Television, though… She had looked in the mirror the day before and had to admit a little work would be needed before she was suitable for public viewing. Five inches of white hair led into frizzy orange ends that had been broken by old elastic bands. Then there were the unplucked eyebrows, sallow skin and a frayed cardigan wrapped round her in place of a coat or heating. Days passed when she didn’t know what time it was and she slept when the words on her screen no longer made any sense. She had taken to ordering a takeaway on a Friday, which she ate with a spoon from the fridge for most of the rest of the week whenever she was too hungry to think clearly.
Karen re-read an article she had found in the Huffington Post. In ten years the cost of treatment in the United States alone would reach 400 billion dollars annually, and there wouldn’t be enough undiagnosed adults to man the Armed Forces. Her dreams jumped from theories on absent parenting causing disconnection, to statistics on weedkillers, vaccines, fields of corn waving in the wind bereft of poppies, bunches of rape growing alongside motorways – it was all linked, and Karen wanted to be the one to put the whole picture together. She added Prince Charles to her list of influential figures who were anti-GM foods, along with the World Health Organisation.
Karen stretched and showered. She longed for her little office, or her car, both gone now. She’d lost her job in the whole fallout from Nick’s job placement, and she missed having somewhere to go, and the prestige that went with it. Dressing in the same clothes she had taken off earlier, she sat back down and looked at her list. She needed to concentrate. She checked over a paragraph she had written about Einstein explaining how he would have been diagnosed as on the spectrum today. He would have been joined by Lewis Carroll, Mozart, Andy Warhol; she had a list.
An hour later, Karen picked up her mug. The tea she sipped was cold, made before her shower, and the mug was misshapen. She remembered that Sarah had made it for her years before at a Christmas pottery club. It had a green dragon painted on it, which had once been a private joke when they emailed each other. The roughness of it touched something inside Karen and she pushed it away. She checked her emails again. One from the BBC telling her that they weren’t looking for a science correspondent, and she had received a similar one last week from Channel 4. Before she knew what she was doing, she had picked up the biggest file and thrown it across the room.
She was on her knees picking up papers with tears running down her face, a tumbler of whisky in her free hand, when she heard the front doorbell. Reluctantly, she got up. It was a cold night. She hesitated and pulled her cardigan tighter around her. She heard a car start directly outside and got up to look out of the window. Her stomach growled and she realised it had been a while since she’d last eaten. For a minute she tried to remember whether she’d ordered a takeaway, but she was nearly sure she hadn’t. Instead, two small figures were walking up her driveway and for a moment Karen raised her hand, ready to knock on the window, but at the last minute she pulled back and turned away.
And there was one moment, only caught in her peripheral vision, that would stay with her always, as hard as she tried to expunge it. It was the image of the turn of heads towards her as she got to the window, a collective excited intake of breath, and the looks of tremulous hope on the faces of her children, Jack and Sarah. As Karen stood in the shadows she watched the car reverse up the path, past the bins, past the spot where she had last seen Tam and Nick, and they drove off into the night.
Karen told herself she would call. As soon as the paper was finished, she would take them all away on holiday. Perhaps they would see her on Sky News and she could explain to them that it had all been worth it. She could get Sarah some work experience. The thoughts calmed her, and she reassured herself that there was time. No good dwelling on it: she needed to get this file sorted, and then everything would fall into place.
It would be years later when Karen realised that this particular evening had been the last time her children had come to see her. By then, a carapace had grown over her soul and she reminded herself often that while she had been doing vital research that would ultimately benefit her children and their children, they had not cared enough to stay in touch, and had for their own selfish reasons rejected her. The shadows that ran past her front door in the middle of the night eventually became familiar, and they muddled along together. Just occasionally that three a.m. shiver would run down her spine while the sweet smell that had filled the air for weeks after Nick was arrested ghosted round her nostrils and she would turn for a moment over her shoulder, and look back quickly at her monitor before she could see what was there.
19 | Nick
‘Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.’
— Aristotle
I’m twenty-five. I’ve never really felt still enough to think about my age before, but now I talk to someone every day, and I have antipsychotic medication and I feel much less scared and much less in a hurry as if my dread has been pushed down and can’t find the way out. Twenty-five is young. I didn’t know I was young.
In my screaming, crying weeks of rooms and needles and germs and strangers after the park and after the job in the morgue and after Sarah came to my flat and after the cleaner was in my bed, I wanted to die. I can’t remember a time when I felt so twisted up and tight and curled and attacked. I wanted to run away so much, more even than when I was in the bedroom with my grandpa.
The police came into my flat, and broke my door, and opened all my cupboards. They pulled out my clothes and put germs everywhere, waving guns, and wearing masks. I wanted to curl up and I clenched my hands over my ears. I had so much to sort out, I couldn’t think how I would get my flat tidy, or the cleaning girl out of my bed, or get a new bed, or get my routine going again. I felt like my head inside was going to snap. So much fear and so much panic and so much wanting to scream and not stop, but I couldn’t even do that, and, just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, policemen hurting my arms and pulling me down my stairs, and I couldn’t even put my coat on to be warm.
