Perhaps I had been in shock. But I couldn’t stop glancing left, down each road that led east. The nervous impulse persisted.
Hamilton was desolation. It was easy to see that nobody had survived, because nothing had been changed in any way. I dutifully checked the main streets, post office, police station and hospital. And there, outside the casualty entrance, an ambulance stood abandoned, its rear doors open. I got out of my car, the sudden tension liquefying my insides as usual, and walked past the vehicle into the hospital. A short way down the corridor there was a trolley topped with red blankets. Inside a nearby room there were beds. The first one I saw was as empty as the rest, but there were bloodstains patching the indented pillow dark brown, and a big spilled stain on the shiny lino floor by the bed. It had come from the inverted transfusion bottle hooked above the bed; the tube hung down loosely into space above the dry iridescent blot. The antiseptic scent in the room was mixed with a suffocating stench, a mucous of stale excretions. I turned and half-ran out, fixing my teeth and lips tight against the reflex of retching, holding my breath until the car was accelerating down the road and I could inhale fresh air.
Then, south of the city, I found the smashed cars which must have been the source of the casualties. Two impacted wrecks locked together were hemmed in at the side of the road by black and white traffic patrol cars, a fire engine and an ambulance, dead warning lights, then a line of stopped cars and trucks. The tarmac was scattered with crystals of windscreen glass, a woman’s shoe, a paperback book, a tartan blanket, a handbag, stretchers and tools. Black sump oil and dried rust-water stains ran away across the camber of the road like bleed marks spilled from the death of machinery, with broken flecks of rust and mud which had been bashed loose and flung all over.
I did not want to stop. The car on the far right was half crushed and I could see indistinctly the head of a corpse tilted sideways in the wreck behind the gap where the windscreen had been. I would not normally have stopped. The obscenities of public accidents, of somebody struck down and suddenly an object at the centre of the stares of strangers going by and looking but not wanting to see, that was all indecent enough; but now all the witnesses crowded around had vanished, and it was as if the horror had been arranged just for me, spread across the road like a display, waiting. Here is another human being, it seemed to say; go on, look closely, you know how rare they are, now, you can’t pass by. But I did go by; I only slowed to avoid bits of stuff on the road, then I pressed my foot on the pedal and the Marina gathered speed.
Soon the accident was miles behind. A weak sun came out. The air freshened.
The leaves of the old trees lining the streets of Cambridge were hissing in the air, the town empty but filled with this noise and the shadows breaking and flickering over the moving car. I did not feel any particular uneasiness, yet when the sun went back into the bank of cloud behind me as I drove on, the day became much darker and the clouds ahead drained the light away from the eastern sky and made the hills into which I was going seem dull and threatening. The road squirmed towards them. I tried not to anticipate anything. My mind went back, pushed by the scent memory of the hospital, and I thought of Joanne and of Peter. There were times, like now, when I could think of certain parts of my life quite easily and without feeling that compulsion to close my mind in the way I’d closed my teeth against retching.
We hadn’t known, or really admitted, that there was anything seriously wrong with Peter until he was nearly three years old. Then the strangeness of his behaviour had become more acute and unavoidable. We were forced to face the prospect that it would not go away or get better or that he would grow out of it. Quite the opposite; it seemed he would get worse, and grow into it. The medical, neurological and psychological analyses finally delivered the word ‘autistic’ as the term which was supposed to describe his condition, and then, having presented us with this word, the experts had relaxed into noncommittal inaction. The word was their achievement. There was nothing else they could do. Little research had been done, they said. Their expressions of helplessness, masked behind the urbane professional courtesies, had stared pensively across polished desktops or out of air-conditioned windows towards clinical parklands. Their voices, hands, and doors, opened and closed softly; I seemed always to be watching soft fingers toying slowly with gold and black pens resting on white blotters of infinite resilience. The sounds I made, the words with which I had tried to wrench some sense out of these people, had been absorbed into thick carpets and upholstery, or reflected back from sterile surfaces. Would he be like this all his life? Well, it was possible…highly likely…no appreciable change foreseeable…
The child was otherwise healthy and normal in appearance. He merely disregarded most of the world in which we lived. His eyes were always averted, darting away; he would never look directly at anybody. He would spend much time looking at nothing in particular, fixing his gaze towards a part of the room which had no visible object there, or at least nothing capable of exciting such intentness. If you moved into the area towards which he was staring, he would turn away. The presence of people and buildings seemed to cause him merely momentary and minor irritation. He was aware of them, but they came very low on his priorities, and his fleeting expressions of annoyance suggested he would rather not be bothered with them. I once saw him sitting on the carpet in our front room making an endlessly repeated but highly complex series of movements with his arms and head, as if operating an intricate machine. Suddenly he stopped (the doctors asked us to note the ‘cessation of hyperactive function’) and turned to stare quietly at the blank wall to his left. This was so odd that Timmy, our cat, who was lolling in front of the fire, turned to follow his eyes. Peter looking at nothing, frowned and tightened his lips for a few minutes, and then smiled. The cat, still fixing its eyes on that spot, rose, stared, and then crouched into its tense predatory position, bristling, as if a rat had appeared. After a pause, the two of them transfixed, Peter turned back abruptly and the cat fled. I felt a curious chill, quite different from the unfathomable wondering of what, if anything, was going on inside the brain of my son. And as his eyes had swept round the room darting at random across surfaces which included my face, I thought I detected a remote flicker of sadness passing from their indifference, little more than the quick beam of a light moving across shapes in a dark room.
The cat abandoned us a few days later and never returned. I had always believed them to be very intelligent animals.
One of my earliest memories, which had formulated itself into a set of images characteristic of a dream, and which may in fact have been a dream or a fantasy dramatised from a real incident, was of being alone in a large hall of enormous height, the walls stretching away on each side in a blaze of white light; and this hall was filled with great echoing sounds, footsteps, whispers, talking, rattling, slamming and scraping noises; all seethed and boomed in emptiness. There was a bench, and doors. I had to sit and wait for my parents because they were to come and meet me there. It was a railway station. Or a hospital. A waiting room. The sounds of people who must have been outside or passing by resounded on every side of me and I jumped and turned when a door slammed loudly or papery whispers seemed to hiss in midair nearby, but when I looked there would be nobody there. At some time or in a way connected with the waiting in this hall I became aware that my parents were never going to return because they were dead in an accident and my being alone foretold that or was the result of that discovery. It was my earliest traceable sensation. Twenty years later it still had the power to panic me into one of those nightmare awakenings which had so alarmed Joanne. The psychological experts tried to probe these memories seeking clues in the past for Peter’s disorder. The neurologists thought they were wasting their time, that autism had purely physiological origins, perhaps a chemical imbalance, oxygen deficiency, specific brain damage, an endocrinal or pituitary conspiracy. I agreed; I didn’t believe in the psychological theories either. It seemed to be typical of that pseudo-science to avoid looking directly at any real problem, and to writhe off into irrelevant areas. They hadn’t a clue about Peter, and since part of his condition consisted of an absolute refusal to speak to psychiatrists, or to anybody, they were reduced to interrogating us. I had wondered later if this demonstrated a state of hyper-wisdom on Peter’s part and imbecility on ours. Peter communicated by a repertoire of noises conveying states of mood by changes in tone; so did the psychiatrists, with the modulations of their jargon. During those years I listened to many theories, and nobody anywhere seemed to be willing to ponder for a moment the possibility that a human being who refused to participate, who refused to speak or listen, who failed to ‘interact with his peer group’, might not be all that crazy, and might even have arrived at an understandable response to the world in which we lived.