Keep Clear

by Tom Cutler

  At the time I didn’t know that these peculiarities were autistic traits. All I knew was that Stanley Spencer reminded me very much of Bob Strange, the intense student who stuck cocktail sticks into cigars.

  After my visit to Cookham I got back on the train to continue my trip to London. It was one of those clanking slam-door trains that used to call at all the halts and produce a lot of diesel smoke. In time we pulled up at a quiet station where an old man supporting himself on two sticks clambered aboard. As we took off I noticed that although he and I were the only occupants of the carriage he had chosen to sit on the seat across the aisle from me.

  We had been jiggling along for a few minutes when I became aware that I was being watched. I peered furtively at the old man’s reflection and he caught my eye. I looked him in the face.

  ‘Is your name Thomas?’ he asked quite suddenly.

  Although I am not prone to supernatural woo-woo an eerie thrill ran through me. Being of a scientific bent I tried to work out what rational thing might explain the accuracy of his query: a wild guess? (improbable), an elaborate prank? (even less likely), or did the old fellow think he knew me? If so, how did he know my name and who could he possibly be?

  I thought I might have some identifying label hanging from my bag or coat, like a wartime evacuee, but I quickly decided against this. In any case, nobody called me Thomas except my parents.

  Then it struck me that this serious-faced old chap might be my long-lost grandfather, the bigamist, who had abandoned his family, but kept in touch sporadically with my father, enough to know my name.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s right.’

  He gave me a respectful nod. ‘Thomas the cat,’ he mused, looking kindly at me for a moment.

  ‘Where do you live?’

  I told him.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘A nice town. A nice place.’ He smiled a rather wistful smile and turned slowly away to watch the sunny banks and trees passing by his window.

  I sucked my teeth. Should I take things further or should I let sleeping dogs lie? Before I had come to a conclusion, we drew into a station, where he got off with his two sticks, as best he could. Slamming the door, he gave me a searching look through the glass before disappearing down the underpass. I saw him come up on another platform, where he stood inscrutably in his grey coat. The train sat for some time ticking over and I had half a mind to jump out and ask him some questions. But before I could act the whistle blew and we began grinding noisily out of the station.

  As we chugged away towards London I felt pretty sure that I had been speaking to my grandfather. Had he recognised in my face the face of his own son? I wished I had taken the time to question him. There was so much we both could have said. He had been an engineer. Did he, I wonder, share the family’s Asperger genes? Had he passed them on to my father, who passed them on to my brother and to me? Who knows what turn my life might have taken had I got off that train and spoken to him? He will be many years dead, that old man, but I often think of him that day, long ago and far away.

  *

  I went along to a meeting in the students’ union of the group who were interested in starting a university radio station. It never got off the ground while I was there, though a portable tape recorder was acquired. I borrowed this one evening and took it along to a concert in town given by the American jazz guitarist Barney Kessel. With an audacity that I now find hard to credit I asked an usher if Kessel would be prepared to talk to somebody ‘from the university radio station’. She went away and returned promptly to say I should go backstage in the interval.

  When I went round I found that Kessel’s relaxed onstage persona disguised the truly alarming intelligence and seriousness of the man. I had read about the techniques you needed for a good interview, and it was a good job I had prepared, because this was my first radio interview and Kessel had done a thousand of them. During the twenty-five minutes he generously gave me he absolutely kept me on my toes. Though I had jumped in the deep end I found that I enjoyed interviewing. It was a safe imitation of conversation, without any room for the social prattle I found so hard.

  The next day there was a letter for me on the hallway table. I recognised the blue handwriting and was astonished. It was from Katy. I took it upstairs and read it through. It was a mildly friendly note telling me that she had started her studies in London and suggesting a meeting. I tried to fancy what the flame of a candle was like after the candle was blown out, for I could not remember ever having seen such a thing. I replied politely, accepting the proposed date and time. Then I went over to see Bill Bradshaw, who had moved into a wheelchair-friendly flat near some shops.

