How to Be Happy Read online

  Yep, it was damn hard. They had to make some tough decisions, and I think they raised two remarkable young men.

  It took me a long time to realise my brothers were different. As a young child, I thought we were normal. Three kids, two parents, a cat and a dog. The picket-fence family.

  Then something mysterious happened when I was twelve or thirteen. I got a lot of hair very quickly, my voice started cracking, and I became ultra-aware of the world around me. I had always wanted to be liked, and I’d always cared what people thought of me, but now my world expanded, and I suddenly realised just how different the twins were. We couldn’t take a family photo. We couldn’t go on adventurous holidays. We couldn’t try out a new restaurant or new food. Routine was a religion in our family. Spontaneity was blasphemous and would almost certainly lead to tears.

  Imagine building this world while also raising another neurotic young man. My parents did an amazing job under tough circumstances. They did their absolute best for me. I was never denied an opportunity. But there was a lot that was inevitably impossible for my family. And when I became a teenager, I began to resent all the ways we were different.

  As it turns out, this feeling of resentment is a fairly normal part of being a teenager, Aspergers in the family or not. Everyone thinks their family is about as cool as wearing socks with thongs. Everyone feels their family is probably the daggiest bunch of dags ever to have bred.

  But just as strong as the resentment is the fierce and loyal protection that only brotherhood can summon. I felt this for Ray too. Bullies picking on me was one thing, but making fun of the truly defenceless was abhorrent.

  Not that Ray would need that much protection. Ray knew every single line from Austin Powers off by heart. By the end of year eight, he would be celebrated for his talents. His sense of humour would even disarm Cameron.

  We should get back to Cameron.

  ‘I could snap you like a twig,’ he slurred into my face.

  ‘Yes, you probably could,’ I replied through his tight grip.

  Cameron, intellectual that he was, was baffled by my response. It wasn’t what I was supposed to say. I was supposed to put up a fight which would egg him on further. I was supposed to retaliate physically and provide him with the opportunity to display his manliness by bashing me into a fine paste. Sadly for him, he wasn’t prepared for the idea that I was a coward. Perplexed, and wearing an expression not unlike a bewildered animal, he let me go.

  It was the first week of high school, and it was not going well.

  I had somehow stumbled out of a primary school, a world I understood and knew, into a place rich with stereotypes. It was like I was in a cartoon. There was the Aspergers kid with the cheese. The bully with the spiky hair and chubby sidekick. The handsome boy from South Africa who everyone had a crush on. The girls who practised dance routines at lunch and made mean comments to each other. The boys who kept their shirts untucked and refused to wear the school hat because they were just that cool. The first-year teachers who were overwhelmed and tried not to cry in the face of harsh adolescent rudeness. The experienced teachers who smoked between lessons and hated every one of us.

  In this mess, who the hell was I?

  I was too scared to have my shirt untucked. Too terrified to join in on girly dance routines. Too Australian to be a handsome South African.

  I hated it. But I really didn’t want to hate it. I wanted to be calm, cool and confident. It would do no one any good for me to whinge and whine. This was high school. It was part of growing up. And I needed to get on with it. This was my opportunity to be a man and show my family that I was ready to be an independent young adult.

  So when Mum picked me up every afternoon and asked me about my day, I would say ‘fine’. Reassured by this, Mum would then tell me about her day. I didn’t want to tell her the truth about Cameron or my feeling of intense isolation, because Mum had a lot on her plate.

  Our family was changing. At that time, we lived fifteen minutes outside town, across the road from the tiny country primary school that I had attended. Andy and Chrissy still went there, and Dad taught there too. My high school attendance meant Mum and I would drive into town everyday, with Mum frequently staying there for work. (I did try the bus at one stage, but the smoke-filled, noisy, forty-five minute trip home added an extra two hours to the day and added opportunities for Cameron to point out that I was a fag. I begged Mum to drive me back and forth.) The splintering of the family—Mum and me in town, Dad and the boys back home—was creating some pressure.

  Importantly, the time for the boys to move into high school was just two years away. How would they handle adolescence? Where could they go? The tiny primary school had been perfect for them, but there were no high schools nearby. It meant a change was coming, and change is the enemy to the Aspergers mind. Would they be able to survive the confusing mess of classrooms, teachers and bullies?

  Some minor cracks were appearing in my parents’ marriage, and Mum would share her worries with me. Dad felt alienated from Mum, and Mum felt under-appreciated. I tried to give advice, but I was incapable of understanding the true depth of their adult problems. Both Mum and Dad were dealing with their own lifelong battles with depression. Mum would often cry in those days. I recognised in Mum a vulnerability that was also in me: a desperate, heart-wrenching loneliness. With few friends to turn to and a lack of family beyond her children and husband, Mum found solace in her eldest son. I tried to be the best support I could.

