CHAPTER 35
He called us over. “This is really very, very good. It’s like a book of mnemonics, and all that James has to do now is make sure he remembers the real names of everything”

Clunk. The penny dropped, though it had been rolling around the rim for hours, ever since I saw him at the reserve entrance. That one phrase cleared any doubt away, and all I needed to work out now was where he sat on the spectrum. ‘Real names’ said so much, and explained quite a bit of his office behaviour. Whether it was Asperger, or some form of OCD, John clearly needed everything in his world to be Right, and in its Proper Place. No wonder he had gravitated towards the job of inspecting people’s VAT returns, and more than that got to the point where he also inspected other people’s inspections. To pick up on Karen’s game with the drinks, it was floccinaucinihilipilification. If it wasn’t Right, it was worthless. I had known him as a nit-picking bastard of a manager, and there he was about to do the same to James’ work.

“John, James does know the real names of what he has in his book, and what he doesn’t know already he knows how to find”

“Yes, John, I know all the real names even the binomial ones which some people say are Latin but they aren’t because they use Greek as well and this book is about mnemonics which are tricks to remember things by”

He was still looping, and Terry passed him a drink to slow him down. John nodded.

“Yes, so then we just need to add the real names to this one”

James then said something that astonished me.

“No, because that would take the fun away”

It is very difficult to explain what an amazing statement that was. Firstly, he had contradicted an adult, flatly and absolutely. Secondly, he had explained why, succinctly. Thirdly, he had used the word ‘fun’ and the one thing that always summed up his condition to me was the word ‘need’. I was absolutely gobsmacked, and couldn’t work out what had brought it on. I looked at John again, and a wild thought came to me: was he trying to nurture the older man? In some odd, filtered way, was he sensing a need in him and trying to meet it?

I was out of my depth. All I knew about their problems–and I realised that it was, indeed, their problems–came from my reading and my experience of James. I looked across to Rachel, and she jerked her head to signal a walk away. We retreated a dozen yards or so, and she hissed at me.

“He’s fucked in the head, isn’t he?”

“I wouldn’t put it quite like that, but, yeah”

“Jill, it does my head in, yeah? All those years of cuntishness, and I now have to ask myself, was he being, you know, or was it that he couldn’t help it? Sort of, what’s it called, Tourette’s?”

“No, don’t think so…look, Tourette’s is about offensive, inappropriate behaviour, aye? The compulsion to do something you shouldn’t. I think this is more about being, I dunno, unaware of what you do. Social skills, like”

“Like letting your tyres down?”

“No, I’ll give you that one, that was definitely MAC rather than lack of understanding. Suppose you’d call it a tantrum in a bairn”

“Well, it’s hard, Jill, hard to keep a hate for him, if it’s loony tunes shit rather than malice, but that’s me thinking outside my head, yeah, and I still hate him because, well, because he is still fucking MAC”

She sighed. “Times like this I could murder a fag. Should never have given up. What do we do, girl?”

I thought for a while, ordering things as well as I could. “Rach, I don’t think he can be a friend, like, too much water under the bridge. But I think we have a sort of truce. James has taken to him, just a bit, so shall we leave it at that for now? See what happens?”

“Well, OK, but…and what the fuck is a Tunnock’s teacake?”

“Where the hell did you grow up? Oh, Essex, yeah? Explains a lot”

“One joke, girl, just one…”

“Right. They’re a sort of marshmallow thing covered in chocolate. Scottish, they are, but we got them up in the North. They do snowballs, and caramel wafers, absolutely unhealthy rubbish, very 1950s. Just a thought, aye, but they must be his tartan flask”

“You what?”

“Ever see trainspotters at a station? Don’t they always have a tartan thermos with them? It’s ritual, if you see what I mean. It’s either Asperger or some variant of obsessive-compulsive. I was thinking earlier, like, how his job suited him”

She actually laughed at that. “Fuck yeah, so what does that make us?”

I grinned back. “Not the same. Look, you like making scrotes pay up, yeah? I like to see the right tax paid, but it’s a people thing. How I met Larinda, that was people stuff. Her boss failed the attitude test big style, but John, I don’t think he even sees attitudes. He just ploughs his own furrow, without regard to the consequences he can’t see”

She thought for a while, in her own turn. “So, back to the question, what do we do with him?”

“Armistice, Rach. We sit and share his teacakes, and we finish the day. If he comes along with us, we let him try, and if he decides to play MAC again, we walk away, aye? While I have some sympathy with him, he is nobody we have any responsibility for”

She nodded sharply, and we walked back to the others. Terry and Karen had poured teas out, and John had produced a paper plate which now held a small pile of hemispherical objects in red and silver foil. I handed one to Rachel, after a nod from John.

