Then on to the café where he’s moved on to carrot cake as ‘it’s healthy’. He’ll nod towards his old seat, ‘Remember when we used to sit there?’ If the seat is empty he’ll take his rightful place, but he’ll also sit elsewhere too. Sitting somewhere else… it’s not as painful as it used to be. I can still see his discomfort but he’s getting there. He still won’t wait for me to finish my coffee though. As we head off, we pass the area where the bouncy ball machine used to be, since removed to make way for the redesigned buggy park and panini press. ‘Remember when…?’ And then, as we head back towards the car, stopping only to stroke any dog that isn’t on its lead (we don’t stroke dogs on leads as they have people attached to them), The Magic Tree looms into view.
The Boy kind of knows the tree isn’t real anymore. About two years ago he suddenly turned round and caught me flicking a two-pence piece into the air. But I can tell by the way he looks up at its branches that he’s still not really sure. And although I know he needs to grow up to be his own person, there’s a part of me that wants him to believe forever. For both of us, that old tree near the exit and those Sunday morning trips to the park will always contain a little bit of magic. Little pieces, son. Little pieces.
CHAPTER NINE
Falling
Those with autistic traits can sometimes be mocked for their desire for routine, for consistency, for ‘sameness’. But at this festive time of year I’m reminded that we all have those exact same desires for nothing to change. But if we dress it up as ‘tradition’ rather than ‘obsession’ then it becomes far more socially acceptable. ‘We always have dinner at 2.00 p.m.’; ‘We always open our presents first thing’; ‘We always eat turkey.’ Are they really any different?
I remember Christmas as a child and that feeling of wanting everything to be the same forever. Waking on a Christmas Day morning, my dad would line me and my three brothers on the stairs, oldest first. I was second in line – never before have the five minutes I arrived in this world before my twin brother been so important. Dad would get us to wait in position while he went ahead into the lounge to see if Father Christmas had been. The excitement and the tension were palpable. The 365 days since we were last stood in this spot had all just been building suspense for this moment to come around again. Dad would open the lounge door, just enough for him to step inside but not enough for us to see no matter how hard we strained our necks over the bannister. I’m sure the silence that followed only lasted seconds, but at the time it felt like forever.
‘Oh, no. No. Please, no.’ He’d step back into the hall, disappointment etched on his face. ‘Mum!’ he’d call up the stairs, ‘You need to come down. I’m sorry, boys. He hasn’t been. I don’t know what we’re going to do. There’s nothing for you. I’m so sorry, lads. You’d better come and see.’
Every Christmas of my childhood this ritual was performed. Yet every year we believed him. And then we’d file into the lounge and by the light of the Christmas tree we’d discover that he had very much been after all. ‘Happy Christmas, boys,’ Dad would say, his grinning face lighting the dark corners of the room that the tree lights didn’t reach.
During my lifetime I’ve now had more Christmases without Dad around than I spent with him. And he probably never realized it at the time, but those few moments of routine on Christmas Day morning have left an indelible mark. Dad constantly worried that he wasn’t educated enough, didn’t earn enough or wasn’t good enough. As parents we spend so much time worrying about the big things that sometimes we forget the small ones. I don’t even remember the presents I received each year. But if anyone ever asks me to define the true meaning of happiness in my life, it will forever be shaped by the memory of standing on the stairs on a cold December morning, waiting to see if he’s been.
MY SON’S NOT RAINMAN BLOG
I’ll warn you in advance, the contents of this chapter might come as a bit of a shock, or seem as though they’ve come from nowhere. Or maybe not. Maybe the events that I’m about to describe will come as no surprise. I just know that I can’t tell our story without this bit – I’d be self-editing a story that I really want to come from a place of truth. Be gentle with me, dear reader.
It’s fair to say that those early years took their toll on me and on The Boy’s mum, too, I’m sure. And I honestly don’t know how she did it. The truth is, I found being a dad incredibly hard. I think everyone had always assumed I’d be so good at it – I was, I suppose, a natural kids’ entertainer, probably because I spent most of my adult life wishing I was still a child myself. But it turns out there’s more to parenting than blowing raspberries and playing peek-a-boo.
My moods had been legendary over the years, particularly when I was a child. I always thought I was just a bit emotionally immature; I couldn’t quite express myself the way other people could. I cried too often if I thought someone was upset or angry with me and, if I’m honest, I still do. I thought I was just over-sensitive. I cried when John Noakes, my favourite television presenter, left Blue Peter, my favourite television programme; I cried when Mr Scott wasn’t our head teacher anymore and I cried when some unsuspecting homeowner returned home to discover they’d had a garden makeover by a television crew. To be fair, it was always the water feature that did it – I used to imagine how my dad would react if he got his very own fountain with a bronze heron and underwater lighting. And when I look back now, I realize I never wanted to cry as much as I did in those early years after The Boy was born. For whatever reason, my mood was slipping and I didn’t want to face up to it.
