Huts52

Mum sprung out of her chair as if she was surprised to see me in for lunch. With the pub open, I was almost as surprised as her. But I was even more surprised to see her sitting down. She always seemed to be up doing something for somebody, or nobody in particular, because it didn’t seem to matter to her. When I was younger I never realized she slept at all. She was already up bustling, opening up the house, with the energy of the sun. I would hear her knocking about, trying to be quiet, before I opened my eyes.

I was worried because I wasn’t sure that I was being turned into James Munn clone, from the sci-fi mags, by reading obscure articles. I’d read in 'Learning Disability Today' that some marker, a test of some kind of autism, was a subject’s inability to separate themselves from their mum. These kids saw their mum as an extension of themselves, not a separate person with their own wants and needs. I thought I might have been born mentally handicapped and was just able to disguise it better.

Mum was tired now. I could see it in those same eyes that had cared for me, all those years, the same eyes as I had. And it was no less a shock than Maureen Hargreaves’ declaration of unrequited love, but I tried not to show it.

I sat down at the kitchen table and listened to the tranny, and a crackly version of Hey Jude, forcing itself into being through the static, trying to sing a sad song and make it better. I didn't need that. I was already blacklisted from happiness.

‘You want something to eat,’ mum said, rustling her fingers through my hair.

I tried not to fidget, but I knew that some of my hair was falling out and I’d have a big bald patch and I’d need to kill myself. I just nodded.

‘What do you want?’ asked mum.

‘Anything,’ I said yawning.

‘Do you want?…’ said mum.

But I wasn’t listening. Mum would have been able to rustle a meal out a bit of squashed up cardboard by grilling it or boiling it and adding cheese. I didn’t really have any worries about that. I desperately needed to find a hand mirror so that I could check for bald spots.

There was a big mug of tea on the table when I got back. Beans of toast. Superfood by adding cheese. But cheese was already a superfood. Mum always put it on dad’s pieces. Every day. She’d even started making them up for me when I started in the hospital. But dad got the outsiders, the first slice and the last slice of a Mother's Pride loaf, because he was working outside. The seagulls didn’t seem to mind at first, but then they’d stop squabbling over my sandwich and just walk around the bread and cheese for a bit, maybe searching for a piece of shite.

‘I’ll need to go,’ I said to mum, standing at the table, eating a slice of toast and smoking a fag at the same time. As usual mum had made enough to feed at least three people.

I walked quickly up through blue bell woods to the auditorium. With every turn and twist of the dirt track I kept expecting to see Maureen Hargreaves. I didn’t know what I’d say to her. It was too late to tell her I loved her too. She’d waited for me to say it. And waited. And I hadn’t. And she’d turned away. But I could’t. How could I? She was pregnant.

It wasn’t supposed to be like that. We were brought up together to believe that if you were good, and kind, and worked hard, everything was supposed to be ok. I didn’t know if I loved her. But I did. I just wanted to postpone all thoughts of love, leave it for the future to sort out. We were supposed to grow old together and she was supposed to nag me for things that I hadn’t done. I didn’t know anything.

Maureen Hargreaves would never be late. So I quickened my pace, until I was almost one of those weirdoes that runs about, from place to place, with shorts on, as if they were still children, for no good reason. The thought of anybody seeing me like that slowed me down. But when I got to the hall I was still out of breath and had to have a quick fag outside.

I peeked my head around the lecture hall door. James Munn was looking through what seemed to be some notes, and nodding to himself. There were a few others in the hall, including Maureen Hargreaves. She sat in the same chair, in the same position, surrounded on all sides by clusters of empty plastic chairs. She looked as if she’d never left, just sat, waiting.

I didn’t have the courage to sit in that empty hall beside her. I sneaked back out and lit another fag and tried to look casual, and unconcerned as the others in the class, as they passed me on the way in.

Gillian Ambrose pulled at my arm. ‘Come up and sit beside me. You don’t need to sit away down the front, like some kind of nerd.’ She spoke in a whinny voice, as if she’d an audience, but it was only her and me. I realized she’d been drinking, even though she said she hated it.

‘No,’ I said, pulling away from her, ‘I’m short sighted. I need to sit at the front.’

Gillian made another lunge for my arm. ‘I’ll come down and sit beside you then,’ she said excitedly, shifting her bag so that she could hang onto my arm.

‘You’re not short sighted enough.’ I pulled away from her and quickly found my way to my seat.

I turned around, feeling a bit guilty. Gillian Ambrose sat while others talked around and over her, in a bubble of her own loneliness. I waved up at her. But, with a smile on her painted lips, she didn’t wave back.

It wouldn’t really have mattered what James Munn had said. Everyone was watching the clock above his head. Forcing it forward with collective will. But James Munn was oblivious to this, smiling as if the day had just begun.

‘Challenging behaviour,’ he said, striding about then stopping and looking at us, as if he had just noticed us. ‘The problem is…’. He spread his arms as if addressing an evangelical audience and ended up showing them size of the biggest fish he’d ever caught. ‘But we don’t have to define it, all we have to do is measure it. And if we can measure it we can rectify it. And we can measure every facet of human behaviour.

Head banging. We can measure how many times a day. Where the head banging takes place and how often it takes place. These factors can help us detect patterns. When we recognize one pattern of behaviour, you can be sure we can replace it with another. Whatever type of behaviour has been learned, can be unlearned’.

‘Give me some examples of learned behaviour.’ James Munn looked at us.

A few people put up their hands. He nodded at Julie Darrow. ‘Smoking.’

‘Good,’ James Munn said. ‘We can look how often a person smokes, where they smoke and then we can look at the environmental cues that can contribute to this form of learned behaviour and try and replace them with something else.

‘Drink,’ said Robert Culpert, to some snorts of laughter.

‘The same procedure,’ said James Munn, in an animated fashion, ‘we isolate the individual and break down his behaviour into manageable chunks, and we change those chunks one at a time. In the eye gouging experiment, for example, a pattern of aberrant behaviour was excised by changing the environmental stimulus. Every time the subject lifted his hand above a particular height he was giving an electric shock. In this way that eye gouging attempts dropped and eventually stopped altogether. The subject was able to move to another ward’.

James Munn looked up at us, as if he had cured the subject himself and had helped he blind see and the lame walk. ‘That is why I’m here,’ he said, ‘with science we can measure anything and whatever we can measure we can change.’

I noticed immediately, but James Munn took a few seconds. Maureen Hargreaves stuck her arm up, like a solitary flag waving discontent.

‘Love,’ Maureen spoke and seemed to hang the word in the air, for us all to see. ‘How do you measure love?’

‘Well,’ said James Munn, smiling indulgently, at a real challenge. ‘Lets break it down. Eye dilation. Eye contact. Nose. Sex pheromones. Mouth. Salivation levels. Proximity. How close two people get to each other and how they mark out their personal spaces. Then, of course…’ James Munn for probably the first time had our full attention. This was better than reading Cosmopolitan.

‘We can measure the levels of phen…’ James Munn continued, but he was put off by Maureen Hargreaves, standing and putting her coloured marker pens away, and her A4 sheets, and her pencils, methodically and deliberately, dropping them into her little sack, with the leather straps, to hold it tight, as if there was no one else in the auditorium. Maureen turned and looked at me. Her eyes shining with unshed tears. Then she clonked out. Each step from her boot in the auditorium sounding like a departing horse’s hoof.

I was too scared to follow.