Keep Clear

by Tom Cutler

  He had a superb sense of proportion and later in life he designed a house for his sister Margaret, paying very close attention to every detail: drawing each window, door, lock, and radiator with such care that they might have been precision instruments. It took him a year to design just the door handles. The radiators, another year. Nothing was unimportant.

  Unsociable and strange, with mad staring eyes, Wittgenstein had very few friends throughout his life and found even simple social exchanges difficult. The Times reported his periods of ‘extreme abnegation and retirement’, likening him to, ‘a religious hermit of the contemplative type’.

  He studied aeronautical engineering and later became a mechanical engineer. At other times he was a schoolmaster and a gardener for a monastery, where he inquired about becoming a monk. Engineering, gardening, and philosophy are all systems-based occupations attractive to the autistic mind. They demand, like the routines of the monk, little in the way of sociability.

  In Christopher Sykes’ BBC film A Wonderful Life (1989), the wife of Wittgenstein’s doctor, with whom he was staying at the time of his death, said that Ludwig refused to shake hands, and, ‘seemed as oblivious as if he was walking through us … Normally he sat at breakfast facing a window, not speaking to anyone … He was just the man in the corner.’

  He suffered from terrific loneliness, and depression was his constant companion, as it had been for three of his brothers, who killed themselves. He too continually thought of suicide. ‘My day passes,’ he said, ‘between logic, whistling, going for walks, and being depressed.’

  Sulky, snappish, sensitive, and nervous, he was attuned to any change in mood, or the tiniest slight. In spite of this personal touchiness he could himself be very offensive. The physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson at first took exception to being on the receiving end of his rudeness, but later made allowances: ‘He was a tortured soul,’ he said, ‘living a lonely life among strangers …’ Philosopher Anthony Quinton described him as ‘an extremely isolated figure, perhaps locked up mainly in his own thoughts’.

  Like many autistics, Wittgenstein found solace in nature: sailing, gardening, walking, and observing the natural world. Among his other interests were pulpy detective stories, which he loved. He also visited the cinema, where he insisted on sitting in the front row so that there was nothing in his field of vision but the screen.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein is generally agreed to have been the most original philosopher of modern times, coming up with two entirely new, though incompatible, philosophies — one early in his philosophic life, the other late. These dealt with language, a frequent preoccupation of autistics. His special concern was with trying to work out how it is that language represents the world. Though his two different approaches became highly influential, he had, by the end of his life, disowned them both, stating that it was impossible to put into words anything that really mattered.

  His writing was as distant and aloof as his personal behaviour. But despite his obsession with being intellectually ‘well scrubbed’ and his immensely fastidious insistence on precision and discipline, his gnomic Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was obscure even to philosophers used to opacity. To the ordinary person it is about as much use as a chocolate teapot. When his English translator asked him what he had meant by certain things he either said he had forgotten or that he couldn’t understand how he could have been such a fool as to write what it looked as though he might have meant. How much use is this sort of thing?

  The otherworldliness of much philosophy and the abstract peculiarity of its language started to annoy me, and as time passed I found myself drawn instead to science. Using scientific method you could make concrete predictions based on reliable underlying laws; science was testable, and it was less highfalutin. How I got through a whole year of philosophy beats me.

  *

  Spring followed winter and, as the wisteria’s heavy perfume wafted across the campus, posters appeared asking for writers for the end-of-year review. I went along to a meeting and was overawed by the sophistication of some of the students there. Most were two or three years older than me, which seems an important difference at that age. Two of them — Andy and Jimmy — were doctoral students approaching their thirties. They seemed impossibly mature and wise. To my delighted amazement I recognised that much of the show’s writing, produced mainly by Andy and Jimmy, was distinctly superior. How wonderful to find some people who really knew what they were doing. Of course it wasn’t exclusively top notch: after becoming irritated in early rehearsals by the constant reference to a kangaroo as a mammal I approached Andy, who was directing. ‘That should be “marsupial”,’ I said. ‘It’s more precise and it’s a funnier word in context.’