I’ve tried to analyse what happened, work out what the cause was, but I’m still not sure. Sometimes, the more I think about it, the more I throw up questions that I can’t hope to answer. I remember years ago, as a child, watching a film with my dad on a Saturday afternoon. Actually, scrap that, it must have been a Sunday – Saturday was his treat day, watching horse racing on the television and having his favourite lunch of pork chops, chips and peas with HP Sauce over the lot. I thought he was so clever because he could shake the bottle of sauce and spread its dark brown goodness over his food without getting big splodges in the wrong places. I was still a large-dollop-of-red-ketchup-in-the-corner-of-the-plate kind of kid and I watched him those Saturday afternoons, vowing that one day I would be old enough to have my dinner on a tray and, when I did, I would learn to like white pepper and I would do that trick with the HP Sauce too.
Yes, thinking back to it, it was definitely a Sunday, before the tea trolley came out with sandwiches and a cheesy family game show came on the telly. There was a film about elephants and, although I suppose it must have been fiction, it felt incredibly real and I’ve always wanted it to remain that way. It was about how the elephants, when their lives come to an end, go behind a waterfall to die. As they feel the moment approaching, they up and leave their family and begin the long, slow pilgrimage to the Other Side. When they finally reach the waterfall, they pass through it to the dark, mysterious cave behind, lay their exhausted bodies down and drift off to an endless sleep.
Somewhere, behind the waterfalls of this world, if you search hard enough, would be huge caves filled with the bones and ivory of those elephants that have passed on. For the child who broke his heart at the television makeover crew turning over a flower bed, you can imagine what that film did to me that day. I was broken. I did what I always did when we watched TV as a family: I lay on the floor in front of the gas fire with my head in my hands, facing the television so that no one could see my face and I made sure my shoulders didn’t shake as that would have given the game away. Much as I did when John Noakes announced he was going, I silently wept my heart out.
Ever since that day, elephants have embodied a sadness for me. It’s there in their eyes, the way they seem to carry the weight of the world on their shoulders, like they know from the moment they’re born that each step is simply taking them closer to the cave behind the waterfall. I’m banging on a bit here to make my point, but I guess it’s thi
s: when The Boy was born, there was a part of me that felt it was my time to lie down behind the waterfall. My work and purpose on this planet was done – I had procreated, I had made my contribution to the circle of life and now it was time to pass the baton on. Something like that anyway. It seems almost daft admitting it now I’ve written it down.
Maybe I’m reading too much into things again. Maybe The Boy being born simply reminded me of my own dad and brought my own childhood into focus and that chasm between those living and those who have passed on. Or maybe I was just a lazy sod who didn’t want to face up to a life of responsibility and organic pureed food. I’m not sure.
Whatever the reason, I knew my mood was slipping. I was retreating into myself more and more. I suppose I just felt so… inadequate. We were struggling financially and my wife had to return to work. I felt responsible, like I wasn’t man enough. Maybe if I earned a bit more I’d feel less useless around the house. The Boy invariably wanted his mum – she appeared to have the patience of a saint whereas I couldn’t settle him, couldn’t quieten his darker moments. Maybe because when I held him in my arms, he could sense the unease that seemed to be pouring out of my body.
I stopped going to work. I can’t remember how it happened and how much of a conscious decision it was; I just didn’t get up one morning. I didn’t call them – I just didn’t go in. It wasn’t out of rudeness, I’d got myself into what I thought at the time was a state of self-pity where I didn’t think anyone would really notice if I was there or not. I’d just have a bit of a lie-in and go in later. Or maybe tomorrow. Or Wednesday…
I stayed in bed for days. Eventually, the days turned into weeks. And, although I know we are constantly told we shouldn’t be ashamed of mental illness, there’s a huge part of me that is, even as I write this now. I didn’t want to include this in this book. I told myself it wasn’t relevant, it wasn’t part of our story. But if I’m honest it’s because there’s still a very real part of me that doesn’t want to own what happened. Even now, years later, admitting that I lay in bed for weeks on end shames me more than I can tell you. My poor ex-wife… no one will ever really know the impact of that time on her. For all our differences, she will forever have all my love and gratitude for everything she did.
And you, son, what was the effect on you? The million dollar question, the one that I ask myself each and every day. There are darker times when I’ve wondered if everything that has followed since that day has somehow been my fault, that it’s all been caused by the man who one day decided to hide under his duvet and forget the world for a while. I’ve learnt to be a bit more forgiving of myself with time. My overriding hope looking back is that the effect on you was minimal, that the overwhelming strength of your mum’s love meant you barely noticed.
As I spent all my time in bed, I began to lose my grip on reality. My body refused to sleep constantly, so instead I ended up lying there, as days and nights tumbled into one and I started to ruminate, thinking things over and over, creating my own form of reality from the little bits of the world that once in a while invaded my space. I heard the phone ring downstairs and the concerned calls from work soon turned into people laughing at me.
