No Rest for the Wicked

I take things literally. Always. Well, nearly always, to be literal.
Like the time Vanessa was chivvying me along and said ‘This isn’t getting the baby bathed’. I stood stock still and looked at her with incredulity. ‘What the hell are you talking about’, I demanded, ‘we don’t even have a bloody baby’.
Vanessa had to explain that it was a saying (meaning that we needed to hurry) and was not meant to be taken literally. I still thought it was a ridiculous thing to say. She has not repeated it.
It reminded me of a time when I was young and my mother hired a cleaner for a few hours a week. Goodness knows why, as my mother didn’t work and was quite capable (well, physically) of cleaning the house herself.
We’ll call the cleaner Mrs Kettle, although that’s not her name in a literal sense (see, I’m catching on).
Mrs Kettle came cheap. That meant she wasn’t the most dextrous cleaner in the world. In fact, in the few years she cleaned for us, she broke almost every possession I owned.
As a child, I liked to collect things and, whilst I accept that the items may have been financially inconsequential (OK – sheer rubbish), they were still mine and I liked them better when they were entire rather than in little pieces. Mrs Kettle had other ideas.
I hated anyone in my room, let alone touching my things, so it was traumatic having Mrs Kettle in there anyway. But returning afterwards to replace all my stuff into exactly the position it was in before her visit was made considerably worse by the inevitable discovery than yet another item had been reduced to rubble through her ministrations.
When I finally left home I used a shoe-box for my packing. From the days of my childhood, I now have only two possessions. One is a bear made of Welsh slate with both ears glued back on and a chipped nose, and the other is a small model of a bull from Crete. The latter is made from cast bronze and even Mrs Kettle found that difficult to disintegrate. All she managed was a dent in its side.
In the end, to avoid the stress of hearing my belongings bouncing off the floor, I took to locking myself away. I claimed that I was busy with homework and it never crossed my mind that there was anything suspicious about being constantly busy with homework, even throughout the school holidays. To be fair, this didn’t bother Mrs Kettle unduly as I wasn’t the most communicative child to begin with. I think the most active she ever saw me was when I vomited over a newly cleaned carpet (long story) but, to my undying admiration, that just got vacuumed up along with everything else.
One day, as I was furtively darting past Mrs Kettle to shut myself in a room that wasn’t on the cleaning roster that day, she asked if I was still busy with homework. Maybe she was making a joke; I wouldn’t have known. I responded with, what I hoped, was a pained grunt that I was. She then said (and I remember her words to this day): ‘Well, there’s no rest for the wicked’.
Wicked. Me? I was deeply offended by this. Admittedly, I had vomited on the carpet that time but this was on account of my mother’s cooking and everyone understood that this was a habitual risk of dining at our house. But it hardly deserved the epithet wicked. I didn’t think I’d ever done anything in my life that anyone could honestly say was wicked. What the hell was Mrs Kettle thinking?
From then on, I avoided Mrs Kettle, even more than I had before. And I don’t think I ever really forgave her for that comment until the day she died. Which is a shame really, as she had a huge impact on my childhood. After all, she single-handily managed to destroy most traces of it.

