We have work to do

Nobody believed in me. That was their first mistake. I get that. I know how rational behaviour is supposed to work. I can see it in others. I just can’t replicate it. I have to deal with myself. That’s hard enough. I don’t know how anyone else manages to deal with me.

The trouble is that I come across as, shall we say, not very clever. People ask me questions and I don’t answer. I get this look in my eyes that I’ve heard people call ‘dumb as an ox’. But I’m just pondering all the possible responses to their question.

Do I want a cup of tea? Well, first we need to define ‘want’. I can certainly get by without a cup of tea, If I’m thirsty I can drink water. I don’t ‘want for’ anything because I have a small pension that covers all my immediate needs. Beryl has a back verandah where I’m allowed to sleep so I have shelter. In Maslow’s terms I don’t want for anything. And I know that ‘to want’ and ‘to want for’ are different verbs, but I also don’t ‘want’ anything.

When I get a hole in my trousers, I don’t want a new pair. Beryl insists I get a new pair, but that’s not the same thing. I am a man without wants. I have a coffee and a pancake in the diner for breakfast. I read books in the library all day. I have a steak and vegetables in the diner for an evening meal. If the diner is closed I don’t eat. Mostly, they’re open. If the library is going to be closed they tell me and I borrow enough books to get me through until they are open again.

Beryl lets me clean my teeth in her bathroom and I have a bath three times a week. I have three sets of clothes. I wash them in my bath water and dry them on a rail in my bedroom verandah.

As you can see I am very organised. I prefer organised. Disorganised has always frustrated me. I manage frustration by sitting down and staring at the ground until the disorganisation goes away. Noise can make me do that. Too many people. Squally kids. People teasing me.

Once a man hit me. I think he was trying to impress his friends. They were not very intelligent people. They were teasing me so I sat down on a park bench to wait for them to go away. That seemed to annoy the man so he challenged me to a fight. I looked at the ground and I did what Beryl told me to do – I pulled out my phone and pressed video and pointed it at the not very intelligent men. The man tried to grab my phone but I pulled it away. This made him angry. He was worried that he might look foolish to his friends. It’s a common weakness. People have so many weaknesses. One of the most common is that they worry what other people think of them.

He went to slap me but I ducked and he missed so he looked even more foolish and he was about to throw himself at me. I knew it was then OK for me to defend myself because he had started the fight. Mr. Kim explained that to me.

I swept my leg and kicked his legs from under him and then some nice people ran up and said they had seen everything and the foolish men should go away. I am smoothing out the language. There was actually a lot of swearing. My Aunt Agatha who brought me up taught me that swearing achieves nothing. I don’t think that’s always correct though because it does seem to help some people express strong feelings. Maybe, in that situation, it helps stop them from being violent. Though for some people swearing urges them to even more violence. That is called a conundrum. You can see why it’s hard for me to talk to people. There are always so many different ways to interpret meanings and feelings. There never seems to be a single answer to any question. Everything is a conundrum.

A woman once said to me: “Are you stupid or what? Yes or No?”

I tried to explain that the answer could not be a simple yes or no because the question required a more complex answer that would take a little time, and also the sentence was incomplete. The use of ‘or’ seemed to offer an alternative answer to the question ‘are you stupid’ but instead of offering an alternative it offered an incomplete interrogative.

The woman stared at me with her mouth open. It seemed to me that the question she had asked, or at least the first clause, applied more to her than to me. I had learnt though that to make that assumption was potentially demeaning to the interlocutor and liable to make them angry. Clearly this was a lesson the woman had not been taught when younger. My opinion was that she was too old to learn that lesson. People are harder to train the older they get. Especially about good manners. Another way of saying that is that older people find learning new ideas harder than younger people. There are many other ways of expressing the same thing but Beryl said that’s just another rabbit hole and my life is a warren. That’s a metaphor.

To return to my story though - the woman swore at me, spat on the ground and walked away. I didn’t say that two ill-mannered actions don’t make a church choir. She wouldn’t have understood that. Aunt Agatha said that a lot but I never understood it either. She said a lot of funny things. I remember them all. They always make me smile.

Their second mistake? I probably gave that away when I said about kicking that man’s feet from under him. People think that a person who struggles to communicate will be unskilled in all aspects of life. But I do my exercises every morning.