“There you go, a Tunnock’s teacake”

She unwrapped it and took a bite. “Bit bland, John”

“That is the way they should taste. They have made some with dark chocolate, but they aren’t right. James has shown me his book, and if it is OK with his parents, I would like to show him the semi-palmated sandpiper, if we can find it”

Larinda took my hand as I sat. “Rob’s already shown us a bittern and a kingfisher, John”

There was a flicker there, and I knew what he wanted to say, which would have been something about already having ticked them, why would anyone want to see one twice, but he held it in.

“They are striking birds, I grant you. Karen, is it possible to take James to look for the sandpiper?”

She nodded in agreement. “I will have to come along, though, and Terry. Won’t there be a crowd, like there was at the reception, though?”

John shook his head. “There was one at Pennington marshes last week, so most of the others have already seen one”

Bang, twitchers. I could see the others now fully understood what it was about, and Rachel was nodding in recognition.

“Rob, what we talked about earlier, with the voles and the butterflies, yeah…I get it now”

We finished the cakes and the tea, and John folded every piece of foil and put it into a pocket in his satchel, along with the paper plate. Ritual… We set off to one of the hides that he had been told was a probable vantage point for the bird, and we settled down with optics and books, and John started to reel off the names of the birds before us.

“Dunlin, snipe, redshank, little grebe, little stint…”

What? I had totally missed that one! For an instant, I was after the tick, and then relaxed. No, I wasn’t a twitcher, and the fact that I understood that confirmed that I wasn’t. Just to be sure, though, I checked the bird out. Just to be sure.

“Ah. There he is, James. Just let me set up my camera. It date-stamps the pictures, so that I can confirm when I saw my birds”

Click, repeated many times, and then he started to pack his stuff away. Larinda put her hand on his arm.

“Are you going, John?”

“Well, I have my pictures”

“What about the rest of us?”

“Pardon?”

“We have only just met, so it would be nice to chat a bit more. James is only just starting to watch birds, so it would help him if someone who really knows them could give him some pointers”

James interrupted. “Pointers are dogs, which are not birds”

“We know, son. So, John, would you help? We are having tea at a pub afterwards”

What happened to a wander around all the other bits of Arundel? I caught her eye, and she just nodded, and before I knew it John was back in conversation with James, even though that consisted almost entirely of bird names. The boy laughed at some of them.

“Rob, they are funny. Some of them already are mnemonics, so I shouldn’t change them. Redshank, that’s one”

Insight rose up, and I realised that what John was doing was a sort of substitution. If he had nothing new to tick, he now had James: twitching by proxy. I had a germ of an idea, but I had to get him away from the others to discuss it. Eventually, we ran down as the afternoon passed, and Terry made noises about getting his numb bottom off the wooden benches and onto a nice, soft, pub chair. That was when Rachel’s stomach made the most obvious of noises.

“Yeah, that was me. Tea time, I think”

We made our way out to our bikes, and his car, John still in deep conversation with James, and I called out to the others that I would catch them up.

“Norfolk Arms, aye? Just want a quick word with John”

Off they went, and I turned to him. He was nervous again, without the crutch of the boy to support him.

“So what was it you wanted, Rob? More abuse?”

I sighed. “John, I am going to try and have a sensible conversation. You were always an absolute arsehole at work, but, well, Rachel called it an armistice, like. We are both sorry for what we did when you left, but you have to understand how you were at work. I mean, letting my tyres down, what the fuck was that all about?”

To my horror, he started to cry, and it wasn’t with sobs or gasps, just a suddenly wet face.

“I’m sorry…but it’s life. You had it, both of you. I just felt angry”

“But why jealous of me and Rachel? Do you have some sort of feelings for her?”

I was astonished at the blank look he gave to that. “She is thirty years younger than me, what would I want with such a young person?”

Less than twenty, actually. “So why, John?”

He looked off into some distant world, tears still falling, and I wondered how much stress the hours with us had inflicted. “Life, Rob. I know I have a wrongness. I always have had. I have to count, list, correct and clear, and it is very odd when I stand outside myself and watch what I do. You have life easy. You are normal, no oddity, and most of the time I forget what I am, and then I have a moment, and it is not right. And even though I know what I am, I am still that person, and I still must conform to type”

“Have you seen anyone, John?”

“Yes…I have a therapist, and she tells me it is OCD. Probably”

“Probably? How long have you been seeing her?”

“Since I retired”

Dear gods, his whole life without help. “John, I had a thought while we were walking. Here, dry your face. It’s the lists for you, yeah?”

He took my paper towel, left over from lunch, and dried his face. “Yes. Twitching, you call it”

“Well, I watched you with James, and you wanted to leave, and then you realised that James might have a list, so you started on his, aye?”

“Er, yes”

“So why don’t you volunteer at somewhere like Barnes? Go round with visitors, show them stuff, work on their lists instead?”

“And that would help me how, exactly?”

I took a deep breath, because I was worried about the word I was about to use. “It would take you into the company of normal people, John. And you aren’t normal, are you?”

Well, neither was I.