“I need to get away,” she had said.
“Again?”
“I can’t stand it here at the moment.”
It had happened before. It was something he had come to accept, even though he couldn’t say in all honesty that he understood. She would spend several days quietly and carefully packing absolute necessities into a small bag and then disappear for up to a week. Her return would be all smiles and hugs and love, and little gifts, and for a while everything would trundle along as near to normal as it ever could. “Loving is letting go,” a wise friend had once said - and he had loved her for a very long time. He would let her go ... and she would come back. And she would come back this time.
She had reached screaming point. They had moved to a quiet street in a quiet town; but over the past months she had hardly slept. Every tiny noise in the night was like an explosion in her brain. Every wheel turning in the dark up to a mile away rocked her bed and pulsed through her body until she felt sick. She would stand alone in her room and howl and rage and weep until she slept through exhaustion. She never disturbed him. She had loved him for a very long time.
“Where will you go?”
“I shall go to Sweden.”
“Why Sweden?”
“There is an Ice Hotel. I would like to go there.”
“Won’t you have to book?”
“I have already booked.”
This was her way. It was always a fait accompli. She would have been brooding for months and then planning for weeks without his knowledge.
“Won’t you be too cold?”
“I shall enjoy the cold. And I have a down parka.”
So that was the strange and secret package that came from Amazon last week.
“Let me give you some money, darling.”
“I have my card. It’s just a few days. I’ll be fine.”
And she would. He wouldn’t compromise her independence. Instead, he gave her the kiss and the long, long hug that would have to keep him going until she was home again.
There was never snow like this in England - not now. Everything around her was white. The cold hurt. Her journey had been a physical challenge - too many engines, too many crowds, far too much noise, but now there was this infinity of echoing air, voices like bell notes on a stave of frost, the creak of packed snow under thick boots, and an undulation in the frozen landscape that was her hotel.
It took her breath away. She hadn’t expected the ice to be so blue! The sky overhead was as deep as lapis lazuli, burnt by the noon sun; the frozen halls that greeted her glimmered with every shade of duck egg, turquoise, soft cobalt and powder blue. The ice pillars bracing the sculpted ceilings were so clear they could be diamond glass; they flashed the ambient light around the carved walls and down snowy corridors and held mysteries in their crystalline depths. Her breath hung on the air.
“Here is your room.”
The soft Swedish voice comforted her. She turned and smiled at the kind attendant.
“Thank you.”
She stepped into her Art Suite.
There was a plinth of translucent ice with a mattress and animal skins ... and an elephant.
It was huge. White. Halfway through her wall. “A white elephant!” she laughed to herself, and looked up into its great big gentle face. The black eyes looked back at her. This beautiful animal of ice would be her guardian and companion for the two days and nights she had managed to afford.
Midweek was quiet. Avoiding all the hoohah of Christmas, New Year and Valentine’s Day there were fewer people and she was able to curl up in the warm skins in utter peace. She had brought a book, a magazine, her phone, but found herself wanting to lie still against the pillows in the freezing room and think.
Why was she so hypersensitive? Why now? Looking back, she tried to remember when it had happened before. There was nothing obvious in her childhood. Except she hid from the fireworks. And wouldn’t join in rough games at playtime. Later, there had been isolated episodes ...the passing motorbike one day in the town when she had yelled at the pain of the sudden roar and her friend had said she was over-reacting.
She regarded the elephant quietly for a while, then thought, “There’s an elephant in the room. What is the elephant in my room? What am I missing ?”
Silently she opened her mind.
“Think back,” said the elephant. “What were you really like when you were little? Weren’t you always quiet?”
“Yes I was. I only had one or two friends. Nobody asked me to parties and I longed to go but I hated the roughness and rowdiness of other children. I would play on my own, dressing up, reading, drawing ... I was scared of animals too.”
“But you loved to hide in the field behind your house. You would lie in the long grasses where noone could see you and watch the shimmering beetles that ran and flew between the stems, count butterflies, practise the names of all the tiny flowers that secretly grew there. Don’t you remember? Elephants never forget.”
“Mind-meld with me. Help me to dig out the memories!”
“Then think about school. You were lonely there, too.”
“I was clever. The other children were jealous. They teased and bullied me. It was years before I had a little group of real friends.”
“You wouldn’t talk to people.”
“I had nothing to say to them! We had nothing in common. Later, I was scared of having children of my own - children meant noise and cruelty and pain.”
“Not just children - families. Yours was a large one and you were forced to be sociable when all you wanted - needed - was to be on your own.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I am the elephant in your room - remember?” Did the wise eyes soften?
“There was something else. I borrowed a tutorial tape at college. Halfway through I heard the voices of my fellow-students. They were talking about me behind my back! They couldn’t understand why I didn’t get what was being asked of me. And I still don’t know what it was they thought I was missing. Maybe it was the same thing that lost me a place at Uni. Four scary adults in a row behind a massive desk battering me with questions I could barely answer. And I was supposed to be bright.”
“Perhaps you were too naive? Clever, but socially backward? So often you puzzled or upset your few close friends when you asked for more than you could have. You rarely saw things from their point of view ... you seemed incapable.”
She was shivering now.
“One woman told me that I didn’t know how to say ‘thank you.’ I was terribly upset. That haunted me.”
“Ah - your benefactor, the artist’s widow! Don’t fret about her. She wanted to play her game with you. She needed to be Lady Bountiful and you had to be her Grateful Lackey. The fine gift you gave her and your uncomfortable honesty in refusing hers were both to your credit, and showed her up for the narcissist she was.”
“Uncomfortable honesty.”
“Yes. Very un-British.”
“Not unlike my son.”
“Indeed.”
Something like panic gripped her and she could barely breathe.
“This is the elephant in my room.”
“Do you want to say it?”
She stared at the sweet white face with its great listening ears - listening to her listening to herself.
“I am on the Spectrum.”
Now she had said it out loud she was shaking and the tears were freezing on her iced cheeks and the animal furs as they fell.
“I have always been. I am clever. I am super-sensitive. I don’t play games. I care about big things and can’t do small talk. I mind about inaccuracy. I am always happiest when I’m on my own. Violence scares me but I can’t hate anyone. I have an uncle, and a cousin, and a son whom I understand, and who would understand me. Oh! ... and I stim! I have read so many books about autism, listened to so many talks, watched so many programmes ...”
“... and never thought to look with your customary honesty in the mirror.”
“No. Never. Not till now.”
“Why do you think your father recognised it in your son so soon after he was born?”
“Because he had seen it before ...”
“Exactly. And just like you with your own son, he brought you up to be yourself, without a label. But it can help, to know.”
“To meet my own personal elephant.”
“Do you love me now?”
“Yes I love you,” she cried through the ice-fall of her tears.
And she knew how great was the love waiting for her when she came home.
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