Bill Morecombe lets me sit at his boxing gym and watch the training. I memorise the movements. I practice them in the verandah every morning. I used to sit and watch the training at Mr. Kim’s Tae Kwon Do academy. Mr. Kim was more friendly than Bill Morecombe, but that is not to criticise Bill. He was just a dour man with troublesome boys to watch over and turn into something better. He never did find his Rocky Balboa.

I was upset when Dr. Groom kicked Mr. Kim’s academy out of the building so he could develop it into expensive flats. Beryl worked for Dr. Groom and I didn’t want to, as they say, rock the boat. That’s a metaphor too.

I found out where Mr. Kim lived and I went to see him. I needed to explain why I couldn’t ask Beryl to intercede with Dr. Groom and get him to give Mr. Kim his academy hall back. Mr. Kim laughed and said he had never imagined that was possible. We were standing at the front door of his little suburban bungalow.

“Do you want to learn Tae Kwon Do?” he said. “No, no, ignore that question. The question is: ’I would like to teach you Tae Kwon Do. Would you like to learn from me, from Mr. Kim?”

He smiled. I smiled. It seemed that Mr. Kim had learnt from his interactions with me how to correctly express himself. What a rare surprise! I said Yes.

“Come on Monday morning,” he said. “We have work to do.”

He trains me in his backyard every Monday and Friday morning. I practice in the verandah every morning. After boxing.

Beryl said I am nuts to learn Tae Kwon Do with Mr. Kim. She doesn’t mean nuts like big seeds, she means crazy. I don’t know how big seeds came to mean crazy in this language. English is often surprising like that.

Beryl is my cousin. She’s Aunt Agatha’s daughter. I grew up with them after my Mum died of cancer. I never knew my father. No-one ever talked about him and I learnt when I was quite a young boy that asking questions about my father was like taking the cork out of an emotional volcano. Not a noisy and violent one. A volcano made of emotions that burst into the house and filled every room with emotional pain. Boy he must have been some guy.

I was proud of his ability to produce such emotions in other people, but also a little worried that one day he would come back and those feelings would blow up Aunt Agatha’s house and burn it to the ground. See how emotional it was! I started to anticipate way too many negative and explosive outcomes!

Beryl is a big woman. Big boned she calls it. I think she is just big everywhere, but I know that’s not the best thing to say. I prefer to agree with her and we get along fine that way. Some people it’s best to just agree with, especially when they show that they like you by letting you live in their house and use their bathroom. She’d feed me too if I let her but we don’t have the same taste in food. I don’t want to appear ungrateful by refusing to eat her big, greasy, deep-fried meals so I just say I like to eat out.

Sometimes when I’m reading in bed at night, Beryl comes in and sits in the rocking chair and we talk about things. Beryl’s the only person I know who lets me analyse the questions she asks and consider all the possible answers. Sometimes I even amaze myself by coming to a conclusion. My thoughts are usually a menagerie of possibilities with no end and no solution. She listens and she smiles and moves the conversation along. Most people walk away before I get to that stage, or laugh in my face, or tell me to shut up. I know they want me to talk less, but I think it’s important to say what you are thinking. Most people don’t say what they are thinking - they say what they think people want them to say. I prefer to be honest, but that just doesn’t seem to work with most people.

Beryl drove a not-big-enough Skoda to her job as a receptionist at Dr. Groom’s office. She worked there for decades. Dr. Groom gave up trying to get her to change her diet and lose weight a long time ago. She was efficient and could chat to anyone. She kept the patients happy so they came back to Dr. Groom and that was all he cared about.

I heard him once say ‘Beryl’s not the best advertisement for my services, but she keeps the office and the patients purring’. I thought that was funny because it made his patients sound like cats but he’s a people doctor not a veterinarian.

When we were kids Beryl was a lot smaller than she is now. She was fierce though. Fierce like a lioness. I had a lot to learn about not annoying people, and many times she fought kids who were rude to me or who hit me. I called her my lioness. She liked that.

When we got older and she got so much bigger I realised she might not be able to fight my corner much longer, which is why I started going to the boxing gym and why I said Yes to Mr. Kim. People think I’m the idiot who watches the boxing. Like I said, that was their second mistake.

Their third mistake? That was the biggest mistake they ever made.

