Under one roof: The remarkable life of the Sharrock-Barnes family

Becky Sharrock can remember everything that’s ever happened to her. But wait till you meet the rest of her family.

Brent and Janet, standing, with children Brendan, Becky, Jess, Kylie and Dylan. Picture: Justine Walpole

All visiting neurotypicals are welcome to use the escape hatch. They can check out anytime they like when the noise and the chatter and the two-hour “I just want to die, Mum” meltdowns get too much. They can climb the rope ladder Janet Barnes has fixed to her living room wall and, with the extraordinary powers of their neuro-­typical imaginations, they can open the trapdoor above the ladder marked “Escape Hatch” and ­discreetly exit the chaos of the blended family’s Brady-Bunch-with-a-special-needs-twist existence. Because anything is possible in the Barnes-­Sharrock household in working-class Logan, southeast Queensland. It is possible in this house to find success and pain and support and love along the winding continuum of the autism spectrum. It is possible to find an independent adulthood.

Brendan Barnes, 18, an apprentice motorcycle spray-painter with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), taps your shoulder politely like he always does when he’s about to say something profound. “There’s everything in this house,” he says. “You’ve just got to know where to look.”

A theatre prop crow perched atop a birdcage in the lounge. A gramophone. An antique American gas pump by the front door. A moulded elephant’s tusk stuck to the wall. A deer’s head. An antique typewriter. Trinkets and keepsakes and unexpected opportunity-shop treasures. A 1950s rocking horse. An 1890s mounted miniature Bible. An early 1900s bronze deep-sea diving helmet.

A 20-year-old woman named Kylie Barnes in her bedroom, standing by the wardrobe where she keeps the work clothes she wears Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Her job involves measuring and packing bags of starch, flour, spices and sugars for Help Enterprises in Sunnybank Hills in ­Brisbane’s south, a not-for-profit providing employment and independence for adults with disabilities. Kylie has ASD and epilepsy. She has the intellectual ­level of a Year 1 student and a smile as wide as the entry gates to Disneyworld, which she hopes to visit next year. Kylie’s quiet, safe place is on her bunk bed, staring at an image of The Madden Brothers.

There’s a frilled-neck lizard called Tripod in a tank. There are two Murray River turtles crawling along the ground. There’s Kylie’s brother Dylan, 15, flying the Millennium Falcon in his bedroom. He, too, lives with ASD. Dylan expresses himself through Star Wars. (Janet, what that boy said to me today made me feel how Princess Leia felt when Han was lowered into the carbonite freeze.) Dylan also has the intellectual level of a Year 1 student along with the infectious laugh of the ­happiest teenager in the world. His older brother, Brendan, expresses himself through his obsession for performance cars. (Janet, that award made me feel like a Nitrate Silver Commodore SV6 hitting a hundred in 4.5 seconds.)

Jess Sharrock. Pic: Justine Walpole

There’s their older stepsister, Jess Sharrock, ­texting on her phone at the kitchen table. She’s 25 and has agoraphobia — an anxiety disorder that can bring on panic attacks when she leaves a safe, familiar environment — and what her mum, Janet, calls a higher functioning level of ASD, much less intense than that of her half-siblings. With concentration, routine and guts Jess walks out the front door each day to attend tertiary studies for a counselling degree and regular comedy gigs at the Sit Down Comedy Club. Counselling and comedy. Tears and laughter. Pretty much the story of her life inside this extraordinary house. The story of her life with her brilliant big sister, Becky.

“I had a meltdown last night,” says Becky, 27, sitting in the lounge room. “I feel really embarrassed because I’m really loud and I’m thinking, ‘I wonder what our new neighbours are thinking of me?’” She looks at her mum, sitting beside her. “The neighbours are quite new, Mum, they must think I’m some sort of weirdo.”

“It was a bad one,” Janet says. She never minces words. Never cushions the truth. “It was two hours.”

Becky Sharrock can recall most of her life in precise detail. Pic: Justine Walpole

Becky shudders. She is the famous one in the family. She’s been on TV chat shows across the world. She shows you an image on her phone taken from Ripley’s Believe It Or Not magazine. It’s a cartoon pencil sketch of her face above the words: “Rebecca Sharrock of ­Brisbane, Australia, can remember being photographed in a car just 12 days after her birth thanks to Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM), a condition found in fewer than 80 people across the world.”

She was 15 years old when she was diagnosed with ASD. She was 23 in 2013 when, after years of complex tests, the ­University of California ­identified her as ­someone with HSAM, which allows her to recall most of her life in precise detail.

We all have autobiographical memories; they’re the yarns from our past we tell at ­barbecues and dinner parties. Becky lives these memories emotionally. She feels the memories and the memories are many. She remembers what it felt like being 12 days old lying on a sheepskin in a car. She can tell you what she had for lunch on her first day of school because she can feel the memory of eating the Dinosaur Dunkaroo biscuits Janet had packed for her. Hers is not a photographic memory. Hers is not a ­mnemonic gift. It’s not about elaborate memory encoding and learning techniques and information retention. Hers is a gift of feeling. And ­sometimes a curse.

