CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Guest: @TinyHux, queer and neurodivergent blogger
RAINA: How did being autistic affect dating for you?
TINYHUX: A girl I worked with asked me to her car one night.
I went and we were just sitting there, laughing and chatting.
She was really pretty. She was playing Fiona Apple and said that the current song always felt like “make-out music” to her, that it always made her feel in the mood.
I think I just started talking about how the sonic composition of the song was interesting in its layering.
[Loud, prolonged laughter]
RAINA: Why are we like this?
Raina said goodbye to her best friend and her sister after some brunch in the kitchen sunlight.
Solana quietly promised to stay out all night with a friend and find somewhere else to sleep.
Raina then got as much filming done for the show as humanly possible, speaking at a higher word-per-minute level than any human had ever achieved before.
Certainly, she hadn’t. She filed the footage and then crashed through her inbox, firing replies back to people with a curtness she hoped they would forgive.
She had a couple of hours before he was due to arrive. She decided to moisturize.
She put on her favourite album. She filled the tub with water close to boiling, letting the steam fill up the room, cloud the mirror and open her up. She scrubbed and rubbed with harsh sand and soft cream.
It was bliss. Sensory bliss.
She was startled out of the bliss by her phone ringing, the shrill sound echoing in the bathroom. She wiped her bubbled hand with a flannel and answered. ‘Hello?’
There was a pause before a woman’s voice said, ‘Ronda Lewis?’
‘No,’ Raina replied. ‘Raina.’
The woman made a small sound of irritation, as if her inability to get someone else’s name right was somehow Raina’s fault. ‘Whatever. I’m Amanda Nolan.’
She went on to identify herself as a journalist from a newspaper that Raina’s mother liked to read, but Raina thought unfit to line the compost bin.
Amanda’s voice was filled with a strange mix of disdainful boredom and unearned familiarity.
Raina felt every protective instinct she’d honed over the years spark inside of her, but she let the woman speak.
‘Well, you don’t have a publicist or an agent as far as I can see, so I thought I’d go right to the source.’
‘Lucky me.’
‘Now, call me an old bat, but a part of me does despair when I see award shows like the Mondays including YouTube and internet creators within their nominations.’
Raina waited to see if there was a second act to that statement but there was only pointed and pregnant silence. She exhaled and sank a little deeper into her bath and waited.
‘However, you did receive two nominations this year. For Best Entertainment Podcast and Best New Host.’
‘Correct.’
Another sigh of irritation, one that Raina had often heard before.
She knew that neurotypical people wanted her to infer what their pauses meant.
They wanted her to jump in with answers that made their questions easier.
It was a natural rhythm that neurotypical people knew and used with one another, regularly.
Raina wasn’t tuned into that frequency, and she didn’t wish to make presumptions.
So, she waited.
‘Well?’ the woman prompted. ‘How does that feel?’
Raina bristled at her tone but made herself smile, so that her voice would sound sunny over the phone. ‘It feels wonderful. I never thought anyone would listen or watch. But now we have an amazing community, so it feels like they’re coming with me.’
‘Only they won’t be. You’re the only one who will be at the glamorous ceremony.’
‘Not necessarily – I’m not the biggest fan of large crowds.’
‘Is that a disorder thing? I confess, I’ve only listened to a little of your show, and I found it tedious.
I get my fill of disability stories at annual telethons; I can’t see why anyone would want an hour of it every week.
Why does something like that need to be made so public? Also, “neurodivergent”. What a word.’
She spoke with such dripping condescension, Raina felt something prick at the back of her eyes.
Flashing memories of being taken out of the classroom for a therapy appointment or a doctor’s examination.
The inclusion unit with the teacher who looked at her like she was a specimen in need of vivisection.
The career adviser who told her that being neurodivergent would ruin her life and she should do whatever it took to pass for neurotypical.
The people who recoiled when she finally felt able to tell the truth.
It all flickered before her like flipped pages in a sketchbook.
She suddenly felt no desire to be accommodating.
‘Is there a particular quote you would like me to give you for your little rag?’ Raina asked calmly. ‘Or can we terminate this conversation?’
‘I— Excuse me?’
