The Fall

"My friend says I shut my eyes to God, that nothing else explains

My aversion to reality. She says I'm like the child who

buries her head in the pillow

so as not to see, the child who tells herself

that light causes sadness. [...]

In my dreams, my friend reproaches me.

She's telling me that when you love the world you hear celestial music..."

Celestial Music, Louise Gluck

MUSIC:

Music for a While- Purcell/Pluhar

Content Warning:

Very strong language, strong sex references, abuse references, neurodivergent theme

Transcript

The Fall

Eve often misunderstands people, and people her. Her routines are strict, her morning rituals, her evening rituals, her diet, her clothing. Of the least detail, about herself, her life, the few people she can bear to come into regular contact with, she is utterly aware. She avoids alcohol: she gets drunk too quickly and it overexcites her. She goes to the gym, walks for miles, reads obsessively. She has a 2:1 from Durham. Left little choice to do otherwise, she claims disability benefits. She is trying to change this. Women who speak to her are surprised by her frankness, her abrasiveness, the conversational beat her candour seems invariably to skip before erupting. Men are intrigued by it, her intensity doesn’t surprise them. It alarms them, but it doesn’t surprise them. They see complexity in her beauty, it is visible in the glassiness of her eyes, the way they seem to look inward and have trouble resting upon any one thing for very long. Not that Eve craves their attention, or their interest. Not anymore. There are particular topics in which she takes a fervent interest. Sometimes she’ll migrate away from one, become seized with enthusiasm by another. Sometimes she’ll latch on to some new subject entirely. To the others (as she calls them), the others outside her mind peering in through the window at the blizzard there, these topics are arbitrary, useless. To Eve they are not arbitrary; they are not useless. 

She has a religion: trams. The train people are her least favourite denomination; with the bus people she is on better terms. She lives in Croydon, she moved there eight years ago, to get away from her father. She can’t understand why so many people call Croydon a shithole. It has trams. Certain movements in her hands signal distress. The furling and unfurling of her hands, spreading them wide and balling them into fists and vice versa, signals mild discomfort. The “finger-counting” betrays considerable distress. With her thumb she goes back and forth, counting the fingers on her right hand. Index, middle, ring, little; little, ring, middle, index. 2, 3, 4, 5, 4, 3, 2. Like a choir warmup. Sometimes the fingers even sound musical notes. This is a calm inner world of order to which she often returns, to swaddle and surround herself. People look to the deadpan expression in which her features hang, the darting eyes, and assume she is well. Her face does not belie the turbulence of her inner life. Her mood is best understood by her hands. She doesn’t like to think of what comes after the finger-counting, if she is unable to placate herself.                  

On a darkening Tuesday afternoon in February, Eve is on her way to have coffee before she goes to the gym. She drinks coffee in a local, independent coffee shop called The Seesaw. She is walking there, both generally anxious and worried about something in particular. In this case, it is a man called Adam.

She stands for a while at the top of a steep set of stone steps. She admires the incline, the downward zigzagging gradient. There is something epic in it. She appreciates the desertion, the quiet. The din of the high-street can be heard here, but is far-off, muffled. She has considered suicide, in the past. She has considered these steps for a method of suicide. Eve descends, making her slow way down the steps. 

The high-street. The green trams trundle by, in both directions. The dainty tracks in the streets, the electric lines overhead hold them perfectly in place, they know where they are going. There is no room for deviation. Deviation is disaster in the life of a tram. She would like to have her funeral in one, she thinks, or, at the very least, a ride in a tram in place of a hearse: she imagines the coffin inside, carried along Church Street, George Street, West Croydon, Centrale, Therapia Lane, a wreath in the tram windows, her name showing in garlands of flowers. She imagines her mother, she imagines her father, crying, weeping. Gazing at photographs of the little girl whose bed he visited, in the small hours, whom he knew would keep her mouth shut. Seesaw. With an imagined seesaw squeak, Eve’s thoughts return to the task in hand. 

