When I said that, which was true, she put her head down and stopped talking. I didn’t like having to think about her life, or what she was doing. I started to walk towards the door and didn’t say goodbye.
I heard her say something else. It sounded like, ‘Apparently, yes.’ It made no sense, so I didn’t turn round.
I can’t remember the journey home now, and I can’t remember what I did in the afternoon. I can remember googling car accidents to see if I could find a picture to print of the girl who looked like Meg, and I can remember that as I sat looking at pure girls on the computer I closed my eyes at the end and remembered that lock of hair, and the feel of her lips. I came all over my desk and I didn’t even care. I also googled symptoms of being in love, and I had more than two. I was in love, and it was a good feeling. I sat quietly knowing that in the morning I would go to work and see her again.
9 | Karen
‘He alone who owns the youth gains the future.’
— Adolf Hitler
Tuesday morning
Karen woke up to the faint echo of a dream that she couldn’t quite pin down but it only lasted a moment. She pushed the imaginary from her mind and turned her thoughts excitedly towards Nick. She had thought carefully about it and he really was the case study she’d been looking for. He was the right age, the right background, had finished his education, and most incredibly of all he lived under the same roof as her and now worked in the same hospital. She allowed herself a satisfied stretch of happiness, and started to think again about everything coming together, the forgiveness of her family and the plaudits of her colleagues. How could it go wrong now? All she had to do was to keep collating information here and at work and she would soon have enough material to prove that there was a valuable and neglected section of the population who could be a massive resource, working, contributing and having real quality of life. In order to accurately record the data and make it into a study, she would have to see Nick at least three times in a twenty-four-hour period in a mix of home and work environments. Karen didn’t envisage much of a problem in achieving that; the issue was more likely to be making sure she didn’t alienate him, or she would get very little co-operation and even less data. Writing a research paper was a technically challenging issue, and it needed to be done properly.
It was 6.45 on Tuesday morning. She would jump out of bed and catch Nick before he set out for work. That way she would be able to chat to him in the car and do the first entry in the log when she got to the office.
She was particularly looking forward to hearing his reactions to his day in the morgue. Detachment from emotion was one of the main signs of being on the autistic spectrum, but its effects on behaviour in situations traditionally regarded as extreme had never really been studied in any depth. It was not as if you could just put a vulnerable subject in close proximity to death just to see what happened to him or her, but by this strange turn of fate she had managed it. She showered, dressed and headed out of the front door, looking forward to the day ahead for the first time in a very long while. Walking down the first flight of stairs she felt confident and optimistic, but as she came towards Nick’s door she realised that Tam was collecting his post. Before she knew what she was doing, Karen had flattened herself against the wall, and was trying to breathe as quietly as she could.
It wasn’t until she heard Tam’s footsteps coming up the stairs and across the landing towards her, that she fully appreciated the picture she was presenting. Hands clenched in balls, mouth in a rictus pose, body squished into the corner of the landing, eyes tightly closed.
She heard Tam clear his throat right in front of her and opened her eyes.
‘Are you alright?’
His voice was deep and attractive, and suddenly Karen wasn’t actually sure how she felt. She knew that from most people’s standpoint she probably seemed as different to them as Nick did to her. Her husband was always telling her what a joke she was, and now she was trying to prove him and her children wrong, along with the scientific community. Now, her confidence receding, she wondered whether putting a young man on the autistic spectrum to work in a morgue so that she could write a paper to make herself seem more credible was really defensible. Was she doing it for Nick and so many others like him, or for herself? Self-doubt was not something that Karen had ever indulged in and suddenly she felt furious, as if something precious was being snatched from her. She felt uncertain, shaky even, and, when she opened her eyes and looked at Tam, all remaining conviction that she was doing all this for the higher good fell away.
Tam put his hand gently on her arm and Karen shook it off, turned her back and knocked on Nick’s door. No answer.
She knocked again, harder.
‘I don’t think he’s in. I saw him going up the path half an hour ago.’
Before she realised it was going to happen, Karen was sobbing. Huge retching sobs, for herself, for all the hours she had put in to prove her worth when no one was watching, for her husband and her children, and for Tam’s gentle hand on her.
‘Whoa, what’s the matter? If I upset you the other day I apologise. I’m a bit blunt at the best of times; it comes with the job. Plods, you know… I didn’t mean to make you feel bad; parenting is complicated. That’s why I’ve never done it, I suppose. Come down to my flat for a coffee, and calm down.’
Karen relaxed; the crying had made her feel better, and she wiped her nose on her sleeve. Her shoulders still convulsed now and then, and she let Tam put his arm round her and lead her downstairs.
‘Come on, I know how to make you feel better.’
Tam was unlocking the door and smiling at her over his shoulder now. Something deep inside her fought back and she shouted in his face, furious now.
‘Don’t tell me what to do, or what I need. I’m perfectly alright, and I need to be at work.’
