Hannah Park’s brain was different from other people’s: her mother was sure of it. It made her incapable of certain things. Love, for instance: the romantic love you see on television or read about in books; that was one of them. Social grace was another.
By the time Hannah was eleven, she’d lost track of how often she’d heard Tilda tell the specialists, in the hushed whisper reserved for embarrassing information, that her only child was unfortunately not quite right.
– But I feel normal, Hannah would object. Normal-ish, anyway.
– Is it ‘normal-ish’ to draw rude cartoons of your own mother? Tilda would snap back. Is it ‘normal-ish’ to wear a giant cardigan day in day out? Is it ‘normal-ish’ to collect thirty thousand peanut-butter labels?
The setting for these prickly discussions was usually a hospital canteen, following another fruitless consultation with a man in a white coat.
– Would I be normal if my cardigan was smaller? Hannah would ask, as she divided and sub-divided the food on her plate into the usual categories: Protein, Roughage, Carbohydrate, Things I Don’t Like. Cool colours to the left of each section, warm to the right. Would I be normal if I collected stamps instead? Would I be…
– Those things are just symptoms, Tilda would retort, fumbling in her little green handbag for her pills. For a clever girl, Hannah, you can be stupid beyond belief.
It was a recurring theme of Tilda’s. How was it possible for a child with an IQ of 148 to prefer disfiguring glasses to contact lenses, and read encyclopaedias in the way ordinary people read mail-order catalogues? Having an abnormal child had taught her the meaning of exasperation. Oh, for a proper diagnosis! How much longer would this thankless odyssey grind on? Hannah had been wondering too. Her whole childhood was a blur of waiting rooms, interspersed with trips to the orthodontist to get her teeth fixed, in case she started smiling. If she bared her metal brace in the mirror of a darkened room, she looked like an oncoming train.
Tilda heard of Dr Crabbe by word of mouth. He was a retired psychiatrist in Groke, who had written several works on disorders which fell within the spectrum of autism.
– Come up to Groke, Dr Crabbe had urged on the phone. Let’s suck it and see.
His surgery was housed in a small portable bungalow made of the new recycled cardboard, which scored marks with Tilda. As Hannah and Tilda sat in Dr Crabbe’s waiting room flicking through style magazines, they could hear his voice booming through the wall. Hannah strained to listen, but couldn’t make out the words.
– Well, he certainly sounds authoritative, remarked Tilda, not lifting her eyes from the gazebo spread in Sweet Home.
Hannah sighed. Her mother always built the doctors up in her mind beforehand. She stared out of the window at the big shock of pampas grass in Dr Crabbe’s front garden, plonked in the centre of the lawn like a failed hairdo. Something about the way the pale tips of its feathery brushes waved in the breeze stirred up an unaccountable but familiar current of melancholy inside her. The feeling was called Weltschmerz, according to the psychiatrist they had seen last week.
Everyone gets it.
Hannah was just beginning to feel an asthma attack coming on when the booming stopped suddenly, the door opened, and Dr Crabbe emerged. For a retired psychiatrist, he was surprisingly young. Short and square, he had a powerful, muscular face, and a dark moustache. He reminded Hannah of a keg of explosives. She fingered the little mask attached to her oxygen inhaler.
– Mrs Park? And this must be Hannah!
He grinned and shook their hands forcefully. Hannah bared the oncoming train.
– I was just talking to my voice system, said Dr Crabbe.
Tilda made a little impressed grunt and nursed her crushed fingers.
In his office, which was decorated with bloodthirsty hunting pictures, Dr Crabbe scanned through Hannah’s medical record on his little laptop, and made knowledgeable noises as he recognised names of doctors and hospitals they’d visited.
– I see she’s done the rounds, Mrs Park, he said. Quite a strain for you.
The tears sprang to Tilda’s eyes as though he’d tweaked the plumbing of a secret tap.
– How can I help? he asked gently, as Tilda dabbed at her eyes. She took a deep, careful breath.
– All I want… Her voice caught and Hannah looked up sharply. Dr Crabbe had talent. – All I want is for someone to –
– To take you seriously, he said, nodding slowly. And you deserve it, Mrs Park, he said softly.
That did it. When he patted her arm, Tilda began to sob. As she snuffled into a hanky, Hannah looked at the wall, where a bloodhound was mauling a rabbit next to a dead pheasant. Dr Crabbe said it must have been very distressing, and he couldn’t promise a diagnosis but he would see what suggested itself; autism had a far wider spectrum than anyone realised. There followed the usual background questions, the testing of the reflexes, the chat about feelings. How depressed did Hannah get, on a scale of one to ten? Did being the product of donor sperm make her feel stigmatised? Had she ever thought of taking her own life?
– Well, said Dr Crabbe, after Tilda had replied to all the questions at length. I have a diagnosis.
Tilda stiffened, and gripped the armrests of her chair. Even Hannah was taken aback.
– It’s a very rare syndrome, he said. Known as Crabbe’s Block.
– There was a tiny silence. Hannah wondered if her stomach might gurgle.
– Crabbe… as in, Doctor Crabbe? asked Tilda faintly.
Yes, he affirmed: having discovered the disease himself – only very recently – he had awarded it his own name. It was the norm in medicine.
– How many people suffer from this, then, Tilda asked him anxiously, as he wrote down the name of Hannah’s disorder on a piece of paper and stapled it to the bill.
He looked up then, his face grave.
– Mrs Park, your daughter is… unique.
Tilda instantly began to glow with pride.
Life improved after that. Hannah felt less guilty about the time she spent on her peanut-butter-label collection, less self-conscious about her need to wear the cardigan, less inhibited about her habit of popping bubble-wrap blisters when she was under stress. She studied hard for her multiple choices, and did well. Tilda thrived too. She developed a plethora of small ailments which kept the diary chock-a-block with doctors’ appointments. Then, when the Liberty Corporation took over the management of Atlantica, she joined a shoppers’ circle, collected loyalty points, and soon climbed the ladder to become a VIP Customer.
– Meet my daughter, she would smile to new members of the shoppers’ circle. She suffers from a rare syndrome.
Hannah felt like a new product that had hit the market. One with special features. She would smile slightly and show her flashing teeth.
– She’s got agoraphobia now too, Tilda would add. This development was a recognised component of the syndrome, according to Dr Crabbe. – It doesn’t bother her though, said Tilda. She’s never liked outdoors.
And it was true. She hadn’t.
Now, fifteen years later, Hannah Park sits on a swivel chair in an open-plan office sectioned with low Perspex screens and phalanxes of potted ficus plants on the nineteenth floor of Liberty Corporation’s Head office, doodling a cartoon of the man who diagnosed her. She had a strange dream about Dr Crabbe last night, in which she was married to him, and had taken on the name of Mrs Hannah Crabbe. Without ever having had sex, she and Dr Crabbe had produced a baby that Hannah wheeled about the pedestrian walkways of Groke in a state-of-the-art buggy. In actual fact, according to a pink fluerescent message that gradually wrote itself across the sky, the baby belonged to another man. She must return it immediately. But she couldn’t, because a chasm full of boiling water and geranium-scented oil had opened up in front of her. It split the city of Groke in half. She would never be able to cross it. Dr Crabbe knew about all this, and did not hold it against her because he was a trained psychiatrist.