Then taking my things from my pockets and not giving them back, and in front of everyone patting me when I hate being touched, and reading me the rights about going to court when I didn’t want to go, then shouting again when I got upset. My mother was on the pavement and crying and I thought she had come for me and I calmed down a little bit when I saw her, but then I saw him. My grandpa. He was with her, just behind, and I really started to scream inside then and then out loud. He spoke to me, but I couldn’t hear the words over my own crying and the hands on my ears. I was pushing tight to keep him out.
The police station was even worse, bright lights, and they took all my clothes and put me in other ones that weren’t mine, made of paper, and I didn’t have proper shoes because they took those too so how would I get home? Scraping my nails, cutting them when they were already the length I like them, combing my hair when I was in handcuffs … there was not an inch of me they didn’t look at, and I had to shower in front of a stranger, and I just sat down on the floor of the shower and cried. I had a dirty bar of soap, no antibacterial shower wash, and then I was in a dirty room with rings of germs on the table. I asked to go home, and no one answered. I wouldn’t sit on the chair; it was stained.
Then Tam my neighbour came and he is a policeman, and he came to help me even after I kept him in the flat and kept Sarah there. He even came as a witness when I was being interviewed and he brought a doctor and the doctor waited with me in the corner and got me a new chair, and wiped it with wipes which kill germs and I sat on it. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, I wanted to go home, but Tam told me that you have to tell when you hurt someone and explain what happened and why you did it. They had a tape recorder so I would only have to tell it once, and I had someone with me who was a responsible adult and when I got upset I could stop. I had to stop a lot.
The hardest bit was when I had to explain about being scared. I don’t like being scared and I was scared all the
time. My grandpa was the hardest thing to say out loud, and I had to do it with my hands over my ears. Don’t hear what you are saying, but you still can when it is you speaking even when you block out all the noise outside.
I told them, though, and everyone even said I was brave. Very brave. He hurt me, and I knew then that it wasn’t my fault, because everyone told me so even though my grandpa had said it was. My mother even started crying when she came to see me, and she said that all the lessons from my grandpa were wrong, and she wished he was dead. I had so many horrible pictures in my head, of my grandpa pulling my hair, and shouting at me, and telling me to bend over, get up, be more careful, touch this, stroke this, fucking suck it up. He told me how stupid I was and how everything was my fault. Over and over. Every time we were on our own. It didn’t make me better like he said it would, it made me scream inside.
Ed who talks to me every day now because he is my doctor always tells me I am doing well and I have my pills and feel like I can look at myself from a bit further away. I have Asperger’s syndrome and OCD and depression and psychosis and these are actual illnesses and conditions, and in the beginning when I was good at school and Mother and me were a unit, then I only had Asperger’s and the rest came because of my grandpa and my brother dying and my mother being young, and because I started off different. Tam says that even if we are different we must feel sorry about hurting people, that the man and the woman in the park were good people just enjoying themselves in the sun, they weren’t disgusting, they weren’t doing what my grandpa did to me. The cleaner didn’t mean to be noisy, she was just young, and she didn’t realise that it would make me upset.
It is nearly a year since I came here and the screaming months at the beginning seem like another person to me now. The panic and the fear are still there, but now that my room is square, and I know what is happening every single hour of every single day, I don’t let it rise up in me. My mother comes and sometimes I lie on my bed and she reads to me and they are the stories from a long time ago that she used to read to Billy and me, and then I could never be still and now I can. I can listen to a whole story without moving too much and I laugh at the funny bits but I know when to stop.
This is a life. I understand who I am. I am on the autistic spectrum. It is a condition. It is not evil – that is what my grandpa did – that is evil. I have done terrible things that I didn’t have the tools to understand were terrible. My mother says I am a victim, and Ed my doctor says I am a casualty of my upbringing, and that comforts me. I think that is right and I wish that my grandpa had known good from bad, and had a Jiminy Cricket on his shoulder like in the cartoon of Pinocchio.
My room is white, everywhere, and everyone knows my routine, and it got painted specially for me to make me feel calm with lead-free paint, and I have my own bedding and my mother takes it and washes it and I trust her, and she brings it back and it has no germs. I have a place for my clothes and a shower and a lavatory and a bed and everything is brand new because I couldn’t stop the panic about the germs, and I do art as a hobby. Every week when I finish a new painting I put it up on my wall and I take down the one that was there before and my mother takes that one to her house because my grandfather is locked up in a prison and now she can choose everything in her life because he is not in charge. He is having a trial and I am going to tell everyone what he did to me and Ed will come and won’t have to see my grandpa in real life. My mother comes on visiting days and I am glad she comes and then I am glad she goes because I don’t like crying and questions.
