‘Did you guys have fun without me?’ Dylan asked while tying into the chimney rope.
‘Yes, I think so. I know I did anyway.’
‘Oh?’
‘I got to climb, that’s always fun,’ Paige said, clipping in ready to belay.
‘Sorry, did you want this climb?’
‘No it’s OK, I just went, you go.’
Paige watched as Dylan began climbing one of the more difficult routes in The Chimney. It wasn’t long before she was tempted to scan the room for Taylor, but as she currently had her back to the auto-belay, it wouldn’t have been safe to do that while belaying Dylan. The more she thought about Taylor, the more she thought it would be nice to climb with her again. As a more experienced member of the climbing club, she was often asked to watch the others, or coach them up the more difficult routes. She didn’t always have much time to just climb. Taylor had allowed her that, which was nice. And Paige was sure that she could help Taylor with her technique, if she wanted it...
She was suddenly jolted upwards as Dylan missed his footing and slipped off the wall, falling a couple of metres.
‘Everything OK?’ Paige shouted up to him, bracing a foot against the wall and locking off the rope.
‘Yeah, all good,’ Dylan answered, already back on the wall. Paige knew she needed to force her brain to focus solely on him. He made it to the top quite quickly, though he did have a few more near misses.
Once Dylan was back on the ground they made light work of untying, before having a brief conversation on where to go next. They chose a wall with a slight negative incline so Paige could practice fighting gravity that bit more, with her goal of completing the new routes on the triple overhang in mind. It was a short walk to that wall, but before they began tying in Paige paused.
‘Is Taylor interested in climbing?’ Paige asked
‘I dunno,’ Dylan said, clipping into the belay. ‘I expected her to only come with me to the first meeting, but she’s been a few times now. I guess something must keep drawing her back...’ He trailed off, leaving his words hanging in the air.
‘So she is interested in climbing?’ Paige asked again.
‘Yeah. Climbing,’ Dylan said with a slight chuckle. Paige still hadn’t started clipping in even though he was all set. She just stood next to the wall, holding on to the rope.
‘I was wondering if she would like some pointers?’
‘I don’t know, you’d have to ask her.’
‘I would but...’ Paige paused, looking past Dylan, ‘she appears to have left already.’
Dylan turned around and surveyed the room for his sister. He could just see the area where all the climbers dumped their bags when they came in, and hers was gone. He sighed.
‘I can give you her number when we’re done, if you like? You know, so you can give her some pointers,’ Dylan said, his voice with a slight intonation of mirth.
‘That works.’ Paige said, before tying in.
Later that night, once Paige was back in her own house, she pulled out her phone and pondered, thumb hovering over the text icon. Would Taylor be offended by her offering climbing advice? Would it be rude to text her out of the blue like this? Would she be annoyed at Dylan for giving out her number? She didn’t want to get Dylan in trouble.
Paige locked her phone and put it back in her pocket. Sooty jumped up onto the arm of the sofa she was sitting on and started purring loudly, rubbing his head against her arm.
‘Hey, buddy,’ she cooed at him, giving him lots of scratches behind his ears. He placed his two front paws on her lap and stretched lavishly, before walking across to the other side of the sofa and jumping down, heading into the kitchen. When Paige didn’t follow, he meowed, loudly.
‘OK, OK,’ she said, easing herself to her feet. She had done the most climbing she’d done in a while that night and was already aching for it. She decided to feed Sooty, make herself a cup of tea and go for a bath to try and ease her aching muscles. She leant on the counter as the kettle boiled, waiting to pounce on it when it was done. The steam swirled up into the air creating a light mist, similar to the night she and Maya had walked home from the pub after meeting the twins. The reminder of that night made Paige take her phone out again. She wrote and re-wrote the message several times, sometimes just changing a word here and there and other times deleting a whole sentence. The kettle clicked off and before she could change her mind, she pressed send.
Once upstairs, Paige threw her phone onto the bed and grabbed a clean towel. She decided to allow herself the luxury of a bubble bath and didn’t want her phone to distract her or cause anxiety with any potential replies or work emails.
The soothing smell of lavender filled the air as she poured the blue bubble bath into the water. She lit the candles she had surrounding the bath and turned the lights off. The hot water bit at her feet as she stepped in, feeling like it was burning her skin until her body acclimatised. She sank down and let out a long sigh. The warmth of the water wrapped her up like a blanket and soothed her aching muscles. Twisting around to get her tea, she took a sip and closed her eyes, trying to relax. Images from the day flashed across her mind - had she done the right thing by rushing to Taylor after she fell? It wasn’t really her place as she didn’t work there, but it had been instinctual; it was quite a high fall. Should she have tried to stop Taylor going to the auto-belay, and therefore have stopped her leaving? Dylan was the one who was late, technically he should have been the one to miss out. Or they could have climbed as a trio? All of these thoughts raced through her head as she squished the bubble bath foam between her fingers, relishing in how soft it felt against her skin. The faint popping of the bubbles and occasional squeak of the bath as she adjusted were the only sounds. Eventually, the silence, candles, and lavender bubble bath slowed her brain down enough that she could finally relax.
