Joe

by Michael Blastland

  If all goes well at this school, if we like them and they like him, he will live here for the next nine years, 120 miles from us. I feel it as an exile, a punishment for Joe, who scarcely knows what’s happening to him or why. A punishment for what?

  … I think of how ordinary a morning it was, the day more than any other that precipitated this, and how ordinarily he would charge into another room in the morning to wrestle his way under the covers with someone already awake, or soon woken, so he could begin the game we know as ‘Beds’. ‘Beds’, according to rules for the pathologically fastidious, is played as follows: the duvet must precisely and squarely cover each corner, Joe’s soft toys must be gathered like colourful tramps in a doss house – a Teletubby or two, Postman Pat, Winnie the Pooh – stuffed in with the parent, tucked up to the chin. Everything must be just so. Next, the pillows must be repositioned according to some rule I’ve never understood, and then if the curtains are open they must be drawn, after which we’re required to spend a few moments under the duvet whispering the word ‘dark’ before emerging to realign it at the corners. Finally, the whole arrangement must be turned through 90 or 180 degrees on the bed before we start all over again. Participation is usually compulsory. But not that day. It was a morning when Joe seemed to be slumbering, while Geraldine, the French au pair and one of Joe’s most capable carers, yawned in her room, the door ajar for her to catch the sound should he stir.

  If all goes well, they’ll see his potential, find his behaviour manageable and see the fascinating, often likeable child; nothing will be smashed, no one hit, he won’t scream (too much), he’ll be Jekyll, not Hyde.

  … And I think – how he wouldn’t have trod lightly that other morning. He runs – you can just about call it that – stiff legged and thudding, on heels more than toes, so that you’d hardly label him surreptitious. That spring day he got up and made his way downstairs unseen and unheard.

  If all goes well, we’ll know in a day or two if the routine of nine years is over, years in which I’ve increasingly stared at Joe wondering how the world looks from there, why the wiring in his head doesn’t seem to connect the way it connects in us, wondering if by understanding the points of difference between him and the rest of us I can find a way to fix them. Watching him now, I see he’s edgy, almost afraid of this foreign place and mistrusting the day’s sense of occasion, what with everyone strangely together.

  … I remember how at that other time the front door had a chain attached with Joe in mind. Having mastered the Yale lock some time ago, he’d rattled that chain many times, knowing it to be the last obstacle to escape. That morning, being so swiftly on the tail of his mother and sister, Joe found the chain not yet in place, turned the doorknob, pulled, and was out, where the trees on the hill were in hopeful blossom. Mum’s red car must have turned the corner at the end of the street a few seconds earlier.

  We turn away from the Downs into the drive, lined with trees now hoarding the darkening green of summer, pull up in the car park at the back and climb out. I look around, feeling for the mood of the place, if one can be felt, trying to learn Joe’s fate from the atmosphere. And if he hates it, and if they find him too much of a handful?

  … And I think, that it was always possible that something like the events of that other morning would happen, given Joe’s form for doing a runner. The first time he slipped his guard was outside the infants’ school where he’d been dragged as usual one afternoon to collect Cait. Usually then obedient enough to stand and wait, Joe melted away in the mêlée of children charging through the school gate and set off with purpose. He was five years old and already possessed sufficient sense of direction to find his way to a house he’d visited maybe once or twice in his life, where a schoolfriend of his sister lived. He was found, across two roads, knocking on the door some ten minutes later when the schoolfriend arrived home with her mother.

  What if they find him too much, as we have begun to find him too much? Not just odd but with a bubbling, insistent kind of oddity that would overflow into something alarming and beyond our ability to cope. That’s what brought us to Bristol, when the coping slipped on that spring morning, the day that led to this. No one was to blame, it was just oddity asserting itself, finally, in a way that made us realise we had been at the limits too long. Joe has one hand in mine and the other grasping my sleeve. Does he know? His fear suggests so.

  … And then I remember the second great getaway, on holiday, when by taking a sudden turn he shook off his grandparents who were escorting him back from the beach to their rented cottage. After a long and increasingly frantic search he was found in a garden shed. Most infants and small toddlers are connected to their parents by an instinctive thread that stretches no more than 100 feet or so. Leave them to crawl or wander freely and they rarely go further. Ever since he’s been able to get about, Joe has been drawn to the distant horizon, showing no fear.

