The Man on the Middle Floor

by Elizabeth S. Moore

  Sarah looked at her mother over a margarita pizza with extra cheese. She was the eldest, always had an opinion and very rarely wavered from it.

  ‘Mum, did you see my exam results? Dad was really pleased – you know I had to revise by myself because he was working so much? I might be put in the excelling class for English and for maths.’

  ‘Maths is great. Not sure what you’re going to end up doing with English, but as long as you’re keeping up your sciences. You do need to learn to write, I suppose.’ Karen smiled encouragingly. ‘What do you have in mind for a career?’

  ‘I want to be a journalist, or a novelist.’

  A small sleepy voice from Jack cut across Sarah’s provocative statement.

  ‘I want to be a footballer.’

  ‘Well, I can see I need to talk to your father. An education is not a passport to just muck about and please yourselves. You need to think ahead, plan the next step. Always take a moment to decide why you are doing what you are busy with.’

  The looks on their faces were familiar to Karen: boredom and a tinge of sadness, and in Sarah’s case she glimpsed suppressed anger. Jack fidgeted, and Jamie was hard to read. She tried to explain again.

  ‘Work is our testament – it’s what we stand for: it speaks for us. Mummy’s work is important for lots and lots of people. It’s a study—’

  ‘Finished, and I have homework to do.’

  There was an edge to Sarah’s voice and Karen noticed that there was half a pizza left in front of each of them. If they wanted to go she would get it put into boxes as a takeaway. She beckoned the waitress over and smiled at her daughter.

  ‘Come on now, happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday, dear Sarah … ’

  Jack was singing a different version involving mashed potatoes and stew, and Jamie wasn’t singing at all. The awkwardness was palpable now that they were about to leave, and Karen felt like a complete failure as a mother. She tried again.

  ‘Sarah, I know you spent your birthday on your own…’ She fished around in her bag for her purse. ‘Here you are, darling, go and buy something lovely.’

  Twenty pounds didn’t seem to cheer Sarah up, so Karen added another, and watched her daughter’s face for a smile. It didn’t come.

  There was a pause. Karen was close to losing her temper now but tried to keep the mood upbeat. ‘So, what’s it going to be? Back to the flat? You’re all very welcome but I have to work, I’m afraid. You can watch the telly.’

  ‘Do you have QI?’

  This was the first thing her youngest child had said since getting into the car. He didn’t look up; he was too busy cleaning his knife and fork with a paper napkin.

  ‘I have BBC 1 and BBC 2, will that do?’

  There was a pause, and they looked at one another until Sarah broke the silence.

  ‘Mum, it might be better if we went back to Dad’s if you’ve got to work. Jamie looks really tired. He doesn’t like being out of his routine, so if you’re busy Dad can help him with his homework. I usually do but I’ve got my own, and it’s getting late.’

  Karen dredged her memory. She had a feeling Charlie had already told her there was a reason that they couldn’t be at home with him tonight, but she wasn’t sure. She couldn’t remember, but if there was he could always get in touch later and she could make a plan. Better that they were in familiar surroundings, she told herself, and decided not to dwell on the thought that she could have tried a bit harder to convince them to stay with her. Jack, her classic middle child, stood up and started to walk towards the door.

  ‘Jack, come back here, what’s the matter?’

  Sarah replied while Jack stood kicking the skirting board. ‘He missed out on football club, and basketball, actually, Mum. Dad said you had the forms and the teacher never got them and I tried to sort it out but you need a signed permission slip and he didn’t have one.’

  Karen remembered then, her insistence on seeing the forms, her promise to get them back. She had a sinking feeling that they weren’t far from the birthday card on her desk.

  ‘Alright, let’s get these pizzas to go.’

  She watched as Sarah smoothed Jamie’s hair and steered his arms into his sleeves. She felt a muted pang of something deep inside, just before her mind turned back to a thought she had been halfway through earlier. Yes, she needed to get back to it, and far better for the children to get some sleep and wake up fresh.

