Odd Girl Out

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Odd Girl Out Page 14

by Laura James


  It’s seven-thirty in the evening and Tim and I are in the sitting room. He is watching the rolling news coverage. I’m pacing the room like a caged animal. We have argued about the likely outcome of the vote and, more acutely, my refusal to think or talk about anything else. He thinks I am panicking about nothing. That there’s no hope of Leave winning. Suddenly he gets up from the sofa and turns off the TV with the remote control before throwing it to the floor.

  ‘Right. I’m sorry,’ he says, ‘but I can’t take any more of this. You are obsessing. I know it and I think deep inside you know it too. And it’s driving me fucking crazy. You’re driving me mad with your endless insistence that you’re right – that you know better than the experts – and everybody else is wrong. It’s going to be fine and you will have wasted all this time worrying about something that isn’t going to happen.’

  I’m stung by the venom in his voice. I can’t take it when people shout and that discomfort is magnified manifold when Tim loses his temper. It is a raw, animalistic anger.

  He regains a little control and his voice softens. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, looking straight at me. ‘I didn’t mean to shout. It’s just that we all need a break. Why don’t we . . . Let’s go out for supper. You need to eat and getting away from the TV and Facebook and bloody Twitter for an hour – just an hour – will do you good.’

  I’m fine about this. He’s right. I should eat and any of the restaurants we might go to will have Wi-Fi, so I can still keep up with what’s going on.

  We finally agree to go to the newish Italian in our local town. It’s fresh and bright and I am always able to find something I’d like to eat. The staff are good at taking my complicated orders and the Wi-Fi works consistently. I realize these aren’t things most people would write in a restaurant review, but they are hugely important to me.

  The walls are white, the chairs mismatched and all colours, and the tables are simple wood. It isn’t like being in Italy, but it also isn’t like being in Norfolk. There’s something hopeful about it. Something new, but in a good way.

  I sit opposite Tim. Whenever we go out he sits facing towards the restaurant and I sit with my back to it. He likes to see what’s going on at all times; I like to feel cut off. Tonight we are the only people in the restaurant. The whole town is pretty dead. I wonder if everyone is planning a long night of watching the coverage live on TV until the result is announced in the early hours. I don’t plan to. I am not good without sleep and I am doing a big interview tomorrow. I have to drive from Norfolk to Kent, so will need a good eight hours’ sleep.

  When I am anxious I cannot eat. It is as if my throat constricts and I cannot easily swallow. As a child I remember sobbing as my parents tried to get me to finish a meal – understandably they were worried I would become ill from being undernourished. Tim gave up trying to get me to eat years ago. He orders a pizza with lots of hot chillies and pepperoni. I try to wade through my pasta. Neither of us can eat. The weather is hot and oppressive. Tonight feels momentous, as if something will be changed forever, yet I am alone in this feeling. Once again I am on the outside.

  I am scared. Properly scared. Dealing with change is impossibly hard for me. It takes weeks to accommodate something new into my routine. The coffee shop I go to each day recently stopped selling the blueberry muffins I have each afternoon. Weeks later, I am still trying to get my head around this. If something as seismic as leaving the EU were to happen, I genuinely don’t know how I would cope.

  Eventually Tim and I give up on eating. I order a latte to take with me and we go home. On the sofa, I begin to shiver, even though it is still bright outside and the sitting room is cloyingly warm. The TV is on and David Dimbleby is summarizing how the next few hours will play out. I flick between Facebook and Twitter, occasionally putting down my phone and staring at the television.

  We sit like this for what seems like hours. Tim watching the TV, me glued to Twitter. Occasionally, the boys come down to check on the status of the country’s future.

  ‘You’re just panicking about nothing,’ Toby says. ‘It’s obvious Remain is going to win.’

  ‘Why is it obvious?’ I ask. ‘You need to stop believing everything your friends or the news outlets say and start thinking and investigating for yourself. Have you looked around the county? Even in Norfolk, I haven’t seen one Remain poster. Literally not one.’

