It was Monday, September fourteenth, and Anthony's fourth session with Helen Barrett. The last two sessions, Anthony had talked about his relationship with Sören, and his relationship history in general - including when he realized he was gay and what it was like to be a gay teenager in the 1990s, a time when the country was far less progressive on LGBT issues. While Helen was reserved about her own history, as was natural in a professional relationship, Anthony nonetheless had seen sympathy in her eyes, and knew that because of their similar age it was probably a very similar time for her as well, being a lesbian herself, and she had faced additional prejudice for being Black.
Today Helen started a different topic. "So, you haven't worked since the accident?"
"No," Anthony said, feeling that hot sting of shame again. "I was told that I can return to my post at Garden Court Chambers anytime I'm ready, but... I'm not there yet. I have a bit of a reputation, I strike fear in the heart of my opponents. I don't know that I'm exactly intimidating like this." Anthony gestured to his cane.
"Oh, I don't know about that," Helen said. "If you've built that reputation for awhile, it's likely still there. Your ability to build a convincing argument isn't reliant on your ability to walk, after all."
Helen had a point, but Anthony knew his anxiety about going back into the courtroom was heightened by his former friends, who were barristers just like he was. He had swallowed down a lot of distasteful attitudes they'd expressed over the years - Lawrence was the least bad of them, as Lawrence didn't come from the same sort of privilege - but since they'd rejected him he'd been analyzing everything in hindsight and was ashamed that he'd associated with people like that. The problem was the legal profession was full of people like Trisha and Vincente and Jack and Steve. People who would see him as a laughingstock as he was now, hobbling on his cane - people who would see the anxiety he had in public and weaponize it. Anthony hoped Helen was right and that Crown Prosecution would still have concerns about facing the Shark, but his experience with the darker side of human nature had taught him to not raise that hope too high, that the courtroom predator would now be seen as prey.
"And," Helen went on, "while I won't push you to go back to work until you're ready, I do get the sense that it's worse for your mental health to not be working."
Anthony nodded. "It is," he admitted.
"How does it make you feel?"
Anthony winced. "Obviously, pretty bad. But if you need me to elaborate..."
"In your own words," Helen said with a nod.
Anthony took a moment to compose his thoughts. "It isn't just that I've felt really powerless and trapped since the accident, but... I feel like I've lost my sense of purpose. I used to feel like I was fighting the good fight. Even when I had a client who was guilty, who was a bad person... well, I would defend ninety-nine guilty to clear the name of one innocent. And many of the guilty weren't bad people, just people who had made bad choices, often because they had a bad hand in life. Lack of privilege, lack of opportunity. In those cases, I would try to argue for less harsh sentences, and try to provide my clients with resources, a push towards a better path. I felt like I was making a difference, at least a little, and life feels so meaningless now."
Helen just listened without reacting, but she nodded and waited for him to continue.
Anthony collected his thoughts again, and then he found himself owning a deeper, less noble truth. "And it wasn't just that I felt like I was fighting the good fight, but it was... the thrill of the battle itself. I used to thrive on that adrenaline, before the accident. Things would get rough, but it was a sort of... exciting challenge." Anthony gave a nervous little laugh. "That sounds a bit messed up, doesn't it, I'm not trying to say that people's very real problems and their lives on the line was some sort of sport..."
"But clearly, you wouldn't have gone on this long if you hated it. You would have changed careers."
"Exactly." Anthony nodded. "And I think it was something Sören fundamentally understood, one of the things we strongly had in common even as our backgrounds are so different. He has the adrenaline rush of the operating theatre, especially when he handles trauma cases at odd hours. For me it was the courtroom. We were both riding off to war, in our own different ways. Two hunters, hunting together."
There was another long silence, and Anthony could practically hear Helen thinking Interesting, though she was still trying not to react. Anthony broke the silence with another nervous chuckle. "I almost married Sören, but I suppose you could say I was married to my job."
Helen cocked her head to one side. "Why did you go into law, if you don't mind me asking?"
