by Kate Clanchy
They are devoted to each other and have been, apparently, since early in primary school; many of their poems are about their friendship, and the ones that aren’t are carefully dedicated to each other. Janie is more sociable and outgoing than Chris; Chris is more gifted in the classic ASD subjects such as Maths, and they work as a team at all times. The school acknowledges and enables this relationship, always timetabling them together. They are right: a friendship like this is very unusual for ASD kids, and defends them against many things, especially the undeniable fact that no one else wants to be friends with them. It’s not that they are not clever, kind, or warm: they are. But they are entering the teenage years, when sociability is everything, and Janie and Chris can’t read social codes at all. Even in class, the jokes not got, the gestures not reciprocated, all the small, intuitive, empathetic moves which Janie and Chris can’t make and can’t learn make them jarring company.
Probably, more than an hour a week would irritate me, too, but for that hour, I like them very much. They are easy to deal with if I am very clear: for instance, they don’t pick up subtle signals about when to stop talking but heed me absolutely when I tell them explicitly that they are breaking the rules of my lesson. If I set them a task they will stick at it, without deviating, for hours, and never ask why. This is fun. Once, I set them the absurdly abstruse and difficult exercise of imitating the half-rhyme couplets in Paul Muldoon’s ‘Sushi’ (leotard/leopard, magnetized/East), then forgot about them while a sixth-former had a UCAS crisis. By the time I remembered, late, a full ninety minutes afterwards, they had turned out one hundred couplets in the form, mostly about mythic animals. If their verses had had a plot, or an emotional thrust, I could have sent them to the Poetry Review.
When we do some work on imaginary dictionaries and making up words, Janie and Chris go off their heads with excitement. They have, it seems, been working on a private language for some years. They hastily write me a poem in it and show it to the group; it looks like runes, carved deeply into the A4 with biros. The code goes deep into the page, explains Chris, because it is based on letters drawn on top of each other, in an order only the two of them understand. The five lines in front of us represent nearly four hundred words. The pretty, made-up faces of the Poetry Group girls are a picture of bafflement under their soft curls and plaits, and it flashes on me that it is remarkable, what two girls can achieve in a bedroom when they are free of all thoughts about personal adornment.
‘But,’ says dyslexic Sofia, who has dropped in to help, ‘how can we understand your poem?’ Because she sees no point in codes, per se. There are enough impenetrable ones around her already; she wants meaning.
‘We’ll translate it,’ says Janie, and she reads it aloud, in her shouty, toneless voice, Chris supplying notes. The poem is about a girl who is afraid. She is afraid that when she speaks no one will understand her. She is silent, and her fear grows. In the night, it turns into a tree which covers her whole house and window. Then her friend comes and calls to her. She calls back, and together their voices melt the tree.
‘Nice poem,’ says Sofia. ‘I still don’t get why you wrote it like that.’
‘We could only write it like that,’ says Janie. ‘That’s our code.’
‘Great,’ I say, shutting down the discussion, initiating applause.
Though I don’t intuitively understand Janie and Chris’s poetic impulse, really, any more than Sofia does. But then, I don’t appreciate Lydia Davis, really, or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, or most of the Oulipian movement. These writers’ relationship to language is the opposite of mine, as Janie and Chris’s poem is the opposite of Sofia’s. To have ASD is to be a hyper-processor, so while Sofia and I suffer from not being able to put one thing in front of another, from not being able to force our wide cup of perception down our narrow pipe of process, Janie and Chris suffer from the opposite. Everything in their minds is processed, ordered, and codified too fast; they don’t have time to read emotions, can’t understand things that are resistant to code, such as facial expressions. Janie and Chris like system, reference, encyclopaedic knowledge, and myths, lots of it; their creative impulse is to make a code of their own. Sofia and I like contemplating small tangles of images, personal emotions, and concrete references. We circle these things on top of each other, making a unit, a moment, a tunnel to another person, a small home on the large earth.
