Authors: Matthew Formby
After a few months he did not have to check so many words and was beginning to feel a lot more clever. Then the internet developed more and online searches, Wikipedia and web dictionaries made finding information even easier. His pool of knowledge was expanding considerably. But as he commented on articles on The Guardian's website and attempted to influence others through his wisdom, he realized people were not interested. Even when he wrote about a personal experience related to his Asperger's Syndrome, the amount of responses and signs of interest he got were few. Engaging in a debate based on logic or a political position was even more pointless. Everyone was set in their ways as they always are. Everyone believes they know best. A few people lightened the mood by posting puns, laughing at the absurdity of it all or by mocking silly trends. Luke tried being one of those jokers too -but was told not to give up his day job or merely ignored. Since he had no friends off the computer, socialising on it made him even more depressed and he halted his comments.
He one day posted on an article about benefit cuts to say that the help people on benefits got was non-existent Luke's welfare benefits had been checked a few times and the stress had been unbelievable. As well as struggling to cope with interacting with other people every day he never knew if he would some day be forced to live on £60 a week; and be subject to the sarcasm of jobcentre jobsworths every few days. The physical effort of having to shop almost every day to get ingredients was a strain on Luke too; he had to make fresh, gluten-free or carbohydrate-free (depending on how dedicated he felt) meals. How would he manage to do that and look for jobs that in the current recession were not even there?
Worse, he could be told to engage in work-related activity - which was often a sneaky term used to describe what was really slave labour. People were told to clean up graffiti, pick up litter or work in a shop for free. This not only carried with it a stigma and afforded people no career advancement: it also undermined people who were working for wages as there were less paid jobs as a result of such schemes.
An increasing number of people believed that harsh actions were being taken against job seekers - and the poor - as a warning to people who had jobs. As sanctions and bullying reports in the media became ever more common, working people would be all the more determined to not lose their jobs. Nobody wanted to be known as "the other", that stigmatized outsider who was labelled all sorts of nasty names, unwelcome in the local shops and pubs; and many a time even driven to end their life. Luke posted a comment about everything that was happening around welfare and how it had affected him, and put that he was considering suicide himself the way things were going. He then posted that he would not bother to post anymore, for regardless of how bad things were, few commenters on The Guardian cared about his point of view.
A few days later an e-mail from a woman called Deborah. Luke had not expected anyone to write to him as people rarely did. Deborah had never e-mailed a stranger before but explained to Luke she was dying from a condition doctors called Lesch-Nyhan disease. She wrote to ask him to keep posting on the site and was sympathetic and kind but Luke could not go back. He had been told by people not to give up things in the past: a voluntary position in which he was being overlooked and abused by fellow volunteers, for example - and staying in situations that upset him usually only got worse. She did inspire Luke though.
She had such strength despite all the hardships of her existence. Luke learned from her that she had lost her Employment Support Allowance (or ESA as everyone called it) for five months. An assessment had deemed she was fit to work. It beggared belief. Deborah explained that when she received a copy of the doctor's assessment during the tribunal review process, they had trivialized every problem she mentioned and not noted the medications by name she took. They even made it sound as though she took very little medicine when in fact she was on more than twenty pills a day. She would probably get her benefit reinstated eventually - but the damage was already done and her condition being so poor, she had already lived for months on no money except what her parents and friends could provide.
After a biology lesson at college, new ideas were filling Luke's mind. He was remembering what he had just learned about the carbon cycle and considering how he could use that knowledge. At last, feeling sad and unheard, it struck him to he write a poem; and so he did and then sent it Deborah.
Reincarnation is what I'll write it about, decided Luke. In biology, he had learned that all living matter contained carbon and that carbon re-entered the atmosphere when living things died. It was as though all living beings continued to exist forever. Even bacteria grew to seem immensely important when he understood the carbon cycle: they ate and digested dying creatures to harvest their carbon particles to be recycled. Luke had also just learned that rocks were formed from the fossils of creatures that had roamed the earth long ago. And with this in mind, Luke penned his poem thus:
From the corner of my eye, do I spy!
