by Will Self
as Zack had piloted them through the London traffic, en route
from one bloody charlatan to the next … You should be grateful,
he’d said – or phonics to that effect – because even thirty years ago,
the recommended treatment for children like Ben was –. I know!
I know! She soundlessly shouts down this voice from the past:
I know – parentectomy, the removal of the child from the evil
refrigerator mother who’s completely frozen her own child’s emotional
development. Which was why, whenever Ben was surrounded
by happily laughing children, he … screamed and screamed and
couldn’t wait to be alone again. Camilla remembers how confidently
Zack had circled the steering wheel with one hand, so the car
slid across Park Lane and slipped round annaround Marble Arch –
strange you’re such a good driver … She recalls saying to him
then – and againannagain: Yes, he wants to be alone – but alone
with me. Which was certainly true, although when they were
alone together … he scarcely noticed me. Or, rather: Ben only paid
attention to his mother when she was trying to give him the
latest guaranteed therapy. Which consisted of holding him tightly
in a secure, mummy-bear-hug, for four separate periods of thirty
minutes each, spaced throughout the day. This had been just one
of the rigid prescriptions she was … unable to fulfil, because, aged
four, her son squirmed, kicked, punched and finally held his breath
until … he blew it all back in my face! A malty blast, stinking of
all the shit we made him swallow … But really, she admonishes her
mirror-self, I mean me … Zack always urged caution: I’ve been
around the block enough times … he’d say as he drove the three of
them around another block, a further time … and I’ve seen so-called
new mental illnesses and conditions emerge throughout
my professional lifetime. Arguably, the naming of our distressed
parts is all psychiatry consists of nowadays – that, and doling out
the drugs which allegedy alleviate these symptoms … Anyway,
every fresh malady comes flanked by its own team of would-be
experts … and I was the striker! She remembers visiting a special
school with Gramps and Ben sometime in the early nineties. Aged
four, her son was conspicuously failing to integrate with the group – the
jargon of the head teacher at the local primary, who’d presumably
been on a course of some kind, where they’d filled her head with this
gibberish. But when Camilla waited, peering through the school
gates at the realm of asphalt and white lines, she saw no group for
her son to integrate with – only furious little bodies charging this
way and that, following intercepting trajectories which sent them
smashing into each other – a strange enactment of … the strategic
defence initiative. At least these children were all together – not
alone. Not alone like her Ben, who sat in the far corner, underneath
the rubber-tyre swing, beside the bin. He was so alone – so profoundly
and fanatically alone, lonelier than the loneliest pine …
on the remotest hillside, his face a vacancy blurred by his whirring
hands’ … stimming. Which is what Camilla learnt to call his calming
of his mind by the agitation of his hands – just as she’s more
recently learnt that her son doesn’t suffer from autistic psychopathy,
or childhood schizophrenia, but rather is neuro-atypical. This sounds
pretty harmless – maybe even better than that. In the last couple
of years Camilla’s begun to read blogs – online diatribes, really –
written by defiant autists, who’re introducing into the established
lexicon terms she associates with the wonky-donkey feminist groups
she attended during her short spell at university … dropped out …
plop-plop-signed on a sheet of bog roll … These militants speak of
becoming empowered – of exercising their rights and actualising
their autonomy, thereby freeing themselves from the patriarchal
attitudes of the boringly neuro-typical. These zealots preach the
New Gospel according to Temple Grandin: they aren’t mentally
ill, but share with this high-functioning designer of abattoirs and
other animal-husbandry equipment a certain handicap … Although
that’s not to suggest … they bang on, that all aspects of neuro-diversity
are negative. On the contrary, it’s precisely the wide
variation in cognitive styles between various phenotypes which allows
for the emergence of prodigies and savants – some showing extreme
aptitude for mathematical reasoning and calculation, while others
are amazingly gifted linguistically, and still others – such as
Grandin herself – are capable of astonishing feats of visualisation
and … spatial imagining. Spatial imagining is what Camilla thinks
she’s doing when she reads on, deep into the Kilburn night …
drunks barking at foxes. Sitting in her curtained embayment, in the
submarine glow of the opened clamshell – a laptop computer which
was yet another Gramps gift – she stares and stares, as if gazing
alone could … make me understand. She stares and stares until the
slickly machined info-panels grow rough and organic – and the
words themselves … hairy: Just as physical diversity is understood to be
one of the engines of evolution, so may be neuro-diversity. Indeed, without
significant neuro-diversity the human genotype might never have
been able to make the leaps in cognitive functioning necessary to bring
about the information revo-revo-revo-revolution … go round and