Sometimes I do pictures of Billy, sometimes of my mother, and sometimes of things I dream about. My mother had a pond when I was very little. It was full of tadpoles and every day I went outside and lay on the stones next to it. Mum says I was three or four, but she doesn’t remember which because she was very busy then. In the beginning they were dots living in jelly, then they got bigger and started to wriggle inside it and it was see-through and then they were like jerky black lines. Soon they got little bumps of heads and tails and got bigger and I lay and caught them on my hands and kept them in jars. I watched them get back legs, then front legs, and then their tails dropped off and they were tiny tiny frogs and then they could jump and I put them back in the pond, then they hopped on to lily pads and I draw them a lot, with all their different bodies, and different ways of being. I draw the stones round the pond, and the long green lawn, and my mother on the step calling me, and the long line of lavender, and the smell is in my head when I draw it and my mother bought me a lavender pillow and it helps me go to sleep, and I have a lavender beanbag and I can put it on my shoulders when I get panicky. I can draw with my eyes closed. Sometimes I can remember it so clearly, being by the pond. It’s the last memory I have which has no panic in it, just me every day with tadpoles, sometimes on warm stones, sometimes on cold.
I never draw my grandpa. I never draw him dragging me up by the hand and knocking my jars of tadpoles over and the dark room where I was crying as I thought of them, wriggling trying to find the water then crying from the pain, or the panic will just come back and the shouting will be in my head.
There isn’t a good conclusion, my mother says, and I know what a conclusion is because Ed told me. It is an ending. You could say I have a story that ended before it started, but that is just what people say. I have a story. I have Asperger’s syndrome, and that is nearly the same as high-functioning autism, and everyone says that in a low voice because it is a bad thing. I don’t know what it’s like to not have it, but I do know that I don’t have the sadness and I don’t have the guilt and I don’t have the questions that everyone else has. I just have an understanding of what has happened to me now. If I can stay peaceful and have my routine, then I am where I want to be.
I have focus, and now that I am here for a long time and now that I know that, I can plan, and I have things I want to study. I have my room, and people to make my meals, and people to explain things to me, and exercise outside, and I don’t have my grandpa. I have my mother, and people to help me, and I understand that what I have done has made a lot of people unhappy. I try not to do the list of them when I am going off to sleep – the parents of the man and the lady in the park, their friends, the people they worked with, they are all sad. The people in Poland who loved the cleaner who came to the flat, her brother. The list could go on but who would it help? I don’t have a prison sentence, I wasn’t well enough, and that made a lot of people cross, but you can’t help it if you are ill, or you can’t talk, or if you are a victim even though you have hurt other people. My mother wants me to come home one day, and we can have a life together like we did when I was little, but I tell her it’s better for me to be here, and she should get a new Billy and a new life and I will still be here, with everything I need, and she can visit me then go home.
I drew a picture of the girl in the morgue when I was in art therapy, and she was still and calm and cool like the things are in my head after my medicine in the mornings now. Sometimes I still wish that I could have a friend like that, a girl who is beautiful and just wants to stay with me and be quiet. Ed says that one day if I work very hard then I can leave but I think that in life some things never end. I will study interesting things, while the world outside talks about nothing and people upset each other.
There is a big wall outside my wing and it wraps round the garden where we get fresh air. I like the wall because it keeps me safe and everyone else safe. I like my weeks because on Wednesday the pat dog comes in and I love him. He isn’t my dog, but he is a Labrador retriever and he belongs to Joyce and she brings him in and he loves me. He comes straight to me and puts his head on my leg and I can sit next to him on the floor, and looking in his eyes doesn’t make me upset. He even licks me and Ed told me that a dog’s mouth is cleaner than my mouth but I still wash my hands afterwards. When he licks me it makes me laugh and I put my head back and laugh properly like when my mother tells me stories of when I was little and we were on our own and she was
n’t sad at all.
So Mother is right and there is no conclusion, and perhaps there is no normal. I know when I am at social time that lots of people in here are the same as me. I know that this is a ward for people who have autism, because a lot of people have it now, but when I get my laptop after I have been stable for six months then I can look to see who has made the rules for normal. In here I feel happy because everyone understands that there really is no normal. There is lots of pretending in the world, and there is love which makes a lot of things better, but in here we don’t worry about that. We don’t talk back and forwards about nothing, and we don’t want to make friends with each other. I still always try and check if someone is telling me the truth. I don’t like it when Ed says, ‘That is the biggest dog I have ever seen.’ It isn’t the biggest dog he has ever seen and I don’t know why he wants to say that if he is a doctor – probably because he thinks it makes me feel better. It doesn’t. I think you should check your facts, and find a subject that interests you and research it, even if you only have books like I do. I am reading about comas. The lady in the park got better after a long time but her boyfriend died because I hit him so hard with the wooden branch. I was glad they didn’t turn off the machine keeping the lady from the park alive. They could have, and she would be dead, but then she woke up. It’s been worrying me, how they decide whether to turn you off, but I need my laptop to do a proper study.
The Man on the Middle Floor Page 24