Saturdays at Noon

by Marks, Rachel

  Jake manages to get into a crouching position and then pushes himself up. He bends down, puts his arms under my armpits and hoicks me up. And I might be imagining it, but it feels like he holds on to me longer than he needs to before releasing me.

  ‘It is fun. Thank you,’ he says into my ear.

  We both attempt to skate again. Annoyingly, Jake suddenly seems to get the hang of it and catches up with Alfie. Then they both look back at me, urging me on.

  I try to take bigger slides, but it feels like my feet are weighed down with bricks. Jake skates back to me and takes my hand.

  ‘Come on, slowcoach. I’ll pull you along.’

  Once I’m up and going, my natural reaction is to let go of Jake’s hand – Miss Independent – but Alfie keeps looking back at us with a huge smile on his face, and it actually feels nice to have Jake to steady me when I start to wobble. So we continue to skate along hand in hand, Alfie ahead of us clutching on to his penguin.

  * * *

  When I finally get home, after not one, not two, but three bedtime stories, I’m exhausted. I immediately head to the kitchen, open the fridge and pour myself a glass of wine. Watching the condensation form on the outside of the glass, I suddenly wonder – when did drinking stop being a decision? Purely autopilot? Like breathing, or putting one foot in front of the other to walk down the street? I push the glass to the back of the worktop and put the kettle on. I’m not sure I even enjoy the taste of it any more. And I definitely don’t enjoy turning up at Alfie’s door each morning with a hangover, the undercurrent of nausea, the general numbness, like when you fall asleep leaning on your arm and wake up with pins and needles.

  Taking my cup of tea and the biscuit jar through to the lounge, I lie on the sofa, surf the channels and settle on one of those parenting programmes where some woman who doesn’t have any kids of her own solves the parenting woes of the nation. In this one, a room of experts are sitting around a television watching clips of the problem child and his family. At first, it’s the usual complaints – problems with bedtimes, mealtimes – but then the camera zooms in on the child’s face as he’s having a meltdown about putting his shoes on for school, and it’s just like watching Alfie. It’s not unruly disobedience I see on his face, acting out for attention and taking pleasure in it: it’s something more, something different – fear, concern. Everything the mum says rings true: the daily battles over the simplest requests, the need to control everything and everyone around him, the meltdowns when plans change.

  After watching the clips, the experts look at each other and nod simultaneously to show the viewer they are in agreement. Then they call the parents in to the conference room and they sit down at the table; the little boy is on the floor in the corner, dismantling a train track.

  ‘It’s a distinct form of autism called Pathological Demand Avoidance.’

  The mum breaks down in tears and the dad puts his arm around her. The experts start reeling off the typical signs and symptoms and I grab my laptop and google the condition. Hours pass as I take in all the information. I find a forum on the PDA Society website and read post after post from exasperated parents wondering what the hell to do with their children, who just don’t fit the rulebook. I pick up my phone to call Jake but then I see it’s gone midnight.

  Suddenly it all makes sense – the meltdowns, the inflexibility, the bossiness – it’s all because of how anxious it makes Alfie not to be in control. It feels like I’ve solved the last clue of the crossword. Like, finally, I might be able to make life better for Alfie and Jake.

  * * *

  ‘Ready, steady, go.’ I turn the timer over. ‘Remember, when the sand gets to the bottom, you need to be dressed. I’m just going to get your book bag sorted.’

  I leave Alfie in his room and collect all the things he needs for school. The timer has been a revelation. No more fights about getting his clothes on, no more Alfie running around with pants on his head and his legs through the arms of his T-shirt – he just gets dressed and appears in the hallway with a smile on his face and the timer in his hand to prove the sand is still running down.

  But not today.

  ‘Come on then, buddy. Timer must be up,’ I call up the stairs.

  Alfie doesn’t appear so I go up to his room and find him sitting on the floor, his school clothes in a pile in his lap and tears in his eyes.

  I sit on the carpet next to him and put my arm around him. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘I don’t want to go to school today. I want to work on my film.’