round, round and round, The wheels on the bus go round and round
ALL FUCKING DAY LONG! While Camilla’s enviably long
and silky wipers go swish-swish-swish, as she bats them coquettishly
at the wrung-out drab staring back at her from the mirror. I have,
she thinks, really let myself go … and, receiving the little spurt of
spunk-soap, she’s at once pregnant with resentment: Who is there
to primp and preen for – father, son and grandson, too – none of
them sees her as a woman, let alone a sexual object … She’s just
a maternal, caring wonky-donkey, who plods around the Kilburn
flat all day, following a course plotted for her from Ben’s nook
to Mark’s hidey-hole: silvery space blankets draped over a clothes
rack to deflect the … death-rays. Round annaround in a figure-eight
that describes her own … hour-glass figure. And now – her
time’s run out! There’s no telling what the pair of them might get up
to in the Where-there-bee Tesco’s – Camilla has often returned
from toileting myself, only to be very publicly inconvenienced by
their behaviour. Mark’s freakouts are easier to take – flamboyant,
his father calls them – he bays operatically, snatches up whatever
coverings there are to hand and, draped in these, crawls under
counters, tables or chairs. There he’ll remain, curled up in a foetal
ball until she arrives to coax him out. But by that time his nimblefingered
and tech-savvy son will’ve got into whatever electrical
equipment the
re is to hand and … fimbled about. Two years ago,
when Ben was just ten, Camilla had been bleeding out on the toilet
at South Mimms services, when she heard: Every girl … every
boy … Come and open up your eyes … ! belting out from the public
address system – and by the time she got back to the soft-play
area where she’d left them, she found a crowd of fellow travellers
who’d hearkened to the call, and were indeed staring at a world
of wonder and surprise: Mark and Ben, piling up a great teetering
pyramid of foam bolsters and vinyl cubes. Spotting his mother’s
appalled face, Ben had cried out: You’re back … ! You’re back!
before adding under his breath, But not in a roly mo … But not
in a roly mo … As she’d struggled with his frightened father,
he’d explained to the gawping spectators precisely how he’d rewired
the system so that it played … Fimbles … Fimbles … Fimbles …
We’re the Fimbles … the ditty’s very repetitiveness another dismal
reminder of his own palilalia. Then there was the time in the
Dixon’s on the Kilburn High Road, when Camilla left them for a
couple of minutes while she popped to the chemist’s next door, and
on returning found the shop window … full of gurning Mark-faces.
Ben had managed to wire up very single television and computer
screen to a seeseeteevee camera focused on his flamboyant father.
She’d stood there, fighting down the urge to scream – for wherever
she’d looked on the cluttered sales floor, Mark’s unseeing eyes were
staring back at her, while his mouth hung open in just the way
she remembered it doing when he came, so impregnating stupid,
drunken me with the creator of this wilderness of mirrors … It’d
been this way as soon as Ben could crawl – he made straight for the
television. Not to watch, but to fimble about with it. I’m a worm …
I’m a worm … Ben had said to his mother on his fifth birthday –
he hadn’t meant a grey, wrigglingly divisible one, but the new internet
variety: I was born the year Robert Morris created the first
internet worm … created the first internet worm … was simply a
statement of fact – the little boy didn’t play the part, didn’t wriggle
or cry out he was being chopped in half, any more than he played
at being anything. There was never make-believe for Ben, only the
facts on the ground – and up in the sky: In nineteen eighty-nine
the first twenty-four satellites of the Global Positioning System
were placed in orbit … were placed in orbit … and Intel released the
eight-oh-four-eight-six microprocessor which contains more than a
million transistors … more than a million transistors … Such precocity
hadn’t been altogether a surprise – it was a difficult pregnancy:
she’d felt him stimming inside of me, and, although she’d wanted a
home birth, in the event it’d been … a phone one. The ringing baby
was yanked from her and held up to the obstetrician’s ear so he
could establish whether Ben was … alive. And now, stepping down
from the rockin’ Portaloo, making her way under the glass canopy
between the Wetherby shoppers, Camilla is presented with another
version of her predicament: a purple pony, which plunges up and
down, eyes flashing as it gallops on the spot to the accompaniment
of synthesised hurdy-gurdy music … I’m going nowhere. Last night,
at first crouching in the porch of Mona’s cottage, she’d then subsided
amongst the muddy wellies and grass-stained waxed-cotton
jackets. Funny thing about Barbours, Mona’s feller had said over
supper, they were actually invented on Tyneside, for the dockers
who had to be out in all weathers … And Camilla quipped:
Stupid middle-class people – carrying coal-coloured jackets to
Newcastle … a feeble joke, but then I’m enfeebled … She’d been
exhausted as well, after a blowy trip out to the Farne Islands, where,
according to the boatman-cum-guide, ancho-whatsits had clung,
praying, to the shit-splashed rocks. All around the boat waxed-cotton
heads had risen from seaweed-swirling swell … Ark-Ark!