Beryl had a small win on the lottery. Hardly enough to change her life, but she paid off the rest of her mortgage and bought a new car. A small SUV so she didn’t have to squash behind the steering wheel.

“There’s not much left in the money box but everything’s coming up roses,” she said as she rocked in the rocking chair, looked out the screen door at the hydrangeas in the rain, and popped chicken nuggets into her mouth. I loved to see her so happy. She’d always been a worrier. I think she worried about me but I didn’t know how to talk to her about that.

I went over and gave her a big hug. It made me feel so warm and comfortable to see her happy.

I was told later that the trouble was that Beryl liked to talk to the people in Dr. Groom’s waiting room and she couldn’t help telling people she had come into some money.

You get all sorts of people at Dr. Groom’s. He’s what I think you call an enigma. He loves making money, as you can tell from my tale about Mr. Kim’s Tae Kwon Do school. But he also takes in patients from all over, many of whom don’t deserve his generosity with his time or his attention to their problems. I have come to the conclusion that some of his patients are scum. It’s not a term I use often or freely, but scum they are. Scum is the filth that floats to the top of a pond.

Calling people scum is another metaphor. Metaphors can be expressive, but they should be used sparely. No-one told me that. It’s a conclusion I came to independently.

The police told me two men followed Beryl home from work. After my evening meal at the diner I usually walked round the back and went in by the back door beside the verandah, but the front door was open. Beryl never left the front door open. I went inside, called her name. I heard a noise in the kitchen. She was slumped on the floor, blood dripping from a wound in her head.

I didn’t know what to do. I had not been told what to do in a situation like that. I started thinking through the options but Beryl beckoned me over.

“Oh Beryl,” I said, and I realised that this was not a situation for thinking through the options. This was like asking about my father. Only instead of other people’s emotions overwhelming me, it was my own emotions. Nothing like this had ever happened to me. I recognised feelings I had only read about. Anger at the people who had done this, anguish that Beryl was hurt, anxiety because I wasn’t trained for the best way to help. I was overwhelmed, unable to act.

“Darling,” she whispered. “These are the names of the people who hit me.” I saw she was holding a pen. She tapped it on the floor, on a piece of paper that had originally been a shopping list. “Put it in your pocket,” she said. I did that though I didn’t know why she wanted me to.

“You’re the lion now darling,” she whispered. “Call the police though. Call 999. You’re the lion.”

I looked at the piece of paper and put it in my pocket then I called 999 and I sat beside her and held her hand until the police and ambulance arrived. I forgot to tell them that Beryl was big so they had to wait for a second ambulance to be able to lift her. She told the police what had happened, but she didn’t mention the piece of paper. Her voice seemed very wavering, very tired. I held her hand in the ambulance and I cried. I didn’t remember crying before. I remembered Beryl, the little girl lioness, defending me.

I hadn’t been there to defend her though. I cried again then they said they had to get her to hospital, and they urged me out of the ambulance. They shut the door and drove her away.

I stood in the driveway a long time, thinking. A boy at school had once mocked me and kicked my school bag into a puddle. Beryl jumped on his back and beat his ears until he ran off whining.

“Why do you do that Beryl?” I had asked. “Is it your role to beat up people who tease me?”

“No,” she said. “My role is to rule the world. But I love you so it starts there.”

“Love is an emotion. Like asking about my father.”

“It’s not the same emotion though.”

“Oh.” I had to think about that for a long time. She never said that word again. Love. But I thought about it a lot.

“You OK there buddy?” the last policeman asked as he walked to his cruiser.

“Mmm, yes,” I said. I walked back into the house. I could smell Beryl. That perfume she sometimes used that smells like jasmine flowers. I never could understand why people put on smells. Why would someone want to smell like a flower? A flower doesn’t want to smell like us.

But the smell reminded me of that word. It reminded me of standing beside Beryl and holding her hand. It made me want to cry again.

I thought about that for a long time, sitting up in bed in my pyjamas, holding the piece of paper.

I had done what she wanted. I was the lion. I called 999.

I looked at the names. I went through all the possible reasons why Beryl would have given me the names but not told the police. Then I realised. The lion wasn’t the one who called the police.

The lioness beat up the people who hurt me.

Now I was the lion.

I always turn my phone off before I put my pyjamas on. I turned it on again and called Mr. Kim.

“Hello Barry,” he said.

“Mr Kim,” I said. “We have work to do.”