"I don't. I mean... it's relevant to my mental health." Anthony leaned back in his chair. He was starting to feel the urge to fidget again, and glanced over at the shelf of toys, but still resisted taking one. He hadn't yet, four weeks in. "Well, this is rather an unpleasant story, but I suppose you're used to hearing unpleasant stories?"
Helen nodded. "There's very little you could say that would shock me, Anthony."
"All right." Anthony exhaled sharply. "One of my father's brothers, Nigel, was in the service, as my grandfather had been. My uncle Nigel was in the first Gulf War, and he came back wrong. Traumatized from what he'd seen in battle, and he also had Gulf War Syndrome. I was very close to him, he was my favorite uncle, he was in some ways more of a father to me than my own father was, though my relationship with my father isn't bad. But Nigel was... more understanding. Both due to the way that his trauma had given him a sense of perspective, that other people are going through hardships in life, and also, he was gay himself, in a time when it wasn't safe to be out." Anthony closed his eyes, remembering. "When I was fourteen, there was an incident. He was leaving a supermarket and he forgot one of his bags, and a cashier ran after him with the bag of groceries and he got startled and ended up attacking the cashier, because the startle response sent him into a flashback."
"Did he go to jail?"
"No, because he had a good barrister who had compassion and knew he was a good person, just troubled. They managed to work something out with the victim and the court, and the cashier even forgave him. But..." Anthony pinched the bridge of his nose, feeling that sharp stab of grief that he always felt when he thought about his uncle for too long. "He still lived with PTSD and eventually it got the better of him. He took his own life when I was eighteen."
"I'm sorry, Anthony."
"So am I." Anthony took the box of tissues from Helen's desk. He wiped at his eyes. "That experience with him having a barrister who was able to see the good in him and willing to fight for him... that left an impact on me. And I was at an impressionable age, an impressionable time in my life. It wasn't just that I was a teenager and starting to think about what I wanted to do with myself when I became an adult, but..." Anthony sighed. "Two years before the incident with my uncle, I was out of school for awhile."
"What happened?"
Now Anthony got up and grabbed the squishy shark from the shelf and sat down with it, and began fiddling with it, watching it wobble in his hands. "I fell out of a tree. More specifically, I fell out of a tree because I was chased into a tree by a mob of boys and couldn't outrun them."
"That's terrible."
Anthony nodded solemnly, and began pulling on the rubber shark, making it stretch. "I broke my femur, needed a metal plate in my thigh - Anyway, I mention this because... I was bullied. This wasn't the first time I had been bullied by other boys, with words or violence. When they used violence, I tried fighting back, and I was always the one who got in trouble. It was seen as my fault, even though it wasn't, they started it. I got in enough trouble that I stopped fighting back, because I didn't want to face serious consequences like expulsion, or ending up in a juvenile detention program. But when adults tell children 'just ignore the bully and they'll stop', they're lying. Ignoring doesn't make the bullies go away. They saw it as free reign to continue tormenting me, and it escalated to that point of being ganged up on. I think they might have beaten me to death, or seriously injured me even more than my femur getting broken, if I hadn't climbed that tree."
Though Anthony could tell Helen was trying not to react for professionalism's sake, she hissed, and scowled into her coffee before her expression resumed neutrality. It was a reaction Anthony understood - he'd had similar reactions to clients telling their horror stories, especially abuse victims who'd defended themselves and were in trouble for it.
Anthony went on, squishing the rubber shark, squishing and stretching. He found himself rocking in his seat a little, something he only did when he was very agitated and tried not to do in front of other people. "Being blamed for what was happening to me, being punished for defending myself... it gave me a sympathy with those falsely accused of wrongdoing. What happened with my uncle, though he was guilty of violence, just not in his right mind... that further cemented that drive to defend others for a living. And being bullied, being othered for being obviously different, and later on, realizing I'm gay, and having to be careful about who knew, in less progressive times... well, that gave me a feeling of solidarity with people in marginalized groups, a willingness to use my privilege to help fight for those with less privilege."
Helen nodded, and then she asked, "When you say that you were obviously different, what do you mean?"
