Cédric must have cried at the loss of his chess set. But as the obsession faded it was replaced by another, fortified by the maths puzzles he tackled in class, and which would prove far more lasting. Mathematics, he was discovering, was delightfully unambiguous, its rules self-explanatory; that is, the moment you grasped their logic. Playing with these rules, code-breaking, puzzle-solving, he could happily neglect the regular problems of having no friends, of being teased or shirked for being so very different to the other children.

For all these problems, he never hated tomorrow. Tomorrow, whether he was spending it in class or inside his books, always had something new to teach him.

Soon he’d become hooked too on mystery stories, another form of puzzle, honing his powers of deduction with the likes of Sherlock Holmes and Arsène Lupin, unmasking the tales’ baddies the same way, in class, he figured out the true identities of an equation’s Y and Z. He devoured the escapades of The Three Investigators, whose heroes were close to his age, almost overcome by a desire to join them, since with them, at least, he felt he would belong.

✲

In December 2019, at the Trianon theatre, Cédric gave a speech on stage before hundreds of his supporters.

‘I’ve read and heard so many things, seen so many attacks, sometimes concerning my policies, often concerning my person. I’ve said it before: being different is a strength.’

He paused for the clapping, looked out at the rows of upturned faces.

‘They’ll tell you that I am mad or that my project cannot succeed. My friends, the true madness would be to hope for change yet vote for the same old parties.’

His campaign for mayor, he knew, had stalled; the polls placed him on low double digits. At least the interviews he had given on his possible autism had been universally well received. Politicians on all sides had saluted his courage, the dignity in his response, including the ones who had themselves spurred on the rumours. If Cédric smiled at their hypocrisy he did not resent it; he had far better uses for his energy.

Whenever he asked himself why he was running he decided that he hoped to redistribute power. Winning it interested him less than making it flow more freely, more efficiently. His manifesto imagined a citizens’ assembly, in which experts and ordinary Parisians drawn by lots would contribute to the mayor’s decision-making. Only then, Cédric thought, when power became less concentrated in a few hands, might change be enacted at the level of voters’ needs and values.

On posters, in conference halls, via interviews in the media, the candidates’ visions, their different Parises, called out to these voters, but increasingly people turned their attention elsewhere. In the New Year, they watched reports from Wuhan about a ‘mysterious pneumonia’ that would soon dominate the headlines. The election, which was to be held at the start of spring, having for months seemed rather exciting, appeared suddenly pointless, and finally dangerous.

The result was, in the end, a foregone conclusion. Most of the Parisians who bothered, or dared, to cast their vote in March, just before the first lockdown, favoured continuity. The incumbent prevailed easily, ahead of the Right and the presidential party which came in third. Cédric, the outsider, trailed in fifth, on 7 per cent.

✲

When Cédric returned to the Assembly’s benches, he sat as an independent. And when, at the end of his term, he sought to retain his seat in the Essonne, the presidential party opposed him. The ensuing contest was tight; the winner unknown until the very last of the thirty-seven thousand ballots had been counted. Cédric conceded after losing by a margin of eighteen votes.

✲

He had just returned from a vacation in the mountains of Colombia when I told Cédric about the narrative portrait of him that I envisaged writing. It was May 2023, almost a year since he had left politics and Paris; he was once more a professor of mathematics in Lyon. We were video-calling late on this particular evening and he was casual in jeans and a zip-up sweatshirt. Although jet-lagged, he looked well. ‘I turn fifty in October.’

As he shared memories of his childhood, he told me about The Three Investigators, a series of books I had not come across myself. He had read the French editions by the dozen, he said, and I imagined the little Cédric soaking up each story, enthralled and no longer lonely.

In the story Cédric mentioned to me – The Mystery of the Silver Spider – the action takes place in a tiny European kingdom named Varania. Here power is enshrined in a crown jewel possessing the form of a spider. The pint-size heroes arrive on an urgent mission: palace plotters have seized the jewel, and plan to turn the country into an international haven for law-dodgers. Gathering all their wits and pluck, the three boys figure out where the jewel has been hidden and so foil the coup.

To reward their ingenuity and daring, the Order of the Silver Spider – the kingdom’s highest honour – is pinned on their three proud chests. The Silver Spider, the boys learn, is worn on a chain by the monarch at each coronation. Far more than a jewel, it is a symbol of everything the Varanians cherish: freedom, independence and the common good.

As he had read the story, Cédric, in his mind the fourth investigator, became an honorary Varanian too, vowing to uphold those same values.

Ayo

It was early morning after a day which had begun innocently enough and the house seemed to hold its breath. The sun came into rooms still scarred from the afternoon before. There had been some clearing of the worst by then, some semblance of order restored, and Ayo’s mother was in the kitchen making noise with the pots and pans, a deliberate hum of activity asking to be thought ordinary but which could feel like solicitude. Ayo was leaving her bedroom when the pots and pans fell silent, and she heard her mother calling her name. Her mother’s voice today was different from the one she used with yesterday’s guests to the compound. It was lower now. Raw. And tentative. Ayo approached but did not enter the kitchen. Instead she dithered at the threshold. At least the kitchen still looks and smells as it always has, she thought.

‘Ayo, go wake your little sister.’ That was what she was expecting to hear any second. In fact, she had already started to half turn when she heard her mother say something else.

‘What?’ said Ayo, turning back.

‘Ayo, come here please,’ Toyin repeated softly. Then, when her daughter did not, she walked over and leaned down and held the little hand that had been worrying the hem of a green pyjama top.

‘Did you get some sleep? Are you hungry?’ She searched her daughter’s face as she spoke. ‘I wouldn’t blame you if you weren’t hungry. After yesterday. What happened. But you really should get something down you.’

