And so it went, on and on. Eventually, we pulled away from the house and headed for the motorway, overloaded with suitcases containing toys and games and junk. Most of it wouldn’t even be touched. Precariously balanced on the top was one carrier bag of clothes and two toothbrushes. In the boot was the Arctic survival pack that his mum packed, as you would for any expedition to the north-west of England in May.
Then came the journey itself. On the way The Boy wanted to play ‘Scooby-Doo’, as he did on every car journey for the next seven years. Seven long years.
These were his instructions for how to play ‘Scooby-Doo’ in the car:
‘Right, you’re Freddy as you’re driving. I’ll be Shaggy because I’m a boy. [Points at passing car] Look, Freddy! MONSTERS! Run! Let’s play again. Right, you’re Freddy as you’re driving. I’ll be Shaggy because I’m a boy. [Points at passing car] Look, Freddy! MONSTERS! Run! Again. Right, you’re Freddy as you’re driving…’
That was it. The clever part was that we repeated this, over and over, for the entire 225 miles. Four hours, no deviation, no adding in different characters, no trying to pretend that Velma has a driving licence. Just that. For the first time in my life, I missed Scrappy-Doo.
Finally, we arrived. The Boy liked Nana’s house. It was a bungalow so had no horrible stairs where dark shadows might lurk at the top. Fifteen minutes after our arrival, the contents of the car were unloaded into his bedroom. The duvet cover was replaced with his own from home and the bed was moved up against the wall just like at home. And when everything was unpacked and put in its place, it could almost – almost – be home. Perfect.
It was difficult for both sets of grandparents in those early days, I think. Although my dad was no longer around, step-Granddad had been around since long before The Boy was born. There was something horrible about the ‘step’ word though, a call-back to childhood fairy tales featuring the Wicked Step-Mother. So he was very much Granddad. And no finer Granddad could The Boy have.
There were seldom hugs from his step-grandchild in the early years. No kisses. If he went too close he got hit and that was about all he could hope for in the way of contact. It must have hurt, deeply – and not always only in the physical sense. Things have changed over the years enormously, although I’m not sure when that happened. Now The Boy is renowned for his bear hugs and affection. No kisses though. Consistently inconsistent.
The difference between him and his cousins was more marked on this trip than any earlier. As they turned from being toddlers to children, a chasm seemed to be opening up between them. When my brothers and their wives visited each other’s houses they were now leaving their children alone to play. The Boy though, needed more supervision than ever. I’d watch him like a hawk, looking for signs that he might attack. How awful does that sound when you’re talking about your four-year-old son? As his cousins played together, he’d play side-by-side, never quite joining in, but there on the periphery. He loved their company, there was no doubt of that, he just seemed unable to know how to play. And he was always within grabbing reach. If there was a sudden spike in noise level or if an arm got perilously close to him, he’d lunge, teeth at the ready. Not here son, please. It’s the one place we’ve got left.
Invariably, someone did get bitten or smacked or both. I’d make my excuses to my family and apologize, but I could see the difficulty even they had understanding him. And in the middle of it, The Boy just looked so confused. He desperately wanted to get on with his cousins, which just meant another autism myth exploded there and then. All the information I’d discovered online forever talked of the autistic child preferring solitary play, but that wasn’t the case with The Boy. He loved the interaction. He just didn’t know how to do it. The solitary play came about because other children gave up on him first.
We travelled back to London more confused than ever. At home, I began to withdraw into my own thoughts and the gulf between my wife and me seemed to grow larger by the day. I finally understood what people meant when they talked about being surrounded by other people but feeling completely alone. I wanted my dad. I wanted him to tell me that everything would be OK, that love would indeed conquer all and, like that day at the theme park all those years ago, there would be victory for the little man once again.
