What I've Been Up To

Chapter 1: The Inciting Incident

You’ve got to ask the universe for what you want. That’s what a guy dressed like Jesus at a music festival told me once. Only I thought he meant some kind of ritual, setting your wishes on fire in the full moon, affirmations in the mirror and that. He was right, though he could have been clearer if he’d just said, ‘You’ve got to actually download a dating app.’

I guess most people figure this one out early on. But if you have a talent for self-deception, as I do, you can get to your mid-twenties protected by the delusion that one day you’ll drop a pile of packages and a handsome stranger will pick them up who, by chance, you’ll be madly attracted to, and they you, and who will turn out to be a sexually talented financially stable black-belt Arctic explorer with your exact sense of humour and an ambition to have, for example, one-maybe-two children with you (an inexperienced socially anxious administrative employee) at least ten years into the future but before your eggs become inviable, while first exploring every continent in the world with you and also, totally by surprise, taking you to see Hamilton the musical in New York at the cost of a month’s rent as a whimsical romantic gesture.

People will try to convince you in all sorts of ways that the reason you’re unfulfilled (in love or work) is your own self-made insecurities, when maybe the fact is, you spent so long studying to be what other people wanted that you never got to learn what you want or how to ask for it. I was twenty-five when I decided to take festival-Jesus’s advice.

At the time of the inciting incident, I was at home in my rented house truck, two thirds through My Ex-boyfriend’s Dad: A Forbidden Romance on Kindle. My underwear was around my knees, my pink dildo pulsing all the way inside my pussy as my left index finger, lubed up, explored the sensitive rim of my anus, when my mother’s face appeared in the far-right window of the truck, her hands cupping the glass like two binoculars, parsing the dark.

‘Knock knock,’ she called.

I fumbled for my clothes, washed my hands and opened the door to receive the left-over stir-fry, spare tea towels and details about my sister locking her keys in the car (again, somewhere along a state highway with the phone dying and the kids and dog possibly now sunburnt and without healthy snacks, roaming the adjacent farmland). My mother has poor eyesight, thankfully, and very little natural suspicion.

‘What have you been up to?’ she said, finally.

The question always made me draw a blank, partly because I find it quite hard to remember the recent past in chronological order. When did I last see my mother? A week ago, or two days? And then to sift through the debris of memory for key events since that point, as if improvising the synopsis of a novella. All I could think of at that moment was what I’d been doing just then.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘not much.’ Embarrassment coiled inside me, my whole body a wire, ready to spring.

Despite my romantic imagination, until recently I’d convinced myself I was asexual. I wasn’t a virgin, but my experiences hadn’t exactly gone brilliantly, and I didn’t think I’d ever had a crush, not the way it was described in my books. When I’d felt something like what attraction was supposed to be, it was in response to someone being attracted to me, which made me think, was I just that much of a people pleaser? You couldn’t trust an emotion like that.

Although the dynamics in the two-dollar romance novels I read turned me on, the male characters were mostly mob bosses or small-town American landowners. They were interchangeable, their alluring traits being an abstract sense of confidence and possessiveness. I couldn’t find any similarities in them with the kinds of people I was likely to get along with or even meet in my own small city, where the prospects were mostly corporate dogsbodies and IT workers. But I was losing sleep, whole days, to read these poorly concocted ethically preposterous erotic novels, so I knew the asexual hypothesis couldn’t be totally true. I was lonely, and I was horny.

When my mother left, I climbed back into my duvet nest. The wind was picking up, and it made the wooden shell of the truck strain squeakily in its frame. The truck belonged to my sister and when she came back with her two kids and her husband, I’d have to find a house-share situation of my own.

‘I’ve decided to completely reinvent my life,’ I told my friend Annie the next day on our lunch breaks.

‘Did you have a new business idea?’ she asked. ‘Oi, what happened to your Mills and Boon you were writing?’ Annie wrinkled her nose over her coffee.

‘No. I mean, that’s still on my to do list.’ She had a point. Reinventing my life was kind of my favourite hobby. Three months ago, when I’d moved into the truck, I’d decided I’d become a sort of reclusive erotic novelist and churn out dirty little books about pirate threesomes and so on over the internet. ‘There’s just no time, really,’ I said. ‘But this is not a business idea. ‘Well, it’s not anything really. I’ve decided to start dating.’ Now that I thought about it, it was quite embarrassing.

