Keep Clear

by Tom Cutler

  Autistic people die significantly younger than members of the typical population. At the more severe end of the continuum, it is epilepsy that does it. At the Asperger’s end — where they are twice as likely as people in general to die young — it is suicide. This increased suicide risk is not a minor one: Aspergers are nine times more likely to deliberately kill themselves than non-autistic people. To say I had resolved to end my life is, though, not exactly right. Though it is silliness to live when to live is torment, all I really wanted was for the intolerable pain to stop. Just draw down the curtain and make it stop.

  My decline was steady. I became extravagantly thirsty, exhausted. I sat on my bed or wandered confused around the campus. I stumbled and tripped. My eyes became blurred. I lost weight. I gasped for breath. Jagged pains cramped my back. My body was eating itself; shutting down. There was nobody to notice.

  One evening in my bedroom at the Chambers’ I found myself bent double, groaning in anguish. I staggered into the hallway and collapsed. This was it. Mrs Chambers called an ambulance. I faded to black.

  *

  I faded in again. There was a twisted square of light on the bright wall opposite. This was not a room I recognised. I was under a white sheet. Much of the furniture was white. A brisk nurse came in. This was some sort of hospital.

  ‘Back with us, then? Let’s sit you up. The doctor will be coming to see you in a minute.’

  A pleasant breeze drifted through the window and I could hear a blackbird singing. The door opened and in glided a confident man in his forties, wearing a grey double-breasted jacket. His hair was polished and there was about him an ambience of kindliness, humour, and aftershave.

  ‘I’m Doctor Alexander,’ he said. ‘How are you feeling?’

  I made a face.

  ‘You’re in the university medical centre. Your blood glucose is off the radar and your body is consuming its own muscle. What we’re going to do is get your insulin sorted out and once your numbers start coming down we’ll slowly try to get some weight back on you. We’ll monitor you for a bit. Doing things too quickly — that’s how you make mistakes.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Anything you need? Anyone you’d like to talk to?’

  I shook my head.

  Dr Alexander was the first person since I had arrived at the university to pay close attention to me, to say something kind.

  They had been feeding me water enriched with salt and glucose and now they wanted me to eat. But I had no appetite and was turning away food. One day I caught sight of my face in the mirror. It was cadaverous. When my parents came to visit they looked terrified. The nurses tried preparing all kinds of stuff for me but the taste of a piece of melon — which they sent out for after I had said I might manage it — was so strong that I was unable to swallow it. The brisk nurse lost her temper, which frightened me so much that I forced myself to chew a corner of dry toast and gradually I was able to build up my appetite again.

  After I had put on a bit of weight she came in one evening.

  ‘I’m sorry I barked at you,’ she said, ‘but we were so worried. We thought you might …’

  ‘What? Die?’

  ‘Let’s get these pillows sorted out a bit,’ she said, plumping them with unnecessary force.

  When Dr Alexander discharged me two weeks later I was still very thin. He gave me a penetrating look. He realised, I think, that there was more to this than met the eye. ‘I never forget my diabetic patients,’ he said, writing his name and number on a slip of paper and pushing it across to me. ‘Ring me up any time you need to.’

  Having missed the first couple of weeks in the art department, I approached Austin Randall to explain my absence. He seemed not to be listening and kept looking over my shoulder. His understanding of his pastoral role was, I felt, poor.

  I went to my space to arrange my paints and brushes. Partitions separated me from a girl called Lucile on one side and I forget who on the other.

  ‘I owe you a tube of chrome yellow,’ said a voice. It belonged to a young man with a thick orange moustache who was wiping a brush in a space on the other side of the room.

  ‘I’m going for a coffee,’ he said. ‘Fancy one?’

  He peeled off his overalls and we strolled along the cloister. I caught sight of Fleeta Swit ambling across the lawn, a length of toilet paper flapping from her shoe. On the fascia of a large shed-like construction in an area behind one of the buildings the hand-painted word ‘Refectory’ announced its purpose. My new acquaintance ordered coffee, I asked for tea, and we crossed the creaking floor to one of the tables.

