Keep Clear

by Tom Cutler

  Lea packed her bags and I said I would go with her to the station. The writer and comedian Barry Cryer lived round the corner and for some reason, which I now forget, his wife dropped us off. I saw Lea onto the train and went back to her empty room. She had left a bottle of hair conditioner on a glass shelf. I picked it up and read the back. It was tremendously quiet without her.

  With church attendance in England on the brink of its dramatic decline, the writing was on the wall for the training centre. I would be moving out of the place shortly anyway, my year being up. It had been arranged for me to spend a month as a spear-carrier with a local radio station off the M1. On my last day I found myself at the breakfast table with Canon Peter and the dean, who was demolishing a pile of toast and marmalade in engrossed silence. ‘This is where you came in,’ said the canon.

  I collected my possessions, held in a single rucksack. As I left, Canon Peter was roping his glider to the car. ‘The year comes full circle,’ he said, giving me an unexpected hug that I did not know what to do with. I turned and looked up at the dark window of Lea’s room. The sun caught the twinkle of ice on the casement.

  *

  I know exactly where I was standing at three thirty-nine in the afternoon on Tuesday 28 January 1986. I was beside the news desk of the local radio station, preparing to edit an interview I had done with a local cobbler. In those days you recorded onto magnetic tape and to make an edit you had to cut it with a razor blade either side of the bit you wished to remove, before uniting the two ends with sticky tape. It was a precise mechanical job that I enjoyed immensely.

  The news team were nearby, wondering how to announce the officially unconfirmed collapse of a local firm. ‘Say they’re “folding”,’ said the editor. ‘Use that word.’ Next to me, a TV monitor was transmitting coverage of the latest space shuttle launch.

  All at once something caught my attention. ‘Er, I think there’s some big news happening here,’ I remarked. One or two of them looked up but nobody moved. Being a mere ‘attachee’ to the station I was of very low status.

  The door burst open and a reporter dashed into the room. ‘Have you seen it?!’ he panted. They shot round to the monitor. The space shuttle Challenger had blown up during launch. The crew must surely be dead.

  ‘Right,’ said the editor, ‘Drop “Potholes”. This is it for the four o’clock. Chris, find a local spokesman. Ronnie, get on to London and see what they’ve got.’

  During my month with the station I did a bit of everything: recording trails, interviewing local celebrities, sitting in on tedious meetings. Princess Diana visited the town and my job was to sprint from reporter to studio and back again with reels of tape. I said things like ‘Steve says the second vox pop is best’ and got replies like ‘Tell him to give us a three-two-one countdown on these for God’s sake. We’re pulling our bloody hair out.’

  Some of the programme producers, including news producers, struck me as remarkably ill informed. They knew the ranks of the police force, the currencies of the world, and what you weren’t allowed to say about court cases, but I had to tell various people at various times, a) who John Ogdon was, b) what ICI stood for, and, c) who composed Peter and the Wolf. Though many presenters were admirably quick on their feet I was disheartened by the contrast between their amiable joviality in front of the microphone and their brusque, humourless pushiness in the office. This two-facedness struck me as both glib and underhand.

  I sent a thin blue airmail letter to Lea in America. ‘It’s working with people I’m no good at,’ I said. ‘The horror of meeting people is something I will never escape. I find it hard even to talk to them here. Perhaps I’m just bonkers.’ I had been aware for many years that something funny was going on with me but this was the first time I had written it down.

  I left the place without fanfare, deciding that a radio station which was little more than a jukebox with traffic reports was not the sort of radio I was interested in.

  Since the cupboard was bare, my parents had dubiously agreed that I might stay with them for a short time. I scanned The Guardian every Monday looking for media jobs, but in the meantime I needed cash. I went for an interview at a family-run department store in a nearby spa town.

  ‘We are the Harrods of the South East,’ said the lady interviewing me.

  ‘Surely Harrods is the Harrods of the South East,’ I thought, but didn’t say.

  They put me in the gentlemen’s outfitting department. I felt as if I had fallen into Grace Brothers, the fading department store of the BBC’s Are You Being Served? I was given training in how to use a tape measure and also in something called, ‘Being Positive’, which amounted to pretending to be every shopper’s friend. I didn’t do very well at this. If I thought a garment didn’t fit, looked ghastly, or was badly made I told the customer so, but it was explained to me that this was ‘poor salesmanship’.

  Despite their offensive propensity to lie through a smile, I found my colleagues to be more rounded, mature, and serious than my university cohort. They tried to show me how the world worked and this was good for me.

  One quiet morning during the first week, my supervisor asked me to try on a jacket that a suit rep had given him. It was pale blue and the lapels were about a foot wide. It looked very unusual in the changing room mirror and I was sceptical.