A glimmer of an atom.
Reappearing from carbon.
Chalk hearts formed in marble arch.
Deborah wrote back to Luke shortly praising his poem and they continued to exchange emails for a few days. Deborah told Luke she would probably die from kidney failure - most people with her condition did. She was often in terrible pain. At last, their friendship dissolved when Luke wrote to ask her if she might consider letting him stay at her house in London. When he had found out she lived there, he could not resist asking. She had taken it the wrong way and simply never answered and there ended their familiarity with one another.
Luke now began to lose interest in the news. He liked being kept abreast of what was going on the world and being well informed but a fair few of the articles on newspapers' websites were written by feminists who seemed to want to always belittle the ways of men. These feminists would criticise pornography and lads' magazines - and quite rightly - but would barely mention women's fashion and gossip magazines. All the tabloid newspapers' websites Luke had left comments on were abysmal. Bigoted hatred was given the thumbs up by hundreds of headstrong fools. Then there had been the recent scandal of journalists hacking people's phones. Some heads had rolled but the bosses who ran the show had survived. It was almost always the case. Whenever things hit the fan it was the pawns who took the full blame while the kings and queens swanned on in their seedy game.
Luke's sister Bridget had for a few months lived in a communal farm in Surrey. The residents there were campaigning to end the British army's involvement in some countries. Their campaigns were designed to stop the atrocities and broken lives that were left behind by war and military action. In their community, refugees from the countries they lobbied for changes to stayed with them - and informed them of true conditions, the kind most people had no idea of. They all would stand outside a local army barracks on Sundays and try to hand out leaflets to soldiers and nearby residents. Some were arrested, a few were even imprisoned, all because the British believed in war: something even the ancient Greeks had realised produced no winners.
They had once gathered outside the high court in London when Julian Assange was put on trial. Assange had exposed the truth about secretive military actions and the authorities were trying to discredit him. Yet the media men and women, every single one of them, deliberately avoided photographing Luke's sister and her group even though there were many of them - and they were very visible and vocal. There had been instances, Luke had noticed, where the media used pictures in reporting a case that did not add up. For example, he had read a story about an alleged kidnapper. One photograph of the suspect's house showed a house flying an American flag, another two photographs showed the same home flying a Puerto Rican flag. When the case had finished and the man was found guilty, the house was demolished. The question in Luke's mind was: had the police planted evidence? Was he framed? If the house was destroyed, who would ever know? Police often sent journalists with cameras and phones away from a scene too. If they had nothing to hide, why? Perhaps the police only wanted a select few media outlets, who had them in their pockets, to have access to information, Luke would think.
Indeed if you thought about it, for someone who had criminal intentions the ideal cover was to be a police officer. If you were seen as someone who upheld the law, who would possibly suspect you of breaking it? It had not been long ago that the British media reported a secret orgy involving many of the Britain's judges had took place at a country estate. If the morals of the law were so lax, woe betide anyone judged by them. Even celebrities from TV and newspapers were now being found guilty of sexual assaults they had alleged to have made years ago. How then so much trust was placed in the media was a mystery to Luke. On the subject of sex, however, Luke did feel a little uncertain. When he was around thirteen in school he could remember there had been young women in his classes who were troublemakers; they had made up simple allegations against people back then and such girls could grow up to make more serious ones. Yet there was no denying there many genuine incidents of rape too.
Well, Luke, concluded bitterly: whatever the media wanted to portray, it would. The people who owned it for the most part lived on islands operating as tax havens. Either that, or they simply avoided their country's tax by using very clever lawyers who specialized in finding loopholes - some no doubt even collaborated with governments in creating laws that would serve such fiendish ends. It was likely that anyone who tried to expose them or challenge them was blackmailed. No doubt when they did immoral or criminal things their influence would help them cover it up too. Controlling information was power. Those who had the means to access the system that published what people believed to be true or false - what opportunities to manipulate they had. At their very fingertips, so much power - and of course power corrupted, as it always had. Now that courts could convict people without evidence and have people sent to prison based on mere hearsay - or "witness testimony" - it was a world in which paranoia and constant fear had become rational.