The word Seesaw is pleasing to her, its two syllables, nestling side by side, like two twins. Girls, she thinks. The onomatopoeia, the evocative vowels, the sibilance. Seesaws themselves, as long as she was the only one sitting on them, were once pleasing to her, before she became too old to play in playgrounds. Mostly, it is the dimness of the lighting in The Seesaw that she likes, and the quiet of the music. In The Seesaw, both of these related levels are fixed at a tender point, a point that doesn’t assault her. But the latter of these is especially important. She prepares to enter, her faith in the realm the other side of the door, her faith in its predictability, its tranquillity is firm, intact. Her first challenge is to navigate the three people coming out of the café just as she is entering it. She is furious. She is furious with probability itself: that she can’t just enter, that at the precise moment she is purposing to enter, people are exiting. As per trams, you let people off before you let people on: she applies this principle to the present situation, letting the patrons leave before she enters. Whatever side of the door she happens to be on, those who do not abide by this, whether in courtesy or rudeness, patience or impatience, are colossally distasteful in her mind. Those exiting exit first: correct. But even so, Eve hates holding the door. She stands back. She recoils from the people exiting as though from odour. They thank her; she doesn’t realise that she is looking at them with hatred.

She enters, deliberate in the way she shuts the door behind her. With staggering immediacy, she clocks that something is wrong. The music. It’s too loud. The level is wrong. It’s sitting just above where it should be. Like a head that should be just submerged underwater but isn’t quite. Her right-hand closes and uncloses a few times as she joins the queue. There is no way she is going to ask the server to turn it down so she uses the brief wait to practice acclimatising to the offensive level of the music as best she can. Her awareness of what she’s feeling, how she’s feeling, why she’s feeling it, does nothing to soothe her. She is enabled to feel less slighted by an understanding of her condition, but no less anxious. She is a voracious reader. Kafka, Kobo Abe, Kierkegaard, Knausgaard, Oliver Sacks. She has read in a recent paper that a disproportionate number of autistic people, many of them alcoholics but not all, make up the regular customer base of Weatherspoon’s branches. Why? No music. A nationwide stipulation.  

The level is only a touch too high, but it’s a decibel of great significance. She feels it in her body, something which strokes her like breath, like when people sitting behind her on a bus, or a tram, talk too loudly: the cranial caress is groping, distressing. It is no more than a caress, but it needs only to run its hands over her, softly, to penetrate, to commit a violation akin to rape. She is able to shrug off the assault, to armour herself against its influence. But this is achieved only by a great effort on her part, and at a cost.

There is a man ahead of her in the queue. The man is old and moves very slowly. There is something very angry about him, his face is jagged with emotion, furrowed with frowns. His lip quivers, he seems to Eve to tremor with potential violence. Like he is about to lash out at the person closest to him. Eve is the person closest to him. And he has a habit, she notices, of slurping very loudly, licking his lips and sounding this tut, as if to shift the excess spittle in his mouth. She hates him for it. The sound cuts though the level is low. Eve’s hand shapeshifts furiously, from ball to fan, ball to fan. The man receives his order and potters off. Eve orders, recognised. She waits and all is well. That is the official line she gives herself.

The old man is carrying his beverage on a tray. Tea in a tea pot, two cups, milk. He has not come alone. Just as Eve is making for the only available two-seat table (she considers it unconscionably rude behaviour to occupy space at a four-seater when alone) she sees that the old man, who was just ahead of her in the queue a moment ago, has placed his tray on this very two-seat table and is transferring the tea-seat from the tray to his own table. Eve stops, hovers. She is full of an inner scream: Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt. She cannot believe the slowness, the thoughtlessness. Move it you cunt! Fucking move it! Thankfully, the old man notices her approach and finishes transferring the items. He lifts the tray off Eve’s table with one hand and trudges back to the counter to return it.

Eve sits. Her bag has been over her shoulder all the time. She shrugs it off, lays it by her chair. She waits for the panic to ebb. The rage retreats quickly, like a quick, distressful snake slinking back into thicket, but the long pang of panic, for whom the rage is an articulate spokesperson, takes far longer to subside. She surveys her environment. Her hand slows. 

