by Rose Tremain
Tonight, at dinner, Alex is very clear. First, he states that he does not eat green things, as I ought to know, and second that he does not eat fruit. He tells me this while folding his homework in half, then quarters, then eighths, then sixteenths. All over the house are pieces of paper that he has folded and then unfolded in various fashions. He likes patterns of diamonds and squares and triangles. For years, I have had to iron his homework each morning before school.
‘Alex, there is no fruit on your plate,’ I tell him now.
He holds up a biscuit, one of the homemade ones I have sweetened with dates and honey.
He says, ‘Fruit is like an excretion from earth. I can’t eat it.’
I shrug my shoulders. ‘Where do you see fruit?’
‘Hidden.’
‘I don’t see it.’
‘Something is here,’ he says. ‘I don’t know. But it is from a tree.’
He returns to his homework page, which he unfolds, showing an elaborate pattern of diamonds and parallel lines. I smile at his creation because he is so proud. He thinks he has made something beautiful, though I know the teacher will be less impressed.
‘So let me get this right,’ I say. ‘Nothing green and nothing from a tree.’
He nods, then places the biscuit onto the plate and covers the plate with his napkin.
I say, ‘Oranges are from trees.’
This makes him cross. He loves orange juice. He looks at his glass, perhaps deciding whether he can permit himself to drink juice now that this fact about the orange has been brought to his attention.
‘No bits,’ he tells me sternly. ‘Smooth style only. Tropicana only.’
‘Okay, but even Tropicana is made from oranges, which are a fruit, and come from trees,’ I say. I want him to understand that, despite how much he denies it, he is as reliant on the facts of nature as the rest of us.
‘Just the juice, not the bits. None of these.’ He pushes the plate of biscuits, shrouded in their napkin, to the centre of the table. Years ago he’d have hurled them to the floor, but those days are over. We have this other thing – his rigid ideas, what would be obstinacy in another child – but not destruction.
‘What do you eat when you visit Daddy?’ I ask him.
‘Nothing,’ he says. Then, after a moment, he says, ‘Meat.’
Richard now lives in a Victorian flat outside Ealing. It has huge windows and a vaulted ceiling and sealed wooden floors; everything solid, no aluminium. He was the third casualty after the house, and after Alex, himself, who changed at about twenty months, the first symptom being that he stopped smiling.
Two years ago, when Alex was six, I took him to Richard’s flat for their first weekend together. He walked the perimeter of the place, his ear cocked as though listening to the waves of traffic below, then threw himself onto the floor, his fists clenched, his face screwed in concentrated agony, screaming in protest as though some invisible force were holding him down.
‘But you will have a great time with Daddy!’ I said, trying to reassure him. His shirt rode up his middle, his shoes hammered the varnished floor and, when I tried to stop him kicking, he caught my thumb and bit it. I heard a little gasp, then realised it was my own. A phone rang and Richard’s voice came on, announcing that Carla and he were not at home.
‘AHHHH!’ Alex yelled. I dropped my head, closed my eyes, trying to absorb this moment like so many others, feeling it enter me, unlock my heart, tattoo a little mark right there.
‘He’s going to take you to see rockets at the Science Museum. And stars at the Planetarium!’ I promised. The caller began to leave an elaborate message for Carla, something about where the wine bar was located and what time they would all meet. Meanwhile, Alex looked like he’d been put on a stretching rack, his legs tensed, toes pointing, his back arched so that his stomach rose like a table in front of me. ‘It’s – not –’ He couldn’t quite get his words out. But he had words – that was the point. The sale of our old house bought us his ability to speak. After hours and hours of therapy; I’d say it was a bargain.
‘It’s – not – !’
‘It’s not what, Alex?’ I said gently.
But he cannot talk when he is upset (this is still the case). He gave up, pounding the floor, pressing his eyes with his fingers, groaning. Richard stood over us, a giant, angry scarecrow. ‘What is the matter?’ he asked Alex, a little sharply.