  He’s clinging to his mother now as we make our way inside, and we’re coaxing him into the cooler shadows, first to reception and then to the large room with the high ceiling and a circle of chairs. We’re invited to sit and wait. To calm him, we ask him to count the growing number of strangers facing us.

  ‘How many people, Joe?’

  ‘Ine, oo, ee, bor, by, ix …’

  … And I think of his first full breakout, more than a sudden dash for freedom this time; a full-blown escape – the time we realised he’d worked out how to spring the latch on the front door. He fumbled his way by trial and error into the open, plodded along the road a short way to another house he’d also visited maybe once before and was found a couple of minutes later knocking like a metronome, wearing nothing but his underpants. He popped into the same house again a few weeks later, finding his own front door more secure now thanks to the recent addition of that chain, but discovering a second route to the street through the back garden and via the garage. It was becoming habitual, like prisoners escaping Stalag Luft III. No matter that we tried to Joe-proof the exits, he would find a way out. I awaited the discovery of a tunnel under the kitchen boiler. On his third breakout, he had barged past the woman at number 22 before he was caught. ‘He’s already got a video in his hand,’ she said. ‘Can’t you let him watch it?’ He seemed happy enough after all.

  Happy? Yes, you could say that. This was what lured him out: the knowledge that in other people’s houses lurked children’s videos – his keenest desire and, banned at home in an effort to control his fixation, his most heartfelt torment; a vicious addiction that drove him like a heroin user into ever more frenzied hunger, and escape.

  And so it was that he emerged on that clear spring morning, Mummy gone to school with Cait, the unchained door no bar to his infatuation, leaving him free from physical restraint but with compulsion chattering in his ear, making getaway number six, his last.

  I imagine him thinking as the latch yielded that this was the day he’d been waiting for; a clear-blue, beautiful opportunity, no adult to bridle him, no barriers, no inhibitions, as in bare feet and wearing only his trademark blue Y-fronts he sees a neighbour’s open front door. It’s not his usual bolt hole but a different house this time, one across the street.

  The delicious promise of a glimpsed living room is that it will grant him a fix, a shot of that one thing most compelling, which in his life is Postman Pat, 101 Dalmatians, Wallace and Gromit, Aladdin, or who knows what variety of heaven. For a while, if you failed to catch him, he’d punctuate every walk along a suburban street with furtive lunges down garden paths, rapping on doors, ringing bells.

  Head down, jagged limbs threshing across the pavement, the front door of his own house left open, he was out, into the traffic.

  Inside the car trundling down the hill between close-parked cars, the young driver not long into his licence was helpless as a near-naked, pale-skinned figure appeared in front of his bonnet. There was the screech of tyres and a raw metallic thud, said a neighbour afterwards, a flash of dark brown hair and a boy flung past
the windscreen and over the other side. The car wrenched itself still.

  Joe had tumbled into the road. He hit the tarmac. I suppose you might say he was lucky. He landed feet first and somehow remained upright, planted like a chess piece – a small miracle. Scorning impossibility now, he quickly reoriented himself. I’ve no doubt it hurt – how could it not hurt to be hit by a car, sent spinning over the bonnet then dumped over the side? But why interrupt his destiny? He trotted off with the same careless determination for the same destination and with no more perhaps than a few of his what I call curses, angry grunts, like rugby players connecting at a scrum.

  ‘Ang!’ he says.

  ‘Ang!’

  No one knew how – we shook our heads in disbelief – but we discovered later that there wasn’t a mark on him. Fate plays its fickle game at the extremes with Joe, at once damning and charming. Still at speed, relatively, he toddled down the path and through the open door into the stranger’s house, surveyed his surroundings, recognised the front room as the type most likely to yield that idiosyncratic black jewel, his plastic booty, spotted the TV, scanned the spines of the videos next to it and snatched at one. Frantic with illicit expectation, he’d have fumbled open the case and stuffed the rectangular box into the slot, pressed play – no developmental delay in evidence there – and stepped back. I picture him as the titles roll, wild-eyed, rocking backwards and forwards from one foot to the other, arms fluttering, yelping, pointing, full of delirious excitement and all the while regarded with what can only have been utter bewilderment by the house’s young occupant about to be late for work.