There is a large trans-woman sitting opposite her. She is clad, tightly, in a beige one-piece dress. She wears a dalmatian cravat. Her hair is an alarming pink, her face tan-brown with foundation, her lipstick a deep cherry tone, her eyes boldly lined in mascara. When somebody leaves the café and neglects to shut the door behind them, the trans-woman stands abruptly up and tears furiously over to the door. She sighs angrily, grimaces loudly. She shuts the door, returns to her seat. Her legs are so long, and powerful looking. Eve sees that she is wearing boots, knee high, the shade just a little darker than her dress. The boot-heels drum irately on the floor-panels.

Time passes and Eve feels that she is not existing as she ought. She sits, in the Seesaw, existing, taking infrequent and reluctant sips from her coffee, existing, but strained in her existence. She is not like the others, but that’s not what bothers her. She has so often been disappointed by the mirage of clear, blue water that is “like-mindedness”. At university, they just wanted sex, and so she gave it to them. They didn’t want to like her, be like her, they didn’t need her to be like them. They just wanted her body. She was able to be passive; then hide, disappear when they wanted to see her again. Pretend to be dead when the doorbell rang; bolt the toilet door; hide under the bed. She is practiced at quiet: she can be as quiet as a mouse, as a mouse-corpse. 

She wasn’t like them, they were not like her, they would never have had the patience or the compassion to understand her, to tolerate her unfathomability. But the sad irony is that as much as she struggles to bond with neuro-typical people, as much as she detests them for their lies and evasions and concealments and their talent for bewildering improvisation and their two-facedness and their double, even triple standards, she doesn’t much like autistic people either. Her hands begin to stim again, as the source of her initial anxiety becomes clear, as its presence in the solution of her mind becomes more concentrate. The man. Adam. At the gym. He thinks, thinks Eve, that he’s in such good shape, that his improvements in physique count for something, that his efforts at self-improvement edify her. She finds him offensively unattractive, she finds the way he approaches her, the way his shadow falls across her, the way he clumsily struts into her life whenever he spies her or whenever the apparatus beside her happens to be unoccupied, the way he feigns casualness, pretends at the temperance that may give his passion smoothness, but is unable to disguise his intentions. Ball, fan; ball, fan. Both her hands open and close, not quite in unison. The coffee cools.

Just as Eve imagines Adam masturbating, as she imagines his ugly, poorly-washed prick stiffening, his chubby hand reaching for it with rancid eagerness, someone else leaves the café and the door does not shut behind them. Most doors close by themselves, they swing back into the frame. This one clicks into place when opened far enough, once the angle of aperture reaches ninety degrees. Eve finds it amazing, staggering that people do not notice these things. That anyone could be anything but acutely aware of precisely how a door opens and closes as they pass through it is an enigma to her. The departing patron goes off; the door is at a right-angle to the jamb; it remains open. February comes in through the door. The trans-woman cocks her head like a velociraptor. She is, once again, furious and tears over open door, shuts it, demonstratively. The sound of her hard heels is tremendous. She returns to her seat, falls into it with an enormous exhalation of irritation, the ventilation of being slighted.

Eve begins finger counting, fast: 2, 3, 4, 5, 4, 3, 2. She climbs and descends a few times. Then she embellishes it, variants on the theme emerge in the way she taps her thumb on her fingers. 2, 5, 2, 4, 2, 3, 2…etc… This is not good news. She is anxious; not annoyed. But she considers her grievances irritations, people’s accidents not accidents but infractions or misdeeds. There is no callousness, only sabotage. It demystifies the discomforting workings of her mind to think of them in this way, it makes her feel not so powerless to dwell in the register of anger rather than fear. Eve isn’t angry with the trans-woman. It’s the thoughtlessness of the people exiting that enrages her…that they haven’t mastered the form, that they don’t even realise there is a form to master! But it is the trans-woman that causes Eve anxiety. Ambivalence as she used to call it when she was little- (for some reason she thought anxiety and ambivalence were synonyms and she favoured the longer word). The trans-woman has become for Eve this large angry source in the room, this source of something akin to heat or cacophony. Like her appearance, the trans-woman’s emotional life is flaming and lurid, the way she sits there fuming, the way she keeps allowing herself to be provoked and keeps acting upon this provocation with great physicality. It panics Eve. She feels unable to calmly coexist with it, and yet is impotent to do anything about it. People are just going to keep leaving The Seesaw without closing the door, she predicts, person after person after person is going to commit this offence, each one derelict in their duty. The trans-woman is going to become angrier and angrier. 