‘Oh yeah? Do you want help with your profile?’

‘I might get you to review. I’m more worried about the whole messaging thing. I dunno, it’s kind of scary.’

‘Is it? Why?’

I frowned. I thought she’d say yeah, of course it is scary. ‘It just is.’ A memory flashed involuntarily in my mind – a particular section of wallpaper, sick feeling. Stop it fuck you get out. I pinched my arm under the table. Tried to think of puppies and tiramisu.

Dating was ‘not my comfort zone’. In a year or two, I’d get officially diagnosed as autistic. I was told I was as a kid, but nobody had really believed it since, not even me, so mostly, I still thought I ‘had anxiety’. I wasn’t autistic enough, you see. That’s because my autism is what some people, mistakenly, call ‘mild’ or ‘very high functioning’. They mean that I seem normal to them, just a bit anxious.

The best way I can explain it is like this: imagine you’re learning to drive for the first time, and the car you’re driving is a manual, but the person instructing you doesn’t know that it’s a manual (nobody in this scenario has even heard of a manual) and is teaching you how to drive an automatic. It takes you a long time to figure out to begin with. Sometimes your engine cuts out. It’s enraging and scary. You can’t understand why this instructor is not being clear with you. Why you can’t seem to follow their instructions. And then over time, if you’re a smart kid, you figure it out. You need a different set of rules, but you can drive just as well as others who drive automatics. Only sometimes it takes you a bit of extra concentration. You have to change gears, and it takes you a moment, and the person in the passenger seat sometimes wonders why you don’t seem to be listening to them. They don’t see that you have to change gears.

My autistic brain is like that manual car. And I was pretty good at driving it. By this point in my life, I was just as competent socially as many others who weren’t clinically autistic. Lots of autistic people have a ‘special interest’, a hobby or subject they’re ‘way too intense’ about, and by some combo of luck and strategy, my big special interest since childhood had been communication. I was always listening, building data, figuring out rules. Like, from theatre classes, I’d learned that every instance of speech is an action, with a goal and not just a literal meaning. You had to think of sentences as gear changes and window wipers. But they’re harder to wield than they are to understand. I still struggled to initiate conversation, to answer open questions and to appear as if I was at ease in casual conversation and not sitting some sort of oral exam. None of this made traditional romantic meet-cutes likely.

That evening, I made a dating profile. Just to be on the app made me feel exposed. Vulnerable. Like an unpopular child who’s been coerced to stand up and invite a class of socially confident middle-schoolers to attend their birthday party.

Swiped right twice by accident and then left left left again in panic, probably missing one that could have been the one. I had to slow down.

The next one looked… inoffensive. Two photos fully dressed. Liked hiking. I paused for a long minute on it. Took a deep breath and gagged myself with the pillow to try to crowd out the crawling feeling, pressing my eyeballs into it until the imprints of light shifted like microbes in a microscope. Then swiped right for the first time on purpose.

Nothing. I closed the app and made dinner. And when I got back to it, I had made a match.

‘Hey girl;) Up 2?’

Chapter 2: Think of me when you score

Every missing detail seemed at first to have a disappointing explanation. Every picture a man took with a dog or his mother must be calculated to disguise his true long game of boasting to his mates about sleeping with me. I almost gave up on dating apps. But I reminded myself I was being crazy. Other people didn’t think like this. Expressing interest in someone wasn’t all that; it wasn’t interrupting-high-school-assembly-to-read-your-true-love-a-poem. It was just a matter of sorting people into those who suited you, like choosing pairs of shoes.

I made myself swipe generously – so what if they wore sunglasses in all the photos like they were in disguise? A certain lack of awareness could be endearing. And if they tried to introduce ‘pineapple on pizza’ as a point of debate… well maybe they were saying it was fun to be outraged, and they were at least right about that.

