responsibility … The outskirts of Wetherby are grim – stony-faced
buildings on all four corners, their narrow eyes snow-blinded by net
curtains. Two elderly women cross in front of the car … the halt
leading the lame, who in turn leads a wicker shopper … closest she’ll
get now to a beehive. The lights bleed out to orange, and Camilla eases
down the accelerator … Endometriotic lesions develop their own
nerves, Zack had told her when his grandson’s difficult birth was
followed by … further complications. And she’d flung back: My
geepee already told me that! The truth was, no doctor – not even a
consulting time lord – could’ve dreamt up such freaky sci-fi stuff:
the lesions not only grew their own nerves, but those nerves were
then plugged directly into her central nervous system … G’dunggg!
G’dungggg! Khhssshhhkkkkhhhhssschhhg’dunggg! So there was the
disease’s pain to endure, plus the pain of the symptoms it’d given
birth to … Camilla couldn’t eyeball the lesions deep inside her
womb – but she could see the eyes that’d been torn from it. It was
featherweight, Ben’s gaze – it wafted away from her heavy scrutiny.
He won’t so much as look at me! she’d said again annagain – to
Zack, to Mark, to all the other members of the disorderly family
she’d drunkenly fucked her way into. He won’t look at me – it’s not
normal! All the other babies at the mums-and-toddlers group – all
the other babies in the world! That’s what they do – stare into their
mother’s eyes … that’s how they bond – that’s how they know who
you are … A decade ago, standing in that concrete trench, watching
her son twitch and flail, she’d shrugged off her father-in-law’s
assurances for the sixhunnredansixtysixth time. You don’t get it,
Zack – you just don’t get it, she’d sobbed. Sometimes I think
he’s like that kid in the horror movie – Damien. I start thinking
he’s possessed – that he’s the … Devil … The handbrake creaks
ominously, the engines dies. There’s the silence … of the grave, but
none of the peace, for father and son are out of the car before
Camilla’s had time to undo her seatbelt – out of the car, and both
striding across the supermarket car park towards the same set of
sliding doors, despite following radically diverging trajectories …
they’re never together. She remembers the conversation on the balcony
so well because Ben had been exactly two and a half – and she’d
organised a half-birthday party for him. Back then she’d believed
she could jolly him into sociability with party poppers and Hula
Hoops – but he’d been perfectly indifferent to the three or four
toddlers and their mothers, who Camilla had artily … craftily …
lured up from the One O’Clock Club in the concrete bunker
ludicrously named the William Morris Community Centre. Ben’s
father had shut himself up in their bedroom – remained there the
whole time, sulking because she wouldn’t let him wear his Power
Rangers mask. It was left to Zack to dole out cartons of Um Bongo
while Camilla wrapped up the pass-the-parcel – left to Zack,
as well, to make conversation about the drains … rancid sewage
smell fluting through air vents poxy with congealed old paint blobs and
the DeeAitchEssEss – both of which he’d been suprisingly well
informed about. As the afternoon wore on, the mothers – three
stolid and near-pyramidal Ghanaian women – had grown warmer
and more garrulous, while the half-birthday boy retreated further
and further into … himself. Ben had ended up sitting in the dirty
clothes hamper and screaming as if it were him – not some gilded-bloody-princess
– who was the most hunted person in the world …
The Ghanaian mother who tried to pick up Ben to comfort him
got a Hot Wheels in her eye for her trouble. Eventually, Zack
gave him half a Valium crushed up in some Um Bongo … not
strictly speaking ethical, that – another of his phrases which, over the
years … has caught me, too. Ben ended up half awake, slumped on
a grubby sag-bag, and clutching the toy car in one hand while
plumbers up on to moving platforms, or made them jump down
into yawning ravines … he was only two and a half! Perhaps it
was on that miserable occasion, after Zack had got a half-bottle of
whisky from the offie, to stifle their own more silent screams – but
it might’ve been at any point during Ben’s terrible second year, his
thunderous third or his fucking dreadful fourth – that this lecture
was delivered: Autistischen Psychopathen, that was Hans Asperger’s
term for the odd children he saw in his clinic. He also described
them as intelligent automata – and he was a humane practitioner!
