Joe

by Michael Blastland

  A pitiful shortcoming in Joe’s former home life had been his isolation. We created a unique nest for him where few others came, excluding anything that disrupted his fragile calm, and other children – unforgiving, noisy, uncompromising – were classed as disruptions. If he were to learn, we reasoned, we had enough to do to hold his attention. We came in time to doubt that logic, since he learnt one thing at the expense of another: numbers and colours, for example, rather than the ordinary civilising encounters of social life. School might just, we hoped, supply both.

  As Joe got used to the school routine and slowly accepted the technicolour presence of other children often as odd, disruptive and wired as he, the signs were promising. Our modest hope for him was not a life of intimacies, deep, trusting companionship and rapport – Joe may never know these things – it was simply for a shared experience of social life, of everyday encounters that might sow a seed or two of awareness that others existed. Lately, Joe and his classmate had begun to look like a pair.

  Standing together in the playground that day, Joe thumped him.

  A raised hand, the open side of a clenched fist, a single blow aimed at the body, not an accomplished strike, not the noble art, but delivered with vicious intent.

  A pause.

  To Joe’s astonishment, the boy hit him back. A raised hand, a similarly pathetic flap, hardly what you’d call a flurry of punches.

  Another pause.

  Joe slugged him again.

  It was as if certain gentlemanly rules applied: you have your whack, sir, then I shall have mine. A cup of tea between blows wouldn’t have been out of place. It ended not many stately whacks later when one of Joe’s went un-returned and, somehow satisfied with that, the two boys resumed their slouch. Joe, the stubborn devil, had had the last word.

  And yet, I want to maintain that Joe is one of life’s innocents. By innocence, I mean this definition: that he has little self-awareness, the innocence of childhood extended indefinitely, knowing nothing of the evil in the world, nor conscious how he appears to others. He’s helped by a sublime indifference to other people’s opinions. Unaware of the bad they do and think, he doesn’t see his own nakedness, has little sense of his own privacy, no pride or vanity, bears little malice because – I suspect – he scarcely imagines how others could suffer.

  Here, though, is the first note of ambiguity, for to be unable to imagine suffering has a barbed consequence; true, it means never intending to cause real hurt (he hits people the way he presses buttons on the video, with no sense of human pain inside), but it also means being unmoved by their pain, as likely callous as virtuous. With this realisation we begin to see how Joe’s innocence is capable of cruelty. One lesson of his behaviour is that as far as we associate virtue with ignorance – the Forrest Gump tendency – we fatally misunderstand it.

  One Saturday, Joe and I stood waiting in the Harlequin shopping centre in Watford for the lift to the car park. Joe is rattled by lifts; he approaches them like stalking a rabbit, hunched, one foot gingerly ahead of other, an inchworm towards the precipice. Some heights, but not all, send him scrambling through his dizziness for the folds of my coat, hiding his eyes, covering his head, distrusting the floor. When we’re driving, he’ll throw himself head down into the seat at the approach of a hill he recognises, grabbing anything solid or substantial as if he’s about to fall off – the gearstick, me, his sister Cait – and hold on like a cat. It’s a peculiar kind of vertigo because he might just as suddenly throw off his fear, sit up and start flapping or shouting ‘weee!’ – his word for a slide. Then again, he might not react at all if he hasn’t come across the hill before. The same physical event thus variously produces alarm, excitement and indifference.

  Around us in the Harlequin centre were the typical units of neon-lit, city Lego: WHSmith, Boots, Dixons, like block-paving in primary colours. Since the alternative to the lift is coaxing him up four flights of stairs and escalators, the lift gets the nod and at least he enjoys pushing the buttons – both of them – though still at arm’s length. And so we waited while the indicator counted off the floors, and in that moment, from a pram a few steps away, came the first plaintiff drone of a restless toddler.

  Crying babies intrigue Joe. If you’re lucky, he points and mimics. ‘Uh huh, huh, huh,’ he says, meaning, obviously enough: ‘crying’. But his recognition of tears can’t be taken to mean he understands the feelings that prompt them and so, if you’re unlucky, he’ll do what he first did that day.

