. At the beginning of 2003 he was, for all appearances, a normal, buoyant toddler. By the middle of the year we barely recognised the child he had become.

Only a few months before, Kathy and I were optimistically planning for his future. We had been teachers for most of our working lives and we understood the importance of a good education. To that end, we'd arranged for a representative from a university scholarship fund to visit.

We bustled about our flat, putting together a simple afternoon tea. We knew we'd be facing a sales pitch but that didn't mean we shouldn't show some hospitality. As we sat on the sofa waiting for the doorbell to ring, we watched Alex playing on the living room floor, his small fingers firmly wedged around a toy lobster half his size. When he squeezed the lobster's stomach, its soft plastic claws swayed menacingly, but the toy refused to squeak. He looked over at us, frustrated, wanting us to do something about it.

We were of course fiercely proud of him, and reserved the right of all parents, especially first-time parents, to claim he was the most beautiful, intelligent and vibrant child in the world. He had light brown curls and soft brown eyes and his skin was pale olive, the result of his racial mix: Kathy was Anglo-Celtic and I was Greek. Alex was tall for his age and slim, and even though his nappy puffed out, his shorts hung from his hips as if he were the guitarist in a garage band.

He walked over to me, his confident step inflected with a slight waddle. I was pleased he'd picked me to help him out; normally he went to Kathy for any troubleshooting. He waved the lobster in my face, and one of its claws bumped against my nose. I should have been annoyed but instead I was caught up in one of those pangs of love for him that coursed through me on a daily, if not hourly, basis.

As if he sensed what I was feeling he put the lobster down, climbed onto my lap and pressed his face against my neck. I pulled him close and gave him a bear hug. Our combined weight made the sofa dip and Kathy too pressed up close to me, her dark wavy hair tickling my neck. She put her arm around Alex and me, lightly, delicately. It was during these kinds of moments that I felt the most complete happiness I'd ever known.

The doorbell sounded and the moment was over. I got to my feet to let in the scholarship rep. I invited him to sit between Kathy and me on the sofa while Alex lay sprawled on the floor watching Teletubbies. The rep began his pitch by eliciting, in the nicest possible way, parental fear. Were we aware that by the time young Alex here was eighteen, the cost of a university education could be as high as . . . ? He mentioned an alarmingly large sum of money. Were we also aware there was no guarantee that the current system of interest-free student loans would continue?

Yes, we told him – that's why we were having this meeting. We didn't want Alex burdened with debt even before he left university.

Satisfied we fully understood the threat to our son's future, the rep offered us hope. The scholarship scheme he outlined came with built-in tax concessions, would cover Alex's tuition fees and a generous living allowance, and enable him to start his professional life debt-free.

As the rep worked through a ring binder of bar graphs, pie charts and other evidence to support his case, I found myself involuntarily projecting Alex into the future. He would spend his first few years at a good public school, then enrol in a private school to ensure strong academic performance. (I winced at the idea of a private school, but that seemed to be the way it was all heading). After that, perhaps he'd go on to do arts at Sydney Uni, just like his dad.

From time to time Alex glanced up at us from the floor, as if making sure we paid close attention to the decisions that affected his future. I also noticed the rep glancing around the living room, no doubt building a picture of us from our domestic paraphernalia. The place was a run-down art deco flat; we were renting cheaply to save for our own house. But there was some evidence of upward mobility: the television may have been old and too small for the room but it was parked on a new Tasmanian oak buffet, and there was some quality hi-fi stacked next to it. Large bookcases were set into the alcoves and stuffed full of the volumes Kathy and I had collected over the years. The rep had walked into a lair of the artsy middle class, a couple too young to be boomers, too old to be gen-Xers (we were both forty). A not so young family on the cusp, he was probably thinking, on the cusp of responsibility. Let's see how they go with the hard yards of raising a family. Let's see how they go with not thinking of themselves for a change.

And if he wasn't thinking it, I definitely was.

He came to a finish and asked what we thought. The weekly contribution he'd mapped out was completely affordable. The conditions seemed fair, although of course we'd have to look at the fine print. It seemed like a good prospect. I glanced at Kathy, and could tell she was interested but wanted to think it over.

If the rep was disappointed at leaving without a signature, he was too professional to show it. He thanked us for our time and asked if he could ring us in six months or so, if he didn't hear from us sooner. Six months – this man didn't think in terms of minutes, hours, even weeks. Six months was a mere blink to someone who thought in terms of lifetimes. He packed his ring binder into his briefcase and as he left I realised I had a lot to learn about parenthood.

Kathy and I were in some ways an unlikely couple. She was the oldest of seven children, I was the youngest of three. She had been raised in a Catholic family while mine was one-part atheist (my father), the other Greek Orthodox (my mother). Kathy grew up in go-ahead Sydney, I was from laid-back Brisbane. Both Kathy's parents were university educated; her mother had taught French before having children, her father was a doctor. My parents had migrated to Australia in the early 1950s with little more than a primary-school education. Kathy had spent a large part of her childhood in the grounds of Lidcombe Hospital, where her father was the resident head of a kidney unit. I grew up in the family fish and chip shop, where I had to peel potatoes after school. Every one of Kathy's siblings had tertiary qualifications; I was the only member of my family to go to university, where I'd gained a doctorate in literature and creative writing.

We'd met in our early thirties at the inner-city TAFE where we taught English language to migrants. Kathy still worked there and I now taught creative writing at a university just outside Sydney. We took our jobs seriously and did them to the best of our ability, but they were not the main game – we both worked part-time, for a number of reasons. Neither of us was particularly materialistic; we didn't want a large house or fancy cars or expensive holidays. In fact, neither of us had ever owned a vehicle, something of a statement in a car-dominated city like Sydney.