  ‘Well, we can do that after school.’

  Alfie shakes his head, but his face isn’t full of its usual defiance – he just looks drained.

  ‘Has something happened at school? Is that why you don’t want to go?’

  Alfie shakes his head again. ‘I just want to do my film. I’m at the best bit. Superman and Batman have just found out that Supergirl is trapped in Joker’s dungeon so they’re going to go and rescue her.’

  As he talks about his film, his face lights up. Then it falls again, each one of his features taking a downward turn.

  ‘School’s boring. All we do is writing and I always get told off because my letters are the wrong way and I forget my finger spaces. Mrs Young keeps saying I need to start trying my best but I am trying my best.’

  I can just imagine Alfie’s little face, wanting so badly to get it right and not understanding where he’s going wrong.

  ‘I know you’re trying your best, buddy. I’ll let you in on a little secret – even teachers get things wrong.’

  ‘And I always end up playing on my own and I don’t like being on my own.’

  I feel my heart breaking with each word he says.

  ‘Please don’t make me go, Emily. Please.’

  Looking at Alfie’s distressed face, I imagine how school must appear to him with all its implied and explicit demands and expectations. I look at the clock. Even if we leave now, we’ll be at least ten minutes late and we’ll have to go through the office and sign in, which will only stress Alfie out further.

  ‘OK, just today.’

  Alfie throws his arms around my neck so hard that he nearly headbutts me. ‘Thank you, Emily.’

  ‘Everyone needs a break sometimes. Come on, let’s go and get a hot chocolate and decide what we’re going to do.’

  Without the pressure of the school run, it’s like I’ve broken free of the shackles. ‘We could do anything, Alfie. Where do you want to go? A safari park? Climbing? We could learn a new skill. What about skiing? I’ve always fancied learning to ski. We could get a lesson.’

  Alfie scoops the gooey remains of the marshmallows off the top of his hot chocolate and it drips down his chin.

  ‘What do you think, Alfie?’

  He slurps his drink noisily. ‘I just want to finish my film.’

  ‘Well, of course we can do that, but we have the whole day free. Where do you want to go?’

  ‘I don’t want to go anywhere. I just want to stay here.’

  So that’s exactly what we do. Alfie spends the day in his pyjamas. He sets up the last few scenes for his film and I take the pictures. While I import them into iMovie, Alfie creates his own Lego Joker limousine, cleverly sticking to the trademark purple and green palette. We add sound effects and a voice-over to his film and then we cuddle up in front of Peter Rabbit and eat popcorn. We make a shepherd’s pie for tea – Alfie thrilled that I allow him to help cut up the vegetables with a grown-up knife. Alfie organizes a party for me and insists I wait in a different room. When he reveals the party room – his bedroom with the blinds down and his pebble light cycling through its sequence of bright colours – he’s thought of every detail. There’s a little table he’s brought through from the playroom with paper plates and plastic cups on top. He’s found a birthday banner from somewhere and Blu-Tacked it to the wall. His portable CD player is blasting out bubble-gum pop. He’s even made party bags – one for himself, one for me and one for Jake when he gets home �
�� full of a range of his toys, a packet of Haribo and a fun-sized Milky Way.

  ‘I love it. It’s perfect,’ I say and grab his hands.

  And it is. I swing him round and we dance to the music. We play musical bumps, even though there’s only two of us and he has to stop the music and fall to the floor at the same time. We have a dance competition, complete with Strictly-esque scorecards that he’s made. It’s the perfect end to a perfect day. Not a disagreement or meltdown in sight. And it makes me realize that I have to do everything I can to make life less challenging for him.

  * * *

  ‘Wine?’

  Alfie has finally fallen asleep and I am sitting at the dining-room table while Jake puts away the last of the Waitrose order. When he called to say he was working late, I rushed Alfie through bath and stories and practically closed his eyes for him so he wouldn’t have the chance to drop me in it about not going to school today. But now I wish Alfie had told him, because I wouldn’t be sitting here feeling like a kid about to confess that I’ve smashed the neighbour’s window with a football. I’m hoping I can soften the blow with my pathological demand avoidance discovery, but I’m not quite sure how he’s going to take that either.