  The car journey only lasted a few minutes. More awkward kisses and they parted on promises of seeing each other that weekend for Jack’s social football on the Common. Karen decided that the lecture to her ex-husband about subject choices and getting enough sleep could wait until then.

  ‘Love you all, see you Saturday.’

  Charlie was bearing down on the car from the garden path, and Karen gave a wave and got the kids out just in time. Duty done, she drove off, mind clearing as she went. Behind her on the pavement Sarah stood with Jamie, her arm protectively round his little shoulders, while Jack zigzagged up the path to the front door as their father watched her drive away, his hand on the top of his head, exasperation clearly visible.

  Her laptop was in the back, and she could work at home. A half-bottle of Pinot Grigio awaited her, and she had eaten. She felt a sense of freedom and almost excitement thinking how close she was to a breakthrough in her research on how to maximise the potential of autistic people in society and work situations. She hit the High Road quite quickly – it was a route she drove often – and then sat in the inevitable jam leading to the turn-off for the road back to her flat. Ten minutes later she had a clear drive ahead. She put her foot on the accelerator.

  Nothing.

  She was stuck, and with a sinking feeling she looked down at her petrol gauge. Three times this month – what was wrong with her? Everyone else could manage to keep fuel in their cars, but she seemed incapable of it. She could hear her husband’s voice: You think you’re above the normalities of life – mothering, cooking, parenting. It’s pathetic: your children need structure, your car needs petrol. You will never be happy.

  People were starting to beep their horns, trying to get round her, and she couldn’t think where the nearest garage was. Two big Polish guys got out of a white van and offered her a push on to the pavement. This was an important day: her many ideas, the strands of her paper seemed to be finally forming a cohesive mass in her mind. She needed to get home, and she could deal with the car in the morning. She steered up on to the pavement, got out, and waved away the guys who had helped her, manners lost in her frustration at the situation. They got back into the van, and shouted something at her as they drove past. The next car to pass her actually put his window down. ‘Ugly bitch, try smiling, it might never happen. Haven’t you heard of petrol stations?’

  Shrugging it off, she started to walk. It was too far to walk all the way, but she might see a taxi. Ten minutes passed and she didn’t see a single one. Finally she sat down at a bus stop and waited. When a bus finally pulled up, she was thinking about her idea and running it through her mind, over and over. She didn’t want to lose her thread before she got home.

  ‘Staverton Road, please.’

  There were several people behind her and the lady driver behind the window just looked at her expectantly.

  ‘Sorry, how much is it?’

  ‘You need your Oyster card, love.’

  ‘What? I don’t have one. Here, I have money.’

  ‘We don’t take cash. Don’t you have a contactless card?’

  ‘Um, no, I don’t think so… ’ Karen had no idea what the driver was talking about.

  ‘Then you need to go to an outlet that sells Oyster cards and get the next bus.’

  By the time she had managed to find a shop, make the purchase, get on to another bus and get home, Karen was shattered. She picked up her bags and dragged herself towards the house. She had left her light on again; she could see it from the road, and as she looked up she caught sight of a young
man in the window of the middle flat, below hers. He was apparently sitting on a chair, staring out into the dusk. He looked straight at her and they locked eyes. The tight formality of his posture, the way he cocked his head on one side, and the immediate discomfort when he realised she was looking at him, stopped her in her tracks. Then suddenly without warning he threw himself to one side and was gone. Karen shook her head, and carried on walking.

  Opening the door, she grabbed her mail. Who had a postman who took the trouble to make letters look this neat? Above the cheap IKEA desk which passed for a table, mail repository and general dropping point, she noticed that there was now a perfectly centralised clock. Plain, black and white. Cheap, but telling the correct time and ticking silently away. Below that, centralised again, was a noticeboard. Small, functional and cork, it had one solitary note pinned to it.