Eve’s hands are rippling furiously. In concert, the familiar finger-counts quiver across both her hands at a tremendous rate. Her hands are alive, possessed, their movements seem arbitrary but are not. There is something malevolent in their wilfulness. Upsets orbit in her mind, they do not disappear. The inconsiderate tray, the slightly mind-numbing level of the music, the door left repeatedly open. The music on the sound system is not in the background. It’s all around, its within the room, humid, and thick, and invasive like a fog, a sort of groping redolence, like hanging creepers and leaves and branches, a jungle of noise. The music’s loudness is the loudness of derangement. It doesn’t provide any clarity, Eve thinks, it muddies, it muddles. She tries to define what she’s listening to, tries to ring-fence the boundaries of the pandemonium’s component sounds. A woman’s voice, wailing, siren-like, contralto but repellent. Like someone flatting their facial features against a window, looking in at you, their nostrils upturned, their lips sea-sponges, their saliva and snot and phlegm getting on the glass. No words, Eve thinks, just a sustained, wheedling whoop. Is that a saxophone, she thinks disdainfully, that laughing sound? She can’t mentally separate the saxophone and the woman’s voice. Nor can she separate the left hand of the piano, the bass, the kick-drum. The high rimshot breaks through fairly cleanly. But the rest is a confused wash. The music’s confused, Eve thinks, not me. She normally finds the sound of the piano comforting, especially when she can clearly tell the hands apart by ear. There’s a logic she likes to those chords the size of a handspan. Her inner life can provide some rescue from her inner life.

This so often happens to her, internally. She is interested for a while, curious. And then she remembers to feel violated. The tray incident comes full circle. Then Adam makes his orbit, the man at the gym who keeps- what is the word, the phrase? none of them mean anything to her, she can’t use a single one of those available with any authority: hitting on her, coming onto her, making advances at her…? The coffee is sitting there, reaching room temperature, she isn’t able to drink. She can’t face the coffee until she steadies herself, her turbulence. She feels like she’s sitting in the stern of little sailboat on choppy waters, her precarity infuriates her, it prevents her from enjoying life.

Someone gets up to leave. Now Eve knows to watch them carefully, to follow their movement, to follow their journey across the floor. She stares, (people have told her about her staring), intent, intense, and alert. Like a small animal, still and traumatised and pulsing and highly-strung, knowing that its life depends upon its ability to discern, to discern what it suspects might be, just might be, the steps of a predator’s feet, a gamey note of the predator’s smell, vague in the wintry wind. 

The trans-woman is reading a book. She doesn’t look up very much, she isn’t waiting to be outraged, she doesn’t fix her eyes on the door expecting someone to leave it open- turgid and scowling with this imminence- she doesn’t even intermittently glance up from the page. It breaks from her each time with surprising suddenness, the way she casts her book aside- its back hard and percussive- leaps up and crosses the floor with irate, flagrant haste. Eve understands the trans-woman’s irritation. But the anger hurts her, it makes her feel vulnerable, it engulfs her in a vulnerability she can’t reason her way out of using logic. Just one more terrifying, tremoring thing she can’t control, like a lawnmower or a hoover, smoking and whizzing, on the verge of explosion. Or an unleashed dog, no knowing where it will go, how friendly it will be when it approaches you, jumps up onto its hind-legs, barks.

The one exiting has put on her coat. A long deep-green raincoat it has taken her an age to wriggle into. She picks up a myrtle handbag. It looks dusty, but isn’t. It is the silver film of a sophisticated style. She has, also, in her other hand, an umbrella. She grasps it by its neck rather than placing the U-turn of the handle on her arm. She reaches the door, pushes it wide open, and trots off into the February world without a second thought. The door does not close behind her.