  Toby rolls his eyes and looks back at his phone.

  I think a part of Tim – the bit that chases danger – is sort of hoping for a Leave win. He’d enjoy the chaos, the drama, the upheaval. It makes me irritated with him. He wasn’t really that concerned about the referendum until it became my number one special interest.

  ‘Do you really want Remain to win?’ I ask him.

  ‘I just want it to be over. Whatever happens the world won’t cave in.’

  Nothing annoys me more than people saying ‘oh well, the sun will still rise’ when something one might regard as appalling is about to happen or has just happened. If we were blasted by nukes, the sun would still rise. If the children fell victim to some terrible accident, the sun would still rise. Why do people say such nonsensical, unhelpful things? If I were worried about the sun failing to rise or the world caving in, then I’m sure these reassurances – if backed up by hardcore facts and scientific evidence – would be helpful. Without these, Tim’s comments are mere platitudes.

  Then, just after 10 p.m., pictures of Nigel Farage fill the TV screen. He is admitting defeat, his face puffy and red, the bags under his eyes sagging. ‘It’s been an extraordinary referendum campaign,’ he says. ‘Turnout looks to be exceptionally high and it looks like Remain will edge it. UKIP and I are going nowhere and the party will only continue to grow stronger in the future.’

  I know, as firmly as it is possible to know anything, that he is wrong. That in a few hours he will be popping champagne corks and wondering how he managed to pull this off.

  It is a common myth that most people with autism have special skills. That most are savants. That we can name every royal birthday in history or tell you which day of the week any date falls on. In any year. The reality is that 10 per cent of people with autism have savant skills, as opposed to 1 per cent of the general population. That means it is not the case for most of us.

  A couple of weeks ago, I called Steve Silberman. He was interesting on the subject of savants and savant-like abilities. He said: ‘I think one of the early selling points of autism in pop culture was [the idea of] savant abilities, making it not a disease, but a superpower. I think it engaged hipster imagination.

  ‘I think it is a major misconception that people think either that all autistic people have savant abilities or that they’re incredibly rare, as if loads of autistic people are a mess but a few have savant abilities.

  ‘There are some savant abilities that truly are like superpowers, like Stephen Wiltshire’s ability to fly over Manhattan for twenty minutes in a helicopter and spend the rest of the week drawing every building there. That’s unbelievable, it’s amazing. But I think that a sort of lower-level savant ability is actually pretty common. Like autistic people being able to quote long passages of dialogue from their favourite television shows. Or perfect pitch. Those things are not so uncommon.

  ‘The juxtaposition of savant abilities with profound disability was what made it such a fruitful subject for fiction writers in books like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. I think there are millions of cultural hooks that make autism interesting to the mainstream.’

  I can’t even do the most basic of calculations in my head, but I do have one skill that I have honed over the years, although it is still far from being anything like a savant’s. I can spot patterns. I can take a few pieces of information and build the whole picture. And I can tell when something will become popular or a trend. I have never been wrong.

  I don’t know how or why I can do this and it certainly isn’t based on any mathematical logic. It’s more a feeling, l
ike taking the temperature of a situation and being able to see what the outcome will be. I think it’s partly because I work from a place of logic, rather than emotion. While most Remain supporters believed their side would win (because how could it not happen, how could others not make the right choice?), I knew Remain would lose.

  Everyone else seemed to exist in their own echo chambers, on social media following mainstream media outlets that backed up their own views. By contrast, I tried to engage with people with very different views to mine. I talked to Leave voters. I looked at the evidence. I saw disparate groups of people coming together and voting for a host of different reasons. I visited the UKIP Facebook pages and those of the prominent Leave campaigners and studied the conversations going on. I saw the different views. I saw the passion. I argued with those whose views were alien to me. And it became clear to me, in the weeks running up to the vote, that it would be almost impossible for Leave to lose.