  WORK WANTED. MUST BE WITHIN TWENTY MINUTES’ TRAVELLING DISTANCE. INSTRUCTION ESSENTIAL. PLEASE CONTACT NICK IN FLAT ONE, MY NUMBER IS 07938 557801. CALL BEFORE KNOCKING.

  Without giving it much thought, Karen turned to go upstairs, and as she climbed the two flights to her front door she thought about the glimpse of the young, neat man looking out of his window on the first floor. His hair had been just a little too perfectly combed with a straight parting, collar buttoned up to his chin, reactions just a little too jumpy. Karen registered all this and lodged it in her mind for later.

  She could hear her children before she could see them. What the hell? Her heart sank, everything seemed to be conspiring against her today. She opened the door. Sarah was sitting at the table with Jamie, helping him with his homework, and Jack was on the sofa watching television. Karen put on her best game face.

  ‘Hi, guys, what are you doing here?’

  She realised she probably looked less than enthusiastic about seeing them, but she could only do so much.

  ‘Dad had plans, and said it’s impossible to stay there tonight. He dropped us off and went.’

  Karen was furious. She plugged her dead phone in and waited until it sprung into life. Charlie, her ex, had sent a text.

  Jesus, Karen, you know it’s my work dinner tonight. I’m up for promotion. We discussed this. I have a work conference all this week and the kids need to come to you to do homework unless I can get away early. They haven’t actually spent the night with you in over a month and I need a bit of flexibility for the next few days. Let me know when you get back. They all have homework and it isn’t fair for them to be ferried from pillar to post, not to mention that I’m now going to be late. Thanks for nothing.

  It came back to her now: the conference, the promotion. Karen took yet another deep breath and resigned herself to a long night ahead. She had some DVDs that had come free with the Sunday papers a while back, and they could watch those when they had finished their homework. It was already after six and she needed to get this new idea down as soon as she could.

  ‘Right,’ she said, ‘I need some peace and quiet because I have a very complicated problem to work out. I’m right here if you need me, just let me know if you need any help with anything. Lucky we’ve all had a lovely dinner. Did you bring the leftover pizza with you?’

  Sarah nodded, and pointed to the boxes on the side in the kitchen. Not for the first time this evening, Karen felt redundant, and turned on her laptop.

  Eventually the children cuddled up together on the sofa and The Lion King seemed to please everyone. Karen managed to tune out the annoying little monkey and the Disney songs and was soon engrossed in the world of data and extrapolation that she understood best.

  It was four the next morning before she stopped typing her proposition, but she didn’t feel tired, she felt jubilant. There was no one to tell, though. The children had drifted off in reverse order of age and Sarah had lifted Jamie into bed, Karen had carried Jack, and Sarah had watched the news before she went to bed. Information collated, ideas crystallised, Karen had finished. She emailed it to her work address so that she could add this work to the main body of her paper tomorrow, and rubbed her eyes.

  It had taken a long time as a practising children’s epidemiologist for Karen to identify the field she was most passionate about. The first big row that she had ever had with her ex-husband was when she had been invited to be part of a panel exploring how everything from toxic chemicals to social factors shaped the health of children from birth to age twenty-one. It had taken place in Boston. Charlie hadn’t wanted her to go; the children were tiny, in fact she had been pregnant with Jamie and even Sarah had only been in Year Two. Karen had realised then that her career was more important to her than her family, and she had made it clear to Charlie that he would have to pick up the slack. He hadn’t liked that, and it had been the beginning of the end. His one-night stand with his secretary had been a symptom, not the cause of their break-up, Karen knew that.