The trans-woman, with a predictability that affords Eve no relief, gets up, tears furiously across the floor, shuts the door, sighs, grimaces, falls back into her chair, picks up her book, shakes her head, sighs, looks about for approval or agreement, finds none, carries on reading, takes a gulp of her drink, pomegranate tea (though only she and the woman who served her know that), seeks relief. The music intensifies, some final chorus burns with incomprehensible ferocity, and descends, like a weighty fog, from the ceiling. The sound nets Eve, its traps her. Her thumbs are dancing, seemingly random, stuck in their spasmic strategies, infernal. Already, because it is late in the day, and the light is fading, and closing time is less than forty minutes away, more people are starting to leave. Eve has no faith that they will remember to shut the door. She can scarcely handle her rage, the thoughtlessness, the insulting, blinkard thoughtlessness! Her rage is too big, too hot a thing to have inside her, too flammable a thing to hold within her in a place like this. She hates the people’s freedom, all the “others”, their freedom from all this worry, all this intense cognitive anguish. Eve finds herself standing up, abruptly. She knocks the table, her cup doesn’t tip over but a little coffee slops out of it, puddles on the tabletop. In an instant, she finds herself in the toilets, the door locked. There is a brief bout of respite from the music. Thank God, Eve finds herself thinking, that the bathroom door isn’t coded. Code at the bottom of the receipt, ask at the counter for the code…nonsense, she thinks. 

It's the disabled cubicle that she finds herself within. She knows the upstairs non-disabled “bogs”, as certain family members of hers infuriatingly say, are locked at this time. She stands, she doesn’t sit. She finds herself recalling the women she went to university with. She finds herself thinking about how little she understood their ease in one another’s presence, in bathrooms, in changing rooms, undressing, undressed, sitting on toilet seats, pissing, putting in tampons, taking them out. Calm, she thinks, inner calm, as her digits decelerate. She even enjoys the deceleration, the affront and the horror leaving her body, like fleeing venom. She relaxes. And for some reason, in the sterile-toned, not terribly pleasant sanctuary of the bathroom, this bright, locked confessional, this private room where secrets are spilled, this place called “Disabled”, clarity descends upon Eve, it reaches down, as if born from the cold, secular light above her, and touches her.

And she laments that life is so exhausting, that her mind, her nerves, her synapses put her through all this, day after day after day. And there’s no relief, and there’s no escape, and time doesn’t make it any easier, and the light of understanding makes her want to cry, not rejoice. A notion comes to her, something she hasn’t thought about since childhood. How once there was a garden. In the garden, human beings and God lived among each other, peacefully. There was a man called Adam, a woman called Eve. They were free to go wherever they liked, to do whatever they liked, to eat whatever they liked. None of the animals had horns or claws, none of the plants barbs or thorns. Nobody told lies, the truth was majesty. Adam and Eve were in love. There was only one rule, one fruit they could not eat. The fruit from a very special tree. This tree was called The Tree of Knowledge. And Eve and Adam obeyed this one law laid down by God. But Eve was tempted by an evil serpent, a serpent who despised God, and she was persuaded to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, to try the fruit. And God was furious, and Adam and Eve were expelled from the garden, thrown out of paradise. They were forced to descend to the earth, and to make the earth, in all its woe and fear and corruption, their dwelling place.

Eve is an atheist. But that tale, she feels, is the tale of autism, the mythology by which the autistic live. She can’t escape from it, though she doesn’t believe it. And yet she can’t work out which character she is in the story. Probably God. The God of the Old Testament is very autistic. God is autistic, Eve thinks. 

And then she thinks of all the eccentric old ladies, their absurd regularity, how some of them would catch mass three times a day, and all the wonky altar servers at Our Lady of the Rosary that were there when she was young. How she thought she had it all figured out, and they were stumbling behind. How she mocked them. Now, it breaks her heart. To think of them seeking the same calm as herself, clinging to the routine and the predictability and the safety. How in the hush, the peace, the fixity, they were able to make themselves acceptable, as children thrown out of a garden, down into the only world we know with its streets and its gyms and its coffee shops and its trams and its towns like Croydon. 