CHAPTER SIX
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The following day, Paige had two meetings and several hours of lecturing scheduled, but she still managed to squeeze in an hour of research for her novel first thing. The life of one particular Resistance fighter had caught her interest; her name was Anna. Her mother had died when she was young, and her father had been conscripted into the French army when she was still a teen, and was killed in action not long afterwards. World War Two had fractured so many families, and German occupation had resulted in her grandparents and an aunt being moved out of their house to make way for high-ranking Nazi officers. Anna had no idea where they had gone, or if they were even still alive. Her family had been openly unsympathetic to the Nazis when they arrived. Yet the more Paige read about her the more it seemed she joined the Resistance not out of desperation, but for revenge. Anna had accomplished many things throughout the war, but her story had been lost from the history books; information on her was scattered and piecemeal.
After lunch Paige had a meeting with the rest of the postgraduate personal tutors in the History department. The postgraduate students always started their courses a few weeks after the undergraduates, to stagger the load on the faculty. This meeting was to discuss the incoming students and who was assigned to which member of staff.
Paige was the first to enter the meeting room. It was a clean and clinical space overlooking the park. One entire wall was made of glass, giving unobstructed views to the grassy area opposite the building. The leaves on the trees glowed gold in the low evening sun. Dappled light fell through them like water trickling in a stream. The conifers stood proud and defiantly green, daring the approaching winter to do its worst. The other walls of the room were a stark white, which reflected what little light came through the north-facing windows at this time of year. Cheap plastic chairs huddled around a square central table. The room had an overhead projector, but that wasn’t used much anymore; most presentations could be conducted using the flat screen TV mounted to the wall at one end of the room. It was only the older members of the faculty who still insisted on using the projector, much to the annoyance of some of their c
olleagues.
Other faculty members started trickling in, greeting Paige as they did so. Some of these people were the same people who had rejected her funding application, and they did not quite meet her eye when they greeted her. The head of the department arrived and promptly started handing out the necessary paperwork, even though they had all received it via email already. She fumbled the paperwork, dropping half of it on the floor with nearby colleagues then helping clear it up.
Each page contained a brief summary of each student. These meetings were a great way to run through the teaching schedule to ensure the taught information was presented in a coherent and sequential manner. There was no point in running the research skills session in the second term. Before the meeting started, the department head came over and crouched down next to Paige’s chair, placing a hand on her arm. Paige immediately winced and tried to move away as much as she could without actually leaving her seat. She hated people touching her. The contact between the woman’s hand and her arm made Paige feel like she had shoved a fork into a electrical socket and held on.
Paige stared at the table as the feeling overwhelmed her. She was vaguely aware of the department head’s mouth moving but couldn’t hear a word she was saying. The unexpected physical contact was all-consuming. Eventually, after what felt like an eternity, Paige managed to rip her arm away. A tidal wave crashed over her as all of her senses returned at once. She took a few steadying breaths before forcing her gaze to flick towards the department head, briefly making eye contact, then looking somewhere vaguely past her ear.
‘Sorry, what were you saying?’ Paige asked, carefully attempting to hide the tension in her voice.
‘I was saying’ the head said, a little impatiently, ‘I hope you don’t mind me giving you the masters student who is, you know, on the spectrum.’ She whispered the last words, like it was a dirty phrase. ‘I just figured you would be able to... ah... relate to them better than anyone else.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Well, as you yourself are... well, you’re quite set in your ways, aren’t you?’
‘So?’
‘So you’ll be able to help them in ways the rest of us couldn’t,’ the head said quickly. She seemingly instinctively went to pat Paige on the arm as she stood up, but noticing Paige’s flinch, thought better of it.
Paige barely registered anything else that was said in the meeting. Her senses were still firing on all cylinders; she could hear the electric hum of the television even though it was off, could smell the cafeteria food despite being three floors up, and the chair cushion was clawing at her legs through the backs of her trousers. And on top of all that, she was angry. The department head didn’t have to ask that question, or word it like that, as if autistic people were some kind of burden to be tolerated. The word ‘autistic’ had been whispered around her since she was a child. One of her sixth form teachers had gently mentioned it to her parents one parents’ evening, and another teacher had chimed in saying she couldn’t possibly be autistic because she was a girl.
The shuffling of chairs brought Paige back to the present. The meeting had finished and she had no idea what had been discussed; she hoped someone had been minuting it. She dawdled while putting her papers in her bag to allowed everyone else to leave first, before dashing out. She walked past her office door and down a long corridor towards the back of the building. There was a rarely used stairwell which descended to a card key-controlled door; people only tended to use it in the evenings and at night, when the main doors were shut.
The heavy fire door closed behind her as she entered the stairwell, almost sealing her off from the noise of the rest of the building. She paced backwards and forwards, fingers haphazardly hitting her phone screen as she typed out a message to Maya, explaining what had happened and begging her to call. It wasn’t long before her phone started ringing.
‘Two phone calls in as many months? It must have been bad,’ Maya said when Paige answered the phone.