Ding. A new message. I’d been chatting with this guy a bit. He was a burly, Middle Eastern footballer. He used my name a lot in messages, and he followed everything with a smiling-blushing emoji, which made me think he must be bashful and happy-go-lucky. Of course, I distrusted overt cheerfulness, but I was trying to be a different sort of person.

I couldn’t look at the messages straight away, though, in case he could see when I’d seen them or that I was typing. As soon as I read a message, I had to answer urgently, as if I had the guy on hold. Ding. I hadn’t been this popular since my family lost me in the mall.

I made it to the office on autopilot – swipe card, five steps, heavy door, ‘Good-morning-Sarah, good-morning-Olivia…’ inflection like a door-bell, almost greeting myself instead of my manager.

My colleague called something over our facing desks, words that I queued for my brain to process in a second. Ding.

‘Get up to much this weekend?’ the footballer had said, smiling-blushing emoji.

I looked at my colleague. She’d asked how my weekend was, I registered.

‘Oh, yeah,’ I said, ‘yeah good.’

‘Are you okay?’

I got that often. It meant my face wasn’t matching my words and needed to be corrected, so I laughed. ‘Sorry. Haven’t had my coffee.’

Get up to much this weekend? I thought about this. If I issued a non-response, a ‘not much’, he might lose interest; if I told the truth – binge-watching The Queen’s Gambit and napping – I’d be exposed as sad and uninteresting, or worse, commit myself to explaining a tv show – what happened and why I cared about it, which was as difficult to say as it was boring. Should I tell them about the vicarious satisfaction of watching a young girl prove a room full of men wrong? Was it even a good show? You’d feel that same way about any underdog. Wasn’t it just manufactured emotion wearing the hat of feminism? But I did enjoy it. I wanted to say to those silly men, Ha! Do you see now, do you feel ashamed? – but not really meaning about Beth Harmon the chess girl, but some younger part of myself I still needed to defend. How silly and confused would it sound to say all that?

It was a good thing I could work from home half the week. All this thinking made me sick. I had to learn to care less – to be cruel – that was what it felt like, this game, cutting people off when I lost interest, responding only to whom I chose. I was starring on The Bachelorette, but without the emotional work of having to manage my contenders’ feelings when they were out of the running.

I left the other messages on read and told the footballer about The Queen’s Gambit, in less detail. He seemed satisfied. ‘Would you be keen to meet up tomorrow afternoon?’ he asked that evening. Smiling-blushing emoji, angel emoji.

I messaged yes. I felt nauseous. We agreed to meet at a local teashop. I had to turn my phone off and go for a run to keep ahead of my heart. Oh god please bury me in the ground, I thought, but against my will my body became a helium balloon, tugging me toward the sky.

☼

This is the part of the romance where the main character looks at herself in the mirror, and the narrator attempts to convey to the readers how unequivocally beautiful she is, but how she is the only one incapable of seeing so. Where the sun hit my long ginger hair, it was the colour of fire, and in the dim little room, the light came in from behind in a halo of wayward baby-hairs.

I used to stare at myself in the mirror for ages, as though every time I looked at myself, I was meeting a different person. Sometimes I’d be beautiful, and sometimes I’d be the ugliest person I’d ever seen, and it would get so I’d be afraid to look, not knowing which I’d see. It was not so bad. I’d have beach waves, so long as no wind or moisture came near me on the walk there.

I chose a little blue slip dress under a denim jacket. It was like I was about to audition for the part of ‘the footballer’s girlfriend’. Did I fit the part? Could I be his summer cheerleader? I wanted to be that sort of person – someone who talked fast and smiled easy.

I tried to add contour to my tinted moisturiser, squinting at the wire-framed mirror I’d squeezed above my bedframe. It looked like I had makeup on, but was that good or not? I looked… nervous. I practised my smile: like a hostage reporting their wellbeing. Resolved to aim for more of a neutral expression.

Arriving early, I busied myself on my phone, so as to look up in surprise as he approached the table. I’d managed to secure one of the big teal booths, though the tea shop was busy: Saturday shoppers resting their feet, a woman ordering her kids fluffies, two guys with laptops back-to-back, a pink-haired person in leggings looking conflictedly over the menu, which was written out on a hanging reel of brown paper by the door.