  ‘I’m Anthony White,’ he said.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. My portcullis was still down.

  Anthony was a couple of years older than me, he liked football, which made my heart sink, but he also knew a great deal about the history of modern painting, Marvel comics, and black-and-white B-movies. He was dressed in a natty thirties tie and cavalry twill trousers as if for the role of a passerby in a film about plucky Londoners carrying on regardless as their houses are blitzed around them.

  ‘We thought you’d chucked yourself in the river,’ said Anthony.

  ‘Bit under the weather,’ I said. ‘Been banged up in the medical centre.’

  ‘I sneaked a tube of chrome yellow out of your box,’ he said.

  ‘Keep it,’ I said.

  ‘You’re the focus of quite a bit of gossip. You’ve scared half of them stiff. You look so haughty.’

  I was astonished. This was the first time I had heard myself described in this way, but it wouldn’t be the last. My social dread was being mistaken for disdain. I thought I had been invisible but it wasn’t other people who were being standoffish, it was, apparently, me.

  I spoke to Anthony every day for the next four years and I have known him now for four decades. He sends me beautifully painted birthday cards, and the other day an invitation to his sixtieth birthday dropped onto the mat. Though we meet only occasionally we pick up right where we left off. Much of life hangs on the throw of the dice and if Anthony had not run out of chrome yellow that day it is possible we would never have become friends.

  In the evening, he invited me up for dinner at his hall of residence on the main campus. Starley Hall was a three-storey brickwork enormity so ugly it made you laugh. Named after a dead vice chancellor, it resembled a 1960s barracks: four sheer walls enclosing a square of prison-like corridors overlooking a meagre lawn. It was the only single-sex hall in the university, and was, I learnt, favoured by rugby players. The clattering of studs down the passages was a constant background sound effect.

  Anthony took me into the bar, where a banner announced: ‘Freshers’ Week 1978’. The date had been crudely done in black pen over a palimpsest of deletions going back years. I ordered two pints of beer and a packet of peanuts, which the barman pulled from a display card decorated with a lady in a cowboy hat and very short shorts. We carried our food over to a bench, where we sat down and surveyed the room.

  Tongue-and-groove pine slats clad the walls and a pair of self-closing ship’s kitchen doors led into a dining room that gave off a perfume of meat pie and disinfectant. The bar’s ceiling was pocked with gobbets of dried Blu Tack, drawing pins, and bits of Christmas tinsel. A handful of pink-faced boys, one with a haircut like an erect horse’s mane, were chatting and laughing beside a coin-operated telephone.

  ‘We’re having curry,’ said Anthony.

  ‘Who’s “we”?’ I asked warily.

  ‘Rick, me, and a chap called Bill Bradshaw. You’ll like him, he’s unusual.’

  Dr Alexander had instructed me to stuff in the calories, and wanting very much not to be alone I agreed to join Anthony and the others for curry. We walked up the corridor to Bill Bradshaw’s kitchen area, which was, so it was said, the liveliest in the hall, and the place to be seen.

  A fug of cigarett
e smoke hung in the air and Rick, who like us was a first year art student, was preparing to go round to the curry house. I had seen him chatting to four girls that morning, flicking his golden hair over his shoulder with studied nonchalance. Anthony introduced us and Rick told me he had once smashed a guitar over the head of a drummer who he found having sexual intercourse with his girlfriend. ‘You hit the wrong person there,’ I said.

  ‘Tom’s joining us for curry,’ said Anthony.

  ‘What do you want?’ asked Rick, waving a menu at me.

  ‘He’ll have the same as me!’ bellowed a reverberant voice. Down the corridor buzzed a barrel-chested man in an electric wheelchair, which he was directing with his toe. His legs were essentially thighs with feet on the end and he seemed to have no arms. He was the source of the cigarette smoke.

