Kevin had been diagnosed as having a higher functioning autism. Research had shown similarities between this and Asperger’s Syndrome, where behavioural patterns could oscillate between ‘normal’ behaviour and severe autistic behaviour. It had been shown that high functioning autistic adults can meet the criteria for a diagnosis of autism yet show no cognitive delays, and can speak, read and write with an average to above average IQ.
With Kevin there were difficulties in communication, language and social interaction. His repetitive behaviour and narrow field of interest were usually deterrents for relationships with other students to develop, positive ones anyway. Abstract language concepts like irony, and even humour were often beyond his comprehension. Kevin could not ‘read’ people and was incapable of seeing or understanding manipulation, some thing the antagonistic rabbits quickly picked up on. In short, to them Kevin was fair game.
Kevin found it difficult to maintain eye contact when people spoke to him so the other students assumed he was always disinterested in them. So a cycle of indifference commenced, except when he was displaying his obsessiveness with cleanliness. The rabbits would wait with pent up anticipation when ever Kevin arrived. His first task was to go straight to the dirty, clay smeared sinks and taps to clean them. Then he would wipe clean the light switches, and state, without humour or joy, to no one in particular, ‘Spotless.’ Of course, being a pottery workshop the sinks and light switches provided Kevin with endless occupational activity.
The class caught on to his routine, and by the end of first semester they would watch the cleaning process and just as he finished they would all call out, ‘What do you call that, Kevin?’
He would look around and in a flat, matter of fact voice repeat, ‘Spotless.’ After a while something must have touched him deep inside because this ‘sport’ often resulted in the faintest smile.
Since Kevin had been attending these classes, his confidence and ability to engage in minimal conversation had improved out of sight as he developed an off beat fascination in numbers, quantities, percentages, and dates. His endlessly patient parents and Melinda were bemused by this fact, particularly as they were usually in relation to disasters, natural and man made. Kevin’s parents did not discourage Kevin from watching the news on the television; on the contrary they thought he should go through life like everyone else. His father had managed to teach Kevin how to use the internet by keying in salient words, only to become perplexed at his interest in words like Cyclone, War, and Catastrophe.
‘I suppose that’s the reality for all of us. Isn’t it?’ Jackson had tried to justify to Melinda several weeks ago after she’d told him Kevin had been entertaining the class that morning with the disturbing numbers of people that had been killed in various conflicts in the history of the world.
And this morning too, Melinda noticed Kevin seemed troubled again, too unsettled to play with his clay or even clean taps. Several times he’d got up from his stool, sat down, got up, walked around, and sat down again.
‘You okay, Kevin?’ Melinda asked.
‘Yes Melinda, I’m okay,’ he replied without the slightest inkling that anything about his behaviour was different. Then he began to speak, quite out of the blue, monotonously, ‘On May the eighteenth 1980 at 8.32 am, 52 people died because the Mt St Helen’s volcano erupted.’
‘Wow. I didn’t know that, Kevin. But I remember it was a huge eruption.’ ‘The summit was reduced by 1312 metres afterwards.’ And then, as if the two incidences were related, ‘In 2009 in the Victorian bushfires 208 people died.’
‘It was a terrible disaster, Kevin,’ Melinda replied as she scraped a lump of soggy clay up from the floor under his feet. She, unlike Kevin, whose comprehension was only fixed on the unemotive facts, understood the consequences of destructive bushfires, and had been moved by the suffering caused at the time.
As Melinda stood up, Kevin, who had sat on the stool next to her, began to ramble into his hands. His words, like a dooms day monologue, were not directed at anyone in particular, and had no correlation to the previous conversation. Melinda held back and allowed the words to flow a torrent.
‘Eight million died in World War One. Nineteen million, five hundred and thirty six thousand wounded. In World War Two twenty million, eight hundred and fifty eight thousand, eight hundred soldiers died, and twenty seven million, three hundred and seventy two thousand, nine hundred civilians died. Three thousand, nine hundred and twelve kamikaze suicide pilots in the Japanese Air Force died in the Pacific region between 1944 and 1945 … ’
‘I wish you’d go an’ bloody join ’em,’ one of the rabbits grumbled, aggrieved by Kevin commanding so much attention.
Kevin continued as if he was sitting by himself in the room.
‘Eleven hundred people died in the floods in Pakistan, eighteen died in the Queensland floods this year, one died in Cyclone Yasi, seventy one died in Cyclone Tracy in 1974, four hundred died in 1899 in Cyclone Mahina in Cape York, one hundred were Aborigines.’
‘Okay, thanks, Kevin. That was most informative. But I think that’s probably enough facts for now.’
‘Yeah, why don’t you go and clean the bloody sinks, ya dick head?’ a greasy haired female rabbit finally sneered through a lip load of piercings.
‘All right, all right, thanks, Tracy. How about we take a break? Ten minutes. When you come back I’ll open the kiln and you can collect your masterpieces.’
‘’Ooray!’ The rabbit mob chanted, scuffing their stools back, having already forgotten Kevin’s recital.
‘’Bout bloody time,’ one mumbled as he barged past Pammy, rudely knocking her.
The cheers were a hollow expression of delight for Melinda, for she knew the practices of some these hooded, sneaky eyed delinquents and their real motivation. Behind a service area, on the southern end of the campus there was a tall brick wall, on the way to the rabbits’ backstreet warrens. Over the past few years there had accumulated a large pile of broken clay shards at the base of it. Brightly glazed bowls, quirky animals and masks, the occasional teapot, albeit with dribbly spouts, platters, carved boxes and sculptural forms constructed with fine white stoneware clay, and delicate crackle glazed Raku fired pots had been hurled at the brick wall with idiotic cheers. No ashtrays though. Red target rings had been sprayed about two metres off the ground. In the centre was a crudely painted penis and testicles with the words smash all poofs sprayed underneath.
Melinda could understand the desire to create an explosion. And the sort after adrenalin rush that followed. By all accounts, while they were under the teacher’s watchful eye, they had professed a primitive pride in something they had created themselves. Melinda could see it in their eyes as they took hold of their glazed works, still warm from the belly of the fire. So it was beyond her why these boys, and girls, would want to destroy their own work that they had given so much attention to, given birth to.
That was until a young student at the end of last year, David Such, a sensitive and unusually creative lad from a background almost completely devoid of nurture, made the most delicately carved figurine of a mother holding a child in her arms. It was a simple but profound representation of family love. It had been on display in the cabinet by the principal’s office for several weeks, admired and talked about by teachers, visiting parents and students alike. Knowing the boy’s home life Melinda was fascinated. It was so realistic and so evocative of a mother’s devotion to her child, it belied reason.
But a fortnight later, Charlene Peters, the only girl in Melinda’s pottery class then who was quite at ease working at the same tables as the spazes, had told Melinda that David had removed the figurine from the cabinet, and had taken it to The Wall. Charlene had retrieved the mother’s decapitated head amongst the rubble and handed it dolefully to Melinda.
‘Why David?’ she’d asked him later, her eyes beginning to glaze like the lustre on the little figurine’s face.
David had mumbled to the ground, ‘Me Dad reckons I’m gay if I do stuff like that.’