LITMIR.BIZ

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seemed to notice I was there. I didn’t like it any better when it was just us and I became the sole focus of her attention. Although she wanted me to be normal, she seemed to hate me being at school, because the times she was nicest to me were when I got sent home. I know she was taken into care herself as a child. So maybe she had always felt as though she had been abandoned, and now I was the only person she might be able to hold on to. If that was true, it would also explain why she was so critical of anyone I did manage to make friends with, like the little girl who lived down the road and asked me to tea when I was seven.

      It isn’t until children start going to school and to friends’ houses that they become aware that there are other ways of being a family and other types of behaviour that might be encouraged or disapproved of. For me, that process of being exposed to alternatives began when I went to Kelly’s house.

      One day, when I was playing with Kelly in her garden, her rabbit bit my finger. Kelly was really nice about it and put her arm around my shoulders as she led me into the house. Then her mum took me upstairs to the bathroom, where she put Germolene on the cut before covering it with a plaster. I remember being intrigued by what she was doing and by the kindly way she spoke to me, as if it hadn’t even crossed her mind that what had happened might have been my fault. I wasn’t used to being spoken to like that, or to having my wounds dressed with ointments and plasters. If I ever cut myself when we lived with Dan, he would take a Rizla out of the pack, spit on it and lay it over the cut to stop the bleeding. Then, if it became infected – by the bacteria already inside it or by those introduced in Dan’s spit – he would squeeze the edges of the cut together, scrape off the pus with a credit card and then douse it with TCP. It may not have been as hygienic a process as the one used by Kelly’s mum, but it was usually quite effective.

      Another thing that fascinated about Kelly’s family was the fact that they were vegetarians, and her mum cooked proper meals. As a child who lived primarily on takeaways, I was intrigued and impressed by the vegetables I was given for my tea. I couldn’t wait to tell Mum about what I had eaten. But she just laughed at me and then took the mickey out of me about it for days afterwards. I didn’t understand why at the time, although I realise now that praising someone else for doing something Mum didn’t do probably felt to Mum as though I was criticising her. What I did understand, though, was that it would be better in future not to tell Mum about anything that happened at my friend’s house.

      However, even Kelly’s mum would have found it hard to compete when it came to cleaning the house. Mum may not have done any cooking, but once we had got away from the chaos of the doss-house and then the mess created by five children in a house that had already been listed for demolition, she became almost obsessively house proud. It was as if she had developed some sort of house-cleaning paranoia. Sometimes, she would spend hours scrubbing and polishing until every germ had been massacred and every shabby, lacklustre surface gleamed, then, a few minutes after she had finished, she would announce that we wouldn’t be able to go out as we had planned because the house still wasn’t clean enough and it all had to be done again. I don’t know how she continued to be able to live with the bare soil in the bathroom. But, somehow, she seemed to be able to shut her mind to it and to focus instead on mopping and bleaching the concrete floor around it, which was always spotlessly clean – between rainfalls.

      As well as tying Mum to the house, the cleaning created other problems for me, because whenever I made a mess, she reacted as if the end of the world had come. As I was not very well coordinated as a child, I lived in a constant state of anxiety, knowing that if I knocked over a cup of juice, Mum would be both angry and hurt. It was as if she thought I had done it deliberately, with the sole purpose of making her life more difficult than it already was. In reality, however, clumsiness was something I was prone to because of the Asperger syndrome, and added to the stress of knowing how upset Mum would be if I spilled or broke something, I was always an accident waiting to happen. So, for most of the time when I was at home, I was either banished to my room because I had already made a mess, or I had been sent to play outside so that I didn’t disturb the pristine perfection Mum was always striving to achieve.

      Even though it was often stressful living in the warzone Mum created in her constant battle against dirt and mess, I did benefit from the results of her hard work. I can remember going to other people’s houses as a child and seeing dirty work surfaces or overflowing rubbish bins in the kitchen and thinking how lucky I was to live in our house and to have clean clothes to wear. I always had a lot of toys too, which Mum bought for me at the car-boot sales she loved going to. I was lucky in many other ways as well, particularly compared with some of the kids who lived near us. What tended to outweigh the positives, however, was the constant state of anxiety I lived in because of Mum’s unpredictable, volatile moods and the fact that something she might not bat an eyelid at one day could send her into a rage the next. She didn’t ever set any boundaries, even when I was very young, and for someone like me, who has real problems trying to cope with change, her inconsistency meant I was always on edge and couldn’t ever relax.

      It wasn’t all bad though. We did have some really nice days out together, and even some holidays. One year, we had a holiday at the seaside, although, unfortunately, it didn’t turn out as well as I think either of us had hoped. I tend to get fixated on things that interest me, and at that time, around the age of eight, it was old houses. Mum had promised to take me to see one that was near where we were staying and only open to the public on certain days of the year. I had read about it in a book at our local library and, for me, visiting it was to be the highlight of the whole holiday. So when the day finally came, I was so excited I could hardly contain myself.

      We 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

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