"Well..." Anthony gestured to himself, aware that he was rocking a little. "When I was out of school after falling out of the tree, I tried to get certain things under control that people had teased me about. I couldn't make them stop entirely, but I learnt to only do them if nobody was watching. Like this. Rocking. Fidgeting." He squished and stretched the shark again, feeling ridiculous, giving another nervous laugh. "I had a stutter, so I practiced my vocal skills. I wear contacts, though I do have glasses - the glasses were another thing I was teased about. Then later, in my early twenties when I entered the gay dating scene, I got teased about being hairy."
"Back to when you were younger," Helen said; Anthony's face burned, realizing he'd probably given too much information.
"Er, sorry."
"No need to apologize. There's a reason why I'm asking about your younger years, and it's not because body hair is a taboo subject."
"...Oh." Anthony's brow furrowed. He didn't like the sound of that - a reason, which suggested something non-trivial - and it seemed like it almost would be easier if Helen had an issue with him discussing personal grooming.
"Were you a good student, would you say?"
"Yes. That was also another thing I was teased for. I was the best in my class until I fell out of the tree. After that incident I learnt to dumb it down a little - not too much, just enough to stand out a bit less. Once I was at Cambridge, and then in my diploma conversion group, it didn't matter as much, I could be the star pupil again. But... if you've ever seen or read Harry Potter, you know how Hermione Granger's hand shoots right up for every question? That was me until I toned it down."
Helen nodded as if that didn't surprise her. She started taking some notes. Anthony didn't like that either. He began spinning the shark around by the tail.
Anthony waited, and then Helen said, "So, what have you been doing with yourself since the accident?"
Anthony laughed - again out of anxiety, not because Helen had said anything funny. He rubbed his chin and switched the shark to the other hand, spinning it harder. "Besides appointments? Not much. Reading. Gardening. I, ah. Signed up for Duolingo and go back and forth between a few different language courses, and I back up my Duolingo lessons with textbooks and other online resources for extra practice."
"You like learning other languages?"
"I majored in linguistics at Cambridge, and I took a year off to travel Europe... well, two years - my uncle Nigel told me to see Europe, not long before he died - and I picked up some more languages then."
"How many languages do you speak now?"
Anthony thought for a moment. "Fluently? I speak fluent French, Italian, Spanish, German, and Swedish. And I learned Esperanto as a geeky teenager." Anthony smiled, though his cheeks burned. "I'm on my way to fluency in Norwegian, Dutch, Turkish, Portuguese, Czech, and Welsh."
Helen gave him an incredulous look, sipped her coffee, and took more notes. "That's twelve languages."
"I want to learn more, eventually. I find languages fascinating."
Helen finished her note-taking and put her bad down. "All right, Anthony, this is a sensitive subject and please understand I'm not trying to cause offense by asking this, but... were you ever in special education classes as a child?"
"What?" Anthony's eyes widened. "No... why?" Little warning bells went off in his head, his arms breaking out into gooseflesh.
"Were you ever diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, or autism?"
Anthony stopped spinning the shark. He straightened his posture in his seat and looked Helen in the eye. "No. I... don't... understand -"
"While I'm not qualified to make a diagnosis myself, there are a number of things you've told me in this session that are textbook examples of both attention deficit disorder and autistic spectrum disorders."
"But... I'm not... bloody Rain Man," Anthony said.
Helen put up a hand. "There are different degrees of autism. You may have heard of Rain Man, but have you ever heard of Daniel Tammet? He's a polyglot like yourself, he's rather famous for how many languages he can speak, and he's highly intelligent... on the autistic spectrum. Bill Gates believes he may be on the autistic spectrum himself. So does Elon Musk, of Tesla."
"I..." Anthony's head was spinning.
"I can make a referral for you to get an evaluation," Helen said. "I would encourage you to go to the evaluation because the more we know about what's going on with you, the better we can help you. The sort of coping strategies I'd suggest for a neurodivergent person are going to be necessarily somewhat different from a neuroatypical person. And if it happens that you can't resume work because of your anxiety, having a diagnosis of something like an autistic spectrum disorder will help your case with getting on a disability pension -"
"I don't want to go on disability, thank you," Anthony said. He realized his tone was a bit harsh and he said, "Sorry." He didn't think there was any shame with people receiving benefits - and that was one way his political views differed sharply from his Tory father's, and some of his ex-friends - but even as he was too spooked to go back to work now, the thought of never returning to work again and living on a fixed income bothered him a lot, that wasn't the life he wanted for himself.