Eve thinks of Adam. Not the Adam from the story of the garden, but the Adam who has come up to her a few times in the gym and is clearly sexually interested in her. He has eyes whose movements she recognises, his hands stim, and he speaks too fast. He will never tell her that he has imagined, many times, ejaculating on the seat of her gym shorts, while she’s wearing them. She will tell him that she doesn’t find him attractive but it will not be easy. All the usual pacifications and signals and codes are useless to her, she cannot begin to command them. Like idiomatic speech, these colloquialisms, these niceties, what she calls lies, make her mouth go fuzzy, make her gag, make her feel like she’s choking. She is a terrible liar. So far she has just left, or run away to the toilet, or pretended to be on her phone. It doesn’t count for anything: that, on some level, some significant level, they are the same, Eve and Adam.

Eve has entertained the notion of secretly filming Adam come up to her. She has seen this done on tic-toc. She would be able to jail him, a telling moment of him, a bottled centilitre of essence, in her phone camera. She’d be in control, she’d be in charge of the video, the upload, the caption. She’d be in charge of how she would be perceived by the world, how he would be perceived by the world, in the world’s watching eyes, knowing that the camera was there, stationed, out of sight. She’d find a way of seizing the upper hand.

She is capable of surprising empathy. She imagines how much courage it almost certainly took him to go up to her and introduce himself. As well as the pornography, the videos on dating and approach artistry he probably devoured. Carefully. Desperately. She feels sad. She doesn’t mean to feel sad. But she feels sad, she pities him, he makes her feel sad and that’s why she hates him.

She is capable of astonishing foresight. She knows that if she posted that video, having been lucky enough to capture it, with text reading something like “Creepy guy keeps coming up to me in the gym”, some women, some people, would probably comment positively on it, laud her. And quite a lot of incels and resentful keyboard warriors and online personalities, most of them male, many of them autistic, would seize upon the video as evidence of their plight, and with nothing else to do they’d call her a slut and a bitch and a Stacey and a dog and a whore and a cunt. Even if their pejorative of choice made no sense, still they’d call her it.  

            And then the rage returns, and the last fraught half-an-hour completes an orbit. And Eve knows there is to be no more relief. She thinks of all those people, person after person, who left the coffee-shop, and didn’t shut the door behind them. Those people, (and there would be more), in their carefree bliss, that didn’t think to close to door for those inside, that didn’t think to keep the people warm from the February chill. The thoughtlessness!

            She despairs, unable to escape the complexity of the ordinary, unable to rise above the constant hurt that she feels. She is unable even to wish for anything, to admit to herself what she wishes for. Life rests its hand upon her, coldly, it holds her by the temples like a device. 

            Within her inner life, running through it, she locates this scream, this suspicious serpent-like thing, erecting and craning itself all through her. She isn’t prepared for how seductive she finds it. She allows it its spectacle. And she screams. Words like Fuck, or no words at all. There is nothing easily destroyed in the room. Just the loo-roll holder. And the mirror. She kicks the mirror as hard as she can. She does so again. Then a third time. A great crack is suddenly put there in the glass, and then a network of cracks, an ice-white spiderweb of damage. But before the glass can shatter, the door is being unlocked by a master-key. Eve stands there, mortified, catatonic. The door opens. Recognising her, not just from serving her but from times before, the staff-member looks at her, forlorn, appalled. Eve knew that her screams would be heard and yet it still comes as a shock to her that they have been. Heads have turned in the café, seeking the source of the disturbance, seeking to understand more. Worry traverses the tables like a death-angel. The trans-woman’s thoughts are temporarily dominated by something other than the door, left unclosed so many times.  

The staff-member knows she should probably call the police. But she doesn’t have the heart, or the resolve, or the energy, or the courage to do so.

Eve seems on the verge of explaining but says nothing.

“Just leave,” the woman says.

Eve obeys. She is followed by concerned, curious eyes. She isn’t able to feel humiliated yet. She takes up her bag from the place where she left it. 

She makes eye-contact with no-one. On this occasion, they are glad of that.  

“Don’t come back,” the woman says, escorting Eve.  

Taciturn Eve exits by the door she came in. She doesn’t need to close it, though she turns to do so. The woman, making sure she leaves promptly, shuts it behind her.