  ‘Is this right?’ I asked through the curtain.

  ‘Try the trousers,’ he said, handing them through.

  The trousers were of the same colour but would have made a sailor’s bell-bottoms appear narrow. They were too long and the waist was loose. Looking at my absurd reflection the first inkling came upon me that I was being set up.

  ‘Come out and let me look at you,’ said my supervisor.

  Clutching the waist of the trousers I waddled out from behind the curtain to find the whole team standing in a semicircle. A loud roar went up.

  ‘I was led,’ I said, ‘Led, like a lamb to the slaughter.’ It had been an initiation ceremony, and I had survived it.

  The public areas of the shop were deeply carpeted but the staff stairs were cold and hard. Coming down them one day I passed the open door of the MD’s office.

  ‘What’s a “mausoleum” and how do you spell it?’ came a voice.

  I stopped and put my head round the door. ‘It’s a big building with tombs in it,’ I said. ‘M-A-U-S-O-L-E-U-M.’ To my astonishment the boss blew his top, sending me packing and screaming at me from the head of the stairs. What was the matter? He wanted information; I had that information; and I had given it to him, at no cost.

  But there was a cost. I didn’t understand it then, but I had made a social error of the grossest kind, severely undermining a person whose sense of self resided, perhaps exclusively, in his position as alpha male. To have a subordinate encroach on his territory and display evidence of superiority in front of another subordinate was excruciatingly damaging to his self-esteem. The omega male had urinated in the alpha male’s lair. I try to be more careful now, but still put my foot in it from time to time. If you have Asperger’s you tend not to pick up on these things as others do.

  I sent a daily postcard to Lea, keeping her up to date with my thrilling adventures. ‘They put me in charge of trousers,’ I wrote. ‘Hooray! This is so stimulating that I wouldn’t be surprised if I woke up.’ I knew that I wanted to spend my life with Lea and I was saving every ha’penny to travel to the States to get married. But marriage seemed a ridiculous business, and to me weddings were superstitious rituals unsuitable for a decent person to get himself mixed up in. I had made a private agreement with Lea. That was the important thing, not a public display.

  Nonetheless, there were rational reasons to go ahead, the chief one being that I would mortally offend Lea’s family if I did not. On the other hand, I could not invite members of my family or any friend. I could not even talk about it. I had no understanding of how hurtful this cours
e of action was to be to my parents, Jon, and my brother and sisters, nor how puzzling it would be to my wife and my in-laws. It was possibly the most damagingly autistic thing I have ever done. I did not understand my motives and it would take decades for the light to dawn.

  By early summer I had a plane ticket, but to be married I needed my birth certificate. I asked my parents where it was.

  ‘Why do you need it?’ they asked.

  ‘Because I might get married,’ I said, using the conditional tense to buffer the announcement. Naturally they were nonplussed, but all I could think about was my own discomfiture. What a truly hateful business this wedding nonsense was. How and why did people put up with it?

  *

  Girt by the vast expanse of flat grasslands of the Great Plains, the oblong state of North Dakota stands in the geographic centre of North America. If you hammered a giant nail into the cowboy-flavoured town of Rugby ND you could rotate the whole continent around it. The wide Missouri flows through the Dakotas like a liquid mountain, sparkling under the broiling sun or groaning beneath a foot-thick lid of winter ice. This is the country’s oven, and its ice box. To the dark-red west the burning coal furrows of the northern Badlands let tufts of smoke into the huge skies. Before their destruction the Mandan, Lakota, and Hidasta peoples lived here. Their name for the area meant ‘place of the tall willows’.

  The plane was making its descent into the airport of the city — now improbably named Bismarck — the state’s capital and Lea’s longtime home. As we banked to port I spotted the capitol building below me, projecting from the surrounding flatness like the arm of a drowning man. After so many months I was about to see Lea again.

  Coming out of the cool aircraft into the stifling humidity of the summer air I saw her waiting for me. She was smiling excitedly; her hair bleached by the sun. We were very glad to see each other.

  She drove me home and I was inspected by family and friends. I tried to seem normal.

  ‘He doesn’t like to be hugged,’ said Lea, ‘because he’s English.’

  I hit it off with Lea’s mother, an energetic surgical nurse, and, more gradually, with her father, a generous host. He had worked as a midshipman on the Great Lakes freighter, SS Edmund Fitzgerald, which finally took her crew to the bottom of Lake Superior in a monster storm. He had been a union firebrand but wanted to talk about Chaucer. The opening of The Canterbury Tales had been drummed into me at school, so I was able to impress him by reciting it from memory over dinner.

