Love on the NHS (7 page)

Ruth returned and saw Luke quivering. "You're still shaking. You really don't look well. When you get out of here... will you be alright?"

"I think so, yeah."

"Is anybody coming to pick you up?"

"They can't. I'm on holiday. I don't know anyone."

"So you're going back to your hotel, right?"

"I'll try but it won't be easy. I'm tired and it's over ten miles away." She asked more questions and he told her everything. He told her how he was now penniless and feared walking back on the highway. He could have got the train if he had money - but not now. Ruth was tormented. She was different to the other staff. She could not just explain to him there was nothing they could do. She almost did do just that but looking him up and down gave her a foreboding. What would become of him? He needed help. She retired to the staff room and persuaded her manager to allow some of the hospital's funds. They would be used to pay for a cab to get Luke back to the airport. As time to go came, Luke said goodbye to Ruth, overcome by her kindness. There was so much to say - and yet no words could do her justice. Ruth gave him a look between a grimace and a smile.

"Don't you ever pull a stunt like this again," she said; and his cab drove him away.

After he had arrived back in England he wrote a letter to her. He wrote it to the hospital with her name on the top line of the address and told her he had fell in love. As always, Luke fell in love quickly, and at the most unexpected time. He never received a letter back. He did however get sent a series of letters from the hospital demanding payment for his short stay. Luke had had a medical insurance plan but had not mentioned having Asperger's syndrome on it, so the insurance company were refusing to pay. Eventually the hospital, which was at least in name, if not entirely in spirit, charitable stopped sending letters. After three weeks of tears and dread Luke came to terms with the loss of Ruth. He said to himself, though, some day he would fall in love and be loved in return. He changed his name back to Luke Jefferson. He had looked for the life of Racey Witty. He had not found it.

XIII

"Why are you so romantic? Can't you enjoy football?" a friend of Luke's had asked him in high school. Luke had two overwhelming crushes as a schoolboy. He was haunted by a feeling of nothingness. Eppy and Leona had distracted him like a cheerful calliope, spinning chivalrously. Even before he had heard of existentialism - or read books by Sartre or Camus - Luke felt innately life was fragile. It is lonely. You never know when you will die. No matter how confident people appear, the reality is all lives are a struggle to fill in the gaps.

When his most devoted crush, Leona, rejected him, it led to dire consequences. Firstly, it intensified bullying being meted out to him. Before he was subjected to common name calling and the occasional fight. Now it turned into persistent teasing and group beatings. At unexpected times his penis would be grabbed, his nipples twisted or a wet finger poked in his ear. He had bricks dropped on his head from a height. It had caused his temple to trickle down blood while his vision swam in and out of blackness. The incident, as well as the one at the river with Norman, made Luke wonder in years to come if he had developed brain damage. He saw an article on a news website one day. It reported a large number of homeless people were undiagnosed brain injury cases. Apparently that was why so many homeless people were peculiar - they found it hard regulating their emotions.

In the intense period of bullying - around the age of fourteen - Luke's brain, accompanied by his hormones, urged him to achieve things quickly; he had to find love, make his mark on the world. Storing his intelligence for use in a career was lazy and would be acting in bad faith - he needed to use it
now
. He realized in school, though he couldn't articulate it well, that the entire system was wrong. Even at the age of fourteen injustices, unacceptable ones with severe consequences, were becoming clear. He adopted the style of a goth. At the time goths were a sub-culture associated with rebellion against the established order. Luke wanted a more poetic life.

When he dyed his hair black he became the first goth of the school and an overnight celebrity. Girls who had been indifferent to him grew curious. Among the more overlooked young ladies, the sort who did not gel with the cocky athletes, he gained a reputation. One such girl, Sonia, invited him on a date to a swimming pool. They had exchanged e-mail addresses and chatted on the internet; he was going to go but at the last minute cancelled. Although Luke might have liked her, he was so nervous around girls.

He was afraid in a swimming pool his feelings for her might be too aroused. He dreaded he would - if her mood mirrored his - soon consummate the relationship. It was every boy's dream, they all talked about it in class. But though Luke got the opportunity, and before most his classmates, he didn't want to grow up yet. Sonia was wounded and frowned whenever she saw him. It was another pressure to add to the bullying. Two other girls asked Luke out but he turned both down. One of them seemed to be joking as her friends were laughing and the other he did not know and felt no attraction to.

He was barely eating the right foods to sustain himself, it was all junk. He dared not try anything new. What little control he had over his environment, he needed. It gave him some sense of security. He had yet learned how to be more flexible; specialist advice would have helped but no one knew - or at least acknowledged - he needed it. As a result, the physical and verbal assaults on him caused severe damage. He went from being a straight A student to occasional A's, to B's, to C's. Some of his teachers called him lazy but he did not care.

In a lot of lessons he would just stare at the table or floor, genuinely uninterested in anyone around him. At his lowest point, he cut his arms and legs with a knife. He had never read or watched anything about self-harm, he hardly knew he existed. He simply felt an urge to hurt himself one day. When the other children saw, they kept asking why he did it. It was almost as if they cared - but not quite. A teacher found out and word among staff got around. Luke was referred to see an educational psychologist.

She was so worried about him she asked him to meet a psychiatrist. Luke saw the psychiatrist a few times and after each visit his remaining friends in school would joke with him. They would ask how it felt to be a nutter. It was on the fifth visit he was officially diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome.