I tried my best to avoid the monsters, Shaggy, I really did. I had my foot flat to the floor of The Mystery Machine. Maybe there were just too many.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Step Outside
Yesterday we went to see the cousins. They’re roughly the same age as The Boy and they live in a small village where everyone knows everyone. They’d arranged to meet all their friends at the local park for the afternoon. They go on their own normally, on bikes or on scooters. They wanted The Boy to go with them. And he wanted to go too.
Playgrounds have always been horrible places to visit. Turn your back for a second and someone has been bitten or hit for being so bold as to want to use the slide when The Boy has decided that the very top is the perfect place to just sit and reflect on the world for twenty-five minutes. The Boy can’t climb or jump, both of which come in handy in a playground. Add to that the presence of other children that he wants to be friends with but can’t work out how to do it and they tend to be places of real frustration that bring out the worst in him.
So, of course we decided to go.
I drove them the fifty metres round the corner. And when we arrived we were greeted by the five other boys we were meeting there: The Gang. They were all about ten years old, all standing in their hoodies and skinny jeans. And to me they looked like they were all about twenty-three years old.
Fashion was something that largely escaped The Boy. And me. Clothes were selected for comfort only. Not that he really ‘selected’ clothes – he just wanted to wear the same ones. Clothing was a necessary evil, only made almost bearable by character T-shirts and Lego Star Wars underpants.
And, suddenly, there he was stood in the middle of all these boys with their Justin Bieber haircuts and neckerchief things. I could still make him out by the luminous socks that he always wears, poking out between too-small jogging bottoms and black school shoes that he insisted on wearing because it wasn’t Saturday or Sunday. And I realized he was taller than most of them. My boy was growing up.
So, I left them to it. I sat in the car and watched from a distance, one hand on the door handle, poised. My nod towards independence. And The Boy played with them for over an hour. They seemed to laugh at his jokes that made no sense. They played tag and one of the other boys would help out when The Boy was ‘it’ and do the running and climbing for him. They pushed him on the swing, far higher than he’d ever let me push him and he squealed with laughter. No one was bitten. No one was hit. I’m sure he called someone a dickhead at least once, but the car windows were up, I couldn’t hear and let’s not spoil the romantic image. Somewhere, in a village in the middle of nowhere, for an all too brief moment in time, my son belonged.
MY SON’S NOT RAINMAN BLOG
Every Sunday morning since The Boy was born we’d gone to the park, just the two of us. It became our lads’ trip out. That was the way it worked, even when me and his mum were still together – Dad would get the lie-in on a Saturday, Mum on a Sunday (except that Mum invariably had to get up on the Sunday because Dad couldn’t work the pushchair or she’d want to do an emergency inspection to ensure the full change of clothes, spare nappies, bottles, first-aid kit, emergency beacon and clamps were all going along too).
I miss our trips to the park now. They were our time, the two of us. I craved the routine and comfort of every Sunday as much as The Boy did. Each week it began exactly the same way: we’d park the car at the same spot and head through the same entrance into the same park. Now, I want you to get the image right. You shouldn’t imagine great avenues of tall, majestic trees and beautiful ornate benches where J. M. Barrie might have sat to first write Peter Pan. Instead, I want you to picture a backdrop of fried chicken boxes rip
ped apart by foxes, smatterings of different shades of dog shit and the same guy cycling round and round, dropping off small-time drug deals to anyone who wanted them. It might not be everyone’s idea of a beautiful park, but it was ours.
There were rules to be followed on those Sunday mornings. Upon entering, the first thing to do was to take a sharp right turn and head to the small bridge over the stream. I say stream – it could have been a sewage outlet for all I knew. We had to stop along the way to collect twigs. The first game of the park was Poohsticks. Even when he was too little to throw his stick in the water himself we’d play Poohsticks. Mainly because I didn’t know what else to do at the park. And because his mum had made it plain that she didn’t want us home for two hours.
For the uninitiated, in Poohsticks you throw sticks off a bridge into the water and then dash to the other side of the bridge to see whose appears first. In those early days I used to hold The Boy over the edge of the bridge to throw his twig, legs dangling precariously over the water below. Then we’d peer over the other side to see whose twig was victorious.