But Janie and Chris are poets just as Sofia is, and I can recognize their system-building, code-making impulse in the creativity of many contemporary and classic poets. They remind me of William Blake, often, and make me wonder if that perverse, difficult polymath with his notorious bad manners, love of the abstruse, and determinedly autodidact learning, also had ASD. It is easy to imagine Janie and Chris, forty years on, sunbathing nude in the back garden like Blake and his wife, greeting visitors wearing only a hat, showing off a printing press for their impossible code. Janie and Chris make my relationship with Blake easier, in fact, because I have only ever loved bits of his work and have baulked and worried about the indigestible epics like ‘Jerusalem’. In my mind, now, I tell him, frankly and openly as I tell Janie and Chris: my brain works differently from yours, William, and I just can’t get the stuff about Swedenborg. But you go on, WB. You go right ahead.
About Being Well
Lianne, Danielle, Susie, Kristell, Courtney, and Dawud
That poor people are less well than rich people is a lesson you can teach yourself any afternoon in a doctor’s surgery or an urban supermarket. How profoundly poverty affects children though, how much more often they have chronic illnesses, accidents, and disabilities than their richer peers, is a lesson that takes years to learn.
Lianne’s Biscuit and Courtney’s Dance
Thursday afternoon: my Inclusion group. It has taken a while to get us all writing quietly. Now Tia has settled in the corner where she insists on putting herself, and Susie has her thumb in her mouth, sucking in thought, and pens are conscientiously scratching across papers, and even Olivia, who gets the shakes, has stopped and Kristell, at last, has her arm around her work, her fluffy pen scribbling.
‘But,’ bursts out Lianne, apropos of nothing. ‘You are all thin. All of you. I’m the only fat one.’
‘No, I’m the fat one,’ shrieks Kristell, all peace lost, little hands flying, shakes restored. ‘Look at me! I’m all fat. So fat!’
‘You go out and in,’ says Lianne. ‘Out and in. Curves. I’m fat.’
Actually, Lianne is fat. It worries me, how much she has to haul up the stairs to get to class, how she arrives gasping for breath.
‘Shush,’ I say, ‘Lianne. Write your poem.’
‘No,’ says Lianne. ‘My poem is about being fat, and I can’t write it here because no one else is fat. Look, Tia and Kristell are curvy, Olivia’ (resentful stare) ‘is anorexic. Susie is just so thin, and Miss’ – she gazes at me – ‘Miss is the thinnest person her age I’ve ever seen.’
‘I’m not,’ I say. ‘Do be quiet.’
I cannot be the thinnest woman Lianne has ever seen. I am a very ordinary shape for a middle-class woman of fifty: a bit heavy on the hips, but waist carefully preserved with front crawl and Pilates. I know this is an ordinary shape because I check myself, anxiously, frequently, against my middle-class peers, the women I work with and work out with, and this is how we roll.
But of course, Lianne is not middle-class. Lianne comes from an extended family of women – mothers and grandmothers and aunts – who are all fat. I know them by sight because there are cousins and siblings throughout the school, and the older generation turn up a lot, both to the trouble meetings – counsellors, exclusions – and to plays and concerts, for their children are sweet and performative and musical as well as trouble. When the whole tribe come to the play, or to see Lianne sing, they fill a row of the hall like a horizon loaded with rain clouds.
So maybe I really am the thinnest middle-aged woman Lianne has ever seen. Maybe Lianne is telling me that she hasn’t se
en many middle-class women, and that I and my middle-class waist make her feel uncomfortable and judged: the way I feel when I change in the university pool in a crowd of muscled twenty-year-olds.
I few years back, I taught Lianne’s cousin, Danielle – or is it aunt? (The generations are blurred.) She was thought to be very bright, as Lianne is: a bit special. Being special was why both girls were sent to me in Poetry Group, or at least, that was the reason we gave them. On paper, they were both having ‘an intervention to preclude and circumvent the effects of a very deprived background on a student with strong academic potential as evidenced by Level 5 Year 6 SAT results’. We want Lianne, and wanted Danielle, to do really well, in other words. To fulfil their academic potential and go to university. To not fall into the same trap as so many disadvantaged children, and fail at secondary school after starting well at primary school.