A saint compared to Kanner – who I met at a conference once and
found to be a bumptious-bloody-blowhard … Manipulated his
trial data as well. As for Saint-bloody-Bettelheim – well, it’s all
coming out now. Far from his “Orthogenic School” being some
haven of creativity and self-expression, turns out it was an abusive
snake-pit – while he was just another self-hating Jew turned
Konzentration Kamp Kommandant… — The sign on the car parked
in front, BABY ON BOARD, is boring into Camilla. Her hands still
gripping the steering wheel, she sees the baby – not bored, but
hysterical inna rape field … Lying there – convulsed, puce, screaming
the way only babies can, on and on, their razor-sharp tongues
revolving mechanically as they process this misery-food. On and on
– boring into you, on and never off – can’t turn ’em off, no off-switch
… Can’t turn ’em off-and-on, which usually fixes the problem …
You’re not bored, though? Sorta phonics he’d come up with – and not
fee-say-shuss-lee … Bored? Her voice, her words – spoken during a
summit meeting they’d held at the peak of one of Ben’s crises:
Bored? I’m not fucking bored, Zack, it’s gone way beyond boredom
– I’m gonna kill myself … Her baby is always on board – suckered to
the windscreen by its Um Bongo-sticky hands … they kill them in
the Congo. Suckered there like one of those dumb stuffed Garfields
there was a craze for – sending out short, savage bursts of misery
and distress only I can receive … Ben, aged twelve, still sleeps in her
bed – and on one … or several … loathsome occasions, Camilla
has woken in the night to feel the hot tip of his rigid penis pressed
against her thighs inna rape field … Can she bear to be bare behind
flimsy partitions … smearscrape-moppitupp? She can – she must.
Squatting and squitting in the cubicle, she hears, Loadsa love –
chat t’yer later … And thinks, Coming soon! To a rockin’ Portaloo
near you! An epic tale of luv-’n’-loss in fully-phoney Dolby Surround-sound!
– We do have money behind us, you know … Such an odd thing
to say! Camilla remembers him saying it for the first time in the
Sainsbury’s
near Brook Green. Would’ve been a couple of years
after the Power Rangers party, and their fake little family had
moved to a sheltered block run by a mental health charity near
Ravenscourt Park … Ben at that age galloping round annaround
under the railway arch, his outstretched arm waggling, his hand
circling, his fingers flickering as he’d … stimmed. Dollops of duck
and goose shit all over the sad lawns surrounding the milky-watered
pond never forget it … Ben sitting on a badly carved wooden
wombat, momentarily stilled – a carton of juice in one hand, a
flapjack in the other, a mumble of cabbalistic numbers sixhunnred-ansixtysix
… slipping from his sticky lips … We do have money
behind us, you know. Such an odd way of putting things – then, as
now, Camilla had pictured a game of Gramps’s footsteps: load-samoney
creeping behind her – a rustling wad, ill concealed in a hide
woven from banknotes. He’d also said things like, You’re not too
proud? To which she’d snorted: Don’t make me laugh-arf-arf! and
clapped her flippers in the Sainsbury’s salad aisle, as Zack turned to
her, a ready-made one in his hand, his puckered facebag full of healthy
concern. He remains, she thinks, endearing – the word appears in
her hurting mind, as she rocks and rolls and squitsan’shits, its letters
wreathed in radicchio and rocket leaves. Back then he’d still been
in his prime: a figurehead of Psychiatry, in his habitual corduroy
jacket and grey flannel trousers, bolted to the prow of … a shopping
trolley. We – the family, that is – have money behind us … To
which she undoubtedly would’ve replied: You’ve always paid our
rent – we’re very grateful. To which he would almost certainly have
countered: And am happy to do so – and to offer more help, if
required. More! Yes, more! That’s what little Ben had needed – more
high-dose vitamin supplements, more minerals and enzymes –
more probiotics and anti-fungals, more Bio-Chelat rice bread spread
with yum-yum almond butter, more glutathione cream rubbed on
his swollen tummy – and especially more Risperdal crushed into
his first morning spoonful of Marmite, a practice that – when his
Grandfather got wind of … he blew: D’you know what this rubbish
is? Shaking the pill pot to a bossa nova beat: It’s an atypical antipsychotic
developed for the treatment of schizophrenia in adults –
if anyone should be guzzling this dangerous pap, it’s Mark, not
Ben … Such conviction, she believes now, was only born of confusion
– those first few years of Ben’s life … we were all making it
up. It was a burgeoning subculture – it wasn’t only the Whitehouse-Busner
Family who were dancing to the autists’ beat: there were all
the other parents, carers and assorted practitioners who’d to tend
and toilet their ceaselessly self-stimulating toddlers. In waiting
room after waiting room, with Ben squirming on her lap, she’d
bitterly ruminated: For once I’m trendy – hip, even … Too young
for punk – too old for acid house, Camilla had cleverly managed to
give birth to … my own rave scene. But then, that’d been before the
rumours of a new and devastating form of autism, one marked by
the most dramatic behavioural regression imaginable. Panic ripped
through the online forums she didn’t so much frequent as … lived
on, the whole fucking time! Late at night, staring into the ghostly
furniture of their back-lit pages, she read about children who’d once
prattled away now falling stonily silent – others who’d seemed quite