  On the evening of Cameron’s attack, I went to bed shaken. The thought of returning to school the next day made me want to vomit. I had avoided a beating, but I was certain I wouldn’t be so lucky next time. At lunchtime I would hide in the library, but there was no way I could avoid Cameron in class.

  As I lay there, something else that had been bothering kept coming to my mind.

  At high school, who was I?

  In primary school, I’d been a friendly kid with a small bunch of reliable friends.

  In high school, I was the loner who spent the day in desperate fear.

  Quiet tears soon became loud sobs. The noise was enough to notify my parents.

  ‘What’s wrong, buddy?’ Dad asked.

  I quickly tried to think of a lie. Um…Rachel and Ross just can’t get it together on Friends?

  But I had never cried over television.

  Ummm…

  Palestine?

  But I had no actual knowledge of Palestine.

  I had nothing. I could only tell the truth.

  ‘I hate high school,’ I sobbed.

  Mum and Dad held me.

  ‘Buddy,’ Dad said, ‘you’ve been saying it’s fine.’

  ‘You should tell us these things,’ Mum added.

  I felt awful. I was worrying my parents unnecessarily. Why couldn’t I just toughen up?

  The next day, Mum apologised for sharing her marital problems with me. I promised her it was fine, genuinely wanting to at least know the path to my parent’s divorce (that’s how it looked in my mind). So Mum continued to talk to me about all sorts of things that I didn’t understand.

  It was clear to me then, and even clearer to me now, that Mum was deter
mined that I wouldn’t feel unloved or uncared for in comparison with my brothers. The private school, the new uniforms, the car drives in—the whole thing was about me being given every opportunity that I could be afforded. Mum and Dad were making sure that I never missed out on anything because of the twins.

  On top of all this, Mum committed a crime that is universally feared by all teenagers: she interfered in the intricate social balance of school. To my teachers, I had been the fairly quiet nerdy kid who hung out with Ray. But a hastily made phone call the day after my weeping soon turned me into the unhappy quiet nerdy kid who needed urgent help because he was a big wimp.

  I knew nothing about Mum contacting the school until a morning assembly, when my English teacher (who I’d only had one lesson with) approached me.

  ‘You’re in the debating team,’ she said, as though it had been settled years ago. ‘Come to the meeting at lunchtime.’

  I was scared out of my mind. But I went. A teacher had given me an order.

  This teacher was Mrs Coates. She would change my life forever.

  2

  Smeghead

  Mrs Coates was awesome and super-hot in an I’m-a-thirteen-year-old-and-you’re-a-young-pretty-teacher kind of way. She was an English and drama teacher, and a very decent costume designer. She came to school in colourful and daring fashions that soon got her into trouble with the rest of the staff. Tops with bare shoulders, shirts with rock music logos, and impressive boots with big heels. For her subtle subversion of the rules, she got immediate respect from us all.

  As instructed, I met Mrs Coates in her classroom at lunchtime. She smiled warmly as I came in. Her red lipstick was especially shiny that day.

  ‘David,’ she said. ‘Welcome. Have you met Simon?’

  She gestured to another boy on the other side of the room. Simon looked too sporty to be in debating. He was solidly built and had short, shaved blond hair.

  ‘Hi,’ he said confidently.

  ‘Hey,’ I replied.

  ‘So,’ Mrs Coates began, ‘we need a debating team. We meet once a week, write our speeches together, and then we have a debate about once a month. I’ve got you both in different English classes and I think you’d be great.’

  Oh, God. I wanted to stand out less at high school, not do anything that would make me stand out more. I especially didn’t want to try to work with a sporty kid like Simon. He didn’t look like he’d be into debating at all.

  ‘Good evening ladies and gentlemen,’ I imagined him saying in front of our entire year level. ‘Today, we’re debating the question: Is David Burton gay, or just a woman? As first speaker, I will be making the point that he’s quite possibly both, and should be exiled from society as soon as possible.’

  I blinked back to reality.

  ‘We can’t really proceed just at the moment,’ Mrs Coates was saying. ‘We need at least three. So consider your first week of homework to go out and find a third speaker. I’m sure you’ll track down someone.’

  I thought about Ray trying to be a debating speaker. I couldn’t imagine him being interested in much else aside from Pokémon and cheese. But I didn’t know anyone else to ask. This was going to be a disaster.

  ‘Is that all right?’ Mrs Coates asked Simon.

  I looked to him. For the first time I noticed that he was holding a gridded notebook and an expensive graphics calculator. We weren’t supposed to buy those things for another couple of years. Maybe I’d read him wrong. Maybe he was nerdier than I thought.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said.

  Mrs Coates moved her beautiful blue eyes to me.

