That was the start of our friendship. Michelle and I were united in stair rage as we got everyone together and went to see the housing manager.
‘People will only have pride in their homes if you give them a reason to by cleaning up the graffiti and getting rid of the dog mess,’ we told him.
The housing manager agreed that if Michelle and I jetwashed the stairs and corridors, the council would paint the walls, and we were asked to pick a colour. So what did we choose? Cream, maybe? White? Blue even? No: pink, pale, baby pink, because it looked lovely with the grey concrete floor, didn’t it? We got so stair proud in the end that we even stuck fake flowers on the walls and would stand on our balconies watching troublemakers walk into the building. ‘Hope you’re not going to let the dog pee in there,’ we’d shout to one man, who we knew let his pet loose in our corridor. He didn’t like that one bit, but Michelle and I did. We’d been bitten by the brightening-up bug and even ended up painting the doors of the storage lockers each flat had on the ground floor to make the place a bit more colourful.
But however much Michelle and I got on, I was still backwards in coming forwards about being proper friends. Once I might have longed for a friend of my age, someone to see a film with or do a bit of shopping with maybe. But I’d learned that I was the only person who could keep George calm and because of that it wasn’t fair on him or anyone else to leave him. His needs had to come first and I just didn’t want to go out without him.
So while there were bad days when I cried quietly after he’d finally gone to sleep, I soon picked myself back up again and got on with things. I was George’s mum and I’d got used to keeping both of us out of the way of most people. We saw family, of course, but I didn’t want George to be stared at by strangers when he lay on the floor stiff as he had a tantrum or hear a tut as he screamed the place down. I didn’t want to have to explain how I was getting called into school because he got into trouble with the other kids, hitting or biting them when they didn’t play how he wanted, or how I’d asked for his hearing and sight tests to be done again because although they’d come back normal, now George was at school I was more certain than ever that something was wrong. I might have got used to his ways when it was just the two of us, but I couldn’t ignore how different they were now, which is why I wanted the tests to be done again in case there had been a mistake.
How could I explain all that to Michelle, whose children, Ricky and Ashley, were perfect? Tell her that George had begun to blurt out things when we were out and just wouldn’t stop, no matter how many times I tried telling him?
‘Fat!’ he’d say as a larger woman walked past.
‘Hairy!’ he’d cry at another with a plait.
‘Moles!’ he’d shout at someone with freckles.
‘Smelly!’ he’d tell just about anyone if they got too close.
People looked at him strangely before carrying on their way, but however much I tried telling George not to do it, he couldn’t keep quiet. The school didn’t know what to make of him and had even started keeping a book in which they listed all his behaviours, like refusing to drink in front of people or disappearing for half an hour when he went to the loo because he took off all his clothes before going. There were so many little things that I did not know where to start, and that’s why I was scared of making a friend.
Luckily nothing seemed to worry Michelle as we started to spend more time together. Maybe it was because she was a trained child minder, or just that she was really patient, but Michelle took everything in her stride – even the day when we were out on the field and I looked across to see George had pinned Ricky to the ground and was hitting him.
‘Stop!’ I screamed as I ran towards them.
George didn’t turn around at the sound of my voice and when I finally reached him, he just looked at me blankly for a moment before hitting Ricky again.
‘George, no!’ I said as I pulled him off, thinking that this time he’d really done it and Michelle would never speak to me again.
But she was quietly fine about it. ‘These things happen with kids,’ she told me as I dragged George away.
It made me so sad to realise that he could not make friends. As I watched him with Ricky and Ashley, I could see that George didn’t understand how to be with other children. I still wasn’t brave enough to talk to Michelle about it all though, until she brought it up one evening as we sat on the stairs between our flats. We’d got into the habit of meeting there as time had gone on and I’d found myself looking forward to the moment when I heard Michelle’s knock. Leaving our front doors ajar so we were both near enough to hear if any of the kids woke up, we’d sit out together, and that’s where we were the night she turned to me.
‘Is there a problem with George?’ Michelle asked.
No one had ever said it straight out like that before.
‘I think so,’ I said. ‘But he’s had his hearing and sight tested and they say he’s fine. I’m at the end of my tether with it, though, because I’m sure there’s a problem and no one seems to want to listen.’
Michelle looked at me with her big eyes. ‘You know, you’ve got to stop apologising for him, Ju. George is who he is and people are going to have to accept that. You get into too much of a state about it all. You shouldn’t care so much about what other people think. I can see how much it bothers you, but it shouldn’t.’
‘What about when he hits Ricky, though, or tells Ashley that she smells?’ I asked. ‘What am I supposed to do then?’
‘You do as much as you can with him. I know that. But sometimes you have to let the kids sort it out themselves and know that people are going to have to accept George the way he is because he’s not going to change anytime soon.’
I’ve always thought we meet people for a reason and Michelle was my karma. As we got to know each other better, I’d talk to her about George: how I’d finally get him to sleep each night just hoping we’d get through a few hours without him getting up to wee up the wall or how I’d see other kids playing together and wish George could learn to join in.
‘Let him be, Ju,’ Michelle would tell me. ‘You can’t make George be what he isn’t, and anyone can see what a good mum you are. It’s other people who’ve got to change their attitude, not George. If they can’t accept him, then they’re not worth bothering about.’
Michelle was so understanding that I soon even felt comfortable enough to take George to her flat. It didn’t matter if he wiped cake up the wall there or bashed the head of Ashley’s doll against the wall, because Michelle didn’t flinch.
‘Are you knocking some sense into Barbie, then, George?’ she’d say with a laugh. ‘That’s good.’
And while George still found it hard to get on with Ricky and Ashley, even though they were both really good with him, I knew that he liked Michelle. He’d never hug her, of course, or smile – George wouldn’t even look at Michelle when he spoke to her most of the time or show that he noticed when she was there. But as the months passed, he started doing something that told me he did: he sniffed. Each day when we left the flat, George would take in a deep breath of fresh air and tell me that he could smell Michelle. Because even though her flat was one floor below us, he knew when she had a wash on and to George that smell meant Michelle. Somehow she had got through to him and George showed me in his own particular way that she had.