"All right, but a formal diagnosis could still help you in other ways," Helen said. "The old adage, 'know thyself'. The old platitude, 'Knowing is half the battle.'"
"You want me to get this evaluation done soon, I take it."
Helen nodded. "They can set you up an appointment at the desk. I won't force you, but again, it will be easier to work with you on coping strategies and helping you get stronger, if we get a pulse on what's happening up here." Helen tapped her forehead.
Anthony groaned. He'd always known he was different, but it was one thing to be different and another thing to be different. He looked down at the floor, and shifted uncomfortably in his seat.
The next day, Anthony met Sören at Starbucks at four PM. Anthony's mother brought him - Anthony could have taken a cab or transit from Blackheath, but he was still nervous about it, even though having Elaine chauffeur him around made him feel self-conscious. Anthony usually liked to arrive to any appointments on the early side, with a bit of time to spare, but in the case of meeting Sören at Starbucks he preferred to go as close to the wire as he could get away with, since his idea of hanging around awkwardly in Starbucks by himself and worry that strangers were gawping at his cane, didn't sit well with him.
When Elaine's Aston Martin pulled up in front of the Starbucks, Anthony could see through the window that the others were already there, at a table by the window. It was raining, and when Anthony stepped out of the car into the rain, Sören raised a hand in greeting, waving with a big grin. Anthony waved and hobbled into the cafe as quickly as he could, not wanting to get drenched - he didn't want to try to maneuver an umbrella with one hand and his cane with the other.
Anthony pulled up a seat. "I took the liberty of ordering your usual," Sören said, pushing a cup over to him.
Anthony's usual at Starbucks was a hazelnut latte. Though Anthony knew Sören's favorite at the National's cafe was the chocolate espresso with whipped cream, Anthony had learned that when it was pumpkin spice season, Sören was all about pumpkin spice lattes, and Sören was working on one now... getting whipped cream on his nose as always. Anthony grinned into his coffee. Don't ever change, Anthony thought to himself.
"How are you?" Anthony asked.
Sören made a noise. "I was in the operating theatre for seven hours today."
"And you still came out?" Anthony's eyebrows shot up. "Aren't you exhausted?"
"Well, yeah, but I'm having coffee. And I wanted to see you," Sören said.
"What even were you operating on for seven hours?" Anthony asked, heart beating faster, trying to keep his tone neutral and not pretend he was elated that Sören wanted to spend time with him. "That sounds serious."
"I was doing a spinal fusion for a scoliosis patient," Sören said. "Every time I'm about to perform surgery I have to run this sort of script through my head so I don't choke. It doesn't matter if I've performed the same procedure a couple hundred times already. It's still nerve-wracking."
"I get like that before I go to court," Anthony said, and then he realized he was speaking of being a barrister in the present tense, as if he hadn't been out of work since March. He gave a nervous chuckle. "I get like that anytime I leave the house now."
"Why?" Sören asked.
Anthony blinked. He looked at his cane, then at Sören.
Sören shrugged. "I don't think it's a big deal you use a cane. I'm not trying to be insensitive, I'm just saying that I don't think any less of you. I think any decent person wouldn't." Then he went on, "It's... dapper. Is that the right word? All those old-timey pictures of gentlemen in suits, with walking sticks. You remind me of that." Sören rubbed his shoulder. Anthony turned to face him and Sören also tilted his head over, crinkled his nose and bit his lower lip. Anthony felt that familiar thrust in his loins, tempted to grab Sören and kiss him right there. Anthony turned back to his drink, trying not to think about kissing Sören... or doing other things to him.
It was a relief to Anthony to know that Sören wasn't any less attracted to him because of his handicap... though he wondered what Sören would think when he finally saw Anthony naked, with all of the scarring from going through a windshield; it was a miracle that his face had been unaffected, but then, it had gone right into the airbag.