  Nodding at a printed card on his tray, he made a suggestion.

  ‘I’ve been invited to this thing in London. Fancy coming along as my official wheelchair pusher?’

  I looked at the invitation. It was from a set-up run by Lord Snowdon, the recently divorced husband of Princess Margaret. The purpose of this organisation was to award grants to disabled students.

  ‘You don’t need a wheelchair pusher,’ I said.

  ‘It’s going to be boring,’ said Bill. ‘I need a drinking companion.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  The awards event was taking place in a large private room at the South Bank complex and Bill was driving us in his crazy-looking adapted car. The sight of him sailing along, steering with his foot, could give you pause for thought, since he was as carefree a driver as he was an eater, drinker, and smoker.

  ‘This is the Seven Bends of Death,’ he shouted cheerfully as we shot round a hairpin turn. He treated the speed limit as an advisory minimum, and, as we hurtled towards our destination, I held on to anything stable.

  After a near miss on Hyde Park Corner, Bill parked without incident. When we got to the door we were ushered into a long room with blond wood and soft carpeting, issued with tea in china cups, and encouraged to mingle.

  I was frozen with anxiety at the number of self-assured men, and women chuckling ambassador’s-wife chuckles. Everyone was kitted out in sharp lounge suits or stylish dresses, whether or not blessed with a full complement of limbs. Bill and I were quite a contrast to other guests. My hair was unfashionably long at the time and there was paint residue and printer’s ink on my hands. I probably seemed terse and offhand. Bill rarely dressed smartly and didn’t own a suit. Hiring one was an expensive nuisance for him since few off-the-peg numbers were made for a four-foot-tall man with no arms.

  ‘I don’t go in for these “Cripple of the Year” contests,’ he said.

  ‘I notice you don’t turn your nose up at the money,’ I replied.

  ‘Hello, hello,’ said a voice. There, in a nimbus of cigar smoke, stood an extraordinary-looking pale-haired creature wearing a loud tracksuit. It was the children’s television personality Jimmy Savile, widely esteemed for his charitable money-raising work. Bill was not to live long enough to witness Savile’s saintly reputation being shattered by the discovery, decades later, of a fifty-year history of reported sex attacks on defenceless children.

  ‘Traffic’s terrible!’ said Savile, through nicotine-yellow teeth. But before either of us could think of a sufficiently flavourless reply he spotted a teenage girl in a wheelchair and turned on his heel. I cannot say that he gave me the creeps exactly, but he did seem excessively self-interested, and his cigar-breath was unforgettably foul.

  After the awards, a lady who was trying to arrange a group photograph beckoned Bill over. ‘Picture then pub,’ said Bill under his breath, pressing his wheelchair button and moving off into the photographer’s bubble. As I waited, staring down at my scuffed shoes, I became aware of a man standing with his back to me. He had on a superbly cut grey suit and was smoking savagely. Another crisply dressed man with spectacles arrived at his side and leant forward discreetly. ‘You have to be in the picture,’ he said.

  The smoking
man shook his head.

  ‘You must,’ said Spectacles-man, pressing his lips together.

  Smoking-man gave his head another shake: more emphatic this time. I searched my memory for anything similar that might explain what was happening. Was this man friendly? Was he dangerous? While maintaining the bearing of slightly sinister servant, he seemed to be in command of the smoking man. He struck me as the sort of creature who would not hesitate to push home the last inch of steel.

  The smoking man turned resignedly, looking around for something. I recognised him at once as Lord Snowdon. He extended his arm. ‘Hold this,’ he said unsmilingly, handing over the rump of a cigarette that had been smoked to within an inch of its life. A chunk of ash hung on fiercely to a slender relict of unburnt tobacco. Any normal person would have stubbed the thing out. I took it and stood holding it hot end skywards as Snowdon moved into the group for the snap. To him I was nothing more than a human ashtray but I took no offence. People have reasons for the way they behave, and anyway the observation was an interesting one.