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Seriously? You don’t want wine?’ Jake helps himself to a beer out of the fridge. ‘You feeling OK?’

  ‘It’s the new me.’ I flip my hands out in front of me like a magician revealing his assistant has not really been sawn in half.

  ‘What was wrong with the old you?’ Jake takes a sip of his beer.

  I was putting vodka in my orange juice for breakfast.

  ‘I’m just doing one of those detox things. Your body is a temple and all that.’

  Jake shrugs. ‘Each to their own.’ He starts throwing the tins into the cupboard any which way and I have to force myself not to take over and order them by category. ‘So, have you had a good day?’

  I know I have to tell him but I feel sick. It’s farcical. It’s not like I spent the day introducing Alfie to the delights of wacky baccy or soft porn.

  ‘Alfie didn’t go to school today.’

  ‘Oh no, was he ill? He seemed fine when I left.’

  I chew a rough bit off my thumbnail. ‘Not exactly. He was tired. He wanted to work on his film. He needed a break.’

  Jake bundles the pasta into a cupboard that contains baking ingredients. ‘So you just let him have a day off? Did you call the school to let them know?’

  Yes, yes, I did. See, I am a responsible adult after all.

  ‘Of course I did. I left a message to say he was exhausted and feeling under the weather.’

  Jake raises an eyebrow.

  ‘See, the thing is,’ I continue, making the most of the fact he’s not yet shouting at me, ‘I think sometimes it gets a bit much for him. Keeping everything in at school.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, the other night I was watching this programme called Born Naughty. It was about these challenging children and they got experts in to decide whether they were just naughty or whether they had an underlying condition.’

  I can see Jake’s jaw clenching.

  ‘There was a boy quite a lot like Alfie on it,’ I continue, although I wish I’d never started. ‘They discovered he had this newly identified condition called Pathological Demand Avoidance. It’s on the autistic spectrum, but it’s quite distinct from typical autism.’

  ‘And let me guess, their recommended advice was to let the child take a day off school when he can’t be bothered to go?’

  ‘No. It wasn’t like that. If you’d seen him, you’d know …’

  You know what? Fuck you.

  ‘He needed a break, Jake. Don’t you ever feel like you need a day off?’

  ‘Of course I do, but I can’t just take one. Kids need to learn about responsibility.’

  ‘And they need to learn about compassion, about empathy too. I saw that he was struggling and I supported him.’

  ‘He wasn’t struggling. He just couldn’t be bothered to go.’

  I’m tempted to leave it, but I can’t. It’s not fair on Alfie.

  ‘Look, I googled this PDA thing. There’s a forum full of parents experiencing exactly what we are, well, what you are. It was like reading about a thousand Alfies. I mean, of course there were differences, no child’s the same, but so much of it rang true. It’s all about anxiety, Jake. All of it. He needs to feel in control and at school he has to bottle all that up. It must be impossible for him. If you’d just look at it, you’d see that –’

  Jake holds up his hands, like Simon Cowell when he’s seen enough of an act on The X Factor.

  ‘I told you before, Em, we went down this road. I’ve been back and forth about this so many times with Jemma. We took him to the doctor’s. They told us quite clearly there’s nothing wrong with him.’

  ‘But they’re wrong. Loads of the parents on the forum said the doctors dismissed them too. You need to go back.’

  Jake rams something on to the overfilled freezer shelf and it knocks the peas out; they spatter all over the floor like green polka dots.

  ‘For fuck’s sake!’ He pushes the now half-empty bag of peas into another drawer and then slams the freezer door. ‘I’m tired. I need to sort all this out, then I’m going to go and watch some TV. I’ll see you in the morning.’

  If I leave, I know Jake is never going to allow me to raise this topic of conversation again, so I give it one more try.

  ‘Please just look at the website. Read some of the posts in the forum. If you still think I’m talking nonsense, then I’ll never mention it again, I promise. But I really think some of the strategies could help Alfie. He deserves for us all to try to understand him better.’

