Love on the NHS (34 page)

He wrote to the police asking if he could apologize: they said no. He also asked if they would pass on an apology for him but they also told him that could not be done, he was not allowed to contact Jolly. Despite how despondent the intractability of his situation made him feel, he attempted to maintain at least a glimmer of optimism.

After finding his way through a Byzantine bureaucracy, he managed to enrol into college. He had to show passports, birth certificates and bank statements to get there but at last he get through the door. A photo had had to be paid for and printed from a photo booth for a student ID card; a form had to be collected from student services, another from the reception, another from the enrolment desk. Bureaucracy always made things difficult. It was like washing laundry. When you put it out to dry, you would follow a pattern. Perhaps you would have a towel hanging on the radiator in your bathroom. As another one was pulled wet and clean from the washing machine, you might replace the dry towel on there with the wet one, and put the used, dry  one in the dirty laundry basket. But then if you happened to find another towel lying around somewhere that needed drying too, it would have to wait its turn. There were socks and pants and shirts to dry too. A person was like that extra towel that turned up and bureaucracy was like that routine in the home. Each newcomer was expected to fit into a system, no matter how silly. In one way, it made sense. In another, was based on nothing but luck. First come, first served - and only providing often seemingly irrelevant tokens were accompanied to gain access. Whether a towel desperately needed drying or not, there was always a system in place.

At the college, the students herded like cattle through the revolving door entrance. The halls were narrow and devoid of wall fittings or hangings, the only things decorating them being an occasional wall-mounted screen with adverts for sports activities. The classes, the canteens and  the recreation areas were small and functional rather than pleasant and very densely packed. The surgically clinical ceiling lights were blinding and the stairways long and steep. Luke's stomach churned at being warehoused in such a sardine can and could not sit or stand still anywhere. Wherever he went, there was commotion. People arguing, fighting, gossiping, jumping; running, sneering, staring, stamping; laughing! None of the faces looked friendly. Everyone was so cocksure.

After a few weeks, it was slightly more tolerable. Some of the least friendly people dropped out of Luke's lessons. However, in his classes he never felt he made friends. Some of the women in his science class talked in a very vulgar manner, including the ones on his table. There was frank talk of sex toys and jokes - or perhaps genuine flirtations - about going to each other's houses to perform sexual acts, all described in graphic detail. The tutors bantered with the students loudly. Luke had initially signed up feeling ambitious. Surrounded by the people around him he soon felt he was just lucky to have the willpower to keep attending. It would be funny if it was not so tragic. Was this it? Thousands of years of human progress... for this? He turned even more to drink, barely turning up to a lesson sober.

Luke made so many amateur errors in his first months of college. He carried his files in his bag as he thought he needed to which wore out his back from the weight. It was worst on Wednesdays when he had maths - there was a hefty textbook, geometry set and calculator to carry too. He noted the date on each page he wrote on and numbered every side too. It irritated his fellow students to no end; and even when he stopped doing it after a few months the first impression had already been created - to the others he would always be known as the  uptight and overbearing one. For the first time in years, not since his school days, he began to set a daily alarm to wake him each morning. Without it he would miss lessons. College was teaching him timekeeping and organisation.

What he was not learning was the art of making friends and influencing people. He feared he may be being set up for a fall by the two girls on his table. In the first ever lesson, they had exchanged their saucy talk as they ever would go on to. Seeing him at a table alone, they demanded he come and sit at theirs, where another student, Dave, was also sat. He learned the women's names which were Penny and Chloe. Penny did not always seem so boisterous if Chloe was not around but Chloe jumped in to every conversation. She was the very definition of an extrovert. The science teacher was called Wendy and was short. She bounded around the room with the energy of a child wearing thigh high motorcycle boots. Luke had no objection to her fashion sense, though her facetiousness, much loved by some of the other students, was off-putting to him. Each teacher in their first lesson came up with an exercise the students must do to break the ice. Wendy's was the most colourful. It involved every student telling the class three exceptional things they had done in their life, one of which had to be a lie.

As the students took their turns, most had a mildly amusing trio of potential falsehoods to share but Luke's turn stood out the most.

"When I was young, I was a talented footballer. I play the piano. And I once got refused entry into Canada."

People murmured and chattered, looking at him and weighing him up. The consensus was that the lie must be that he was refused entry from Canada.

"You look like you were good at football," one man said. Then Luke revealed the lie was in fact that he had been good at football. An outburst of laughter and disbelief erupted in the room.

"What happened?" asked Wendy curiously.

"I turned up without booking a hotel. When I got there they asked where I was staying and I told them I was going to find somewhere but they didn't believe me so I had to come back home."

People grinned and some laughed some more. Luke was glad but his fade reddened too. Though he wished he could enjoy this moment and make more of it, he struggled to look upwards. It was all so unusual to be amusing people; lest he let his audience down, and feeling his blood pressure rise, he decided to say no more.

What Luke never got used to in college was the movement all around him. There were always people fidgeting; spontaneous and loud conversation would break out and there was not enough structure to lessons; someone would start joking or go off on a tangent, and Luke would not know what to do, glancing around sheepishly. The exchange of so much eye contact in a small space and a lack of control over his environment were difficult to cope with for an Autistic mind. Just as he might feel settled on his table, someone on another would shout to someone at his and all the eyes and body postures on his table would change to accommodate this new interaction; which begged of him, what do I do? Who do I look at? He had nothing to contribute lacking so much in confidence and so generally he would look down most the time - but then sometimes one of the girls would teasingly shout at him to "stop sleeping" or ask him, "Are you not talking today, Luke?"