  There was a moment when the tide could have turned. The day the reprehensible Leave campaign poster was unveiled showing streams of refugees under the headline Breaking point: why the EU has failed us. June 16th. The same day the Labour MP Jo Cox was killed. It was as if there was a momentary pause, a collective deep breath. Campaigning stopped, the conversations didn’t. But just for a short while the tone changed slightly and there was the possibility things could turn out differently.

  That didn’t happen and, as I watch the results slowly trickle in, I know the world – my world – is going to be a very different place.

  My heart races and I cannot remain calm. I’m under a blanket on the sofa. Every half an hour or so, I tell Tim I will be going to bed in ten minutes. I don’t. I am compelled to keep looking at the screen. It is like watching a car crash over and over.

  Jack and his girlfriend, Mary, arrive home and say hi, but then go to their room. Tim and I sit together watching the coverage on the BBC and occasionally channel-hopping to see how other broadcasters are reporting events. The TV screen fills with a graphic showing the value of the pound plummeting in an almost perfect vertical line.

  Jack bursts in, showing us the same graphic on his phone. ‘Have you seen the pound!’

  I can’t bear to look at the TV. The Twitter app is open on my phone, the Facebook app on my iPad. I flick from one to the other, while the commentary from David Dimbleby continues in the background. His voice is mesmerizing. I remember it from childhood. It has such an air of calm authority that it makes me feel as if, come what may, there are still some grown-ups around.

  Toby and Mary drift downstairs to join us, our faces silver from the screen in the corner.

  ‘What will happen if Scotland votes to stay and England to leave?’ Jack asks.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Tim says.

  ‘What if it’s too close to call?’ Toby asks.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘If we do vote to leave, when would it happen?’ Jack asks.

  ‘I don’t know. No one knows. It’s all uncharted territory.’

  The questions continue and we have to keep repeating that we just don’t know. It seems as if tonight we don’t have many answers. I go upstairs to bed, but find myself compelled to get up within five or ten minutes. I can’t sleep. The sitting room has a magnetic pull on me. Watching this unfold on Twitter in bed, alone, feels wrong somehow.

  I chat on Facebook to those friends who are still up. Somewhere deep in the darkness, author and journalist India Knight tweets: I think we may be fucked. Plus side: I know nothing.

  I reply: But your earlier cautious optimism was keeping me going.

  She says: It wasn’t even cautious :(

  I go upstairs again. I come down again. Repeating the pattern over and over. I have a feeling radiating through my chest and stomach that I can’t quite describe, a churning. Fear plus. I feel very cold. Now I understand what cold means on the feelings wheel. I colour it in. Dark blue.

  Then it comes. Dimbleby – his face drawn, his eyes tired and resigned – announces what others had begun to fear but I long knew for certain.

  ‘Well, at twenty minutes to five,’ he says, ‘we can now say the decision taken in 1975 by this country to join the Common Market has been reversed by this referendum to leave the EU.’

  ‘This is mad,’ Jack says. Mary looks pale and worried as she sits on the edge of the sofa, occupying as little space as possible. Toby looks unsure of what to make of it. Tim is silent. I look at my phone.

  The food writer William Sitwell has tweeted: We’re out, says Dimbleby. Shan’t forget that moment.

  I know those words will stay implanted on my brain, repeating themselves over and over in the way snatches of poetry or song lyrics do. I find I am crying. I never cry. It’s not that I don’t want to, it just doesn’t happen. Usually I stay frozen. It feels strange and good and strange and bad.

  The boys and Mary are now asleep. Tim decides to go to bed to catch a couple of hours. On Twitter, Rachael Lucas, one of the only other autistic women I have dared to strike up an online relationship with, says: I don’t want to tell my children – who said at the polling station ‘it’ll be OK, won’t it?’ – that no, it won’t be.

  I reply: My heart breaks for all our children.

  She says: My smallest doesn’t understand why anyone would want to leave. My older ones want to know why they don’t have a say.