More importantly, we were both artists. I was a writer; my first novel had come out some years previously and led to regular work writing reviews and features for the national media. I was in the middle of my next book, the all-important follow-up novel, for which I'd received various grants. Kathy had for many years danced semi-professionally with a troupe called Arabesque, whose style was raqs sharqi, more commonly known as belly dance. She now taught it to small classes and private students. Before she became a dancer she'd been a painter and had majored in visual arts at university. Our flat was filled with her work, mainly female nudes painted in a neoclassical style. Once Kathy had finished with dance, she planned to return to painting.

Before Alex was born in June 2001, we had traded income for artistic fulfilment. And after he was born we traded income for artistic fulfilment and time as a family. With the financial commitments a child brings, this wasn't an easy decision to make, but we both felt strongly this was how we wanted to live.

It was a decision made all the harder by the state of the housing market. We did have a property to our names – 'owned' seemed a grandiose term for the status of the small, one-bedroom flat Kathy had bought in the late 1990s with a minimal deposit, and which we were paying off with glacial speed. Still, it was something we could build on, in order to buy a modest family home. But this was fast becoming an impossible dream. In recent years, house prices had soared to levels we could not possibly afford on our part-time incomes, even with our small investment as equity.

Thinking about it dampened our spirits. It was particularly depressing because it affected whether or not we had a second child. Alex had brought us such happiness that we talked of having another, and it seemed wrong that he didn't have a little brother or sister. But Sydney's ascension to its new status as a global city was making things difficult. How could two artists compete with those turbo-charged couples willing to hold down full-time jobs and structure their whole lives around them?

Kathy and I would often discuss these issues but we never seemed to get anywhere with them. And now there was the cost of Alex's education to add to the mix. The future was intruding more and more on our daily lives, and we seemed ill-equipped to meet its challenges.

After the rep left we got on with our evening routine, centred of course on Alex. Mealtime, bath time, bedtime: if you weren't feeling overtired, overworked or worried, having a child made your life indescribably sweet. And bedtime was the sweetest time of all.

Alex lay propped up on his pillows and stared with delight at the show that was playing in the dark. At strategic points around his room we had placed whirring neon phase lights that flashed out displays of stars, animals, geometrical patterns and simple words. Sitting beside him, Kathy held a torch that projected the shadow of a dolphin. It floated across the walls as she sang a bedtime song.

There are fish in the sea,

There's no doubt about it,

Just as good as the ones,

That have ever come out of it,

Yo ho, little fishy, don't cry, don't cry,

Yo ho, little fishy, don't cry, don't cry.

When I first met Kathy she claimed she couldn't sing if her life depended on it, but that changed when Alex came along. Initially her voice was soft and shy, as if she were afraid it wouldn't meet his approval. She needn't have worried: he loved his mother singing to him and now she sang in a clear, melodic voice full of confidence.

He listened and watched until his eyelids drooped. I turned off the whirring lights one by one, then we kissed him on the cheek and left.

Later that night, lying in bed, Kathy said, 'Things are so different now.'

I knew what she meant. We had agreed to discuss the university scholarship after dinner but had forgotten, probably on purpose. It was only now that I realised I'd been suppressing a wave of anxiety about Alex's future, about what sort of world he would become a part of.

'Our uni education was a free ride, wasn't it?' she continued. 'How long did it last for?'

I was pretty sure Whitlam had abolished university fees in the early 1970s. They came back in the late eighties. 'Around fifteen years, maybe?'

'Who'd have thought it would all end so soon? If someone had told us they'd bring back fees, we'd have never believed them. And to think Labor did it. Now Alex's generation will have to pay.'

'Either him or us.'

'But not the government.'

I knew if she hadn't been so tired she'd be angry. Instead she sounded melancholic.

Kathy fell asleep but I lay awake, troubled by what seemed like an increasingly hostile world. Kathy was right; things had changed. When we were in our early twenties, terms like user-pays and self-promotion were dirty words. Yet at some point they'd become the new orthodoxy, along with tax cuts, McMansions, and the 'right' to pay for your own education. Still, a stubborn loyalty to lofty ideals wouldn't get Alex the education he needed. We no longer had the luxury of taking the moral high ground. We had brought Alex into the world; now we had to make sure he was given every chance.

I tried to sleep, but my head filled with a flurry of incoherent calculations about what we could cut from the household budget in order to boost our monthly scholarship contribution. To block out these thoughts I told myself to think of Alex. His face as I conjured it was suffused with a golden light, the embodiment of my love for him, a love that could only stop the day I died. No matter how hard life got, no matter what worries piled up around me and kept me sleepless in the dark, this was one image that would always give me joy. Ever since my son had been born, I'd had this radiance to sustain me. And with that image, I drifted off to sleep.

Some nine months later, Alex as we knew him no longer existed. Autism descended on him first as a trickle, then a brutal wave that swept away the child we knew. Kathy and I would no longer be contemplating university scholarships; we would be standing by helplessly, watching his mind disintegrate. The vibrant child who seemed perfectly normal would be struck mute and barely recognise his own parents. He would find himself terrified of the unfamiliar and spend long periods as if drugged, racked by fits and inexplicable compulsions. During those cruel months of his descent, whenever I went to bed at night I would conjure him up as I had before, but the light in his face had gone dead and his features were obscured by a film of darkness, and I couldn't think of him in those small hours without suffering an anguish so intense that sometimes I thought I could no longer endure having to witness what was happening to him.

It took a long time for that radiance to return and it had to be fought for, doggedly, with blind faith, and often when there seemed to be no hope. When finally it did return, a softer, more nuanced light, Alex was a completely different person. And so were Kathy and I.