  When the snapping was done Snowdon returned, plucked the stub from my grip without a word, and sucked it, like one of Bob Strange’s cigars, into oblivion. I noticed as he did so that his hands trembled. I had the feeling he needed a drink.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ said Bill.

  We went to a vast black pub I knew under the railway arches near Waterloo station. It was dark and smelled deliciously of soot and dripping beer. Every time a train passed overhead the whole place rumbled, and glasses rattled against the tabletops.

  ‘Are you okay?’ said Bill, gripping his glass between his teeth. ‘You seemed rather quiet in there, and you were a bit rude to that lady with the pearls.’ I tried to explain, but I didn’t understand. Why my permanent lover’s quarrel with the world? Why could I not feel cheerful along with everyone else? We drove home fast but quietly.

  Despite my continuing low mood, I was somehow still able to laugh. I read Prick Up Your Ears, John Lahr’s biography of playwright Joe Orton, who used to send spoof letters to pompous officials under the name Edna Welthorpe (Mrs). On Valentine’s Day 1967 Welthorpe wrote to the manager of the Ritz Hotel in London asking whether he had discovered her brown Morocco handbag, which contained, ‘a few loose coins, a Boots folder with snapshots of members of my family, and a pair of gloves made of some hairy material’. On another occasion, she wrote to the manufacturers of a pie filling objecting to the inclusion of, ‘“EDIBLE STARCH” and “LOCUST BEAN GUM” … My stomach really turned at what I saw when I opened the tin’. The way Orton used language made me laugh out loud. I wanted to write my own spoof letters.

  It was a tremendous help to me that alcohol was a central pillar of student social life. After a pint or two, I always felt more at ease, more able to join in. It’s not that drinking made me feel good so much as that it made me feel less bad. I am not a social drinker but neither do I drink alone at home. I like to be in a pub, where I sit in a corner in the company of strangers, watching. Luckily there were several wonderful pubs near the art department, one for every mood. There was the Turk’s Head, where the landlady put lemon zest in the chicken sandwiches, the snug Beehive, and the Fisherman’s Cottage on the canal, with fresh sawdust on the floor every day.

  The inability to join in has always been the essence of my problem. So often, at school, at parties, at work, I was faced with other people’s insistence that I join in with something thoroughly disagreeable. This expectation, I learnt recently, is known by human resources people as ‘FIFO’, standing for ‘Fit In or Fuck Off’, a charming philosophy that results in many Aspergers being socially shunned, excluded from work, and failed at school.

  I found parties terribly difficult, but, wanting to fit in, I used to go along. Usually it was a disaster. Once or twice, to my dismay, someone offered me a marihuana cigarette, which I refused, before getting up and going home. My attitude to sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll was that I was all for the first but firmly against the second and third.

  This was not Puritanism: it was, in the case of rock music, that I found the sound physically painful and emotionally upsetting. I cannot cope with so much noise and aggression in so distilled a compound. As for illegal drugs, my antipathy to them is that, being illegal, they ought not to be taken. Laws ought to be obeyed. I feel this very strongly. My attitude is, actually, that ordinary cannabis could probably be decriminalised, since it may well be less physically harmful than the very harmful legal drugs tobacco and alcohol. If it were made legal, however, I should object to it on two grounds. First: exclusivity. To someone who does not wish to smoke it, a shared marihuana cigarette is highly antisocial, a shibboleth that pushes him further out than before. Second: hygiene. Putting something in my mouth that has been in somebody else’s mouth has always disgusted me. The marihuana cigarette is thus as nauseating as the communion cup of my boyhood, slathered with other people’s spittle and crawling with faecal coliforms and who knows what else.

  *

  The swirling leaves from the plane trees gave way to feathers of frost on the inside of my bedsit window. One bitterly cold morning I awoke to ice on the surface of my blankets. Later my water pipe burst while I was out, flooding the flat downstairs.