  Peering towards the pram, turning with a puzzled look from the toddler to me, he shuffled into a better position to see. The baby’s mother looked on serenely, smiling as one sweet little one exhibited cute fascination for another.

  ‘Yes, Joe, baby crying,’ I said as he glanced over for some kind of reassurance. ‘Baby sad.’

  ‘Uh huh, huh, huh!’ said Joe.

  ‘I think he’s a little bit tired,’ said the mother to Joe.

  ‘Uh huh, huh, huh!’

  ‘Yes, Joe, crying.’

  These are mostly words he can make sense of, words he’s heard and understood before, but not with the meaning you and I would attach to them, as it soon transpired. Joe took another step forward, peered closely, raised his hand and smashed his fist into the writhing bundle in the pushchair.

  For a breathless moment we stood and gawped. All good clichés deserve their day: we froze on the spot, we really were lost for words, for what does etiquette demand following unprovoked toddler atrocity? I was still staring, stupid with shock, when it dawned on me he was about to do it again, and I jumped gawkily to catch his raised arm.

  Judging by the even tone and intensity of the cry, Joe hadn’t connected well enough with any tender part to do damage. All the same, it was grotesque; profuse apologies and mumbled explanations scarcely made amends. The baby’s mother was understanding, to a point, but clearly couldn’t take in the brutality: a baby, for heaven’s sake. She stood there a little pale and open mouthed and who can blame her, that she came shopping only to witness an act so confounding her deepest instincts to protect the weak and be tender to unhappiness. From a scene of sweetness and apparent compassion sprang thuggery.

  Doubtless, Joe did it, but did he do it with malice? Did he know it to be wrong? A court wouldn’t find him criminally responsible and the interesting question is what peculiarity in Joe allows us to say that the court would be right.

  ‘Yes, yes, I understand,’ she said, taking in what logic there was in my hasty, garbled explanation, but evidently not caring for it. Thank goodness, I think as I look back, Joe didn’t do any real harm. The mother knelt in front of the pushchair, stroking and tucking her toddler, still wincing and perhaps subconsciously shielding him from us. I’ll muse over this one later, I thought as we made our still apologetic exit.

  ‘Yes, do take it,’ said the mother, keen to see us off. ‘No, no damage. Yes, he’s all right.’ We shuffled into the lift, Joe sloping along beside me silently chewing his thumb.

  Does shame smile? On every page of Joe’s life there’s been another pop-up disaster. With almost all, an odd laughter also rises in me, lurching between waves of something more desperate and intense, something a little like grief. This absurd vacillation passes behind closed eyes, my head down, my face somewhere between smirk and grimace, convulsive, doleful sniggers mocking my seriousness. Not, I think (I hope), because I relish moments like this, but because, I reason afterwards, seeing them as comedy is the one alternative to despair. For after the panic comes shame pure and simple. What on earth did I say or do to give Joe the idea that the correct response to crying toddlers is to thump them? Nothing, I hope, but truly, who knows? Later, a friend tried to console me with the thought that there are adults among us who also think violence is a proper tool of upbringing, but putting Joe in that class is no comfort.

  Joe, on the other hand, gave no indication of guilt or anything like it. I’m not sure how he would express guilt, so could be wrong, but surmised from his blith
e expression and happy chatter once we were out of the lift and back in the car park that he felt no particular moral questions had been raised.

  Compare Joe’s behaviour with the story of Yoni, a chimpanzee raised by Nadie Ladygina Kohts in Moscow in the early twentieth century.

  ‘If I pretend to be crying,’ wrote Kohts, ‘close my eyes and weep, Yoni immediately stops his play and any other activities, quickly runs over to me, all excited and shagged, from the most remote places in the house, such as the roof or the ceiling of his cage, from where I could not drive him down despite my persistent calls and entreaties. He hastily runs around me, as if looking for the offender; looking at my face, he tenderly takes my chin in his palm, lightly touches my face with his finger, as though trying to understand what is happening and turns around, clenching his toes into firm fists.’

  The story is told by the primatologist Frans de Waal in his book The Ape and the Sushi Master. It’s one among many remarkable examples of animal empathy for both other animals and humans. Chimps do it, most humans first begin to show signs of it from about twenty months, a feeling of empathy. In all likelihood, Joe doesn’t feel empathy now, aged ten, and might never.