‘I felt like I was being crushed and couldn’t breathe. I had nowhere to go. Then she started talking about this autistic student and how I am “set in my ways” and -’
‘I didn’t think you had a diagnosis?’ Maya interrupted.
‘That’s irrelevant.’
‘Well I can understand why you’re overwhelmed. What do you need, lovely?’
‘Distract me. Talk about your day,’ Paige asked, her pulse rate already slowing down due to the comforting familiarity of Maya’s voice. She continued to pace as she listened to Maya explain how there was drama in her office as two of her colleagues had been secretly dating, and how someone had caught them kissing in the kitchen and now it was all anyone could talk about. Eventually a calendar alert sounded on Paige’s phone, dragging her back to the real world and the responsibilities that came with it.
‘Thank you, Maya. I have to teach a class now.’
‘OK, Spence, text me later, OK?’
‘I will. Thank you. Bye.’
Paige unclenched her jaw, pulled her shoulders down from her ears and walked back to her office to grab her laptop. She still had fifteen minutes before the lecture started. She mentally ran through her pre-lecture checklist, physically miming out each stage to make sure she had everything she needed. Just as she locked her office door on her way out, her phone pinged again. Paige was surprised when it wasn’t Maya sending a thoughtful text like she expected, but was in fact Taylor responding to the text she had sent her last night. The feeling of being overwhelmed threatened to creep back in as she stared at her screen. She shoved her phone back into her pocket and made her way to the lecture hall. She’d reply properly later.
At home that evening, Paige was curled up on the sofa with Sooty nestled down in the awkward gap between her head, shoulder, and the back of the sofa. He really did not understand personal space. She had ordered a takeaway pizza as soon as she got home, before feeding Sooty and making a cup of tea as usual. She hadn’t turned any of the lights or the television on, and she’d seen the delivery driver hesitate before getting out of his car. He’d seemed relieved when the porch light came on and she came to the door. The half-empty pizza box was still open on the table and the mug of tea was most definitely cold. Sooty yawned lazily before going back to sleep, his little paws and fine whiskers twitching as he dreamt.
Paige carefully pulled her phone out her pocket and stared at the text from Taylor.
‘Hey, yeah sure, climbing pointers would be great. When would you be free? x’
It felt like a flock of butterflies had awoken in her chest. She had tried to make friends with people before, by offering them help with something or giving them something she thought they would enjoy. Most of the time they smiled politely and never spoke to her again. She rationalised this by deciding that their friend quotas must be full - there was no way people could have the mental energy for an infinite number of friends, right?
Paige opened the calendar app on her phone and tried to find some free time where she could meet with Taylor. Her phone helped her keep her life organised, reminding her where she needed to be and when, the map apps giving her confidence to go to new places, and the music was so vital in drowning out the rest of the world when everything got too much. Before getting a smartphone, Paige had struggled to leave the house without getting extremely anxious, to the point where she almost stopped trying, other than for work. It meant that she often had to turn to her parents or Maya for help when forced to travel for conferences or guest lecturing at an unfamiliar university. Modern technology had given her so much more independence. But right now it wasn’t helping her work out how to respond to this text.
Eventually she was able to compile a list of suitable times and dates to send across to Taylor, covering the next four weeks. Message sent, she sat up, put her phone aside and pulled her laptop towards her. Sooty opened his eyes, glared at her a little, and moved to the other end of the sofa to lie on the blanket. Paige opened up a web browser and her fingers
hovered over the keyboard. What information was she actually trying to find out? Eventually she typed ‘How to tell if you are autistic’. One of the results that came up corrected the phrasing of her question to ‘How to tell if you have autism?’ and linked to a multiple choice questionnaire she could take, where her score out of fifty would indicate whether autism was likely or not. She began reading the instructions at the top of the page, shaking her head now and again when the page called autism a ‘mental health condition’, or made sweeping generalisations about autistic people being good at maths. She reminded herself it was just an online quiz; it was never going to be the epitome of scientific accuracy. The quiz required her to decide to what degree she agreed or disagreed with certain statements. Some of the options confused her - of course she was interested in dates, she was a history lecturer at a university, it was her job to be interested in dates. And wouldn’t anyone get upset if they couldn’t pursue something they were interested in? Everyone she knew through the climbing club was always a bit unhappy when an injury or illness kept them at ground level. Surely that was just human nature?
She had made it as far as question thirty when her phone started ringing; it was Taylor. She stared at the screen, eventually managing to pick it up on the eight or ninth ring.
‘Err, hi, I hope you don’t mind me calling, I thought it would just be easier to discuss dates over the phone.’
‘Hmmm? Oh, right, yeah’ Paige said, still scrolling down the quiz and holding the phone a few inches away from her ear, as if it might burn her.
‘I could do Thursday next week, but it wouldn’t be until later as I have a lecture that doesn’t start until four. I can’t imagine I’ll be done any earlier than six.’
‘I can do six,’ Paige said absentmindedly.
‘Well, I wouldn’t be at the climbing centre by six, I probably wouldn’t be able to get there until seven. Is that alright with you?’
The Face of It Page 6