‘I’ve read some of your columns, actually,’ Raina mused, laying her legs against the side of the bath, splashing a little water onto the black-and-white floor tiles.
‘Not my kind of writing, but I entertain alternative points of view. Even if they involve publicly berating your staff under the flimsy guise of a political piece about class.’
‘For your information—’
‘Careful, Amanda,’ Raina said softly. ‘I used to be a cleaner. Hell, I might have been yours. You don’t know. You never learn people’s names and I’ve dyed my hair. Certainly could be.’
Astonished silence hung on the other end of the line.
‘Here’s your quote,’ Raina added, her voice brisk and breezy.
‘I’m delighted that the show is being honoured by the Mondays, not only because it’s a new type of media, but also because it’s a disability-focused platform.
I hope this will be the first of many nominations for neurodivergent creators. ’
She could hear rustling on the other end of the line. Then, ‘They told me you were a little upstart. I don’t buy your sweetness-and-light act for a minute. Look and act like a teenager but with a viper tongue.’
‘If I have any sweetness and light in me, I’m not giving it to sneering clickbait miners. You can print that, too.’
‘I’ll print what I like, missus,’ railed the other woman. ‘Not exactly a good role model right now, are you? How do you fancy being called rude, overly sensitive and entitled in a national newspaper? I can do that.’
Raina threw her head back and guffawed, a genuine bellow of delight.
‘It would be an improvement on what your paper normally prints about disabled people, Amanda, true enough. I mean, why go after a politician who’s embezzled millions from the public when you can hound a disabled pensioner who’s afraid of their heating being turned off?
You really do speak truth to power at that rag – whatever will I do without your good opinion? ’
‘You’re palling around with that Branimir man,’ the woman suddenly said, in a honied voice full of glee. ‘He doesn’t spend time with nice, decent girls. Whatever he has planned for you will be a lot worse than anything I could say.’
Raina’s mirth halted at that. She flexed her toes and gripped the phone a little more tightly.
‘Aw, Amanda. I’m in the bath right now. If you keep irritating me, I’ll drop you a picture of my lovely wet arse. Which I invite you to kiss.’
She ended the call and dropped her phone to the ground, breathing rapidly and staring at her mildly shaking hands.
She knew better, but it had almost been worth it.
The snide tone, the judgement, the lack of good faith – it was all part of an openly neurodivergent woman’s daily life.
Nosy people, writers who worked for the establishment, people in charge of benefit assessments – they would treat you with incredulity and disgust without the label, and with snobbery and contempt after you eventually got it.
To them, every disabled person was a faker who needed to be unmasked.
An attention-seeker who deserved to be taken down a peg or two.
The only chance you had of appeasing them was to reveal every vulnerability, even the ones you desperately preferred to keep private.
It was a losing game, and Raina was no longer playing.
She went back to scrubbing, scraping, shaving and luxuriating.
There was only one writer she was interested in speaking to.
Raina had once done an episode of The Disability Track about neurodivergent femininity.
For so long, she’d felt like a bad member of her own club.
She loved glittery things, jewellery, high heels, lipstick and fashion.
While none of that was exclusive to womanhood, she felt apart from many of her neurodivergent sisters – those who’d happily shrugged off the suffocating gender norms that brought them so much misery.
Raina supported those people. Admired them.
But she had her own likes and tastes.
When she was bullied relentlessly at school, she’d discovered vintage clothes. Glamour. Costume. Rouge. They’d become her weapons of choice; the things that she adorned in order to feel better about the world she was trying to move in, the world that told her she was a bad fit, wherever she went.
Raina looked at herself in the mirror as she put on the red lipstick. The tube he’d given her.
She felt so alive. In control. All of the things she’d once thought impossible.
The doorbell interrupted her thoughts and sent exhilaration through her.
She moved down the stairs to answer it. Barefoot and hair down. A silk dress with no bra. The London summer heat was intrusive but not oppressive. She felt a soft sheen on the back of her neck as she dabbed some perfume drops there.
When she opened the door to him, they looked at one another. Him, standing with a large brown bag of groceries. Her, red-lipped and certain about something that had been uncertain that morning.
Tom’s lips twitched and he slowly looked her up and down. ‘You look unreal.’
‘I’m starving.’