I’d read too many romance novels in which the men fell in love on sight. Where it was sudden and undoubtable like a religious vision. Of course, it wouldn’t be like that. I would have to display a personality, which meant having ‘fun facts’. I had the same feeling I’d had in a dream where I’d sleep-walked onto a bungee platform. I’d woken inside the dream, falling in my rush to turn toward safety. It had been so embarrassing to be dying like that. The bungee jumpers had filmed videos of it to put with headlines about dumb tourists getting themselves in trouble, and I somehow knew this as I fell and cringed.

I was scrabbling for some fun facts about myself, when a bearded, muscular figure rounded the corner.

I frowned at my phone, feigning interest in an ad for a razor subscription service.

‘Maddy?’

‘Hello!’ I went to stand, but the seating was bolted. My thighs hit the table and propelled me back down.

The footballer shook my hand with a firm grip over the table as he sat down. He smelled of mint and musk. He looked at me quite seriously, as if startled, and with no hint of the smiling-blushing emoji.

My attempt at holding his gaze lasted less than a second, and I blinked and shifted my attention from the table to his hair and roundabout, gathering intel with each swiping glance, while his big brown eyes tried to find mine again. I sought focal refuge in the salt and pepper packets and picked one up, rubbing the packet between my fingers so that the granules ground together.

‘What kind of tea do you like?’ I asked.

‘Ah, I’m not much of a tea person,’ he said softly, but glanced at the menu. ‘Ah sheyesh there’s a lot. What would you recommend?’

I had to recalibrate. It had been he who had suggested tea, since he didn’t drink coffee, so I’d thought he must be a tea connoisseur. He seemed shy and serious, where I had assigned him in my imagination the characteristics of a personal trainer – gregarious and upbeat. But I ordered us a gunpowder tea for two, to save him having to learn about teas, which seemed to overwhelm him.

He rumbled something quietly, and his Arabic accent knitted the words together in a way I struggled to unpick, so that I understood what he had said only after a delay: So, what do you like to do?

‘Um, I like reading,’ I said, ‘and writing.’ As soon as I said it, I felt silly and wished I liked better things like outdoor rock climbing.

‘I’m not much of a reader myself.’ Now he looked embarrassed. He must have thought I was one of those people who only date men that read books.

‘Well, what kinds of things do you like to do?’ I said.

‘Oh, ah, I play football. Video games with my mates sometimes. Do you play?’

‘No. I’ve actually never really played a videogame.’

‘You’ve never?’

‘Except SingStar,’ I corrected, ‘and FarmVille.’ I’d been through a phase of that once years ago.

‘Oh. You never played video games?’ He seemed floored, as if I had told him a fun fact. ‘You play any sports?’ he continued, and I admitted I did not.

‘I never liked team games,’ I explained.

He asked if I went to the gym. I laughed in desperation, realising how hopelessly unrelatable I must be, how boring and contained. ‘No,’ I admitted. ‘Gyms kind of freak me out. I feel like people are watching me, and I just, don’t know how to use the machines.’

Thankfully, the tea arrived on a platter, with instructions on a little card. ‘Two-minute wait time,’ I read out, glad to have something to contribute.

‘Fancy,’ he said.

I wasn’t sure what was fancy about having the same wait time as two-minute noodles, so I pretended there was more to read on the card.

‘What about food?’ He asked. ‘You like to eat?’

‘Yes,’ I said, flooding with relief. But then he asked after my favourite cuisine, and I was once again floored.

‘Um, I don’t know, that’s a really hard question,’ I said, aware that it was in fact a very easy question. ‘Um. I like everything?’ I scrambled for something more concrete as I mentally retasted every meal I could remember eating. ‘Indian food, I like spicy.’

‘Ok, nice.’ He grinned, brushed his huge forearm across the table, absently. As he pulled it back, the tray was pushed, as easily as an errant cobweb, to the lip of the tabletop. The jug teetered and lurched. I lunged and grabbed hold of the tray, but the jug had leant too far, and half its contents were already on the floor.

‘Shit, oh I’m so sorry,’ he said.

‘It’s okay,’ I said brightly. It hadn’t been me who’d dropped it, so I felt, with relief, that I had won the date.

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