Somebody Somewhere (9 page)

I found a job picking apricots at a local orchard. I had no shorts, and the summer days were scorching hot. It was over one hundred degrees.

My father's girlfriend gave me an old dress of hers. Armed with a few bottles of ice water, a transistor radio, and peanut butter sandwiches, I set off at sunrise each day to work.

The boss was a chauvinist pig who said he didn't usually hire women. He said he had made an exception for me and I was grateful for the work despite the fact that there were no toilet facilities and I had to go in the orchard, bush-style.

The boss hung around like an old blowfly. He stood beneath the ladder I perched on in my apricot-stained dress.

I was confused about the intentions behind the things he kept asking me about: boyfriends, marriage, being pretty, and sleeping with people. These were factual questions requiring factual answers but I recognized some kind of system to his questioning and felt uncomfortable about the type of topics he found interesting. I told my father about it. He set me straight.

“Stop annoying me,” I told the boss. He took me off the job I was doing and put me on the hardest job in the place: repicking. Repicking involves carrying the tall metal ladder from tree to tree, row to row, in order to pick about five to ten apricots from each tree. Payment was by the crateload and it took about six times as long to fill a crate this way. I watched the men picking full trees in the rows nearby. I choked on the inequality, the dust, and the heat. I emptied my last apronful of apricots, cashed in my tickets, and left. Sometimes, no job is better than “any” job.

I cleaned my father's girlfriend's house and rode the bicycle my friend had loaned me around the dusty clay roads. I collected leaves and pebbles and feathers and studied the fall of shadows created by dead old gum trees at various points in the day. I walked through fields of dried grass and hovered around the hay shed smelling the hay and watching the sun set slowly behind the barbed-wire fence of the paddock. I took photos of cows and of my own bare feet, walked tightrope along the white paling fence at the back of the house, and spun the clothesline, watching the wind make the washing flutter. I listened to nature play a symphony, caught up in the patterns of fields and hills, the play of light upon grass, the rush of the wind past my ears, the crystal-like dewdrops hanging upon barbed wire in the early morning, the
thud
,
thud
, rhythm of my own feet running over clay and scratchy dried golden grass that scratched my freckled, sunburned legs.

Inside the house the feeling between my father's girlfriend and me was icy cold. If only she didn't have that high-pitched voice, I could
have stood listening to her. I knew it wasn't her fault and tried my best to remind myself of that every time anxiety soared.

My father had tried to talk her around. I had given her a copy of my book to read in the hope it might help her understand that I was trying.

“You're not autistic,” she declared, almost spitting out the words in disgust. “My friend's sister has a daughter who is autistic. She lives in a psychiatric hospital. She goes to the toilet anywhere and can't even feed or dress herself.”

Was I meant to conform to these pathetic expectations or accept that I simply “wasn't trying”? I wanted to scream at her that it was probably because I
was
obsessive about trying that I had progressed in ways this other woman had not.

A letter arrived in the mail. It was from Kathy, an autistic woman from America.

Kathy was six months younger than I was. Like me, she had gone to regular schools. Like me, she had a degree (history and politics). She lived on her own in an apartment, worked part-time and studied part-time.

“So, autistic people can't feed or dress themselves, and pee everywhere,” I thought as I read her letter. “Obviously, not all.”

I suffered from food allergies, vitamin and mineral deficiencies, and a blood-sugar problem called hypoglycemia, all of which my father's girlfriend seemed to tolerate with gritted teeth as a load of fancy hoo-ha. Among these difficulties was a severe allergy to everything containing milk.

“I don't believe in all this allergy business,” she said, dishing me up ice cream. “I really shouldn't eat this,” I told her, “it's made from milk and it's got sugar. I'm not meant to have sugar.” “A little bit won't harm you,” she said as she spooned it into the bowl with the best of intentions. In a way it didn't harm me but she certainly wore some of the effects.

It was midnight and my mood and behavior were at the mercy of my messed-up biological state. Unable to keep it up, I broke down, or perhaps I broke through (I had probably come down from a sugar
high or the allergic reaction wore off or both). As I came back down to earth I felt defeated and ashamed. I gathered up my cardboard boxes, packed my things, and drove for three hours through the countryside toward the city lights.

I didn't really know where I was going. There really wasn't anywhere to go. I parked my car outside my younger brother's place and eventually went and rang the bell. A tall, smiling figure came to the door. “Hi sis,” said Tom.

My little brother had grown from being a seriously undersized child to a tall teenager and an even more towering young adult. He had become more popular, more “cool.” Outdoing even his own image, he had become almost a caricature of himself, a white Michael Jackson and probably just as undercover. The dancing that had been in his eyes at age three reappeared in rare glimpses but mostly there was a deadness so sadly reminiscent of Carol at her best. The grimace of infancy had become the smile of childhood and was now part of an ever-ready-to-entertain comedian's language; quick jokes, clever lines and a smile—always the smile.

Tom was sharing the house with a friend, and my mother slept there on the couch. The house was something of a drop-in center. Newspapers, clothes, soggy towels, cold abandoned baths, dishes, containers of half-eaten take-out food, ashtrays, and beer cans dotted the place. Not a lot had changed.