Her memories can be triggered by scents, sounds, words, weather patterns, voice tones, ­random objects. She can see a piece of fruit and be thrust into a memory from 16 years ago when some kid rubbed food in her hair in the school playground. And she’ll feel today how scared and isolated and confused she felt back then. “I’m ­having to relive that day and all the emotion,” Becky says. “It all comes back. I call them intrusive memories. I could be having a day where I’m supposed to be happy and all of a sudden this ­negative experience intrudes and ruins the day.”

“It’s not just remem­bering,” Janet says. “She’s reliving the memory. It might be someone who looked at her in a shopping centre and she felt bad or she was embarrassed when she was five years old and she’s now reliving that moment with the same intensity.

“Often it’s festering within me and Mum asks, ‘What’s wrong?’” Becky says. “And I’ll say, ‘Oh, I remembered how someone once looked at me when I was seven’, and I’ll then feel embarrassed because I feel the emotions as if I am that age, the age I am in the memory. I remember it with an adult’s reasoning but my emotions are a childish emotion and then it creates confusion in me because I’m thinking it’s such a petty thing that was solved long ago but, emotionally, I’m still ­feeling it so it’s a battle of two sides.”

Place this ongoing battle of Becky’s inside a cramped nine-room house with seven people — six of whom live with disabilities — and it makes for a unique life in the sleepy Logan suburbs.

Jess laughs as she outlines a typical heated ­living room dialogue with her older sister, like something out of a TV sitcom called Becky & Jess.

Becky approaches Jess, who is sketching one of her brilliant charcoal portraits on the couch.

“Apologise,” Becky says.

“Huh?” Jess says.

“How could you say that to me?” Becky says.

“Say what?”

“You called me a bitch.”

“What?” Jess says, mortified.

“You said you didn’t want to be my sister.”

“Hang on, Beck, when did I say that?”

“May 26, 2002.”

Over the dinner table, Becky will raise minor household sins she saw her stepbrothers commit five months or five years ago. She’ll ask ­stepdad Brent a question about his family and she’ll be confused and rattled over why he changed the wording in his response between 2009, when she first posed that question, and now. “Sometimes Becky blends conversations together,” Janet says. “Something as simple as, ‘Where’s my hairbrush, Jess?’ Becky is then reliving every issue she’s had with Jessica over a hairbrush.”

Memory film-reels run together: being teased at eight spliced into being pushed over at 12 spliced into being ridiculed at 18. “It doesn’t happen in any order,” Becky says. “It jumps between time frames. That’s what keeps me awake at night.” One thread of her ASD is a slow information ­processor in her brain. She can’t process all the information and make it go away. It clogs up inside her head. “Then the computer crashes,” Becky says. Meltdown.

Parents Janet and Brent. Pic: Justine Walpole

Brendan and his dad Brent know cars and theyknow car paint. They’re outside, staring into the paint job on Brendan’s blue Daihatsu Terios. Brendan’s been working with his dad at the spray-paint workshop. Work for him means transitioning into adulthood independently. He knows he’ll one day leave the safety of this nest. He knows that ­won’t be easy. He knows his social skills aren’t the best. He learnt how to converse by listening to Jeremy Clarkson on Top Gear, his TV obsession. He knows that sometimes he doesn’t talk enough and sometimes he talks too much. But he knows his goals and how to achieve them.

“My loan came through today,” he says, eyes wide. “Tomorrow I am picking up a 2015 Holden Commodore SV6 sedan in red. It’s pretty much a new car. Still under a new car warranty. It’s a big, big thing for me.” Brendan bounces back inside the house. His new-car euphoria brings a touch of ­melancholy to Dylan, whose disabilities mean it’s unlikely he will ever achieve his wish to get his motorcycle licence.

“Sorry D,” Janet says. “If we ever get enough money we can buy a ­property and you could probably get yourself a ride-on mower.” This only briefly lifts his spirits. Becky brings her own support. “I know because of my processing speed and my medication I’ll never be able to get my licence, either,” she says. “I do sometimes feel a bit upset about that because Brendan has his.”

“All of us are different,” says dad Brent, who’s 47 years old and dyslexic. In contrast to stepdaughter Becky, he has an extremely low-functioning memory. He can’t remember his phone number, or the spelling of simple words. “But I know shapes,” he says. “I know motorbike parts and where they fit. Hundreds and hundreds of parts. I can tell you everything about how to put a motorbike together but I could not write the word ‘motorbike’ down for you.”

He scans his house, its inhabitants darting between bedrooms. “You’ve got five kids here and they all have different forms of [autism] on different scales. So six people in one house with totally different impairments.”