The paranoia is what I remember the most, the unmistakable knowledge that everyone was out to get me, to expose me as a fraud to the world. And all the time I thought I could stop it at any point; I kept thinking I’d get up in a minute and that would be the end of it. I’d have a shower, go downstairs, take The Boy for a walk and then head into work and everything would be fine. I wasn’t ill; I’d just got off the ride for a while. I’d get back on in a minute, I’d just stay here for a while.
Eventually the GP came round. And then the community mental health team. What could I say to them? I couldn’t tell them I was an elephant on my way to the cave behind the waterfall. I didn’t know how to put any of it into words. And if I tried to speak I thought I’d cry and cry and the tears would never stop. So, the longer I became trapped in my own reality, the safer it became. I refused their antidepressants, refused to answer the door when they called round in the daytime and my wife was at work and The Boy at nursery. I ventured downstairs each day to turn the volume down on the phone and take the batteries out of the doorbell. Then I’d retreat back under the duvet and if I lay perfectly still I could convince myself I didn’t exist at all.
It wasn’t long before I lost every last sense of what was real and what wasn’t. I’m not even sure how long I was in that bedroom before things finally came to a head. The paranoia was taking over, I remember that much. It was early summer, the odd fly would come into the room and I became convinced that they were spies fitted with miniature cameras, sent by either my employer or the medical community. Neither could be trusted. Everyone became the enemy. The conversations I had been having with myself in my head for weeks on end finally spilled out and I began talking to myself out loud. I’d lost it.
I remember one morning in particular. There was a hive of activity in the house, I could hear voices downstairs, all talking away. And I remember not being sure if they were real or not and how frightening that felt. By this point I knew I’d become unwell, but it still felt like something I’d created. I thought I could snap myself out of it. If I’d just got up and gone to work that day, none of this would have happened.
Eventually the voices came into the room. A consultant psychiatrist, a psychiatric nurse, my GP and a social worker. What a party. And as they walked in, a fly followed them through the door. A sign, if I needed one, that they were bad people.
I hid under the duvet, buried myself from them and, as they talked, I tried to escape further and further into my own world. The psychiatric nurse, a sweet gentle Irish man who shared my name and who, even then, I felt was one of the good people, reached down and I felt his hand on my back through the duvet. ‘You’re not well, John. We think some time in hospital might help you.’ Like the old days watching television in front of the gas fire, I made sure he didn’t know it, but there was something about his manner that reached me that day. In the darkness I kept my shoulders still and the tears poured down my face. ‘OK,’ I mumbled from under the duvet, ‘I’ll go this afternoon.’
I sensed they didn’t believe me. After all, it wasn’t the first time they’d suggested hospital admission; the community mental health team had tried to persuade me some weeks earlier. ‘We’d like you to go now, John,’ the consultant psychiatrist said. He tried to do the soft, gentle voice that came so naturally to John the nurse, but he hadn’t quite mastered it. To my ears there was an edge of menace in his manner. ‘There’s an ambulance outside to take you.’
Eventually, I agreed. I kept trying to delay things – something about the psychiatrist had put me on edge and heightened the paranoia. ‘I’ll just have a cigarette’ and ‘I’ll just get changed.’
They told me the ambulance was waiting, so after some persuasion I gave in and for the first time in weeks, even months, I stepped outside the front door of the house. The world seemed somewhat different that day; not quite real. I can’t describe it.
The one unmistakably real thing though was the ambulance, parked in front of the gate. It looked out of place, like they always do when they’re in familiar surroundings. It was like a scene from Doctor Who when you see the Tardis in the middle of modern-day Cardiff. Behind it, parked slightly up the road, was a police car, but I thought nothing of that. This was south-east London after all.
As I stepped into the ambulance I went to sit down on one of the drop-down seats near the rear doors. ‘You’ll have to lie on the bed, I’m afraid,’ said the medic. ‘There aren’t enough seats.’
I shrugged and got onto the stretcher.
He immediately pulled some large red straps across me, tying me down so my arms and legs couldn’t move. ‘Go easy, mate,’ I said, ‘I’m not bloody Hannibal Lecter!’ No one laughed.
I noticed my wife sitting opposite. It was the first time I’d really looked at her in weeks. She smiled at me, b
ut it was just her mouth moving. Her eyes didn’t change. She looked so tired, so sad. The social worker stepped into the ambulance, taking up a seat near the rear doors. As soon as she stepped in, the technician pulled the doors shut, gave the all-clear to the driver and we started to pull away. I noticed the police car following through the rear window. The social worker cleared her throat with a little cough, then began a speech that she’d no doubt delivered many times before:
‘John, I am informing you that you are being detained under section two of the Mental Health Act…’
I’m sure there was more to her speech, but her voice seemed to trail off into the background as my wife reached out and held my hand. She gave it a little squeeze. I don’t know if it was the reality of it or if it was that first human contact in weeks, but I turned away to face the side of the ambulance. I tried my hardest to not let anyone see but my shoulders shook uncontrollably up and down and, for the first time in my life, it felt like they might never stop.