‘It’s – not – square!’ Alex yelled. And then I realised that it wasn’t the thought of being in a new place that bothered him, or the thought of being with his father for the weekend, or having Carla there instead of me. It was that the walls were not true in the flat. The shape was not geometric, being neither rectangular nor square.
‘Okay, okay, it’s not square, but …’ I thought for a moment. ‘It’s still a quadrilateral,’ I said.
Richard turned and went to the window. ‘Let him cry,’ he said.
I looked up. ‘He’s only six.’
‘If he’s old enough to know what is square, he’s old enough to stop crying.’
This kind of logic had been the wrecking ball of our marriage.
What I learned that day was important. Not about my exhusband being a jerk – I already knew that. Carla could have him. Being an architect herself, maybe she could remodel him into something more spacious, more inviting. What I learned was the importance of changing my house around, not letting Alex get too stuck on ‘sameness’. I can’t do anything about the walls, which are all perfectly aligned, but I can alter curtains so that they don’t hang exactly right, swap around colours and furniture. Make a bedroom into a study, the living room into a bedroom, then switch it back again.
Alex hates this. But I notice that he accepts such changes now with resignation. Tonight, after a dinner during which he eats nothing green and nothing from a tree unless it is orange juice, he climbs the steps to his bedroom. There the computer waits for him, his faithful companion, purring like a cat.
The first thing he sees is that I have painted his door.
‘It’s green!’ he calls down. ‘It should be white!’
‘It’s still a door,’ I say in a chipper sort of way.
‘And there is a tree on it!’
‘Yes, an oak,’ I tell him. ‘I painted some acorns at the bottom.’
Inside his room is a rug with one corner cut out of it – another part of my cunning plan to combat inflexibility. But I noticed this morning when I was putting away clothes that he had filled in the missing corner with permanent marker, which he drew across the floor.
I deserved it, I suppose. But the door is a bushy green English oak now and I can hear his sigh from all the way down here.
‘Stupid door!’ he says. ‘Stupid, stupid, stupid!’
The week before the birthday party, I uncover the invitation from its place behind the railway schedule, securing it with strong tacks at each of its corners. The next day I check to see whether he has hidden it again, but it is still in full view. It is there the day after that. And the next.
‘This is a great invitation,’ I tell him.
‘It has balloons,’ he says, then sucks his lips so that his mouth seems to disappear.
‘You’ll be nine soon, too,’ I say, inserting a measure of intrigue into my voice, like his turning nine is a splendid new thing. ‘Maybe you’ll have a party.’
‘I like eight,’ he tells me.
But the invitation remains. I am hoping that the fact he allows it to remain means he has brought the birthday party into his horizon, expecting it, maybe half looking forward to it. I think the party excites him and frightens him. He looks at the invitation, wringing his hands like a racetrack punter, occasionally standing for many minutes with it inches from his nose. Throughout the day he checks the rail schedule and then glances at the clock, calculating perhaps the number of minutes it will take before the Bedwyn train stops at Newbury, our local station, or how many London trains are scheduled that hour. Then he looks at the invita
tion. I see his eyes move with the words he reads. I see him smile and then put his hand over his mouth.
‘There will be cake,’ he says to no one in particular.
The cuckoo clock was always his favourite toy. It always cuckooed, or whatever you call it, exactly on the hour.
Film times, listed in bulleted lights across a black screen, held him for ages. He danced beneath them, memorising the times for any number of films he had no interest in seeing, preferring always to watch videos.
A single video will wear out after about 150 viewings; this I have learned.
The first song on the album must be the first song you listen to. The last song on the album must be the last song you listen to. When I program the CD player for random selection, he says, ‘Uh-oh,’ then shakes his head and reprograms it.
‘That’s not right,’ he says, like he’s talking about ethics. About truth. ‘That’s not right,’ he says, when I mix Tomy trains with a Bob the Builder machine.
It is as though he wishes for more order. The things he loves – computer games, music playlists, the building of robots – all function within a closed, static system.