  For most of us, the ability to recognise a set of basic human emotions is near universal. Show pictures of a happy, smiling face or a sad, weeping one, and just about everyone, in every culture, agrees what they mean. The experiment has been tried, the results are overwhelmingly positive. And Joe? Joe I know recognises expressions: he can name a smile, a crying face or an angry one – the first-order emotional expressions – and produce consistent words or sounds approximating to the correct description for each. He can point to a crying face when we say the word ‘sad’. But I suspect it’s mostly veneer to Joe. It’s all on the outside, noise and salt and water, nothing to do with what he knows from his own aching heart or shrieking nerve endings when he also cries.

  A friend, finding herself alone with Joe for a moment or two while he shelled a packet of fruit pastilles into his mouth, asked if she could have one, held out her hand and when he ignored her pretended to cry. She might as well have been invisible, she said. It could be that Joe saw through her, though I suspect the truth is in the other direction entirely: that he could barely see her as a rounded psychological being at all, with wants, needs or feelings distinct from his own chomping sense of growing satiety. Here, then, is another likely casualty of Joe’s mind-blindness: as with his difficulty in understanding what other people mean when they talk to him, or their motivation when they act around him, so is he unable to work out, with the casual ease so familiar to the rest of us, what they feel.

  This is so despite the fact that Joe does cry too, and it is thought to be in large part from familiarity with our own feelings that we suppose others who behave as we do, feel as we do. In making that assumption, as most of us do, we have to be able to imagine a separate mind with separate sensations but working in the same fashion as our own. If we typically found that difficult to imagine, as Joe finds it fiendishly difficult to know what others are feeling, how could we know what would constitute their good? How could we know what virtue was?

  For a year or two, Joe went to a school for children with moderate learning difficulties in south Watford. It was an exceptional institution. I was in awe of the devotion of the staff, the head teacher who was wise and helpful, his teachers and carers often loving and dutiful. They laboured to make the placement work and would have battled on gamely with Joe, I suspect, almost whatever happened. It wasn’t to be. Joe’s behaviour, despite one-to-one support, became steadily more disruptive and violent. In the end they expelled him, not because the school ran out of goodwill, but because we asked them to. Had we withdrawn him voluntarily, we could have been said to have assumed financial responsibility for his education, a ruinous prospect. ‘Never been asked to expel a child before,’ said the head teacher.

  As Joe’s behaviour at school deteriorated, the staff kept a log. It made fascinating reading, that by-now golden blend of agony and hilarity that seems to be one of Joe’s motifs. When he became difficult, he was taken out of class and left to chill for a couple of minutes in a separate, safe but somewhat spartan room, a kindergarten cooler.

  Joe understood this, brilliantly, as an incentive: the way to escape from work was to cause mayhem. The log came home at the end of each day, neatly divided into columns with the time, the nature of the incident and the action taken carefully recorded. 12:23 Joe hit Jimmy. Action taken – two minutes quiet room. 12.26 Joe hit Jimmy. Action taken – two minutes … 12:29 Joe hit …

  The problem for the school was what to do with this child in the confined space of a classroom whenever he turned into the livid flailing squid from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Jimmy was within range. The answer seemed obvious: take him out of arm’s reach, take him where he could do no harm, take him out. Unfortunately, Joe wanted out and the school was unwittingly coaching him to achieve it. He didn’t like the bustle, didn’t like the more innocent idiosyncrasies of his classmates, and so, in seeking his own peace, found violence highly effective.

  Equally, Joe didn’t want to learn. Learning involves novelty whereas he prefers familiarity. Yet the lesson he did master with precocity was that the quickest way to see off all that riled him was an unmeasured right hook. He practised it, to the teachers’ dismay, with ruthless efficiency, as if pain were not real unless his own. I knew this attitude to my cost when, playing in bed, he’d cantilever his hefty self over my chest on the points of his elbows, sublimely indifferent to the wincing and groaning. I used to have a sneaking, perverse regard for the way Joe could reduce responsible, committed adults to rubble, myself among them. Of necessity, I smiled about that in private. Mind you, poor Jimmy.

