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A-word

Harrison Linklater Abbott

    A is for what?
    Apple, apocalypse, appointment, alcoholism, Atlantic, aggrandisement, asymmetrical, algebra, ah, and the sheer wealth of the English alphabet.
    You signed yourself up to the English language, too, quite some time ago, and you’re wondering whether that was a decent idea. Because these words pop and ping about your head non-stop, and you keep filling it with other words, too, via your own volition. These books hang in your room. They stare at nothing, and know that you’re there; they watch you when you’re sleeping; they have a victory over you, a prowess.
    “Asperger’s!”
    “What’s that mean? Is that the word you were on about? What’s that entail, exactly?”
    “It used to be ‘A.S’ ... But it’s changed the last fifteen years,” the Doc says, “It used to be AS and then it was Asperger’s and now it’s ‘A.S.D’. There’s no medication for it.”
    You know there’s no medication for it. You didn’t think a doctor would say something like that: obviously there are no pills: you just figured there might be some support available, for, umm, whatever this condition is. The lady you spoke to before said the same thing as well, almost verbatim, an identical sentence. You said to her,
    “I’m not interested in medication. I would just like to know whether I am au –”
    And that was right before the first lockdown in Scotland. You passed the first questionnaire back then. (Before Covid changed the world forevermore.) They give you a form with ten questions and a matrix of boxes to tick and you did it that initial time and thought you failed, but you passed it, but the lady Doc recorded it wrong. She wrote down the wrong number. Human error. Then after the pandemic lockdowns you returned to the GP to reengage with the whole idea and you didn’t pass the test this time. He wanted you to redo the test and somehow it came back blank. So it’s all still a bit confusing because you feel a bit missed out, that something fluffed by you, that there were mistakes along the way.
    On those St John’s Wort bottle/tubs/containers, there’s a label on the back which says,

‘Consumption may increase the risk of suicide’

    And this is linked with an asterisk to the sentence on the front of the bottle, which says,

‘Helps you stay feeling sunny’

    Wow.
    You tried those tablets when you were like fifteen. They tasted of nettles. And you stopped with them because you didn’t wanna end up killing yourself.
    Avocado. Astronaut. Arachnophobia. Most of your influences are from minds born in America. You’ve always wanted to go there, have been dreaming about it since you were a kid.
    When you’re at work you wish you were in America. Wish you had been born there, too. When you are working the job is so intensely dull that there’s nothing to do but think. And you are a naturally reserved, shy person. You don’t get angry with people very much. But inside your mind there are all these raging thoughts which repeat themselves 500 times throughout the shift. The repetition is so flagrant and relentless that you think there must be something ruined in the head.
    You think about that boy that headbutted you and punched you;
    About that college tutor who said your name over and over during class, “Harry Harry Harry,” when he was delivering lecture content;
    About your elder brothers who ripped you to shreds around the dinner table whilst everybody laughed;
    Of that man from up the road who smacked you action-movie-style in the cheek and pulled your hair when you were a teenager, and for some reason you didn’t call the police;
    Of how your own mother told you you were going to fail at university. And has never apologised for it to this day.
    In no specific order. The incidents are jumbled together, entangled, clogged. When you work this shitty job you regurgitate these memories. It is useless mental behaviour. The anger is futile. It never goes anywhere, has no productive purpose. And yet the cognition is factorylike. Never fails. Makes comebacks like any terrific villain. Pantomime villains, silly but brilliant. ... Because you’ve already talked about many of these scenes, these characters from the past. Whom hurt you. And they never go away. They’re still there. You cannot execute them.
    Why don’t I just do that to myself then?
    Yes yes yes yes yes. You’re not the only boyo that thinks about that every day. But, nah. You have more stuff to do until you try that, if indeed you ever go ahead with it.
    The shifts at work always end. And you’ve never collapsed thus far. Still alive. You wonder how on earth you haven’t gotten fired yet.
    Maybe the A-word is all a phantom. Not what you should be thinking about. Muddy behaviour. Shrug – just forget about that which isn’t really there. Cos: you just speak to the colleagues about normal stuff, right? Soccer, their kids, their pregnant wives, (“What you thinking of naming your kid?”), the new superhero film in the cinema. You can do chitchat like anybody else, can’t you?
    So why do you get a headbutt every single time you’re in the workplace? That happened when you were fourteen, and you’re twenty nine now. Why does this still bother you? Of what relevance is it to your current state?
    “Fight back,” the boy said. He was very ugly. No offence. He just was, a remarkably ill-looking kid, had a horrible face. “Fight back,” he demanded. And you just couldn’t smack him back.
    “I don’t want to,” was all you said. Honest reply. And that was it. He didn’t get a caution from the police because he was too young. Just a minor. Didn’t get punished for it. And so you punish yourself because you still feel like a coward, and you have imagined – so many times – heading back in time, with your man’s body, with a man’s brawn, and punching him under the jaw, this rollicking uppercut. Nail the cunt back. Knock him out.
    But this will never happen.
    And there are no pills to help you out.
    It’s not even an option, for the doctors to try and aid you with your issues. You just have to say to yourself:
    I’m not autistic, not autistic, not autistic, no no no I am not autistic. There is no A-word.

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