  That first Boston conference had given Karen an insatiable appetite for statistics and cause and effect. Eventually she had distilled her vast theoretical knowledge down to one subject: autism. She had become obsessed with its causes, and then with how social factors could help those on the spectrum to lead productive lives. She lived and breathed the apparently endless facts and figures. She gobbled up the latest estimates of the increasing number of people diagnosed, and now she was concentrating on the lack of specifically designed routes into employment for autistic children. The lack of career opportunities and lack of appropriate teachers who could maximise these children’s potential kept her awake at night. Karen was determined that there should be a formula for this growing part of the community which would maximise their contribution and happiness and, where possible, keep them in the workforce. It was her passion, and kept her focused on the path ahead, even though it might keep her away from her kids. Karen saw it as self-sacrifice. Others seemed to think she was being selfish.

  Even discounting the discredited studies, no one could deny that autism was a rapidly increasing problem, with at least one in a hundred children on the spectrum today (up from one in two thousand in the 1980s). You had to be sensible about it, of course, there was a lot of over-diagnosis, but Karen had seen so many skilled children with Asperger’s going to waste, and she wanted to write the definitive paper identifying early markers, methods of coping, and eventually career and education paths that really would make use of the incredible skill-sets that some of the high-functioning Asperger’s children demonstrated. All she needed now was a perfect case study to back up her findings and she would have everything she needed to present her paper.

  On her way to the bathroom, Karen passed the mirror, caught sight of herself and looked away quickly. She might have a sound intellect, but she couldn’t remember the last time she had put on a slick of lipstick or mascara. Sacrifices had to be made. She smiled as she thought that might be a good epitaph for her, then wondered who would be there to read it.

  Karen put this maudlin train of thought to one side and, after a lukewarm shower and a cup of coffee, she curled up on the sofa and set her alarm. The couple of hours she had allocated herself for sleep passed much too quickly and she awoke disorientated and feeling a bit paranoid from tiredness. She crept into the bedroom and woke up her children. Jack kept falling back to sleep, but Sarah was up straight away and gently levered Jamie’s legs over the side of the bed and pulled him into a standing position. ‘Arms up, Jamie, come on, time for school.’

  Karen had lent them a T-shirt each to sleep in, but they still looked a sorry sight in the day before’s school uniforms, underwear turned inside out. At least their homework was done. If Charlie was trying to be Father of the Year and make her look bad, he could at least have sent them with a change of clothes and clean underwear, or a toothbrush.

  Jack had been handed back his football by Sarah as an incentive to hurry up, and was bouncing it on the floor repeatedly. Suddenly, the banging was answered by something like a broom handle from below, and muffled shouting. Karen had lived in the house for five years, ever since her marria
ge had broken down, and never before had she heard a peep from the flat below her. Now in the space of twenty-four hours she had seen the occupant staring at her from his window, read a note from him about a job, and now apparently woken him up.

  She did the best she could, making them all brush their teeth with her toothbrush and untangling their hair, then called a cab to get the kids to school and herself to the hospital. Five minutes later she had disgorged them all at the gate to the playground, a five-pound note for the canteen taking the place of breakfast at her flat. She watched as Sarah tenderly led Jamie towards the primary school entrance and handed him over, Jack running in ahead of them to join his friends, and then for the second time in twenty-four hours she drove away from her children. As she left, she realised that she had never noticed before just how dependent her youngest son was on his sister, and she wondered whether it was because he missed his mother. She dismissed the thought, reminding herself that they had a primary parent at home, before her mind filled up with the day ahead.

  As she sat at her work station, the morning sped by. Surrounded by case files, she worked her way through pictures and biographies of familiar faces that she had interviewed over the years, trying to place them on the spectrum. Familiar pathologies and symptoms swam in front of her eyes, but she had been involved with most of these case studies for too long for them to be viewed as objective by her peers. She needed a fresh case, but had no idea how to find one.

  Twelve-thirty came around and she was no further ahead. Stomach grumbling, she headed for the canteen. She filled her tray with a balanced slow-release mix of chicken salad on wholegrain bread, a banana and a sparkling water, then looked for somewhere to sit. Every table was full, and she had no option other than to sit perched on the end of a group of lively-looking young people who obviously all knew each other.