Turning, she rushed out of the door, down the path and into the car. Nick must already be at the hospital and she needed to see him. She wasn’t about to turn into a ‘little woman’ and blow her life’s work just so that Tam could have a handy shag whenever he felt like it. She spun her wheel, turning to get on to the road, and glanced once into her rear-view mirror, to see Tam standing in jogging bottoms, looking perplexed, staring after her. Karen sped off. For once she was taking control. She pushed down her doubts, and the series of images from the past few days of people in her rear-view mirror as she drove away.
On the drive to the hospital Karen made a plan. Three observations a day was going to mean she would have to stick close to Nick. If he was going to insist on using public transport, then she would follow him, to see how he coped with crowds, and the rush hour, and proximity to other people. It would sort out the problem with the car constantly running out of petrol anyway, and she would get a bit of exercise. She didn’t let herself think about Tam once, and that felt like a personal victory.
She parked her car, and went straight to her office. She hung up her coat and turned on the computer. It was hugely important to Karen that she had her own space, even if her ex had called it ‘the cupboard’, or ‘that fucking shoe box you call an office’. The nameplate on her door and the sign in the car park were the only two pieces of tangible proof that she existed at all in the eyes of the world. She sat down and cleared her mind. Everyone breaking new ground had the same doubts, she was sure of that. She opened Excel and drew up a spreadsheet for the visits, then opened a new file and prepared a document ready for her observations.
She got up, went to the lift, and while she descended she planned how best to approach Nick when she got downstairs. The doors opened and Karen walked down to the kitchen. Pete was leaning against the counter, waiting for the kettle to boil. Karen began to understand why they needed an assistant. Pete smiled.
‘Hi – Karen, isn’t it? Thanks for sending Nick to us! He’s quiet, but he’s doing great. Does whatever we ask, no fainting, no puking. Seems to actually enjoy the work as much as you can tell. Even ate his breakfast down
in the body room next to the freezers this morning. Honestly don’t know how we would have managed without him; Mark’s off today, so Nick’s been thrown in at the deep end. I don’t usually like leaving guys down there alone when they’re new, but when I told him I’d be gone for an hour he didn’t mind at all.’
‘Thanks for the feedback, Pete, I’m glad it’s working out. I’ll go and see if he needs a lift home later.’
‘OK, see you, Karen.’
If Karen had been interested enough to look, she would have seen the second perplexed male face of the morning staring after her, but her mind was already with Nick in the body room. She turned right, and in front of her was a cold, apparently empty white-painted hallway. There was no sign of human life, and Karen walked alone towards the area Pete had indicated. Past the relatives’ area, the sluices and the drying room and towards the freezers. If that was where Nick was eating breakfast then that was a good place to start.
Karen came round the corner and there he was, clearly visible through the glass panel in the middle of the double doors. Poised over a steel trolley, the angle of his tall body obscured all but the feet of the corpse below him, arms spread and his right arm raised above the body.
Karen’s immediate reaction was pride. No one instructing him, no one giving him tasks to do; here was her subject, taking the initiative and dealing with a difficult situation on his own. She shrank back behind the doors and watched as his hand rose and fell, and she thought to herself that he must be washing the body. There was something in his hand, which Karen couldn’t see clearly. Nick was intent on what he was doing and she waited to see what he would do next. This was exactly what she needed to observe. Concentration on one task to the total exclusion of all others was one of the ten characteristics she had already classified as being transformable into useful social skills, allowing these subjects to contribute and function in society. Karen suddenly made out what he was doing. He was brushing hair, the strands of blonde rising, held up by static, from his hand. Long, translucent white-blonde hair, suspended in the position Nick lifted it into, then relaxing and falling slowly back towards the head of the cadaver.
Karen decided not to disturb him but to log the visit and come back at lunchtime, but, just as she was about to turn, she caught something out of the corner of her eye, and looked back towards the body room. Nick was bending towards the body now. Karen thought he must have noticed something out of place, but he kept on bending until his face was close to hers, and then he smoothed her hair back from her forehead, and he kissed her.
He kissed her on the forehead first, and then the cheek. The last thing Karen saw as she backed down the corridor was his hand pushing the sheet down from her body, and his mouth covering hers.
Karen retraced her steps, heart pounding, walked straight into the lift and hurried, head down, to her office. Shutting the door behind her, she scuttled to her desk. The question she had burning in her head was simple. What should she do?
Karen thought back through the many experiences she had of children and adults on the spectrum. She knew that if children were already suffering from Asperger’s, the way they were treated when young was incredibly important. Abuse of any sort, physical or sexual, was incredibly difficult for these children to process, and their adult behaviour became skewed as a result. It was true for anyone, but Asperger’s sufferers didn’t have the emotional tools to distinguish between good behaviour and bad. That was often cited as a reason why there was such a high proportion of Asperger’s sufferers in the prison system; the original condition was exacerbated by trauma, and, as with any vulnerable group, autistic children were more likely to end up in care, or in boarding schools, and were at a higher risk of abuse. You had to love the human race; the weakest were always most likely to be attacked.