But I am not a static system. When I speak, I go off on tangents, or change my mind, or change the subject, or pause too long. I might sneeze, cough. My facial gestures, my gaze and movements, are too random for Alex. He looks away.
‘Talk to me,’ I beg him, speaking to the side of his neck.
‘It’s good to talk,’ he says, Vodafone-style.
In the car, on the way to school, I try to hook him into conversation. ‘Look, an alien from outer space!’ I say, pointing at a cloud. He tells me, frankly, that it is only a seagull. ‘But the alien was riding the seagull!’ I say, to which he announces that I am annoying him. ‘I like to annoy people,’ I tease. ‘If you want me to stop, you better call the Silly Police.’
‘Silly Police,’ he repeats.
‘They will stop me,’ I assure him.
A few minutes later, I say, ‘The alien was riding a seagull with green feathers.’
‘Silly Police!’ Alex says. ‘And there was no seagull.’
I try several other manners of engaging him during the journey. All he wants to do is sit. Finally, somewhat apologetically, he confesses, ‘You are confusing me.’
I nod. I tell him, ‘I know. But I am confused, too.’
‘It is because I am autistic,’ he announced once after a prickly meeting with his classroom teacher. Both Richard and I attended the meeting, which was about how Alex was not socialising enough, was not assimilating, to use her words.
Richard exploded. ‘Who the hell taught him that?!’ he shouted as Alex clasped his ears.
‘One of the other children at school told him,’ I explained. I cleared my throat, looking straight ahead. It hadn’t been another child; it was me. Alex sometimes cries silently, sitting in bed, staring ahead as at a film only he can see. A few nights earlier he said, ‘I am not like the other boys.’ And then those odd, quiet tears. So I told him.
‘You can’t expect other children to follow your ideas,’ I said to Richard. ‘If he goes to a mainstream school, kids are going to talk. That’s just the way it is.’
‘Bloody school,’ said Richard.
I sighed. I hated myself for lying. ‘It’s not such a bad thing that he knows.’
‘It is 19:14,’ Alex told his father. ‘Your train is at 19:31.’
I shouldn’t be relieved when Richard leaves, but I always am.
‘Shall I walk on my hands?’ I ask him, ‘Shall I eat with my nose?’ I pretend to be a bird, pecking spaghetti from my plate. Alex cannot stand it, of course. ‘Stop that,’ he says.
I iron his homework and he tells me, ‘That’s not clothes.’
I brush my hair with a toothbrush and he shakes his head.
‘Rule violation?’ I tease.
His lips lift in a half-smile. ‘I’m calling the Silly Police,’ he says.
This is progress.
Most of the time it is a question of intrusion.
‘I want to go on the computer,’ he says. It’s like a sign on the door saying ‘No Entry’.
‘I want to go on the Alex,’ I tell him.
‘You can’t go on me,’ he says. ‘I’m not a machine.’
This is the thing I am counting on. That he knows he is not a machine, and that he is willing – now or someday – to take risks, to enter into the complex, broadband style of communication the rest of us have. That he will not want to remain always within the safety of the predictable – videos, timetables, computer games, Lego instructions – but will seek out the erratic, shifting world of social exchange. Seek it out, not be pushed into it.
‘I’m not going to the birthday party,’ he tells me. ‘I don’t like mammals.’
For the birthday party he has a new pair of combat trousers I picked up at Marks and Spencer’s. He has chosen a shirt he has used a clothing marker on, drawing the exact places on the shirt beneath which you would find his inner organs. He thinks it is cool, this shirt, but I doubt the other children will agree.
He combs his hair straight down with a damp comb, brushes his teeth, smiles into the mirror and then lets his smile fall.
‘What is our departure time?’ he says.
‘Fourteen-four-oh,’ I tell him.
The invitation has been folded so tightly that the patterns seem infinite, like those of a crystal. He sits in the car with his gleaming hair, his clear brown eyes. Every so often he makes an odd grimacing smile that looks neither natural nor joyful.