Then the worry intensified - the group seemed fairly accepting of him having a physical handicap, but the appointment for the evaluation with the psychologist to get tested for attention deficit disorder and autism was looming. Anthony frowned.
Sören picked up on it. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing," Anthony said.
Sören gave him a look and elbowed him. "It's not nothing, Corn."
"All right." Anthony squirmed in his chair. "My therapist thinks I have ADD and/or autism. I have a referral to go for an evaluation."
"I was told I had that when I was a kid," Sören said. "Er... ADHD. My aunt and uncle didn't want any kind of special services or treatment for me, they thought it was 'coddling' me."
"Jesus Christ," Anthony said. "The more I hear about your aunt and uncle, the more I want to go to Iceland and burn their house down." He was horrified. He was also surprised - though considering Helen had said he exhibited textbook traits of the two conditions, and he and Sören had some core similarities even as different as they were, he knew he shouldn't be surprised. He blinked at Sören. "You never told me."
Sören shrugged. "There was never any reason for it to come up. Anyway... it's why I'm crap at remembering dates and phone numbers and things like that and I live by my phone schedule, but I can remember completely useless trivia, and why I can hyperfocus on a surgical procedure like it's the only thing that exists when I'm doing it, but also tend to have twenty tabs open when I'm online. And I self-medicate with caffeine." Sören made a swirling motion with his cup. "Speaking of which, I'm gonna go up to the counter and get another, you want another latte?"
"Please, thank you." As much as Anthony hated Sören getting up and leaving him alone right then, he also had a feeling Sören was doing it deliberately - to give other people a chance to chime in with acceptance or lack thereof.
Once Sören came back, Anthony said, "I'm pretty nervous about the evaluation. I'm wondering if I should even go."
"I don't think your therapist would have told you to get tested if it wasn't important," Sören said. "It probably would help you to know more about yourself."
"Helen said that, yeah." Anthony nodded. "She said that the sort of coping strategies she'd give someone with... that... are different than what she'd give to someone else."
"That makes sense to me," Sören said. "You have a different kind of brain. Awhile back I did some reading up on psychology and I came across an interesting article on ADHD that I never forgot. It said that humans evolved where most people are 'gatherers', but people with ADHD have a 'hunter' brain."
That clicked in Anthony's head; he remembered what he'd told Helen yesterday with feeling like he was off on a hunt when he entered the courtroom, and the way it seemed Sören also thrived on the adrenaline of surgery. "The hunter-gatherer thing makes a lot of sense," Anthony said.
Sören put his cup down and began to scratch his armpits. "Me caveman. Me invent fire. Me cut back. Me stab brain."
Anthony facepalmed, chuckling. "Sören."
Then Sören sobered up. "When is the appointment for your eval?"
"Two weeks from today. Tuesday the twenty-ninth. It's a late afternoon appointment, four PM. "
"...It might help to have someone go with you to the appointment. Instead of your mum, I mean."
Anthony nodded. "You're right." Anthony also knew that Sören wouldn't coddle him and let him lose his nerve and go home, while if he had a meltdown, that might be exactly what Elaine did was just take him home.
Sören pulled out his phone and checked his schedule. "I'm free that afternoon, if you don't mind me coming with you."
"I don't mind if you don't mind," Anthony said. "I don't want you to feel obligated -"
Sören waved his hand dismissively. "And after, if you want to get a bite to eat, I'll treat you as a way of saying 'good job for getting it done', I know these sorts of things are scary. Consider it a gift to a friend."
Anthony breathed a small sigh. As much as it stung to be reminded that they were just friends now and it would be a long time before they could be more, he also felt relief and gratitude that Sören cared this much.
Sören seemed to sense Anthony was still tense about the impending evaluation. He started scratching his armpits again, scratching his beard and his head. "You take gift. You make friend."
"Goddammit, Sören." But Anthony was amused rather than offended - it was Sören's eccentric way of trying to make him feel better, one "hunter" to another. "You're ridiculous."
"Takk," Sören said. Under the table, Sören reached for his hand and squeezed. And in the warmth of Sören's touch, it really did feel like Sören's joke was sort of true, that he'd invented fire.
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