On a recent visit to Becky’s psychologist, Janet asked if she, too, might be on the spectrum. Many of Becky’s traits she has long identified in herself, not least her obsession with collecting antique curios and fastening them to the walls of her home. “I said to the psychologist, ‘I’m sure there has to be something there’, ” Janet says. “And she said, ‘No, Janet, you’re not autistic. You’re artistic’.”

Thirteen years ago, Brent Barnes was a sole parent of three enjoying a rare drink at the ­Greenbank RSL down the road when he looked across the bar to see a divorced mother of two named Janet on a rare night out with her girlfriends. “Might as well go get a knock-back,” he told himself. She didn’t knock him back and she didn’t say no when he asked her for a dance. Janet hadn’t dated for 11 years. Her daughters Becky and Jess were OK with Brent because they thought he looked like Harry Potter’s father.

Janet and Brent’s lives are now a breathless ­suburban treadmill of car trips between doctors, ­psychologists, mainstream schools, special schools, social enterprise jobs, work for their own small business and meltdown management. Emergency meltdown phone calls come weekly. “It might be Jess having a panic attack on a bus,” Janet says. “And she’s screaming down the phone saying, ‘I don’t know where I’m going’, and I’m saying, ‘Get off the goddamn bus!’”

There is rarely silence in the house during ­neurotypical waking hours so Janet finds her quiet time at 2am when she sneaks to the toilet with a history magazine. If she doesn’t have a magazine she simply reads the pages of the World War II-era newspapers she has glued to the walls. But lately everyone has clued on to this trick and now there’s a line-up at the toilet each night at 2am. “We don’t drink much,” Janet says. “But I tell ya, sometimes a Friday Sambuca and Coke is my saviour!”

The family of seven share one toilet and one bathroom. Like life, they make it work because they have to. “The goal is always independence,” Janet says. “Every single one of them will get to their own level of independence.”

The escape hatch exists for the kids, too. They support each other up the rungs. They slip and they fall and they find their feet again. Becky’s two-hour meltdown the previous night came from a flood of anxiety-laden feel-memories. She was hit with so many she couldn’t process her speech. The two-hour domestic storm of ­emotion ended with Becky and Janet lying on the floor of the kitchen.

“So many times the police come to our door,” Janet says. But Becky likes the local police. They’re tender and understanding. When the meltdown is over she explains to them that she was trying to tell her mum she was trying her best. She intends to say, ‘I’m trying’, but the faulty word processor in her brain spits out ‘I’m dying’. And the awful memory of last night is filed away in her vast mind waiting to revisit her in five, 10, 15 years from now.

But here’s the thing about Becky’s feel-memories. The good ones flood in, too. At 10.30pm she ­prepares for bed. Her bedroom feels like a Harry Potter set. There are racing brooms leaning against shelves lined with Harry Potter memorabilia and books. She will recite the pages as she falls to sleep.

“Becky,” Brendan says before bed.

“Yep,” she says.

“The Half-Blood Prince, how does chapter five start?”

She nods. “‘An Excess of Phlegm’. Harry and Dumbledore approached the back door of The ­Burrow which was surrounded by the familiar litter of old wellington boots and rusty cauldrons …”

You gasp at these word-perfect recitations then apologise for watching her open-mouthed like she’s a circus act. “I’m used to it,” she shrugs. “When I was nine my doctor said to me, ‘Count sheep and it will make you fall asleep’. I gave up at sheep 310. Counting sheep is a myth. It doesn’t work. But reciting Harry Potter does.”

She will sleep easy tonight. The good memories will come. She can slip into a feel-memory of her fifth birthday and that memory can slide on into Christmas Day, 2006, and that memory can run alongside that wild family trip to America and what it felt like when she was two years old seeing her baby sister, Jess, for the first time. And five, 10, 15 years from now, maybe this night will come back to her, too.

She will remember Brendan’s face when he was eating a chocolate biscuit tonight after dinner and telling the story of how he received a high school award for “overcoming adversity” and he asked his teachers what “adversity” meant and he thought about handing the award back because all the things the teachers said were difficult about his life — the ASD, speech difficulties, obsessive tendencies — were all the things that made his life interesting.

She will remember that sweet story Dylan ­giggled over in the lounge room about how he didn’t know what the word “Mum” meant. He thought “Mum” was just a woman’s name like “Sally” or “Ruth” or “Becky” but then he figured out what it meant — that it was a catch-all word for love and care and responsibility and future and hope and support — and he ran to Janet one day and he said, “Janet, Janet, I know what ‘Mum’ means … it’s you … you are Mum.”

She will remember the crescent moon this evening and the stars over Logan and she will remember six different ways of saying goodnight to the ones she loves and she will remember that love is a spectrum condition, too, just a strange human continuum of countless feelings and symptoms and behaviours. She will remember all this, every last aspect of a night in the Barnes-Sharrock house. Just another night in her normal.