Though he drank alcohol to help him cope with college and going outside, Luke would have rather made use of more sophisticated drugs. Lacking social skills, he did not know anyone who sold any. Even when the occasional person hustled him for business on the street, as he could not negotiate well he was wary he would be overcharged. There was also the fear that he might be coerced to buy more when he did not want to. On one of his nights in London, before sleeping outside a train station Luke had been approached by a short man in faded sportswear.

"Hi there, you alright mate?"

"Yeah, not bad," replied Luke.

"Are you lost?"

"No, just waiting around."

"I'm Wayne. What's your name?"

"Luke. Nice to meet you."

Wayne held out his hand and they shook. Luke noticed he had a missing ring finger.

"How did you lose that?" Luke asked.

"I bit it off while I was in Broadmoor."

"Bloody hell."

"Listen pal, would you like to buy some whizz?"

"Some what? What's that?"

"Ah, you're an innocent one. Ha ha! Cocaine, pal. Cocaine!"

"Erm, okay. How much?"

And then Wayne had told him it would be forty pounds and explained to Luke they needed to go to a restaurant where another man would sell the drugs. When they got there, after Wayne had made several businesslike calls to his associate, he asked Luke for the fee which Luke gave. Wayne walked away towards Kings Cross station and Luke eagerly awaited for his product to return. What new adventures he might experience made him feel like dancing. But to Luke's dismay Wayne never came back. That experience made him think twice about ever trusting a drug dealer again.

On the other hand, Luke was a keen reader and having read The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley he came to believe drugs really could expand his mind; that they could teach him through experience what mere information could not. A life without experiences was like a theory without practice. It had widely become to be believed now that Jesus had gained his wisdom in part through what were now illicit substances. There was always of course a counter-argument: that drugs often led to people robbing, shoplifting and becoming prostitutes.

All Luke knew was that it was a very serious business, this life, and he had to lighten it up somehow. One escape for a lot of people was in the emotionally cathartic  qualities of music. Luke shared in those sentiments. If it was not for Peter maybe Luke could have enjoyed learning a musical instrument. Such expression would have benefited him - but it was not to be! Whenever he would start to play, Peter downstairs would put on loud music or stamp around. To attempt to compromise, Luke bought headphones; he could not handle sullen behaviour. Luke was by now able to play a grade two classical piece proficiently on the piano but still mourned at his progress. Metronomic music bugged him too, there was too much of it. Too many technically great pianists published themselves on YouTube performing mediocre songs in mechanical precision. Even classic songs were butchered by a hollow and over-formal perfection.

One of Luke's goals in life was to learn the piano well enough to be able to play a sentimental from the heart. That he would have to put in hours and hours, week after week of intellectual study and rote exercise was inconvenient. Further, It was bordering on impossible when it was taken into consideration how uninspired he was. A battle could not be won, let alone a hobby mastered without a healthy dose of vigour. It was not possible to conjure such stamina in his current circumstances. Should he stick to it or give up? It costed him eleven pounds a week for a lesson and it took up a lot of time. He wished he had learned from under the age of ten so that he might have serenaded lovers in high school or entertained new friends. No - it was too late for that. Or it would have come in handy in the ten years after dropping out of school when he needed something to live for. Now, too much time had passed. He gave the piano up.

But music was in his blood. He could not totally rid it from his life and so he was compelled to buy a Taylor Big Baby acoustic guitar.  He had wearied of technologically advanced instruments. Anything electronic was far more likely to malfunction. The sound on his digital piano had sometimes cut off for no apparent reason; the instrument would have to be turned on and off once or twice to end its muteness. Now he had bought an instrument free of all that nonsense; yet again, he wished he could have learned from a younger age - the guitar, that is. It could have helped him belong in his peer group. Many of his peers had owned guitars but at the time Luke was too poor to do likewise. None of his parents had been working. His dad was a retired electrician and his mother had had an awful upbringing and only just found the confidence to become a mature student. Money was not in plentiful supply.

Luke still wished somehow his parents could have pushed him more to learn a musical instrument; or even to learn to sail or something else practical. It might have given him an edge later in life, something he could find a job or impress friends with. It was a fact of life that people had children without fully considering the implications. There was no manual that came along with a newborn baby. Ironically, it was often women in poverty who had less to offer their children who gave birth to more offspring. It was a survival strategy. The more children that were produced, the greater the chance one of them would be a great success and transfer the family's genes to a higher station.

An unexpected benefit did come from Luke's aborted piano lessons. He developed an appreciation for classical music he had heretofore lacked. Like most people he loved the sound of the Moonlight Sonata and had watched plenty of Hollywood movies with Mozart scores but sitting down to tickle the ivories himself, he realized how intricate and expressive classical music could be. It explored the desires, passions and temperaments of the human condition far greater than most people acknowledged. He began to download and place a lot of classical songs on his MP3 player so he could relax while out - it was quite unlike some of the overly percussive hits with tribal lyrics that had become the mainstay of popular music.

If Luke's musical education in school had not been such a joke he would have enjoyed classical music sooner. There had been too much political correctness and wooly thinking in the running schools in Luke's youth. Tambourines and bongos were handed out to bang on indiscriminately when it would have been far more useful to have had structured lessons on orchestral instruments and to learn melodies in harmony. In countries that were making the Western economies struggle such as China and Japan, this was already the case. Luke had seen hundreds of videos on YouTube of oriental children masterfully reciting classical music at an age when he and his friends had been shaking maracas. Music had also - even in high school - been taught too theoretically; too separate from the animal impulse that had created music in the first place. Luke could never see the point in his music lessons as a youngster. He might have felt differently if the teacher had told the class about Beethoven's love affairs or Mozart's outbursts of profanity at his dinner parties. Just like opera, classical music is an art that is rooted in the real,  gritty world we all inhabit. These art forms were attempting to embolden life, to transcend its harshness with the purest outbursts of joy and fantasy - once people got that, they might like it.