  ‘See what you can do with this,’ he said, stuffing a crumpled sketch into my hand, making me suddenly an accidental script doctor. I remember suggesting a few improvements, including some language jokes with a German lady at a bus stop and a bit of business with cucumbers in a bicycle basket. Andy chuckled but I was sure he would soon find me out as the impostor I was.

  At the end of the year I somehow passed my exams and got myself a job for the long vacation in a town down the river with a pretty suspension bridge. In the high street was a hotel and it was here that I was to be employed as barman and factotum.

  Charley told me he had landed a job as a whisky deliveryman. Any breakages, he was warned, and he must return the bottle’s unbroken cap seal. ‘What I do,’ he said, ‘is turn the bottle upside-down and hit it below the label with a steel ruler. The bottom flies off and you can then drink the Scotch and return the seal intact.’ I was shocked.

  Reporting for my hotel job on the first day, I met the boss, an Italian who combed the remaining six strands of his hair over his shining scalp. He introduced me to a few of my new colleagues including a pretty young waitress from Wolverhampton and a chef called Mike: cynic, lothario, and wit. Mike pointed to the kitchen cookers, which were mounted on casters and stood in huge stainless-steel trays that caught the dripping fat, custard, and fallen scraps of food. ‘A company came to clean those trays recently,’ he told me. ‘They pulled out the cookers and underneath was a gigantic carpet of pus.’ It was a vivid picture he painted.

  Gerry the washer-upper was scrubbing an oven tray and wanted to tell me about his favourite subject — his time in the Far East after the war.

  ‘What do you remember best?’ I asked, hoping for some historical colour.

  ‘Those Japanese girls,’ he said. ‘They’ll do anything.’ I noticed a blob of ash drop from his cigarette onto a tray of tomato salad.

  There were several bars in the hotel and I was kept busy, learning on the job. I was very anxious at the beginning, partly because of my inability to chat with customers, and partly because of my severe problem with numbers, which made it difficult to work out prices fast, especially when customers were three deep at the bar, all shouting and waving pound notes. Out of desperation I came up with my own method: calculating the pounds first and adding the pennies afterwards. This resulted in weird mental sums that went, ‘One pound forty-four, plus three pounds twenty-eight, that’s four pounds sixty-twelve.’ But it worked for me.

  The assistant manager was a compact fellow of about my age, whose mission was to become a silver-service waiter. He was bright and ambitious but prematurely world-weary having got his girlfriend pregnant while still at school. Trapped in a curdled marriage he found his job a release from the limbo of dirty nappies and tired harangues. At the end of my first shift, which flew past, he came to help me with the mountain of glasses.

  ‘Do you want to wash or dry?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ll die,’ I said, which kept him laughing for several weeks.

  I was being put up in the staff lodgings, where I briefly shared a room with a Parisian student who wore red silk underpants to bed. Other members of this transitory menagerie were a Portuguese chef and his dishwashing w
ife. In a hutch at the end of the scrappy garden the chef kept rabbits that he fussed over like a dowager. One day I saw him in tears after he had broken the neck of one and cooked it for his dinner. His wife explained in stumbling English that this was the purpose of these animals, but that it made him cry every time.

  One sultry evening after the clamour had died down I was tidying the bottles behind the bar, a repetitious classification job ideal for the systemising mind. The pretty Wolverhampton waitress, whose name was Soraya, came over. She was engaged to another hotel employee, a prognathic clod with wide shoulders.

  ‘Would you like to go out for a meal?’ she asked without preamble. I was immediately alert.

  ‘How do you mean?’ I said.

  ‘Brett’s going to a party and he won’t take me,’ she said.

  ‘Are you sure that’s wise?’

  ‘Look, it’s just food. Nothing else.’

  Having lived like a monk for too long, the promise of female company sounded like just what the doctor ordered, so I agreed. A more experienced person might have warned me that this was not a good idea.