  ‘Shake hands, newcomer,’ he said, proffering his bare right foot by lifting it off the special tray he had on the front of his chair. This was Bill Bradshaw, a man who was to become one of my closest friends. I took his foot awkwardly and shook it. Bill bent forward and replaced between his first and second toes the cigarette he had been sucking.

  ‘Ever eaten a phaal?’ he asked, coughing through a cloud of smoke.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s the hottest fucking curry ever.’

  ‘Hotter than vindaloo?’

  ‘Suck it and see,’ said Bill.

  I felt that a challenge had been issued. Though anxious by nature, and cautious by principle, there is a contradictory risk-taking element to my character. ‘All right,’ I said.

  ‘Get extra beer!’ Bill shouted after Rick. A lot of university life so far seemed to involve drink.

  There was a pregnant pause. I didn’t see how I could not refer to Bill’s unusual bodily construction without it becoming something, if left, that was forever too late to mention.

  ‘If you don’t mind my asking,’ I said, ‘what in God’s name happened to you?’ There was a guffaw followed by rather a lot of coughing.

  ‘Bluntness gets points,’ said Bill. ‘It’s a congenital condition, Tom. It’s called, “phocomelia”. It’s not thalidomide. Let’s open those cans.’

  Bill told me he was in the second year of a linguistics degree, and said he was related to the Bradshaws, of Bradshaw’s Railway Timetable fame, which I knew about from its mention in the Sherlock Holmes stories.

  Bill’s beer-drinking technique was intriguing. He would bend forward, grip the rim of the pint glass with his teeth, and lift it off his tray before tilting it back to swallow a mouthful.

  When the curries arrived, a semicircle was formed around Bill and me. We opened our foil containers, the contents of which were black as the sea. I peered into the depths. Everything solid seemed to have been dissolved. Pouring the treacly phaal over the rice, I gave it a nervous sniff. The miasma made me splutter.

  ‘Ah, the mystic Orient,’ said Bill. ‘Well, here goes.’

  Gripping his fork between his toes he bent double, inserted a mouthful of curry, and sat up again, chewing vigorously.

  I took my first, deliberately small, mouthful and chewed it like a debutante. It was certainly spicy, but nothing special. I took another, more generous, forkful and became aware of a creeping conflagration beginning at the back of my throat but spreading forwards until my head was engulfed. Tears came to my eyes and I started to cough. Rick passed me a can of beer. ‘Alcohol dissolves it,’ he said urgently. Water only makes it worse.’

  Bill was clearly suffering too. Rivulets of sweat were rolling down his temples into his bushy beard.

  ‘Well?’ he asked, through a mouthful of food.

  Bravado seemed the best plan. ‘It’s a bit warm,’ I said. ‘I’ll give you that.’

  The others finished their curries and tipped their plates into the sink. Then they sat down to watch us. Breaths were held.

  We ended the ordeal pretty much together and though my gorge was ablaze I became conscious of a feeling of anaesthetic calm. ‘Endorphins,’ said Bill. I think it was the first time I had heard the word. We wiped our foreheads and Bill lit a cigarette. I had passed the test.

  I began spending more and more time at Starley Hall with Anthony and Bill. At the end of the first term Mr and Mrs Chambers decided that accommodating students, or, at least, accommodating me, was perhaps not what they were cut out for, and they asked me to leave. So, at Anthony’s nudging, I took over the place of a student who had just moved out of Starley. It was a warm, decent-sized ground-floor room with a regular cleaning lady, a single bed, bookshelves, and a window onto the shrivelled quad.

  Much of the first year in the art department was spent suffering the indignities of the daft exercises that we were continually set. I wanted to draw things I could see but was told that this was ‘mere illustration’. I felt like Josef K. accused of some mysterious crime, without having done anything wrong. Why this loathing for the human drive to record what we see? I wondered. To me, cave paintings, Rembrandt, and Rothko were part of the same story.

  Instead of matter-of-factly going along with things I took it all too much to heart. If Miss Legge could have seen me now she would have railed at me again for having turned up my nose at the Central School. The trouble with advice is that you cannot tell the good from the bad until it’s too late.