Such trust in the Labrador eyes that held hers for long moments –
such empathy. Look at the seals, Ben! his mother had cried. Aren’t
they fab? But Ben had the collar of his borrowed wax-cotton jacket
buttoned up right over his head, so he could sit in his one-boy
tent … playing his fucking Game Boy. The sweetly smeggy smell
of the mussel broth she’d slurped for supper followed Camilla into
the porch, where she turned this way and that – as she’d been
instructed. For a moment or more … tired heavy breasts had rested
on knees creepy-crêpey, yet I didn’t exist … for without reception
there could be no perception: no mussels, no Mark, no Ark-Ark!
No Ben – no number ten … until the smallest of the three connection
bars on her mobile lifted its blocky head a tiny bit … lofting
her with it towards the white light … It’s our fault, she’d gasped
into the shingle-shifting ether. We did it to him – I feel so guilty,
Gramps … I think … I might die of guilt … For a long while he
hadn’t spoken, but at last his plummy voice squeezed from the
handset: Nonsense, utter balderdash – I don’t know this man personally,
Milla, but he works for my Trust. I’ve already made
enquiries, and there’s a lot more to this than meets the –. Stop it!
she’d cried. Will you please, just for once, stop lecturing me!
Camilla – who ran away from her convent boarding school at sixteen
and never went back – has only the haziest understanding of
the maze of communications we’re stumbling through. When Ben
was little, she’d made him a tin-can telephone – which entranced
them both. She’d been well prepared – she thought then, thinks
now – for these straitened circumstances. Her parents’ parsimony
had extended to ironing brown-paper bags and keeping them in
kitchen drawers – they scrimped their only daughter into private
education, choosing a Catholic school not because they wanted
her soul saved, but because it’d been all we can afford … Their
shitty words – parsimonious pebbles, dropped plop-plop somewhere
else … in space – in time – yet still rippling the world. Rippling the
electric pony’s purple mane – rippling the four identically freckled
faces plastered to the adjacent photo-booth. But these are her words,
spoken here and now … person-to-the-person that’s … me: What
do you want to be when you grow up, Milla? – Me? Why … I’d
like to be a carer to a schizophrenic partner and an autistic son,
getting by on benefits and hand-outs – after all, that’s what my
upbringing has prepared me for … Camilla had enjoyed the tin-can
telephony, because, once freed from the oppression of his mother’s
gaze, Ben had prattled away, not exactly to her, but at least in my
general direction. When, a year or so ago, his grandfather had bought
one of the brand-new eyeBooks for both of them, it’d been Ben who
set up their internet con
nection – the cement-mixing, miniature-anvil-bashing,
feedback-howling which rapidly gave birth to his
first written communication, and to her first experience of the merry
chirrup: You’ve got male – which was how she’s heard it ever since.
Ben’s email also consisted of three short misspelt words … sounds
that became signs that become sounds that became signs in his mother’s
ever bleary, ever teary eyes: by me mobl. Well, perhaps I will …
Among the Wetherby shoppers Camilla sees plenty of teenagers
with mobile phones … it might do the trick – he might talk to me
normally at long last. It’s Good to Talk! and listen as well. Last night,
her conversation with Gramps had ended with wave upon wave of
static carrying the frail barque of their conversation further and
further away: You’re breaking up! he’d cried to her. You’re breaking
up, Camilla! Which had indeed been true, because when she
returned to the cottage’s sitting room, where Mona and her bloke
were curled up on the couch … I was in bits. She’d sat there watching
them cuddle. Sat there looking at the fishing net pinned to the
perfectly plastered wall – sat there looking at its catch of dried-out
starfish, scoured seashells and a bottle-green glass float. Sat there,
not envying her dear, dear friend … not envying her at all. Certainly
not envying her paradoxical post-partum bum – she’s childless, but
fully gravid with his come … Or envying their relationship … don’t
fancy anyone any more, yet hating herself for the Ralgex jealousy
she’d felt burning on her tummy and … between my thighs. She
didn’t fancy anyone any more – but it’d be nice just for once to
have someone in her life who, gently and tenderly, would rub an
embrocation into the lovelorn lesions that have grown their own …
nerves. Camilla can’t see her wayward menfolk anywhere. She goes
into the supermarket and walks hurriedly along beside the checkouts,
scanning each aisle in turn: BAKERY, READY MEALS,
DAIRY … Her frigid parents are due for the first of their two,
two-day annual visits tomorrow … should I stock up now ? At Victoria
Coach Station they’ll be waiting for her right where they’ve got
off the Birmingham service: two sedentary and apprentice old folk,
wearing early-retirement-uniforms and shoes with enhanced grip.