Taking People at Face Value

Like many people with Aspergers, I tend to take people at face value (although usually without actually looking at their face, obviously).
This means that I judge you as I find you, with absolutely no reference to anything else. This is not all good.
If you make a smart comment to me, then I will assume you are smart. If you make a dumb comment to me, then I will assume you are dumb. This is irrespective of anything that has gone before. If Kermit the Frog quoted Shakespeare I would immediately assume he is cultured, well-read, and completely overlook the fact he is a frog, and a puppet. Similarly, if Einstein said he didn’t know the name of the President, I would assume he was a complete idiot, and completely overlook his contribution to, erm…snazzy equations. Although being dead, I’d probably give him a little more leeway.
So, despite almost 20 years of marriage, Vanessa gets no privileged treatment from me.
Regular readers of this blog will remember that I have recently had a head cold. As soon as I thought I might be going down with it, I emailed Vanessa to tell her. I didn’t make a big thing of it, of course, but if I wasn’t going to pull through, I wanted a record of the cause of my passing.
Vanessa didn’t respond.
Now I will save you from the crushing disappointment that I felt that morning, realising that after almost 20 years of happy marriage, Vanessa had finally decided that she was no longer concerned for my well being and clearly couldn’t give a hoot whether if I lived or died, by telling you that she didn’t actually receive the email. It had vanished into internet stardust, never to be seen again.
That didn’t occur to me. Instead, I started to plan my life as a single person. I realised I would need to move out of the house but as Mabon would still need feeding and walking every day, I reasoned that I couldn’t go far. Maybe I’d buy a caravan and live in the adjacent field. It also left the weekend clear. I decided I’d watch a film.
Within a few minutes, I was sorted. My new life opened up before me.
Then Vanessa emailed. Upon reading its contents, I realised that not only had she ignored the perilous state of my health, she was even pretending that everything was perfectly normal by wittering on about the usual banalities she writes about. She made absolutely no reference to my earlier email at all. Nothing. I might as well have dropped dead in the interim for all she seemed to care.
Before I began to pack my belongings, I emailed back. I asked how she could be so uncaring as to throw years of happiness away at a time when I might be taking my last few breaths on earth.
She responded to explain that she had not received my earlier email. I hadn’t considered that possibility.
That was all right then. No need to buy a caravan after all. She also said that she feared she might be going down with the same illness as me (albeit in the milder form that women seem to get).
I replied in jovial fashion, ending with ‘I hope you haven’t got it too’. Except that I didn’t write exactly that. In error, I left out the ‘haven’t’.
I only noticed a few hours later. Despite being grammatically incorrect, the statement was still pretty damming. I immediately emailed Vanessa and took great pains to explain the mistake, pointing out the incorrect grammar as proof of an error rather than a callous and quite unnecessary statement (well, quite unnecessary now we had things sorted out). I feared that, in the few hours since I had sent the email, she would have already consulted solicitors and that divorce papers were probably on their way.
Vanessa responded. She said that of course she had assumed I had made an error and hadn’t given it another thought. In fact, she always thinks the best of me anyway.
Er…right. Funny that: I’m just the same.

Eye Contact, Or Why Staring is Rude

Vanessa and I have a huge farmhouse table in our kitchen. It’s so long you can catch a bus from one end to the other. When we got it (and Lord knows why we did, as I absolutely hate having anyone eat with us), Vanessa had images of us snuggling up together at one end to eat. Yeah, right.
My preference is for us to sit at either end and, with the centre holding a candelabra, assorted flowers (Vanessa’s idea), and condiments to put a fish shop to shame, we can’t actually see each other when we sit down. (We also light the table with nothing but the candelabra, putting the far ends of the table – where we sit – into deep gloom. Some evenings I’m not even sure what’s on my plate, it’s so dark). That all suits me fine and Vanessa and I have many and varied conversations whilst sitting so far away from each other that we have different post codes for the evening.
You’ll have gathered by now that I don’t necessarily want to look at the person I’m speaking to. Actually, I don’t necessarily want to be in the same room as the person I’m speaking to, but Vanessa has drawn the line at shouting through the walls. It confused the dog.
Most non-human animals don’t stare at each other and, if they do, it means ‘I’m bigger, stronger, and fitter than you are and if you don’t move sharpish I’m going to give you a good pasting’. (It’s called non-verbal communication. See, I’m meant to be hopeless at that but I’ve got this animal staring thing down, no problem.) Not unreasonably, I don’t exactly want all that hassle from Vanessa at the dinner table.
The trouble is, even through staring between humans doesn’t always mean you’re about to lose your teeth, that’s all it means to me. And just to clarify, staring is looking. It doesn’t have to be for long before I feel it like a physical assault.
Apparently, staring at someone with autism stimulates a part of the brain called the amygdala, which controls the fear response. Put simply, staring can frighten the beejezus out of an autistic. Does out of me anyway.
So if I’m talking to you, I’ll do one of two things. If I’m comfortable, I’ll just look away as we talk. It’s polite (to me) and keeps my stress level to a manageable panic. Or, if I’m less sure of you, I’ll obey the rule and lock eyes for the duration of our conversation – a bit like a zombie would do but without the over-the-top menace or rotting flesh, obviously. This can be unsettling I realise but, hey, it’s either all or nothing with me.
I don’t even like magazines with pictures of people that gaze out from the page. I cover them up or draw sunglasses on them to avert their stare. I’m not always the most popular guy in dentist’s waiting rooms as a result of this.
If eyes, as the poets tell us, are the gateway to the soul, then please, keep it covered up. Unless you are sitting at the opposite end of a table so long you become a mere speck in the distance, in which case, you can do what you like. Vanessa could eat dinner naked for all I know, although, just for the record, she probably doesn’t.