  I had arranged to visit Katy at her hall of residence in London. I was, of course, on time.

  I rang the bell and she let me in.

  I gave her some small present.

  She thanked me.

  I asked about her English course.

  She told me about it. Did I want a cup of tea?

  Yes please.

  Should we go for a walk around the area?

  Okay.

  What time was my train home?

  I was flexible.

  Would I like to go to the pub?

  Yes, okay.

  So we went to the pub and had a drink by the fire. And then some more. Her knee accidentally touched my knee. It was late. I walked her back.

  Did I want to come in before catching my train?

  Okay.

  She was sleepy. Did I mind if she lay on the bed?

  How could I?

  She seemed to have dozed off. I leant over her and she opened her eyes. They were like stars.

  *

  Many people look back on their time at university as one of the most enjoyable and freest periods of their life. For me it was the unhappiest time. As well as my difficulty with the enforced social expectations, I remained irked by the course and the quality of teaching, and indignant at the way I was being treated. Other students were also disaffected but understood how to change their circumstances. Both Bobs left, moving on to better places, and so we lost two interesting people. Lucile had a word with her uncle, who she said had connections with the Ruskin school, and she moved to Oxford. A new student named Harry Samson, who was in the year below me, made an official complaint to the professor. Before he knew what was happening he had been summoned for a grilling by the sub-dean. Coming back with his tail between his legs he told me that he too would be leaving.

  One day a tutor berated me in front of the group: ‘You are so uptight!’ he scolded. ‘Is there something wrong with you? You should get pissed! You’re not an artist.’ Being publicly ridiculed in this unkind way is not helpful to Aspergers — or anyone.

  The autistic writer and television presenter Chris Packham has said that at university he was, ‘confused … inordinately angry … absolutely raging.’ I identify with this remark. My indignation had always been righteous and now it became focused. I composed a three-page letter of complaint, referring to the ‘you should get pissed’ incident. I addressed it to my tutor and copied it to the professor. Since Harry Samson had been levered out by deliberate use of the sub-dean I decided to give them a taste of their own medicine and copied it to him too.

  The next morning I was drying a cup at my window when, looking dow
n from the eminence of my garret, I saw a tweedy middle-aged lady arrive on a bicycle. She got off holding a long white envelope, passed out of sight, and reappeared envelopeless before cycling off. I walked down to the hallway. Sure enough, there on the mat was a luxury envelope. On it, superbly typed, my name.

  At the top of the enclosed heavily laid paper was the insignia of the vice chancellor. The thrust of his message was that he would very much like me to make an appointment, at my convenience, to discuss the letter I had posted the previous morning, which had been passed on to him by the sub-dean.

  I was astonished by the speed of this response, by the careful hand delivery, and by the urgent politeness. Had I been more worldly I would have recognised the signs of a chief executive scared green that the business he was supposed to be running was conceivably about to be exposed in the press as one that was encouraging the teenagers in its care to ‘get pissed’. But all this passed me by.

  As requested, I made an appointment with the vice chancellor. He was genial, but at one moment his eyes narrowed: ‘Three copies of your letter,’ he mused. ‘In long hand …’

  The next day the professor, who generally had no contact with students, asked to see me. I walked into his sanctum. There were papers, a pipe rack, and a tin of coin tobacco. He was not smoking. Through gritted teeth he made me a subspecies of apology, at the end letting something slip: ‘I find the vice chancellor a rather aggressive man,’ he said.

  ‘I found him charming,’ I retorted.

  I had them in the vice. One wrong move and they would get another rocket fired right up their department. But that was not my aim and I never mentioned the sorry business again. I had been intent only on doing whatever I could to overturn the injustice I felt. I was treated thereafter like a vibration-sensitive bomb in a shoebox. That is to say, their hostile movements became slower, craftier, more subtle.