‘Again’, he’d say, even before the twigs had reappeared. ‘Again.’ If ever there was a word to define what made him happy it was that one: ‘Again.’ Let’s keep doing everything again and again and again. And again.
After we’d exhausted all the options for Poohsticks, we’d wander away from the stream and head over towards the man-made lake in the middle of the park to feed the ducks.
And it was there, on those Sunday morning outings feeding the ducks, that I suppose I first really knew you were different. There were always other children around at this point, often of a similar age to you. Much as I did with your cousins, I tried not to compare what they were doing to what you did, but I couldn’t help it. I’d watch them and it was like they instinctively knew what to do with the bread. ‘Little pieces,’ would be the only words whispered from their parent. The children would squeal with delight, following the order. Little pieces. Tearing off small bits of bread and casting them into the water as the ducks scrambled for their food.
The Boy just used to eat the bread I’d given him. We soon learnt that we couldn’t take stale, mouldy bread to feed the ducks. It had to be fresh. I remember those days of kneeling beside him, copying the other parents who all seemed to have far more of a clue what to do than I did. I muttered the words, ‘Little pieces’, as if he’d suddenly understand what I meant. The Boy would just look at me bemused, taking a bite out of the extra bit of breakfast. And, looking back now, it does seem strange that I expected him to grasp that when I handed him a piece of bread at home it was to eat, but when we were outside he was expected to turn it into breadcrumbs and scatter it across open water. Every now and then though I would think he’d grasped what I meant. But then he’d proceed to launch three or four whole slices of bread into the water. Along with the bag they came in.
There was, however, a species of bird The Boy liked feeding much more than the ducks. Pigeons. They were far more entertaining. As all the other children were led away from them and discouraged from giving them any food (‘Dirty,’ the parents would say). The Boy would plough into the middle of them, giggling and screaming. He liked pigeons – still does. Loves chasing them, desperate to catch one, is happy feeding them and strangely knows instinctively to break the bread into little pieces. It might be their flapping he likes. He used to lull them into a false sense of security, giving them pieces of bread until all their friends came over for a bit of food and then, when he was surrounded by every pigeon within a three-mile radius, he’d suddenly wave his hands and shout and the birds would all take off, flapping noisily as they went, leaving a grinning boy with a mouthful of bread laughing away in the middle.
It was a left turn after the ducks, moving along to The Wall. This was little more than a kerb really, only about two bricks high. The Boy had once watched another boy climb on to it and decided he wanted to do the same. He could never quite do it, never found his balance, never had the muscle tone. Each time Dad would bounce him along it, dangling him along the wall’s edge. Next week he’ll manage it. Next week…
We would move on to the café. Once he was old enough, it would be a fairy cake and orange juice for The Boy, coffee for Dad. We never sat inside. Whatever the weather, come rain or shine, you’d find the two of us in the same seats outside. A pigeon or two would join us, The Boy breaking off a bit of his cake to share with them each time. And as soon as the fairy cake was gone, so were we. No waiting around for Dad to finish his coffee. There were things to be done – not least to pay a visit to the machine with the bouncy balls.
In the entrance of the café was one of those old-style machines you often saw at the British seaside that used to contain gobstoppers. Now you often get them in posh pubs where you can buy seven M&Ms for the bargain price of 20p. Well, this one had luminous bouncy balls inside. And each week we’d buy one and each week as he gave it the first bounce it was like he was discovering the joy of a ball for the first time. The Boy would bounce his ball up and down, giggling away as he gave chase. Every now and then another child would try to join in his game, reaching down to pick up the ball or running after it to try to catch it. They were treated with absolute contempt. No matter how many times I encouraged him, there was no sharing of the bouncy ball game. It was his ball.