Lianne is a lot more interested in writing than her cousin. Danielle’s poems tended to start well, then fizzle into something not all that special, perhaps because she was always too busy to develop anything; after all, she was also in all the top sets, and playing Sandy in our school production of Grease, and star of the netball team. Her boyfriend, who came constantly into her conversation and poems, was a free runner, and on the weekends Danielle would go with him, and run up the towers in the city centre, and all over the car park at the back of the station.
In one way, though, Danielle really was special: she was exquisitely pretty in the dark and elfin, Audrey Hepburn mode. She knew it, too; she was always finding occasion to take off her clothes and expose her pale, beautifully turned limbs. She declared, for instance, that it was easier to write poems in shorts, and would wriggle out of her uniform in the corner of the classroom to change. Between lessons, she was always demonstrating dance moves out by the sports hall, skirt ridden up to her crotch. ‘Poseur’, the kids called her, but she tossed her head, uncaring, sure of her talent. When I left school in the summer evenings, Danielle always seemed to be perched up on the gate, one hand in her lap like the Little Mermaid, boys and girls gazing up at her as she gesticulated and chattered, her little denim jacket pert on her slim shoulders, all potential and shiny pale lip gloss.
Nothing bad happened to Danielle. She didn’t take drugs or drop out of school or turn to crime – but somehow the winter she turned fifteen she lost the free-running boyfriend and gave up dance. And somehow the following spring she slipped out of the top sets, and the summer after that, she didn’t get great GCSEs; and somehow, after two years of sitting around in the sixth form, she failed her A Levels. Somehow, somehow, she missed all those ambitious targets we had for her in the same way she never finished her poems, in the way white, poor students so persistently do less well than they ought, as if they were being pulled downwards by an invisible current.
And all the time, as if refusing middle-class food along with middle-class ambition, Danielle put on weight. At first, she didn’t seem to notice, and continued to strip off at every opportunity, continuing to pose on gateposts and desks, ignoring the soft pads adhering to her sculptural limbs like clay. At first, she still wore the little denim jacket, her new bosom protruding ever more bulbously beneath it. Then it got too small to go over her arms and she wore it like a shawl over her shoulder. Then, she discarded it, and wore bovver boots and leggings and smock tops and was fat.
The last time I saw Danielle, she was twenty and had come in to help with the school play. She was standing behind the lead, a slim child in a leotard, and I mistook her for her own mother. I was surprised how hurt I was to see it. It wasn’t the flesh so much as the loss of grace; now she stood the way her mother stood, legs apart to hold the bulk, stomach out, arms awkward and ashamed. I thought of the poised girl she had been, and the phrase she got above herself came to my mind. Danielle had been brought down from that moment of beauty, subsumed in the women around her like a nymph tugged down by hounds. It only took seven years.
‘Shut up,’ says Tia, now, trying to write as ever. ‘Shut up, Lianne. Have a biscuit. Have a biscuit and write your poem.’
‘Yeah,’ I say, ‘go on, Lianne. You’ve made a good start.’ And I pass the biscuits. Lianne always makes a good start; then, too often, something happens. Shouting about being fat is just one of the potential disasters.
Tia has a biscuit, too. I don’t, because this New Year, when my middle-class swimming group announced competitive resolutions to give up sugar, carbs, cake, I came up with the simplest: to give up lunch. And I’m sticking to it, so I’m hungry now, this Thursday afternoon as I talk to Lianne. Lianne is stuffing fig rolls, my favourite, into her pretty fat face, and it is very hard indeed not to have one. I can manage it, I think, in the same way that I can manage to finish a poem, because I am middle-class. Because, since I was a tiny child, I have been taught to wait for long-term goals: for dinner instead of a snack, for good exam passes instead of a party, for university instead of a job, for a job instead of a baby, and – very important, this – the promised rewards have duly been given to me. Now, I am able to think, or more to the point, to feel and believe, that the long-term reward of thinness is better than the short-term one of a fig roll. I think it’s worth it. I think I’m worth it.