The TV ran day and night here and it seemed there were always as many lights as possible burning, whether everyone was asleep or not. Unpaid bills piled up and overflowed into a collection of spools of thread, matchboxes, empty cigarette packets, and discarded cards from various birthdays long gone for which no one had bothered to find a special place. I went and found the tea bags and began to tidy.

It had been thirteen years since my younger brother and I had been accustomed to seeing one another around the place. He had been eight years old when I had left home for good at the age of fifteen. He was now a young man trying hard to hold on to time and to not acknowledge his own impending adulthood.

Tom's ambition was to die before he turned twenty-one. Perhaps
there wasn't a lot to be ambitious about in that atmosphere. As he put it, “It's hard to soar like an eagle when you're surrounded by turkeys.”

The backyard was littered with spray cans and half-finished works of art. With only a skeleton of an education, Tom had become accomplished in art and dancing. He'd made sums large enough to earn pride though not enough to keep up with the cost of living. Unlike me, Tom's ability to write was generally limited to graffiti murals with one-word sentences ten feet tall. Captured by color, pattern, and image, he slept through the daylight hours, coming to life at night like a vampire. Like a modern-day van Gogh, he seemed tormented by the impression that his art was never good enough.

For Tom, art was a world that was never real enough. His paintings reached out and grabbed the viewer, wrapped them up in an explosive experience of color, and dragged them in. But Tom couldn't cross the bridges he painted across deep, treacherous caverns. He couldn't reach the solid ground of cliffs painted invitingly in the distance.

Tom sat across from me on the floor with one of his paintings in front of him. He pointed to his own head. “You don't know how crazy it is in here,” he said, his voice dead calm. “Because you can't make them real enough to climb into?” I asked. “Are you as crazy as me?” he replied half-joking. “It must run in the family.” Tom hadn't yet read my book. Perhaps if he had he might have known these feelings had nothing to do with craziness.

Tom cooked spaghetti and everyone was talking fast. He handed me a bowl. “Smile, will you. Just be happy,” he said, flashing me a press-the-button, made-to-order example of a Cheshire Cat grin. It clashed brutally with the deadness in his eyes. I felt ill. What a crime I would commit if I encouraged him to accept this as reality.

“How's this one?” I asked him, a mechanical, production-line, look-alike smile appearing on my own face. “That's better,” he said casually, and turned away.

I burned with the injustice of having been taught to put a smile
on the face of hatred. I raged silently with the memory of how others justified what they'd done as long as I did as I was told and smiled, always smiled. They almost could have sawed my arms and legs off, and as long as they made me think this was normal I would probably have tried to smile. Facial expressions had everything to do with learning to perform and nothing to do with feelings. Something inside now told me this was wrong.

The bowl of spaghetti was raised high into the air. “Look at me, I'm soooo happy,” came the stored-up phrase from my mouth. The bowl tipped over in my hands and fell with a crash and a splatter into the sink. I was having a healthy response to a sick situation.

Suddenly I was out of my head. My hands pulled my hair and hit my face, unable to accept that I couldn't just act “normal,” that I had feelings that demanded expression, that I could express none of them “properly.”

I was too overwhelmed to be aware of anyone, including the me possessing this thing called a body from which I wanted out fast. The commotion and the movement toward me spelled one thing only: a threat.

Tom approached me. Irritating emotional tones rang out on meaningless words and arms opened to capture and engulf me like a giant pair of tongs. I had no time to connect who I was, let alone who these extra bits belonged to. They belonged to Tom, but who the hell was Tom? Tom was my brother. But what the hell did that mean? I was in a state of overload that had triggered a shutdown. The bottom had fallen out of meaning. I was falling fast into a void of Big, Black Nothingness.

I curled up toward the flat solid surface that was the wall and gripped the gentle furry thing that was the velvet curtain. I cried hysterically and hyperventilated in panic as the moving, fleshy, noisy thing that was my brother tried to swallow me up in what is called “holding.” Between squeals and gasps and tears, I smacked at the ominous, fleshy, pink, moving things that were his hands coming near me. I tried to bury myself in the curtain.

“What's wrong with her? What's wrong with her?” Tom was demanding. He was shocked to see his big sister reduced to a
frightened animal. His hands raised in surrender, his face a picture of shock. “I'm out of here,” he said as he backed away.

I scurried away as though he were a rattlesnake about to bite. I looked at this man's stunned face—Tom, my little brother, Tom. I remembered how he'd once held my leg, crying for me not to go. Was this man the same person? Logic told me yes. Perception told me no. One couldn't cancel out the other, so nothing connected and the riddle was aborted as unsolvable.

“Sorry,” I spluttered. “Can't stand being held,” I said to the person I knew in theory was my brother. “That's your problem,” Tom replied. “You should have let someone hug you.”

L
ater I sat on the floor in the bedroom looking through photographs. Tom walked in.

“What do you remember of the time before I left home?” I asked. “I don't remember anything,” said Tom sharply. “I was just a kid.” I tried to jog his memory. He told me that the things I mentioned didn't happen. He told me I had never had any difficulties; I had had dancing lessons and owned dolls.