  How do we still call Joe innocent? True, he has no mind of Jimmy, no obvious compassion for his discomfort, just as he had little human regard, it seems, for an ‘innocent’ baby; but then, he has little mind, little awareness even of himself.

  What we sometimes mean by innocence here is what Simon Baron-Cohen describes when he talks of mind-blindness. Mind-blindness, an inability to imagine the state of mind of others, an inability to wonder what they’re thinking, is often said to indicate a lack of vanity or pride. Most of us make assumptions about what others know and think all the time. In writing this, I think about how you will think. If you walk towards the corner around which I’ve just passed a drunken brawl, I know that you will not know about it and I’ll probably warn you. Likewise, because I am aware of your thoughts, I might worry about your opinion of me, I might become vain, seek fame, demand respect, shrink in embarrassment. I doubt Joe would have much sense of any of this: being unable to imagine the minds of others, or indeed, I suspect, to imagine in abstract his own thoughts, he lacks both self-awareness and awareness of others to an extent that arguably makes him innocent of his actions. How can he intend malice if has no idea that he is causing harm, if he cannot imagine properly the effect on us of what he does? To think of consequences, emotional, psychiatric consequences, requires an ability to put oneself in the place of all those others affected by our actions. To have no sense of others as thinking, feeling people, to be innocent as Joe is innocent, may be to live free of vanity, but it may equally lead to a life of breathtaking emotional selfishness.

  Joe is baffled by my inability to understand him, expecting me to be wired into his thoughts. ‘Ugh,’ he’ll grunt, pointing nowhere in particular. ‘Ugh!’

  ‘What, Joe? What do you want?’

  ‘Well obviously, you idiot parent,’ his expression suggests, ‘what I want is “ugh”!’

  What he’s pointing at, I have no idea. It could be just outside the window, it could be miles away. He expects me to know. He seems not to differentiate between his own thoughts and the thoughts he assumes I’ll have. Now and then, he’ll be sitting on the other side of the room leafing through the pages of a book on his raised knees when he’ll jab at something on the page. All I can see is the cove
r, and not much of that. Joe stabs again and looks up to see if I’ve cottoned on. I’ll walk over and try to tip the book forward to see what’s caught his eye. No, he doesn’t want me to do that, he wants to keep looking at it himself, but he does want me to say something about the thing on the page in the book in front of him. He jabs again and grunts. It’s clear that this is supposed to be sufficient to demand an answer. ‘But, Joe,’ I want to say pointlessly, ‘Daddy can’t see what you’re looking at. How could I when the book is so obviously turned away from me? I don’t look through your eyes, for heaven’s sake, I don’t have your thoughts.’

  Daniel Tammet, whom I once featured in a programme on Radio 4, has recited pi from memory to 22,514 decimal places. It took him five hours. He is an amazing, gentle character whose Asperger’s comes across as an engaging English timidity. When he was young he went on holiday with another family. Feeling homesick, he rang his mother and asked her to ring him back. Then he put the phone down. ‘I didn’t realise,’ he said, ‘that I had to give her the number. I assumed that since I had it, she did too.’

  There’s a well-known experiment you can try with small children to see if they’ve acquired a sense of other people’s consciousness. I’ve seen its invention in numerous forms variously attributed to Daniel Dennett, a philosopher, Simon Baron-Cohen, a psychopathologist, and psychologists Heinz Wimmer and Joseph Perner. It goes like this:

  Hide a toy in a box while a doll is watching. The doll then goes out of the room. Take the toy out of the box and hide it somewhere else. The doll comes back into the room. Where does she look for her toy? If your child thinks she’ll look in the box, then it’s evidence of a theory of mind – an understanding that the doll doesn’t know the things we do; doesn’t know, because she wasn’t in the room, that the toy has moved. If the doll looks in the new hiding place, your child is assuming that the knowledge the toy has been moved is somehow universal, that to some extent her own thoughts are everyone’s thoughts. The experiment is known as a false-belief task and most children begin to pass by the time they’re about four, though some researchers claim to have detected the skill earlier. Even if such a narrative could be presented to Joe, which I doubt, he’d unquestionably fail.