XIV

Luke had five social workers while living in Duldrum. It was hard to remember them all. They came and went so rapidly. They all had one thing in common: they didn't help much. If he would call to ask for assistance, they would usually book a visit. They treated him like anyone else, as opposed to someone with communication difficulties. They would ask him how he was. Because of how muddled his short term memory was and how strongly he felt according to the moment he would say, "Fine." He was fine because he was happy to see someone; someone who was asking about him, who was interested in him. Anybody feels fine when a person makes a diversion to visit them and enquire about them.

Professionals often assume people with Asperger's Syndrome or Autism are more capable than they really are. Due to their intelligence - and their logical and calm presentation in meetings - presumptions are easily made. But of course meetings with professionals are not normal situations at all. They are sterile and predictable. A lot of Autistic people - just like Luke - do not express emotion easily. As they are likely to take questions literally, unless exactly the right questions are asked, the right answers will not be given. Specific probing questions are required to identify problems the person is having so they can be addressed.

There is also an issue of trust as many people with Asperger's syndrome have been let down by a lot of people. This in part because the condition is not always acknowledged as it should be. So when Luke would call on a later date in turmoil and needing help, the social worker was confused. If Luke's mother called the social worker on his behalf, they would not always pay attention to what she said. It was as though they thought she might just be an interfering mother. Of course such mothers do exist but Luke went out of his way to explain he had personally endorsed his mother as an advocate for himself - and they still ignored most she said.

Some of the social workers referred Luke to a day centre or an activity group. They were in Duldrum and he would board the bus there, hopeful he was at last going to find support. Getting to Duldrum by bus took half as long as it took to get to Woecaster, though the distance covered was only a third. Along the way,
so many
bitter and impoverished people boarded and Luke would gradually feel himself dishearten. When he reached the place he would find himself in a dark and gloomy old Victorian building. The decor would be dated, the rooms damp and cold. Therein would be a group of people, all with mental health problems but with backgrounds so different. They wore creased and dirty clothes,  had had no education and were made mean from years of squalid poverty.

The staff running the services were often university educated; there were so many desperate social work graduates unable to find a job. Luke could never accustom himself to their patronizing and condescending tones - and their requests for people to fill in forms and perform certain tasks the organisation saw as necessary. It was like being a hamster in a treadmill, performing for an audience. Arts and crafts classes, pool competitions and singalongs around a piano were held in the most anodyne, institutionalized way.

Among the working staff, the lowlier occupations were filled by key-jangling utilitarian types. Their strict security protocols, whilst unnecessary, served to give them a sense of power. The cooks in the canteen dolefully scooped the meal of the day onto each plate; seats were arranged fourteen to a table, elbows of the hungry clashing harshly and all this in Duldrum's characteristic drizzly weather. Any individual's particular story was overlooked. Their specific needs ignored. Their idiosyncrasies noted on a clipboard. What mattered was that the organisation flourished, paid staff kept their jobs and volunteers climbed up the career ladder.

XV

Luke was outraged to be diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome. He read about it and did not feel the condition defined him. The other side of the coin was, it was a useful way of quickly explaining some problems he had. The trouble was each person with it was so different that some were relatively capable of socializing and others were loners. Some were ingenious at using computers and some were artistic. The label could have attached to it a false first impression. It could well be there was nothing wrong with him at all. It was the rest of the world that was messed up - with their drawn out chit chat and love for mediocrity.

When he grew older Luke read up on the effects mercury has on the human body; it seemed to match the way he turned out to be. Almost everyone said Andrew Wakefield was wrong to link MMR vaccines to Autism and Asperger's syndrome but he seemed part right to Luke. It would not be the first time  person has been shamed for having a strong opinion. Because more children had died from not having the MMR vaccine, it was a very emotional argument people would have about it.

Among the symptoms listed for exposure to mercury are shyness, irritability, fatigue and depression. Luke had all of these. He would also be told by his mother of how he had eaten anything as a very young baby. Then he suddenly became very fussy, after his vaccines. Fussiness is a trait of Asperger's syndrome and Autism too.

Luke realized that brushing his teeth made his symptoms worse - he researched and found out most toothpastes contain mercury. It seemed irrefutable evidence. Answers were not necessarily easy to find, though. Luke was extremely cautious about chelation therapy. His opinion was parents should not attempt to treat their children with unproven, often dangerous chelation drugs.

In Luke's opinion vaccines such as MMR did not cause autism. Instead they made people already autistic have more pronounced and difficult symptoms. Mercury poisoning epidemics in Japan where thousands of people were exposed did not lead to a great rise in Autism; it would seem clear only certain people were affected.

Luke dropped out of school at fifteen. He had not completed so many homework assignments. He had daydreamed so often in class, he was too far behind. Home tutors were arranged for him. Before long, their eye contact, small talk and petty authority bothered him too; he  refused to see them anymore. To cure his boredom he gallivanted across the internet in search of adventure.

He developed a few virtual relationships when he found a thriving and intimate chat room for teenagers. There was a girlfriend from Iowa, later one from Las Vegas - both of whom he met in the wrestling chat room He was a big fan of television wrestling and had wanted to do it himself. He used to practise it with his next-door-but-one neighbour Reese in the garden and on the sofas of Reese's parents' lounge; but when Luke stopped attending school they drifted apart. At school too Luke and others had wrestled during break time on the football pitch.

Luke's newfound friends on the net would not last. The internet changed a lot in the next few years. Social networking websites would make old chat rooms fall to the wayside and he lost passwords to various accounts he used to have. Although web relationships can be shallow, around the time Luke was having them, the early 2000s, an innocent enthusiasm filled the air. Luke and girlfriends talked sincerely of meeting up and marrying. People made fun of the internet but over time it would become normal to develop many of one's thoughts and relationships through it.

Some of Luke's friends visited him at his home one day. "Where have you been? Are you alright?" they asked.