continent shitting themselves in droves … What frail hope Camilla
had rested in Ben’s Jolly-fucking-phonics: he spoke – and not just
the sporadic words and disjointed phrases to be expected at his
age, but entire, well-formed sentences … Tarzan was a very good
film, Mummy, and precociously early: Moreover, if he was “high-functioning”
for a child with Asperger’s – a term beloved of the
clinical psychologists who ticked boxes and flipped charts for a
living! – he was also well in advance of his “normal” peers, who
were gooing and gaaing while he was already issuing precise
bulletins from his metallic world: These are vee-eights and they’re
super-fast – these are special rockets and they fly very high … and
issuing them again: and they fly very high … He might look straight
through her a thousand times a day, but he gave her the gift of his
words – which had been a … relief. Relief! She tenses her buttocks
experimentally, feeling the sharp-edged corona of the flimsy toilet
seat … cutting into me. All done? Yes … yes, she clenches, she might
well be … done. Mute and moaning – that was the alternative: she’d
seen those autistic children who took the crooked roads that led to
cul-de-sacs of incommunicability, where they rocked and rocked –
and rocked some more … but never rolled. And now the internet
was seething with speculation: This doctor – at Heath Hospital no
less! had definitively established a link between the emmemmarr
and autism. The publicity given to his study had produced a great
howl of new cases – parents who screamed that within heartbeats of
their children being immunised their little bodies had convulsed,
and it was closing time as their minds … their spirits – their souls …
whatever … went … west. When their parents got them home,
instead of the light fever expected, there was a heavy one – hallucinations
followed … Fimbles fumbling – fucking, I dunno … and
when the poor mites finally recovered themselves, that was all
they had: themselves … Now the online forums resounded with the
despair of parents whose once lively, outgoing and empathetic
toddlers were imprisoned in the most terrible solitude, locked up
inside in the red plush padding of … their own brain cells – Hullo?
Yes? Hi – sorry … we got cut off … again … reception’s …
patchy … Well, indeed! Why wouldn’t the reception be patchy
if you make a phone call right beside a woman doing a shit! The
night after Ben got shot, he’d galloped up and down the trench
of the balcony, around annaround the cramped little flat – a headless
horseman, neighing and neighing and neighing some more –
Oh, Christ-fucking-Mary-Maclary-from-Donaldson’s-Dairy, why did
we DO IT! In the resonating toilet stall, in the rockin’ Portaloo, in
the grim-faced Northern market town, the distressed woman rolls
around on the toilet seat. Camilla knows she isn’t truly ugly –
she thinks: I’ll see it when I’ve wiped myself, pulled up my knickers
and tights, pulled down and straightened my dress, unbolted the
door and am standing in front of the soap-smeared mirror – see
my fat cheeks, snub nose, thin lips and yellow-bloody hair. Camilla
has – or so she’s been told – lovely eyes: wide, bountifully lashed and
baby-doll blue-ooh … She’d once been chucked on the barbecue of
male regard, they like their flesh … flame-grilled. But now? Camilla
sobs – and then plops: healthy round-sounding pebble-dropped-in-a-pond
plops. But when she rises Look behiiind youuu! there’re blood
and mucus in there as well. Pretending it doesn’t exist, she knows,
is not an option – but living in the full knowledge of it doesn’t
make things any easier, given the condition … isn’t, I’m afraid to
say, treatable – unless you’re prepared to have a hysterectomy – although
we can provide quite effective symptomatic relief. These last the words
of Doctor Glazer, a specialist who billed pretentiously in guineas
and consulted floating high above the leafiness of Montagu Square.
Not that Camilla ever saw the bills, because … we have money
behind us. Paying her and Ben’s private medical bills was something
Zack candidly admitted he would never – could never – do for his
own children … not strictly speaking ethical, that. Doctor Glazer
specialised in the laying on of his own long and waxen hands – but
the premium price-point was determined by his plumminess. My
patients don’t die with endemetriosis, Mzz Whitehouse-Busner –
let alone of it. No, my task is to make it possible for you live
with the complaint until, in the fullness of time, you reach the
menopause, and are naturally relieved … the fucking shit. Framed
degree certificates and watercolour sea scenes of … dumb Cowes,
and mood-music tinkling from concealed speakers. Glazer had
thrust his tapering fingers into Camilla’s tummy and tum-tummed
along to Pachelbel’s Canon – I’d’ve liked to’ve lashed him across
its muzzle and fired the fucking thing! Which would’ve been a
sweetly melodic death, and far better than he deserves … Standing in
the chilly-damp Portaloo, staring directly into her own exhausted
eyes … without flinching, Camilla is able to muster a certain objectivity:
And you, she interrogates herself, what exactly is it you
deserve? She’d tried her best – she’d loved her son, and ministered
to him assiduously … my little Tamagotchi, responding to each and
every one of his electro-peeps and synthesised cheeps. So caring
had she been towards this intelligent automaton that she’d neglected
to … keep myself alive … It’d been a rigid corpse of a woman
propped up in the passenger seat of Charlie’s BeeEmmDoubleyou,