  One student who took the whole thing in his stride was Charley Lindsay, a boozy and charming young fellow who knew how the system worked and how to work it. He did almost nothing for four years because he was permanently propping up the bar in the Beehive or the Turk’s Head. Everybody including the teaching staff liked Charley, even though they barely saw him outside the pub. One evening, full of beer, he fell downstairs holding a knife and cut his little finger tendon, which they replaced with a bit of toe.

  ‘If they ask if I’ve had my bowels open,’ said Charley when I saw him in hospital, ‘I always say yes.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘Tell people what they want to hear; it makes life easier.’

  I was impressed by this worldliness but repelled by the dishonesty. Someone later whispered that Charley Lindsay was actually Charles Lloyd-Lindsay, who had learned at nanny’s knee how to glide along on life’s gondola while some other poor fool pushed with the stick. Not for Charlie the bleak single-sex Starley Hall. The rumour was that he, like fellow students who had been to public school or who were otherwise perceived to be of good stock, had got himself put up in Christ Church Hall, a building of Tudor pretensions, endowed with crenellated turrets and stone archways. Such shameless social engineering, if that’s what it was, struck me as squalid. Others, less moralistic, just shrugged.

  Every art student had to take art history as a subsidiary first-year subject. Anthony and I had agreed that one year of art history would be a doddle for most of us painters, and so it proved. We did not mingle with the art historians, none of whom seemed particularly interested in painting, or aesthetics, or being painters themselves. They were like eunuchs in the harem: they knew how it was done; they saw it done every day; but they were unable to do it themselves.

  The subject of art almost never came up in art history lectures. There was instead a zeal for dates, schools of painting, the politics of the time, who had known whom, who had done what to whom, and, most absurdly, what paintings were called. The only thing I remember of the art history professor was that, while working in the beautiful art library one Sunday, he tripped on a Turkish rug and went hands-first through the glass doors of a bookcase. Microsurgeons at the nearby hospital had their work cut out.

  I recall only one art history lecturer with any clarity, a softly spoken young Scotsman with degrees in law, philosophy, and modern languages from a number of distinguished British and French universities, as well as one in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art, where the spy Anthony Blunt had admired his oomph. Somebody said, ‘That man is chair
material,’ which puzzled me.

  The man’s name was Neil MacGregor and he went on to run the National Gallery and the British Museum. Though I have forgotten everything he told us about painting, sculpture, and architecture, I do remember that during one of his talks some people were nattering. ‘Will you please shut up at the back!’ he said. Though not good enough, perhaps, for a book of quotations, this did stick in my mind.

  As well as art history, all undergraduates had to pass a first-year exam in a third subject, one of their own choosing. I plumped for philosophy, imagining stimulating tutorials in which we would be thrashing out tricky problems such as ‘What is beauty?’ or ‘How ought one to behave?’ or ‘Does it make any sense to talk about the “meaning” of life?’ As it turned out, we were just told to read a lot of old books and attend tedious lectures. The only chance to discuss ideas came in tutorials during which everyone spoke in a pre-agreed code that was gobbledegook to me. They used terms like naturalistic fallacy and secundum quid, which sounded like the final part of a two-part payment.

  The only time I scored a point in philosophy was when I declined an invitation to agree that atoms were real. ‘Aha!’ said the tutor, ‘Another Wittgenstein.’ As a young man, Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, had famously annoyed Bertrand Russell by refusing to accept that there was not a rhinoceros in the room.

  Like Hans Asperger, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) was born in Vienna, the youngest of nine children. His father was described as a harsh perfectionist, lacking in empathy. His mother was characterised as anxious. He was almost certainly autistic.

  As a boy, Ludwig was fascinated by machinery and was so technically adept that by the age of ten he was able to make a working model of a sewing machine out of bits of wire and wood.

  The family was musically educated; his father was a good violinist, and his brother became a celebrated concert pianist, who continued playing even after he lost an arm. Ludwig himself had absolute pitch and could whistle lengthy and intricate tunes. He played the clarinet and also composed.