Ayo did not move. ‘I’m okay,’ she said, rubbing an elbow with her free hand. ‘I wasn’t hurt.’

‘To God be the glory! You were very strong. You know, your father and I spoke on the phone last night. We had a long conversation. About yesterday. About our future. We made some decisions. And now there’s no reason to be afraid, none at all, because it won’t ever happen again.’

Ayo, who had been looking down at the floor as her mother spoke, said nothing for a moment. Then she said again, very quietly, ‘I wasn’t hurt.’

‘No. But you could have been. Your father agrees with me. What happened here was the last straw for us. Ayo, look at me. The only thing that matters is your safety, yours and your sisters’.’

She couldn’t return her mother’s gaze for long. A memory from the afternoon flashed through her mind; she was on her elbows and knees, panting, hiding her little sister under the bed. The sister was too young to understand. ‘She’s still sleeping,’ Ayo said now.

Toyin nodded, released her daughter’s hand and straightened up. ‘Go wake her, please.’

✲

Ayo Sokale spoke, in 2020s fashion, to the recording camera of her phone. Behind her stood only the beige wall that served as a neutral background. The camera shook as she spoke; no one had thought about a tripod. She was wearing a black turtleneck and an expression of sustained concentration. ‘There’s no one look for an autistic person,’ she was saying. ‘We don’t all look the same.’

Ayo is a civil and coastal engineer. She is not yet thirty and lives in the Thames Valley, in Berkshire. ICE, the Institution of Civil Engineers, uploaded her one-minute clip, one of several, to its video channel in the spring of 2021. Exactly twenty years after she and her family left Nigeria.

By chance I came across her clip one day, while watching videos on the Internet. I probably shouldn’t say ‘by chance’. Probably the clip reached my screen on account of my recent viewing history, of some algorithm which – this time at least – had successfully read my thoughts.

‘We don’t all look the same.’ It felt familiar to me, a neurodivergent writer, this modern exercise of ‘raising awareness’, and the reason it felt familiar was that I had similarly lent myself to it in the past. Speaking to a camera, in 2000s and 2010s fashion, with a TV cameraman manning it. Using a word like ‘Asperger’s’ – as was employed then – to describe a life, a way of seeing and being in the world.

But that was as far as the similarity went. I had no clear idea back then that I might be ‘speaking out’, or braving the attitudes and expectations of viewers. And, unlike Ayo’s generation, I had felt neither the consolation, nor the responsibility, of belonging to a group. It would never have occurred to me to say ‘we’, only ‘I’.

She wasn’t hard to find. She had a website. After I had been in touch, after showing my credentials and earning her confidence, we got to talking on a semi-regular basis. The Ayo on our video calls was the same Ayo I’d seen in the clip: articulate, thoughtful and candid. And there was something else beyond these qualities, attractive and essential as they are, that had made me want to write about her. She was vibrant.

She would find thirty minutes for me here, three-quarters of an hour there. Even that took quite some doing – pretty much every waking hour of her day being accounted for. She has only to look at the time to be told where she ought to be.

I had no plan as such and few prepared questions. As much as possible, I wanted to keep our conversations open-ended. I thought we might talk about her engineering career, then jump back to her childhood move to England, then who knew? But that’s not quite how things turned out. Our exchanges took sharp, surprising detours – disorientating and fascinating in equal measure.

I had thought her brave; I hadn’t known the half of it.

✲

Dr Sokale worked for an NHS hospital in England, and when his wife’s waters broke, one freezing February day, he welcomed the arrival of their second daughter, Ayo.

Toyin brought the baby home to her native city of Ibadan. Her husband, like many Nigerian doctors who work for the NHS, would visit his wife and children two or three times a year.

The Sokale sisters shared a large house in Bashorun, Water Reservoir Area, with their mother, aunt and older cousins. The house stood inside a compound whose walls were high, its gates surveilled. Bougainvillea brightened these walls, while palms and mango and guava trees flourished within – an intrepid cousin might occasionally fall from the lower branches, like ripe fruit. On Sundays, dressed for church, the three sisters would not climb a limb of any tree; they would be too busy curtsying to the grown-ups who lunched at the house after the service. Or, ahead of that, laying the table, or, helping out in the kitchen, or getting under the maid’s feet as they rustled and bustled. There was a rigour in the house, but guests were always a welcome sight. They would be ladies from the church, wearing wrappers and headgear, smiling broadly and smelling the beef stew, pounded yam and okra as they entered.

Ayo liked sitting up with the ladies, saying grace, watching the women eat, the eldest always first to begin, copying their fingers as they moulded the doughy yam into scoops, seeing the beef on the plates linger till the end before disappearing, as good table manners required. The beef was lean and spicy. When it disappeared, the women talked at last. They praised their host (after the Lord), shared recipe tips, complained about the rising prices. ‘You go to market with your seventy naira and when you get there they tell you it is now ninety or one hundred.’ Some talked about their husbands overseas, and others their children’s grades in class, and Toyin passed around the report cards that came to the house in her daughters’ satchels, each commending their cleanliness – grade A – and high marks, and stating, for instance, that Ayotunde is a well-behaved and diligent student.

The women had all known Ayo since her babbling days. Such a quiet and intent child. Older than her years. Always taking her toys apart and putting them back together again. Not dolls. Cars and trucks. They would tease her gently: did she remember the time she ran them ragged searching all over for her? Searching for what seemed like hours, they turned the compound upside down until, aah, at last, there she was snoozing behind the curtain in the living room, a toy truck beside her with its engine in pieces, snoozing all the time they’d been rushing and thumping from room to room calling out, ‘A-yo!’

She remembered. Or perhaps it was only the ladies’ story that she remembered, she had heard it told so many times.

‘Yes, Aunty,’ Ayo would say each time she heard the tale. ‘I was very small but I remember.’