  Mine did have a say. It was the first time the boys had been able to vote and it was one of those moments when I realized I was now the mother of young adults. Tim took a picture of them and sent it to me. The polling station in a church in a neighbouring village is so pretty. The boys are standing outside the gates. In the picture they look carefree. Jack is wearing an awful green and orange Hawaiian-patterned shirt with blue shorts and Green Flash tennis shoes. Toby is, as ever, dressed head to toe in black. Mary is standing in the background, looking elegant and slightly apart from these puppy-like boys who are all long limbs and big eyes. Her blonde hair is poker straight, her posture perfect.

  They are about to go in and cast their vote, these almost men. It’s another step on the road to adulthood and away from the life of their childhood that I am clinging to with increasing desperation. I love the picture. I made it the screensaver on my phone.

  My experience of motherhood is, I think, in many ways different to that of neurotypical women. As well as not recognizing my own emotions and feeling them at a very muted level, I don’t cope well with the emotions of others. I would like to live in a world where we all went along on a straight emotional line, never feeling anything too strongly.

  Because of this, I cannot bear for my children to feel upset or disappointed. Their pain, however minor, is always simply too much for me to cope with, so I do everything I can to not allow them to suffer any negative emotions. I guess in today’s terms I would be called a snowplough mother as I clear all obstacles from their paths.

  This time there was nothing I could do and I knew they would be upset. I feel a weird guilt, as if somehow there must have been something I could have done. Maybe I could have voted harder somehow, made it count more.

  At 07.17 I get a message from Lucie. I am so sad. I woke up at 4 a.m. and checked. In the end I decide to go in to the boys and Mary at 7.30 a.m. Jack wakes like a confused puppy, stretching. Mary, seemingly sensing bad news, sits bolt upright. ‘Oh god, this is bad.’

  When I go to Toby’s room, he turns over and looks at me. ‘I said you would cry.’

  Norfolk – Spring 2002

  ‘Which carriage will we sit in?’ Toby asks. ‘Annie or Clarabel?’

  The boys are excited. They’ve been talking about it for weeks. A trip on a steam train. The real-life Thomas the Tank Engine.

  ‘Annie!’ Jack says. At six, a year older than Toby, he revels in a sense of authority, but he looks to me as he always does to reassure him that he is right.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Let’s wait and see.’

  It is half-term and I am enjoying the
break. It is not too short, not too long. It is a punctuation mark in the sentence that is real life. It is as if the world has stopped for a while, frozen in time on the platform of a rural station that looks unchanged since the 1950s.

  ‘Will the carriages really be the same as they are on Thomas?’ Lucie asks in a quiet voice so the boys don’t hear. ‘They’re going to be disappointed if they’re not exactly what they’re expecting.’

  I shrug. ‘I’m sure they’ll love it whatever the carriage is like.’ I hope I’m right.

  The station is crowded, alive with the chatter of children. We wait in an isolated huddle at the far end of the platform. Part of the throng, but separate from it. The boys’ hands squirm in mine.

  I see the train in the distance and Tatti notices it at the exact moment I do. She squeals and jumps up and down on the spot, her hair flying around her face. Her excitement is contagious and I struggle to hold on to the boys.

  ‘You have to hold Mummy’s hand,’ Lucie says. ‘It might be dangerous if you don’t.’ She is only twelve, but she seems more of a grown-up every day. She has a maturity beyond her years, a gentle, quiet confidence.

  Jack stands very still, his eyes fixed and bright, as the train lurches into the station, its front adorned with a giant smiling face.

  ‘It’s really Thomas,’ he whispers, his voice taking on the babyish tone it does when he is excited or unsure. Jack worries in a way not shared by any of the other children, his enthusiasm always tinged with apprehension. He takes longer to process the world than others of his age and needs to see how they are experiencing something before he is entirely comfortable. He will let his younger brother climb a tree first. Will he reach the top or will he fall and break his arm?

  Toby is more his own person. He knows what he likes and what he does not. If he tires of a walk, he will sit down and refuse to get up. If he doesn’t like the look of something on his plate he will refuse to eat it. He wriggles next to me, impatient to get on board. Impatient for an adventure.

 

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