  We were to meet in a local restaurant so I showered and ran a comb through my hair and through the highly unfashionable handlebar moustache that I was beginning to cultivate. I walked the short distance to the place. Soraya had got there before me.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘What would you like to drink?’

  ‘I’ve got butterflies,’ she said.

  At this moment warning sirens should have gone off, but instead of thanking her for a delightful evening and going straight home I went to the bar.

  During dinner I was discretion itself. Afterwards she wanted to walk along the river but halfway over the bridge she stopped me.

  ‘Tom,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Are you gay?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Because you’re the only man I’ve ever met who doesn’t try it on all the time.’

  ‘But you’re engaged,’ I said. ‘And anyway that is not a respectful way to behave.’ I was starting to sound like the Most Reverend Donald Coggan.

  ‘I’ve never met anyone like you,’ said Soraya, suddenly clasping my hand and intertwining her fingers with mine. Full of beer and also wine I did not dissuade her.

  ‘Let’s go down here,’ I said, indicating a secluded spot on the riverbank. She stiffened immediately.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I know what men are like. You all want the same thing.’ I got the feeling that she had been hanging around with the wrong sort of men.

  ‘We’ll just sit on the bench,’ I said. I led her down and we sat beside each other listening to the lapping water. We discussed what she had seen on the television, why southerners pronounced ‘jug’ ‘jag’ instead of ‘joog’, and, less trivially, her unhappy life at home in the West Midlands, where all men wanted the same thing.

  I looked up into the crisp sky. I could see several constellations, and recalled my boyhood interest in astronomy. I squeezed Soraya’s arm and pointed out Cassiopeia. I watched the soft light on her upturned nose as she inspected the constellation’s giant W for the first time in her life. She was a remarkably pretty, intelligent girl who seemed horribly ill informed about almost everything.

  A church carillon sounded the quarters. She stopped and looked steadily into my eyes. Then she let go of my fingers and very deliberately put her palm into my lap. Catalysed by the alcohol pumping through my temples, desire erupted and I roughly took hold of her. She moaned luxuriantly.

  Nemesis follows hubris and next morning the boyfriend demanded to interrogate me in the bar. A background tape was playing a quiet medley of hits, and to the accompaniment of an ersatz Nancy Sinatra singing a soundalike version of These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ I delivered in my defence a series of statements that, though strictly true, were non-incriminating. My bland account of a dullish evening somehow persuaded the boyfriend that I hadn’t been a-messin’ where I shouldn’t’ve been a-messin’ and that his girlfriend’s late arrival home minus certain articles of clothing was innocuous. Thus I avoided being punched. I convinced myself that my brain had been too subtle for his brawn, though I did wonder afterwards whether Soraya hadn’t just told him I was gay.

  Though my stonewalling had been strictly truthful, I knew it had also been dishonest and this troubled me. I consoled myself that the preservation of my teeth had been a justifiable motive. I was also concerned that this oaf might take physical revenge on Soraya. And of course I was young. And of course I had not been the one pushing it. And of course I had been drunk. This is called ‘rationalisation’.

  I wonder what pretty little Soraya is doing today. She must be sixty. Has she retained her naive poise, or ballooned out, lost teeth, and been shunned by the men who once all wanted the same thing but no longer want it, at least not from her?

  *

  The leaves were trembling along the river and the holiday was coming to an end. There was a new assistant manager who was annoying everyone by poncing about smoking Balkan Sobranie cigarettes through a holder. Custom was slackening off and summer staff were leaving the hotel. Soraya and her fiancé had gone to Weston-super-Mare and Mike the chef thought he might join the army.

  On my last day I knocked off early and went to look round the church that had chimed the quarters as I sat beside Soraya that night. It was a Victorian Gothic number with a skinny stone spire and chequered flushwork. As I walked into the cool interior the door swung shut with a boom. Pews were ranked among the great yellow arches, and dusty standards hung from the walls. I sat down under a discreet loudspeaker and thought about Katy. She was somewhere now, doing something. I could draw a line from where I was sitting to wherever she was. We were physically connected. Everything was connected. I got on the train back to the university.