‘Birthday parties are boring,’ he says. He has undoubtedly heard this said by someone in his class about maths or train times. His tone and his expression as he says it seem as though they come from someone else, another child, not Alex.
On the way to the birthday party I tell him that I can stay with him or I can go – it’s up to him.
He says nothing; I don’t even know if he has heard me. He licks his lips over and over. Below his lower lip is a chafed area the shape of a crescent moon.
‘I can chat with the other mothers,’ I say.
He closes his eyes, then shudders, licks his lips again. I would ask him to stop but I know he can’t help it. He is doing his best, I tell myself. He is trying.
‘You’re doing great,’ I tell him.
Then he starts to cry. His tears are silent, falling one at a time in a steady stream down his cheeks.
‘Oh sweetheart,’ I say, searching the kerb for a place to pull over, feeling that same unlocking that I have become so familiar with. I am marked like a dartboard. As I pull to the side of the road, Alex opens his mouth to speak, but all that comes out is a single, long moan.
He was not always like this. In our old house, the one Richard mourned so much, he chased me across the cherry wood floor, laughing as I hid from him, springing out from behind doors to surprise me. He made baby sounds and touched my lips as I imitated back to him his mysterious cooings. We have photographs of him dancing with a stuffed bear, turning sand with a shovel, testing his skill with a tricycle. And we have the other photographs, too, in which his eyes seem heavy, his gaze vacant, his expression dulled. Autism has taken from us and we are not the same. Like people in a country that has suffered a long and brutal war, we have lived under its siege, uncertain of our future, facing daily the great and menacing spectre before us as though with one eye.
‘I’m tired,’ Richard said when I called him about the party. ‘I can’t have him this weekend. Carla wants to go away.’
Richard sounded worse than tired. He sounded depressed. Or drunk, or perhaps a mixture of the two. Sometimes I remind myself that this is hard: for me, for him, for Alex.
‘That’s okay; he has a birthday party anyway. I’m happy for him to stay home – I mean, with me.’
‘A birthday party? He’ll hate that.’
‘It will be fine,’ I said. Richard coughed, then laughed unpleasantly. He said Alex wouldn’t make it through a party.
And that I was crazy.
‘Of course he’ll make it through,’ I said, trying to sound confident, trying to sound like I know my son.
‘Don’t call me all tearful when it goes to shit,’ he said.
‘I won’t call you.’
In the car I stroke Alex’s hair. I tell him it’s just a party. We don’t have to go. On his lap is a present he has chosen for the birthday boy, a train that you can take apart and put together again with a plastic screwdriver. It is exactly the sort of thing Alex loves and he has chosen it for another boy. This is a step forward. Some ridiculous and practical part of me wants to move the present from his lap now, as his tears are making the wrapping soggy. But he clasps it tightly, hanging on as though to a ledge from which he might fall.
‘We don’t have to go to the party,’ I tell him.
‘I’m a silly boy,’ he says.
‘No, not silly. Wonderful. A wonderful boy.’
‘Silly, useless boy!’ he says. And still the tears, one after the other, following the same track.
What I must remind myself of now – what I must tell myself – is that it is good that Alex wants to share how he feels. This moment, however painful, signifies a change. Because it is all the things he is not doing that matter. He is not having a tantrum. He is not hitting his head against the dashboard, kicking his legs out straight, biting his own hand. What he is doing is so normal. He is telling me how he feels and with that he is showing an expectation, I think, this somehow communicating his feelings will make it better. Surely we are getting now to the real problem, the very core of the autism that holds him back, that hurts him.
‘Right now, in other cars, are boys like you,’ I tell him. I have no idea where this is going, but I keep talking. ‘They are nervous that nobody will like them. That at the party they will be afraid … of the animals or the noise or … or that there will be too many colours—’
‘And the balloons might pop!’ he cries.
‘Exactly,’ I agree. ‘The balloons might pop. They are concerned about that.’
‘And that’s a horrid noise!’ he says. ‘And the children running in all directions!’