  ‘Well, you see, there was this boy, and …’

  How often, after all, do strangers’ eight-year-olds pop by for a video all but naked? Convict-like, but with disarming lack of self-consciousness, he’d pitched up in the morning rush and helped himself; manners, ceremony, inhibition, privacy, property … all meaningless to this bizarre, chirping, baffling intruder. For Joe, it had been a most satisfactory and stimulating start to the day.

  Joe is fiercely motivated and often blithely uninhibited: propelled by obsession but careless, he’s an untethered party balloon in a gale. By and large, other passing cars had been until then merely a palette of noisy colours, rumbling down the hill. We’d stand and watch them sometimes, with Joe calling out as they went by, as near as he could to red, blue, green and white: ‘Ed!’ ‘Boo!’ ‘Een!’ ‘Ite!’ He knew nothing of the danger they presented, and until that moment had shown them no fear.

  My guess is that Joe has always suffered from a poverty of experience, an excessive selectivity which means he neither can, nor cares to, dip into the rest of life’s data swimming busily about him. He draws from a statistical sample of one: himself. We all favour this kind of evidence, finding on the whole our own experience to be our best guide, but tend not to grant it quite such exclusivity. The rest of us know that things could be other than the way they were for us. We amass this knowledge from other sources: other people, books, TV, our own imaginations. Joe, finding other people a mystery, their minds impenetrable, is slow to pick up what has been ours, and so attends inordinately to what’s been his. Thus his entire knowledge of cars was that they either transported him or slid by.

  The problem comes about not because Joe is unable to communicate or because he is so intellectually impaired that nothing makes sense to him; I can have something like a conversation with him even though speech is among the weakest of his skills. I can tell him facts – that the shop is closed, that the pasta is all gone – and he will understand, but these are facts about material things. His difficulty is with inner facts, the facts of human experience. Joe seems to live within himself to a degree that even the most private among us would find hard to imagine. I don’t mean that he is unaffectionate or shuns people who are close to him, he can be the most tactile child, happy on occasion to soak selected strangers in kisses whether they like it or not; it is rather a mental isolation, a solitariness of consciousness whereby he fails to learn that other lives are lived too, fails to appreciate that we all exist in a state of subjectivity, all have points of view; fails, in short, to think of other people as other people. This is what leads him to reject so much of the experience that could help him: he just doesn’t see its relevance; worse, he seems not even to know it’s there, and so cannot begin to do what the rest of us do compulsively and share experience. Hence the fanatical devotion to what he already knows, for after all, as far as he’s concerned, it’s all there is, or at least all that matters. This includes his attitude to videos, food, toys, where only the familiar will do, and also, to take the example to hand, what to be afraid of.

  Walking round the school in Bristol or sitting in its meeting room among strangers, he wants to go home. It’s not normal, this earnest focus of adult attention from so many, this coming to a place which holds no pleasure for him. What is it about fear that infects him now, but not then?

  Fear strikes us as instinctive, an elementary passion, a rush of adrenalin. We’ve all heard of the fight-and-flight mechanism, the hard-wired trigger in the brain that supposedly governs our response to any threat, but we can exaggerate the biological basis of fear. Joe’s problem here is not that he doesn’t know what fear is. Whatever the slice of grey matter that tells the heart to quiver, the eyes to stretch and the muscles to tense is in perfect working order in Joe. He’s afraid of cars now, all right. There’s nothing wrong with his fight-or-flight mechanism these two years hence and that’s not because the accident rewired his brain where it was wrongly wired before. The problem is that he doesn’t instinctively know what to be afraid of, and nor does anyone else. There’s nothing in our genes to tell us that unattended luggage is scary. Fear has to be in part socially constructed, it has to be learnt; other people have to tell us to some extent what to be afraid of. That should be obvious enough, for unless we know what a fast-moving car can do, what a gun is, how American foreign policy is motivated and what its likely consequences, why should we fear them?