  Jake doesn’t speak for a minute, just sweeps at the peas with a brush. But when he looks up, I can see in his eyes that he’s raging.

  ‘You’re not his mum, Em. You’re his nanny. You’ve known him, what, ten weeks, something like that? I’ve spent pretty much every day of the past six years with him. So how dare you tell me what my son deserves, because you’ve watched some bloody TV programme and read a few posts from a bunch of whining parents with nothing better to do?’

  His words are like a slap around the face.

  ‘You’re right. I’m not his mum. But just so you know, I’m not trying to be. I’m just trying to help him out because, as far as I can see, his mum doesn’t seem too bothered about doing that. And neither does his dad, come to that.’

  I storm out of the kitchen, grab my things from the hallway and leave, slamming the front door as I go. Once I’m in my car, I put my head on the steering wheel and let it engulf my sobs.

  Jake

  As soon as I get through the door, Emily grabs her stuff to leave. It’s been two days since we fell out and both days she’s avoided eye contact and bolted the second I got home from work. I wish I hadn’t been so harsh to her, but the truth is what she said hurt. For the first time ever, I thought I’d found someone who ‘got’ Alfie, who didn’t think there was something wrong with him, but now it feels like she’s just like everyone else.

  ‘He wants to bake a cake. I said you might not want to.’

  Might not want to is an understatement. Cooking with Alfie is akin to enduring a severely turbulent flight with a toddler repeatedly jabbing you in the back, but I can tell Emily thinks there’s no way I’ll do it so I’m desperate to prove her wrong.

  ‘I’d love to. Can’t wait.’

  ‘Great,’ Emily says, heading to the door and slamming it on the way out.

  But after a traumatic trip to the supermarket with After-School Alfie (i.e. a child who acts like he’s off his head on speed), I realize that my initial standpoint was correct – never cook with Alfie.

  I put all the ingredients and a big mixing bowl out on the worktop and search the cupboard for the scales. When I turn around, Alfie has his hand in the bag of flour, which is dispersing through the air like a cloud of fog.


  ‘Alfie, hands out of the bag. Don’t touch anything until I say.’

  I continue to search for the scales and find them underneath the huge casserole dishes. Who would think that was a good place to put the scales? And why do we need casserole dishes that are so cumbersome they could feed all the children in a large orphanage?

  I just about manage to lift the dishes enough to pull the scales out. This time when I turn around, Alfie is munching away on the chocolate buttons we’ve bought for decorating the cake.

  ‘Right, that’s it. We can’t make a cake if you can’t listen to instructions.’ I practically throw the scales down on the worktop and then quickly press the on button to check I haven’t broken them.

  Alfie jigs up and down on the bar stool. ‘I will, I will, I promise.’

  ‘OK. Last chance.’

  I’m determined that we will successfully make this cake together if it’s the last thing I do, which it might well be if he continues to raise my blood pressure any further. I put the mixing bowl on the scales and hold the sieve so that Alfie can pour in the flour.

  ‘Gently. We only need it to get to one hundred and seventy-five.’

  Alfie slips with the bag so the kitchen looks like a crack den.

  ‘Seriously, Alfie. I said be careful.’ I snatch the bag out of his hand and start spooning flour back in until the scale gets down to two hundred. ‘Right, that’ll do.’

  ‘I thought you said it needed to be one hundred and seventy-five.’

  ‘It’s close enough.’

  Alfie grabs the spoon off me and starts removing flour from the bowl until the scales say exactly one hundred and seventy-five. ‘There you go.’

  The sugar goes in without too much being spilt and then I cut a few slices of butter and Alfie begins to stir, half the mixture flying over the edge of the bowl.

  ‘Can I lick the bowl now?’

  ‘No, Alfie. At the end.’

  Alfie puts his finger into the mixture, scoops up a blob and puts it into his mouth.

  ‘Fine, you can’t lick it at the end now.’

  ‘Please, I just wanted to try a bit.’