went by coach from the place we were staying, and almost as soon as we had sat down, Mum started chatting to the coach driver and completely ignored me. It was as if I had suddenly evaporated or become invisible. By the time we arrived at the house, the plan for our day had changed and instead of taking me to look round it, as she had promised she would do, Mum had decided to go to a pub and have a drink with the coach driver – a man she had just met and would probably never see again.
One of the problems for many people with Asperger syndrome is that they can’t express their emotions. I have quite good language skills – which, again, is quite a common attribute of the condition – but I find it really difficult to identify or explain what I feel, although it’s a bit easier now than it was when I was a child. So I started kicking off, and then I felt embarrassed because people were looking at me. But I couldn’t stop myself. The disappointment and frustration were like a big ball of blackness expanding inside me. And I was angry too, because Mum knew how much I had been looking forward to that day, and because she had promised.
Although I wasn’t tall for my age when I was a child, I was quite chubby, thanks to a diet that consisted almost exclusively of junk food, and Mum is petite and skinny. So when I lashed out at her, I probably hurt her. I know I scratched her arms. But she fought back, pushing and hitting me and shouting that I had wrecked her holiday. She said the same thing again many times afterwards, and told me how long it had taken her to save up the money to pay for it, how she had only gone on the holiday for my sake, because she knew it was something I had always wanted to do, and how I had ruined it all, just like I always ruin everything. I felt really bad about it for a long time, particularly because, even at the age of eight, I was aware that Mum couldn’t really afford for us to have a holiday at all. So, in the end, it became just one more item to add to the ever-increasing list of things I felt guilty about when I was a child.
Mum and I weren’t the only ones who felt sorry for Mum. Everyone else in the family did too, because of the way I behaved. It wasn’t until years later that I began to understand why I often reacted the way I did, and that it didn’t help me to control myself when Mum fought back, pushing and scratching me and pulling my hair. She always said it was self-defence, which was an explanation I accepted, until I became aware that most parents don’t allow situations to escalate to the point of getting involved in physical fights with their children. What I really needed when my frustration exploded into panic was someone to calm me down by making me believe that, although I didn’t have any control over things, they did, and they were going to take care of everything so that there was nothing for me to worry about. Instead, when I had a tantrum, Mum had one too.
She used to call those occasions when I got upset and lashed out ‘auti moments’ – short for autistic, I suppose. They happened when I felt more than usually confused or insecure, which was most of the time whenever we travelled anywhere, because Mum couldn’t get off a bus or a train without instantly getting lost. She was always completely hopeless about finding the way. All children need to believe that their parents are in total control in any situation; for a child with autism, the realisation that that isn’t the case is a trigger for total panic.
I remember one particular occasion, when I was about seven, when we had spent the day at the beach and were walking along the sand trying to find the bus that would take us home. Mum had no idea which bus we needed to catch, let alone which bus stop it would stop at. But she just laughed about our predicament and made no attempt to hide it from me, even though she knew how distressing I found even the thought of being lost.
Perhaps she would have had a better sense of direction and made better travel plans if she hadn’t always smoked weed when we were on holiday. She said she needed it to cope with me, because I was so difficult. ‘If I didn’t have weed,’ she told me, ‘I wouldn’t be able to take you on holiday at all.’ Maybe that was true – although it might have been better not to have added to my anxiety by telling me so. It was certainly true that I kicked off more often than usual when we were away from home. But only because I was unnerved by being somewhere I didn’t know, where everything was new and unfamiliar.
For me, almost any outing with Mum was like a nightmare, and a vicious circle: she got us lost because she was stoned; I almost imploded with distress because she didn’t know where we were; she smoked more weed because I was kicking off … She thought everything was funny when she was stoned. Whereas, in those situations, I could never find anything to laugh about at all.
In the end, I took on the responsibility of knowing everything that needed to be known to enable us to do the things other parents and children take for granted – like getting home at the end of a day out. So there was a positive outcome from that day at the beach, and from all the other days when Mum couldn’t find the right bus, because I learned to plan our routes in advance and to work things out for myself.
Taking on the role of route planner at the age of eight was good for me in some ways, I suppose. But there are many decisions a child isn’t mentally mature enough to make. That’s why children are supposed to live with responsible adults until they become adults themselves. Because if there’s no one watching out for them, preventing them from making mistakes because they can’t yet see the bigger picture, they can become involved in things that may destroy their childhood and affect them adversely for the rest of their lives.
It was not understanding something that made me anxious. Sometimes, though, I didn’t know that I didn’t understand, so situations that might have been distressing for another child were simply a bit confusing for me, because I was used to people doing apparently inexplicable things.
An example of what I mean occurred at school when I was seven. At the end of a corridor in the school building there was a metal grille door with some stairs behind it that led up to a music studio. Some of the kids in my class had tried to open the grille, but it was too stiff and heavy for little hands. Then, one day, I was in the corridor when a boy called Billy managed to slide it back just far enough for him to squeeze through. Billy was in the top class, so he must have been 10 or 11, and when he looked straight at me and said ‘Come on’ I just stood there for a moment, staring at him, unable to believe he had really chosen me.
There was one large room at the top of the stairs and a door that opened into a much smaller room with a row of washbasins along one wall. There must have been toilets too, but perhaps all the doors were closed, because I don’t remember them now. Billy and I were standing beside the basins when he told me to do something I didn’t understand. I was so proud of being in that forbidden place with someone who had actually asked me to go with them that I felt a rush of panic at the thought that I might be about to ruin everything by getting it wrong. No one had ever chosen me for anything before, and if I messed this up, maybe no one ever would again.
Fortunately, Billy didn’t seem to be as impatient as a lot of the other kids were, and after he had explained it to me again, he put his hand into the pocket of his trousers, pulled out a necklace and said, ‘And then I’ll give you this.’
All I remember after that is walking back down the stairs holding the necklace tightly in my hand. So I suppose I must have given him the blowjob that I only understood much later was what he described to me that day.
I showed the necklace to my mum that evening and told her, proudly, that a boy in the top class had given it to me. As she was examining it, with a half-smile, I suddenly remembered the huge row that had followed the incident with one of my stepbrothers when we lived with Dan. I still didn’t know why Dan had been so angry, but some instinct told me that what had happened with Billy might be wrong in the same sort of way and that, if it was, it would be better not to tell Mum what I had done to deserve such a wonderful gift.
Mum