  A chimpanzee raised in a zoo has no fear of snakes. One raised in the wild seems to learn from the anxiety of others who are older or more experienced to keep away, and soon starts to pass on the same clamorous warning. A chimp in a zoo, ignorant of the danger of snakes, once introduced to a chimp from the wild, is quick to learn the routine. Their fear is contagious. This is conclusive evidence, say certain primatologists, that chimps have culture in the same way humans do. If it were true that they were creatures only of instinct, one would expect fear and alarm of this kind to be either universal among them or non-existent. It’s neither: chimps have to learn fear from each other. Thus we get to the nub of Joe’s difficulty in this respect: being so cumbersomely slow at picking up cultural or social clues, of broadening his experience with the help of others, gives him the appearance of being eccentrically despotic in his own attitude to the world, of being in the broadest sense uncultured.

  The advantages of being able to communicate danger are obvious. It saves each one of us having to discover what it means first hand by possibly fatal experience. If you don’t know the harm a snake can do until its bite takes poisonous effect, your education has arrived late. If you don’t know the harm a car can do until it sends you skyward, the learning curve might be too steep to survive. Such cultural knowledge is invaluable, if it can be passed on in advance.

  ‘Cars, danger Joe.’

  ‘Car,’ he says.

  ‘Cars ouch!’

  ‘Car.’

  ‘Car bang! Joe ouch!’ With a thump on the carpet for effect.

  And he laughs.

  No matter how often it was said in how many ways, no matter what games with toys, Joe picked up less cultural understanding of this danger than the chimps of theirs. Until his accident he paid traffic little regard, happily ambling down the middle of roads.

  Cultural knowledge can’t exist without the ability to pass it on. It was once said to be uniquely human. It is not, though it certainly makes human
society possible, shared experience being a reservoir of education, a reservoir Joe can barely sip from.

  At the new school, by being asked to perform his reading or typing skills for teachers, being required to sit in an unfamiliar room under the gaze of others, Joe probably recognises this as a place of unwelcome compulsion to broaden his experience, make him learn and do new things. He’s been at a school before and the paraphernalia of certain kinds of books, tables, pencils and paper will be worryingly suggestive. What he sees this day that’s recognisable is unwelcome, and what he sees of strange people in a strange place is unwelcome simply for being strange. He’s confronted with a mixture of the new and the disliked, not a happy combination. Experience counsels escape on both counts.

  On the roadside in the small town where Joe lives, cars had never previously included among their very familiar characteristics of noise, movement and colour, the extra quality of causing pain. The poor young driver, who knew this characteristic well enough to hit the brakes and had now sensed it with an immediacy he never expected, was in a terrible state. He phoned his father on his mobile, unable or unwilling to get back behind the wheel. In time, the police arrived, then an ambulance. Social services were notified. Geraldine, the au pair, had drifted back to sleep and didn’t hear a tentative knock on the front door. No one could get any sense from the manic, happy boy in the underpants in front of the video, whose only response to the police was that, look, it’s Pat.

  They concluded – wrongly – that the child had been left to fend for himself, so he had. I remember picturing the headline: ‘Home Alone Dice With Death … Disabled Boy Abandoned’.

  Joe is wary of traffic now, steps gingerly into the road with nervous looks and takes to the pavement in haste, but he had to feel pain and shock personally, directly, to learn that cars could cause them. More fundamentally, though he understands what pain and injury are, I’m not sure if he will ever conceive of that ultimate injury, death. Other children begin with the idea of death as an extension of sleep, and don’t fully understand it as a permanent loss of consciousness until they’re five or older. Until then, developmental psychologists report, children seem to think that thoughts persist in the dead in some form. Even so, they understand well enough at a very early age that death is a condition with little to recommend it. At Joe’s rate of learning, he might be very old indeed, with the kind of experience to inform him that I’d rather not contemplate, before the idea makes any sense at all. Whereas others will become fond, aged four or thereabouts, of asking about the magnitude of any danger – ‘Will it kill me?’ – imperfect though their understanding of death must be, Joe might never ask, for he has never heard of it.