73. I used to think that Mother and Father might get divorced. That was because they had lots of arguments and sometimes they hated each other. This was because of the stress of looking after someone who has Behavioral Problems like I have. I used to have lots of Behavioral Problems, but I don’t have so many now because I’m more grown up and I can take decisions for myself and do things on my own like going out of the house and buying things at the shop at the end of the road. These are some of my Behavioral Problems:
- Not talking to people for a long time (Once I didn’t talk to anyone for 5 weeks.)
- Not eating or drinking anything for a long time (When I was 6, Mother used to get me to drink strawberry-flavored slimming meals out of a measuring jug and we would have competitions to see how fast I could drink a quarter of a liter.)
- Not liking being touched
- Screaming when I am angry or confused
- Not liking being in really small places with other people
- Smashing things when I am angry or confused
- Groaning
- Not liking yellow things or brown things and refusing to touch yellow things or brown things
- Refusing to use my toothbrush if anyone else has touched it
- Not eating food if different sorts of food are touching each other
- Not noticing that people are angry with me
- Not smiling
- Saying things that other people think are rude (People say that you always have to tell the truth. But they don’t mean this because you are not allowed to tell old people that they are old and you are not allowed to tell people if they smell funny or if a grown-up has made a fart. And you are not allowed to say “I don’t like you” unless that person has been horrible to you.)
- Doing stupid things (Stupid things are things like emptying a jar of peanut butter onto the table in the kitchen and making it level with a knife so it covers all the table right to the edges, or burning things on the gas stove to see what happened to them, like my shoes or silver foil or sugar.)
- Hitting other people
- Hating France
- Driving Mother’s car (I only did this once by borrowing the keys when she went into town on the bus, and I hadn’t driven a car before and I was 8 years old and 5 months so I drove it into the wall, and the car isn’t there anymore because Mother is dead.)
- Getting cross when someone has moved the furniture (It is permitted to move the chairs and the table in the kitchen because that is different, but it makes me feel dizzy and sick if someone has moved the sofa and the chairs around in the living room or the dining room. Mother used to do this when she did the hoovering, so I made a special plan of where all the furniture was meant to be and did measurements and I put everything back in its proper place afterward and then I felt better. But since Mother died, Father hasn’t done any hoovering, so that is OK. And Mrs. Shears did the hoovering once but I did groaning and she shouted at Father and she never did it again.)
Sometimes these things would make Mother and Father really angry and they would shout at me or they would shout at each other. Sometimes Father would say, “Christopher, if you don’t behave I swear I shall knock the living daylights out of you,” or Mother would say, “Jesus, Christopher, I am seriously considering putting you in a home,” or Mother would say, “You are going to drive me into an early grave.”