  After ten weeks of dehydrated breakfast mushrooms and carousing rugby clubbers I had decided to move out of Starley Hall and was to spend the rest of my four years in a small but convenient bedsitting room in the town. The room was in the attic of an Edwardian house, my neighbours on the top landing being a giant black man who played eye-watering reggae that shook the rafters while he bellowed into a microphone, and a pale bearded Scotsman called Tim Scattergood who brought a different woman back to his flat each night. The walls were thin and when I wasn’t being kept awake by the pounding music I was listening to the squeaking of Tim’s springs and the grunts of his various lady friends. On the floor below me lived a strange man who wore kilts and cried himself to sleep.

  During the second year we were left more to our own devices in the art department. I learned etching and also lithography, a technique unchanged since the eighteenth century. First you drew onto a smooth stone with a greasy pencil. Then you applied acid and gum arabic, which smelt of cat’s pee when it went off. You then wet the stone and applied ink, which stuck only to the original greasy drawing. Finally you overlay a sheet of paper and put the stone to press. The magic moment came when you peeled back the paper to reveal your drawing, in reverse. The work I produced was heartily loathed by the teaching staff, and they let me know it.

  I became vaguely friendly with a student called Diana. She had been to an expensive school in Highgate and was polished. I was talking to her one day about turps or something and jiggling my leg, as I like to do. ‘Don’t do that in my space, please Tom,’ she said with a laugh. Diana’s dad had bought her a house in town. The wallpaper was peeling and each door was sloppily painted in different colours, which unsettled me. Diana let out rooms to students, including Anthony, who, like me, had moved out of Starley Hall. One of her tenants smelt very strongly of antiseptic. She took me to his room. ‘Have a look,’ she said, pushing open the door with her elbow. Thousands of empty TCP bottles covered the floor and the bed. The smell was hard to describe.

  Some of Diana’s tenants were girls from the art d
epartment. Alice, the strawberry blonde who ignored me, had a room near the staircase and was often obliged to pass me as I sat talking to Anthony in the kitchen. After a while she began to nod grudgingly when she went in or out of her room. One day we were discussing the Sony Walkman, a newish battery-run gadget for listening to cassettes through earphones while you walked along. Was the plural ‘Walkmen’ or ‘Walkmans’? I wondered. Alice didn’t know. She smiled mysteriously.

  Jon, my friend from school, had moved to London to study at the Slade. He was staying in a hall of residence near King’s Cross, not far from the National Youth Theatre, where Michael Croft had looked me up and down in his office a few years before. King’s Cross is now a sterile promontory of gentrification, craft beer, and al fresco dining. When Jon was there it was a lovely shithole of tarts and drunks.

  I began travelling to London on a Friday evening and staying on Jon’s floor over the weekend, a procedure I kept up over three years. I spent more than I could afford on a plaster bust of William Blake from the National Portrait Gallery. It stands on my bookcase today, next to an old box of Woodbine cigarettes. One day I stopped off in the Berkshire village of Cookham to visit the Stanley Spencer museum. Spencer, whose work I liked, was a peculiar painter and a peculiar man. Slovenly looking, he dressed in ludicrous hats and grubby looking formal jackets, frequently with his pyjamas underneath. In the rare interviews that I have seen he makes no eye contact whatever.

  He had a strange, distant relationship with his two daughters, one of whom said that he, ‘needed to be alone a great deal … he had to go into himself and rummage around and walk about inside himself’. He was curiously naive, and, to everyone’s dismay, married a lesbian freeloader who moved her partner into his house before taking him to the cleaners and evicting him.

  Spencer had a series of narrowly focused unchanging interests, including painting, sex, and the Bible. He would traipse through the lanes of Cookham pushing an old pram full of paints and brushes, recording in abnormal detail every leaf and blade of grass. He was also a prolific writer of lists, which documented, among other things, every single plant he had included in his paintings.