The park was arranged in a circle and so by this time we’d be bouncing the ball back in the general direction of the car. For a boy who so often craved predictability in life, it was the unpredictable nature of that bouncing rubber ball that used to give him the most pleasure – twisting and turning, never quite knowing where it was going to land and which direction it would spring off in next. And then suddenly, almost as quickly as it came into our life, the ball was abandoned, left on the pathway for someone else to pick up and take home. All that interest in it had suddenly gone, it had fulfilled its purpose. There were bigger fish to fry. Because, at the peak of our Sunday park adventure, we’d finally arrived… The Boy would start to point and rush forward the minute it came into view, towering over us as we neared the exit. There it was. The Magic Tree.
At first glance and to the untrained eye, The Magic Tree looked like any other tree in the park. But a select few knew its powers. For a start, you had to go right up to it, as close as you can be. And if you went right up, clasped both hands around its trunk and then wiggled yourself a little dance, The Magic Tree would start to work.
‘It’s not working,’ The Boy would shout despondently over his shoulder, his hands wrapped tightly around the tree, bum wiggling away.
‘You’re not wiggling enough,’ Dad would shout back, desperately rummaging through his pockets. And then it would start. Just as The Boy was giving up hope, a rustling noise would come from the branches up above his head. ‘It’s coming,’ Dad would encourage, just as it always did. Much to The Boy’s delight, money would start tumbling from The Magic Tree. If Dad had planned it right, it would be two-pence coins. Every now and then he’d curse as he had to use a ten-pence piece.
‘Again, again…’ The Boy would squeal with delight, running round collecting up the fortune.
‘You need to wiggle some more!’ Dad would shout back, moving position as The Boy retook his place around the trunk. Every now and then, if Dad was really prepared in advance, The Magic Tree would even drop individually wrapped sweets too.
I’m not sure what anyone else made of us in the park on those mornings. Walking past, seeing the small boy wiggling against the trunk of a tree while his dad stood behind him throwing money up into the branches above his head. But I started to care less and less what people thought. I knew we were different. I might have painted a rose-tinted picture of it all here, but that’s because they’re the memories that I want to cling to; they’re the memories that for so long I’d forgotten.
Anyone walking past us on those Sunday mornings wouldn’t have seen Poohsticks or magic trees. They’d have seen a young toddler screaming incessantly as each
activity came to an end and his dad desperately trying to create something else to entertain him. They’d have seen the rude, badly behaved boy at the café going and sitting at the same table, even if someone was already sitting there, because that was his table and that was where they always sat. And when Dad tried to lift him away they’d have seen him hit out and scream and then sink his teeth into his dad’s arm as hard as he could because for one brief moment it made things feel better on the inside.
The Magic Tree itself only came into existence because for two weeks running the machine had given us a green ball, which meant it should always be a green ball going forward, but the next time it was orange and it shouldn’t have been orange, it should have been green forever. And that’s what our trips out were like for so, so long. There was never enough bread, enough Poohsticks, enough ‘again’. There was always too much noise and light. It was never right, no matter how hard I tried to make it so.
Despite all that, we still go the park, now and then. It’s good to head back there; for too long I only remembered the bad bits. It took The Boy’s memory to remind me of the golden, joyful bits in between. Nowadays we push the wheelchair around because cerebral palsy has weakened his legs as his body has grown, meaning it’s too far to walk all the way. We still follow the same route of course. The Boy will jump out of his chair for a game of Poohsticks, only disappointed at how small the bridge seems. Winning is more important than ever these days. Then he’ll get back in as we head towards the ducks. In keeping with the new signage there’s no bread to feed them this time – it would appear even ducks are gluten-free nowadays. He’s still got no interest in them, but will charge his wheelchair at the pigeons for them to flap around him once more. Still grinning, still desperate to catch one. Then past The Wall that manages to dwarf him even in the wheelchair. He doesn’t ask to climb on it now; he’s learnt over the years he could never get his balance. ‘Remember our wall?’ he’ll say as we go past it, with all the wisdom of an ageing war veteran. Memories…
My Son's Not Rainman: One Man, One Boy, a Million Adventures Page 6