People were convicted of assault or harassment for staging a political protest: say, throwing an egg or jumping on stage to interrupt a speech; or even just expressing an opinion in a way someone claimed caused them feelings of anxiety or intimidation. Julian Assange had been accused of a rape by a Swedish woman - but only after he had leaked details of unacceptable violence in the military campaigns in the Middle East. If a person was going to expose the truth at the cost of the selfish interests of the wealthy and powerful, it was not ridiculous to imagine those people would want to tarnish their name.
Luke felt the situation was bleak. Legal aid was unavailable for many people and Luke himself had experienced indifference from lawyers when he had approached them. Even the Citizens' Advice Bureau - who everyone recommended, from the Samaritans to the National Autistic Society to the lawyers turning him away - told him to simply drop the problem as there was probably nothing that could be done. He asked all the different lawyers if he could sue the NHS or Health Service Ombudsman after their complaints system treated him so cruelly - and usually had got no farther than the front desk. Even people who wanted to change the system from the inside usually faced nothing but problems. Whistle-blowers had lies invented to make them sound worse than the injustices and corruption they exposed. And just after the legal aid cuts, the government was talking about creating more new laws... Laws that would make it harder to challenge people in authority. Laws that would make leaking data and information they did not want people to know an act of treason. Their excuse? The usual - freely available information could aid terrorists. And as long as people accepted that idiotic superstition then further everyone went marching towards the end of all good things. Ever again doing anything spontaneous, unapproved by the hierarchy or the established system would become impossible. Life was becoming more like Orwell's 1984 by the day and yet this was it, this was life! - and Luke would only live it once.
LVI
Chloe, Penny and Dave were sometimes good company and Luke even began to join in with their humourous discussions. In lessons they would talk about Family Guy episodes, though this would eventually always become a discussion about South Park. Luke did not understand the appeal of that show. It was very alienating to sit there listening to people recall their favourite moments from a show he did not like - nor find amusing. Chloe and Penny sometimes teased Luke and occasionally crossed the threshold into bullying. In one lesson he had been staring shyly at the floor while Wendy was explaining something to the class. Penny had leaned forward before yelling, "Wake up!"
Luke was talked about by the two girls sometimes too as though he was not there. "It's the quiet ones you've got to watch out for," Chloe would say. "He balances our group. I'm the loud one. Penny's the giddy one. Dave's the sarcastic one and Luke is the quiet one. He keeps us in balance." When Wendy asked students to pair up and research on the internet, Luke would do it with Chloe. This was because she was sat next to him. It could be annoying, for Chloe had a habit of taking control. The only people she did not boss around were those who intimidated her and she was the kind of girl who loved domineering men. Other times, the whole table would be set the task of creating a poster to display and as Chloe and Penny were more extroverted they led the way while Luke was scared of participating for fear of doing something wrong; if he did he would be sure to be made fun of.
He once wrote something during the class that Chloe looked at, and she grabbed his paper, showing it to the others. "Look. Doesn't that look like he's written whore?" she grinned indiscreetly. Luke had actually written "where" but the word had been scrawled messily. "Oh, he's a dark horse," said Dave - at which the table laughed. Even Luke accompanied them though he worried what might come next. It never became so bad that he felt he was being made a victim in the way he had been in school. Nevertheless he did feel people were undermining him as well as excluding him. It was probably because he had a different personality which really made him feel bullied - yes, less physically and blatantly than in his youth, but he could feel it happening all over again. To prepare for the worst, he bought a dictation machine and surreptitiously kept it in his pocket to record during lessons. Knowing he had some proof to present in the event anything happened, it kept his confidence for the time being.