Robertson - Reaching one thousand: a story of love, motherhood and autism

The real is not given to us, but put to us by way of a riddle. ALBERT EINSTEIN

Im hungry for some fruit, says Ben, standing close beside me so that his arm is on top of my notebook and I have to put down my pen and pay attention to him.

Okay, I say, let me see what I have. Bens always hungry for fruit or salad. In fact his favourite foods are green apples, the stalks of lettuces and tinned pineapple. Today, I have something new for him.

Look, I bought a pomegranate.

Do I like pom-grans? he asks.

I dont know, but I expect you will.

I cut it in two and give him half on a plate with a teaspoon so that he can scoop out the seeds and flesh. He takes it into his bedroom and, from the kitchen, I hear him talking to himself as he eats it. The other half sits skin side up in a bowl on the kitchen bench. I remember many years ago sharing a pomegranate with a man I loved. He read to me from the Song of Solomon As a piece of a pomegranate are thy temples within thy locks. I thought it was romantic. I knew the pomegranate represented fertility, but I didnt know then that the pomegranate is thought by some scholars to have been the forbidden fruit of the Garden of Eden.

I finish making my notes. Then I go into Bens room.

How are you going with that pomegranate? I ask. Do you need help getting the seeds out?

Yes, please.

Bens face is covered with pink juice, his hands and nails are stained red, there are blobs of red all over his Thomas the Tank Engine bedcover, his T-shirt and the floorboards, and a smear of pink on the pale-blue walls. The only clean thing in the room is the teaspoon I gave him. Hes managed to dig most of the seeds out with his fingers and then put them into his mouth in clumps.

After Ben has finished the last of the seeds and Ive cleaned him and his bedroom up (well, a rough clean, anyhow), he goes outside to swing on a rope from the tree in our garden. This is one of his favourite activities, swinging over the garden, and he likes me to push him. Only he calls it a set of pushes, because he wants me to push him five times with differing strengths, starting from excellent which is actually a small push moving on through good, satisfactory, limited and ending with very low, which is a high, spinning push that has him laughing madly, but never quite letting go of the rope and falling off. This is the way Ben thinks: in ordered sets of a predictable and logical nature. Its just a shame that life and other people are rarely ordered, predictable or logical.

Between swings, Ben runs inside, lifts up the remaining half pomegranate and pokes the seeds.

Dont touch that, Ben, I say, not being keen on further mess.

Im just admiring it, he explains. And it is very beautiful, the glistening crimson seeds packed between skin-thin membranes. Its easy to imagine Hades tricking Persephone into eating just a few seeds, thus ensuring her return to the underworld and our winter season. Ben touches it again. And besides, it feels strange, he says.

Ben, please dont poke it all the time. Ive had enough of red drips all over the place. Your fingernails still look like they have blood on them.

Speaking of which, he says, and dashes off into the other room, coming back with a book called Making Spooky Things at Home (bought for him by his father, needless to say), we could make the frightening foot and horrible hand.

This is another typical Ben thing: association. The idea of blood made him think of the spooky book. The only thing is, next time he eats pomegranate, hell want to make something else from the book too, because his mind runs along associational grooves and doesnt vary much. I dig out some black paper and cut hand and foot shapes and then we paste some bone-like strips of white paper over the black paper, creating a skeleton foot and hand. He hangs these on string in his room and tapes a sign over them saying, Danger. Frightening foot and horrible hand. Caution.

Ben loves making signs.

Then he decides to make a list of the different spooky things we could make each day for the next week, so he gathers up paper and pen, sits on the floor and starts writing, his tongue poking slightly out of his mouth as he concentrates.

Ben loves making lists.

Its funny to me now to think of my younger self, equating pomegranate seeds with sexual desire. In fact, Im wondering if it really was me, or just a dream. (But I know it was me.) Now, when I think of pomegranates, I think of a memoir by Carolyn Polizzotto called Pomegranate Season , a book that is partly about her reactions to having a son with a disability. In particular, I think about a wonderful paragraph on the hiatus that the news of a diagnosis can cause. Its such a good passage that the publishers reproduced it on the back cover of the book.

Loose photographs you can shuffle about. You can pick them up and put them down again in any order you like. Photo albums are for happy families. Children, grown-up, pass them on to their children. When you are thirty-one years old, and the soaring curve of your carefully planned future suddenly freezes into stillness against the sky, photo albums are the first thing to go.

I, too, have a drawer in my desk stuffed full of loose photos. I, too, have photo albums that run from the birth of my son until he is two but then stop. I pretend the desk drawer isnt there; it has a power of its own to open up my insides. Like a fierce animal in a cage, the photos lie untouched, untouchable.

A girl of twenty-something sharing a pomegranate with her lover (where is he now, I wonder?) and the forty-something woman making horror hands and afraid of her bottom drawer these two people seem unrelated. It seems impossible to remember and connect to the person I was before I had Ben and especially before I realised Ben was different from me, before we gave that difference a name.