Free Somebody Somewhere by Donna Williams Page B

the work despite the fact that there were no toilet facilities and I had to go in the orchard, bush-style.
    The boss hung around like an old blowfly. He stood beneath the ladder I perched on in my apricot-stained dress.
    I was confused about the intentions behind the things he kept asking me about: boyfriends, marriage, being pretty, and sleeping with people. These were factual questions requiring factual answers but I recognized some kind of system to his questioning and felt uncomfortable about the type of topics he found interesting. I told my father about it. He set me straight.
    “Stop annoying me,” I told the boss. He took me off the job I was doing and put me on the hardest job in the place: repicking. Repicking involves carrying the tall metal ladder from tree to tree, row to row, in order to pick about five to ten apricots from each tree. Payment was by the crateload and it took about six times as long to fill a crate this way. I watched the men picking full trees in the rows nearby. I choked on the inequality, the dust, and the heat. I emptied my last apronful of apricots, cashed in my tickets, and left. Sometimes, no job is better than “any” job.
    —
    I cleaned my father’s girlfriend’s house and rode the bicycle my friend had loaned me around the dusty clay roads. I collected leaves and pebbles and feathers and studied the fall of shadows created by dead old gum trees at various points in the day. I walked through fields of dried grass and hovered around the hay shed smelling the hay and watching the sun set slowly behind the barbed-wire fence of the paddock. I took photos of cows and of my own bare feet, walked tightrope along the white paling fence at the back of the house, and spun the clothesline, watching the wind make the washing flutter. I listened to nature play a symphony, caught up in the patterns of fields and hills, the play of light upon grass, the rush of the wind past my ears, the crystal-like dewdrops hanging upon barbed wire in the early morning, the
thud
,
thud
, rhythm of my own feet running over clay and scratchy dried golden grass that scratched my freckled, sunburned legs.
    Inside the house the feeling between my father’s girlfriend and me was icy cold. If only she didn’t have that high-pitched voice, I couldhave stood listening to her. I knew it wasn’t her fault and tried my best to remind myself of that every time anxiety soared.
    My father had tried to talk her around. I had given her a copy of my book to read in the hope it might help her understand that I was trying.
    “You’re not autistic,” she declared, almost spitting out the words in disgust. “My friend’s sister has a daughter who is autistic. She lives in a psychiatric hospital. She goes to the toilet anywhere and can’t even feed or dress herself.”
    Was I meant to conform to these pathetic expectations or accept that I simply “wasn’t trying”? I wanted to scream at her that it was probably because I
was
obsessive about trying that I had progressed in ways this other woman had not.
    A letter arrived in the mail. It was from Kathy, an autistic woman from America.
    Kathy was six months younger than I was. Like me, she had gone to regular schools. Like me, she had a degree (history and politics). She lived on her own in an apartment, worked part-time and studied part-time.
    “So, autistic people can’t feed or dress themselves, and pee everywhere,” I thought as I read her letter. “Obviously, not all.”
    —
    I suffered from food allergies, vitamin and mineral deficiencies, and a blood-sugar problem called hypoglycemia, all of which my father’s girlfriend seemed to tolerate with gritted teeth as a load of fancy hoo-ha. Among these difficulties was a severe allergy to everything containing milk.
    “I don’t believe in all this allergy business,” she said, dishing me up ice cream. “I really shouldn’t eat this,” I told her, “it’s made from milk and it’s got sugar. I’m not meant to