But Lianne doesn’t think she’s worth much. This she keeps establishing as she writes poem after poem in which she is abandoned by stepfathers and boyfriends and friends. It’s in the way she writes, too, in those good starts which falter, in the way she can’t draft, can’t bear to look at what she has written, the way she downloads and copies work from the internet. She’s like her cousin, really. Lianne and Danielle come from the same loving but chaotic backgrounds. Rewards and treats come, but irregularly and irrationally. Neither of them has had the experience of waiting for things and then being well rewarded for waiting. They take the short term because the long term has let them down over and over again. They can’t refuse biscuits any more than they can study. They can’t believe in university any more than they can believe in thinness, or themselves.
‘I wish,’ says Lianne, eating the biscuit, and it is a familiar theme, ‘I wish I was anorexic. Like Olivia. Bulimia, you don’t get no sympathy.’
‘Olivia ain’t anorexic,’ says Tia. ‘She said so, didn’t she? And we give you lots of sympathy. Now shut up.’
Olivia is in the room, but she says nothing. Olivia is on strong anti-depressants. Her shakes are constant and very hard to control; we have to use a carpeted classroom so that the tables don’t rattle. She has been on high doses of what she calls her ‘meds’ for a couple of years, since a serious suicide attempt. She says she hates them, that they stop her from feeling, but also that she needs them, they insulate her from feelings. She also says, and I believe her because she is only thin, not starved looking, that whatever Lianne says, she doesn’t have a food problem as such; she just finds it hard to unclench enough to swallow. Her poems are written in sharp, high, oblique handwriting, very fast, and reveal sharpened, heightened slices of a tortured world. Olivia stays thin enough to slip away, to disappear through her own door.
‘I don’t actually know any anorexics,’ muses Kristell, reaching for another biscuit. ‘Not in this school.’
I don’t, either, not in our school, though I do worry sometimes about Zosia. She is the cleverest girl in the sixth form, intent on medical school, and carrying the expectations of a poor Polish family in her carefully packed school bag. She is also blonde and very pretty and slim: recently, too slim. But Zosia tries too hard to be in control, and anorexia is a disease of control. That’s why it is a middle-class disorder; why it is rampant in the academic girls’ school up the road. Bulimia, on the other hand, that expression of chaos, self-hatred, and mixed messages, is common in our school, and so, epidemically, is self-harm.
‘I used to be skinny,’ says Kristell, now thoroughly disrupted. ‘Not no more.’
She did. When Kristell arrived in Year 9, she had a bosomy, curvy figure with a tiny waist and pretty ankles. She also h
ad huge, fringed brown eyes, a pouting, sorrowful, half-open mouth, lush, waist-length brunette curls, and a downy, newly hatched quality altogether. She looked like trouble, was my first thought.
And she was trouble too. I taught her English set, and she disrupted it. She wasn’t noisy, as such, herself – she had a soft, breathy voice to match the Bambi lashes and fresh mouth – but noise followed her, arose around her like thorns around an enchanted princess. ‘It ain’t me!’ was one of her cries. ‘Miss, I ain’t doing it on purpose.’
And she wasn’t. She wore less make-up than many of the other girls, sported no special variation of the school uniform. But each morning she got out of bed and brushed out her cloud of princess hair, and there she was, locked in a puddle of pretty, a bubble of trouble, and she couldn’t get out of it any more than a fly can get out of milk.
But Kristell herself, when you got to know her, was very intelligent and desperate to please, especially when it came to writing. She loved poems; they made her little hands shake with pleasure. She wanted to write, too, but it made her nervous. What if she wrote the wrong thing? ‘Miss!’ she would say, in her husky voice. ‘I’m getting my anxiety.’ Her lip would quiver and her nose wrinkle. I’d send her to the quiet corner; I’d let her put on her headphones. Her poems were usually about loss, especially the loss of ‘innocence’ (her favourite word) and childhood. Once she started, she wrote most earnestly, her fluffy-top pen, bright pink, bobbing along the paper.
Once, when she complained that she couldn’t get any peace to finish a poem, because it was so noisy, boys were bombarding her with paper balls, whispering her name, taking her drafts from the bin and reading them aloud, and she begged me to explain why, I said: ‘It’s because you’re very beautiful, and they are trying to get your attention. Because they like you.’