Karen needed to find out whether Nick had gone through any childhood trauma that had made him more detached than was usual when you were at his level on the autistic spectrum. He seemed to have a pronounced detachment for his intelligence level. Karen compared him to Temple Grandin, someone who had achieved great things by using every coping strategy at her disposal. She had tried therapies and drugs and even a cattle press to subdue her anxiety. That was the gold standard for Asperger’s achievement, whereas Nick did not seem, from what she had seen so far, to have had the benefit of much intervention at all. She would wait and watch, but interacting with a cadaver was not a good sign. Karen decided to ignore the voice in her head telling her that leaving him in the morgue was not a good plan.
When 12.30 came round, Karen took a deep breath and headed back towards the lift. It was set at the back of a little-used corridor. Death was not something that sat well with the patients, which Karen had always found odd. Surely the possibility of death was all around us, and having it hidden, and whisked away like a magic trick, seemed like denying something fundamental.
She stepped out into the corridor for the second time, and it was a different place entirely. Pete was standing chatting to an orderly outside the break room, coffees in hand, and Nick was walking towards them, eyes down.
‘Hi, Nick.’
Karen got no response, so went towards him. As she got closer his agitation at her arrival was clear; his hands started flapping and he half turned away.
‘Don’t worry, I just popped down to see if you were getting on OK. Do you want some lunch or a lift home? I can run you now and then come back to work.’
The closer she got, the more agitated Nick became. ‘I get the bus from the corner, twenty minutes because they can use the bus lane, and then I walk to my job. I don’t need a lift, and I have work here this afternoon.’
With this Nick picked up a sandwich and drink from the side and walked back towards the freezers.
‘Nick, don’t forget to clean up if you drop crumbs.’
Pete was grinning as he said it, and Nick didn’t turn but his head was nodding, and his steps got a little faster.
‘Jesus, he may not be very communicative but he is a hell of a worker. Honestly, you have to show him once, and he doesn’t need to be shown again. We’ve even asked him to stick around till three today, to have a really deep clean of the drying room. He’s taken over all the body prep, watched an autopsy, and not flinched at any of it. Best guy we’ve ever had down here, even if he reminds me slightly of Marty Feldman in Young Frankenstein.’
The guys laughed, but Karen didn’t find it funny. Nick was coping and these guys seemed to find him good to have around. Still, Karen thought she had better cover herself and enquire further.
‘Can I ask, has he been a problem in any way? Has his work been up to scratch?’
‘Yeah, I just said, his work’s great and he’s willing to do anything. Just likes to be left alone when you aren’t giving him an instruction. That’s fine with us.’
Karen smiled tightly, then headed back to the lift, bad-taste pathologist humour following her up the corridor. Perhaps Nick was just taking their lead and getting it slightly wrong. At the end of the day he was working with cadavers, and there was little harm he could do to them. She knew it was him she should be worrying about. He was functioning, even excelling in a job, and surely that was the most important thing. The little voice whispering in her ear that trouble was coming and something had gone wrong that might well be her fault had stopped by the time she got back to her computer. Her study would be groundbreaking, and sometimes hiccups along the way were just that. It would be Pete she would be interviewing to collate the data for the work-related part of the paper, and he didn’t seem to have any misgivings. She headed back to her office, and completed the morning log to read: Observed Nick paying detailed attention to his work, leaning over body to make sure it was meticulously cleaned.
Karen began to think that made much more sense, wrote up the lunchtime visit, did some research on different reactions to childhood trauma and headed home at 6.30. She had tried to keep an eye on the car park through her window but she had still been busy at 3 p.m. a
nd she could see how he reacted on public transport in the morning. She was already excited about her journey in tomorrow; she would be up at the crack of dawn to make sure she didn’t miss him.
She walked in through the front door with her mind still full of her day, feeling she had made some progress. She stopped for a minute outside Tam’s door, feeling she should say something, but she didn’t know what would help, and she didn’t want to take the lid off her feelings again; it was making her confused and she needed all her concentration to get this paper finished. She would have plenty of time for a personal life when she had got her findings down. People were suffering right now due to a lack of clear, defined diagnosis, and she had no time to waste.
On the way upstairs she put her ear to Nick’s door. She could hear him cleaning. She had never heard the hoover on in the evening before, and it surprised her. Most autistic subjects hated loud noise; perhaps being in a work environment was changing some of Nick’s behaviours. Making a mental note to add this to the evening log, which she had been battling to see how she would fill, Karen almost skipped up the remaining stairs to her room.
What the fuck was going on here? As she crossed the landing she realised that noises were coming from inside her flat. The smell of cooking pervaded the landing, and laughter, children’s laughter, and now male laughter, was coming from inside.
She froze, again. The overriding temptation was to creep back down the stairs and return to her office. It could only be the children and their father. What the hell was he doing in her flat? He probably wanted to give her another lecture. Racking her brains to remember what day she had said she would have the children, she was starting to retreat when the door was thrown open and Jack stood there, grinning, his mouth covered in chocolate, and the guy behind him wasn’t his father – it was Tam.
‘I lost a tooth.’
‘He lost a tooth because Tam tied cotton round it and then the door handle and slammed it.’
The Man on the Middle Floor Page 12