  ‘You’re fine with that, aren’t you David?’

  I swallowed. I smiled. I couldn’t disappoint her.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Absolutely fine.’

  High school subjects were weird. None more baffling to me than manual arts. A room full of sharpened blades and automatic power weapons was apparently the perfect place to put a mob of restless teenagers.

  Cameron was unusually good at manual arts. He burnt a perfect penis into the side of his ash tray. My ash tray failed to meet the sole criteria of an ash tray: holding ash. In fact, it couldn’t hold anything. It looked like a slightly bent scrap of metal.

  Our next assignment was a doorstop. The final test was a disaster. I watched as the classroom door easily moved my miserably chiselled stick of wood, slamming shut on it and snapping it in two. My poor doorstop never stood a chance. Cameron saw the whole thing, of course, and applauded. In my imagination Cameron was the door. I was the malformed and useless doorstop, snapping pathetically under his force.

  It was in woodwork that the blood came. I was chiselling far too enthusiastically at my block of wood when I was given reason to pause. Heavy drops of dark red were pooling on top of the timber.

  I raised my hands. My right hand was covered in blood.

  ‘Did you cut yourself?’

  This question came from the girl across the table. Mary.

  Mary was known throughout the school for her muteness. She was a round-faced, sad-looking girl, who tucked her shirt into her skirt and pulled it up, higher than her waist, to cover her slightly overweight midsection. Her short brown hair covered her freckled face, and her eyes, if you could manage to see them, were remarkably large and wide, open with quiet terror. I had been watching her from afar ever since the school’s open day last year, when she stood at the back of the classroom and cried as the principal welcomed us all warmly. We were all uncorrupted and shivering twelve year olds then, without uniforms, and without a pecking order. Mary stood at the back, head up, looking forward, not moving, with tears slowly rolling down her face.

  In the months since then, her tears had stopped, but she remained mute and afraid. We had been thrown into each other’s orbit by social order alone, drawn to the same wood-shop table in silence.

  This was the first time I had heard her speak. Her voice was soft, delicate and full of concern. I looked at her in surprise.

  ‘Did you cut yourself?’ she asked again.

  ‘Um, no. I don’t think so. I don’t know.’

  Then Mary pointed to my chest, right at my heart. She smiled. I had never seen Mary smile. In surreal wonder I looked down at my shirt. A pool of red ink was spreading across my pocket. The realisation came to me instantly. The red pen in my pocket was leaking. Cameron had given it to me outside, insisting that I carry it or he’d punch me in the dick. Without thinking, I had put it in my pocket.

  Mary and I laughed.

  I’d found my best friend.

  Mary joined the debating team. Simon hadn’t found anyone. Mrs Coates was very pleased to welcome Mary on board.

  Basking in Mrs Coates’ tuition and her gentle warmth and positivity, Mary’s confidence blossomed. And mine did too. I found the one lunch hour a week I had with Mrs Coates a wonderful respite from the classrooms and the terror of lunchtime.

  Plus, I enjoyed debating: articulating well-defined points, making an audience laugh to bring them round to your side. All of it clicked with me. It was the best part of high school.

  My first impression of Simon had been all wrong. Sporty wasn’t quite the right word. Sim
on was tough and determined. He looked at home in his perfectly ironed uniform, and his hair never seemed to grow past the clean tidiness of his buzz cut. Simon treated high school like it was the military. He wanted to succeed.

  Simon was smart. Super smart. Smart in a way that I wasn’t. Our maths classes came together later that year. I was completely lost in maths, but Simon was at home. He was more than willing to help me; he talked me through my mistakes. The situation was reversed in English. I found a similar pleasure in pointing out nouns and verbs and subtext to him.

  Simon was confident but a loner. We were diametrically different men. He was the science guy, and I was the artist. In life outside school, we would never be companions, but our desperation drove us together. We were mates. Along with Mary, we were a regular Three Amigos.

  As our friendship grew, school slowly became easier. It also helped that towards the end of the year, Cameron was expelled when he gave someone a blood nose and a teacher found pot in his backpack. I never saw him again.

  After twelve months, it seemed I had finally been able to answer the question that had so perplexed me since I arrived: who the hell was I? I was the debating guy, with the two friends. We were ‘that’ group. We went to the library most lunchtimes. Simon and I swapped computing magazines. Mary and I memorised and acted out British sketch comedy. To put it bluntly, we were big nerds. But we didn’t really care. Nerds are the best people.

  My new community had come at a cost. Ray faded into the background. I remained kind to him, and he would occasionally sit with us at lunch, but he was difficult to talk to and sometimes unintentionally rude.

  ‘What’s that?’ he would say with disgust, looking down at a humble ham sandwich Mum had packed for my lunch.

  I shrugged. ‘Just ham,’ I said.