  Beyond the family, my accent was a cause of great interest and amusement. At the Ground Round restaurant on Third Street I tried to ask about their beer. I used every pronunciation known to phonetics but the waitress looked blank. I was obliged to write it down on a napkin. ‘Oh, beer,’ she said.

  ‘Even when you swear it sounds so polite,’ someone told me.

  The visitors bureau described Bismarck as ‘a hub of culture, history, and shopping’. Everything was somewhere else and you got there in a car. Directions were given by green highway signs crowded with ill-positioned blue shields containing ill-spaced yellow numerals. Next to these, on the same sign, were white Native American-head silhouettes, with black numerals on them indicating who knew what. So ill drawn were they that at even a short distance they looked more like squashed albino hedgehogs.

  Lea took me to a cattle auction, with real cowboys chewing real jerky and buying real cows. We went bowling. The noises, and smells, and lighting were horrible, and I was obliged to wear special shoes that made me cringe.

  Few locals ventured beyond the state, but everyone was on top of the world. Strangers greeted me warmly, and unlike his surly British counterpart the Pepsi deliveryman whistled with pride. You were not old, you were ‘senior’, and if you were wrinkled there was something you could do to defeat it. Life, and even, it sometimes seemed, death, could be tamed. My waitresses for today offered me expansive breakfasts of bacon, waffles, and syrup. ‘Oh, hey, are you English?’ or Irish, or Australian, they would gurgle. ‘How cool.’ Shortly before the wedding I was taken to be measured for a monkey suit. Could it be altered by next week? No problem. The constant sunny-side-upness was a refreshing change from the Northern-European stoicism I was used to, but it got a bit much. Checkout girls kept telling me to have a nice day, even when I had other plans.

  We visited a pig farm where they dressed us in white scenes-of-crime outfits. We looked as if we were going to be handling plutonium. A thousand animals were squashed together in an unlit concrete hangar. Bowling balls had been provided to distract them from killing each other out of boredom and fury. There was no happiness in these nitrogenous sheds and we left. The smell of pig clung to our clothes and car for days.

  Near the confluence of the Heart and Missouri rivers we saw the rebuilt house that General Custer had lived in until his unfortunate appointment at Little Big Horn. All around was the familiar prairie landscape I had heard about in the stories of Laura Ingalls Wilder, which my mother had read me when I was a boy. We visited the On-a-Slant Native American village, where the Native Americans were no more. Native American matters were handled, I learnt, by a government agency called the Bureau of Indian Affairs, or BIA, which stood, the Native Americans said, for, ‘Bossing Indians Around’.

  We were asked to speak to a class of English undergraduates at the university. They wanted to know about exchange rates, which jobs paid most in Britain, and my advice for getting on. ‘Cultivate the art of doubt,’ I said. ‘Read a book. Think for yourself.’ They looked blank.

  We went to hear wedding organists demonstrating their skills. I was dumbfounded by their commingled incompetence and chutzpah. A fat young woman stumbled through simplified wedding marches on a Wurlitzer in her dining room.

  ‘Do you know any Handel?’ I asked in desperation.

  ‘Oh, are you an organist too?’ she squeaked.

  ‘No,’ I replied, ‘but I have heard of Handel.’

  After slaughtering a stripped-down arrangement of The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba she turned to face us with a huge smile, mistaking my rictus of disbelief for approval. So bad was she that she thought she was good. I later learnt that this cognitive peculiarity has a name: the ‘Dunning–Kruger effect’. It’s a good one to remember. It seemed to be more pronounced here than at home.

  I was staggered by the stuff that came out of the television. It was a freak show of wobbly soap operas and shouty commercials for one-cal root beer, spectacular storewide savings, and control-top pantyhose. ‘Like sands through the hourglass so are the days of our lives …’

  Clicking through the million channels I found the commercial-free C-SPAN (the Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network), which was transmitting live pictures from the space shuttle that showed the astronauts doing science experiments. It was bliss to sit there for half an hour and watch two white-clad people drifting about holding weightless petri dishes and bits of foil. Almost nothing happened and it was mostly silent. Every few minutes the camera would cut back to Mission Control, where two or three people sat, scratching their noses. From time to time a quiet voice would ask a question or make a cryptic announcement. Like poetry it sloooowed you down.

  I hadn’t given Lea an engagement ring. It seemed irrational to waste money on a superstitious gewgaw. Why not give a woman something of value instead: a nice big potato, say, or some pens? Lea’s father no longer wore his wedding ring so Lea decided to have it resized for herself. I am not a jewellery wearer or remembrance poppy flaunter but they told me the ceremony was to be a ‘two-ring’ affair, meaning that I also needed one. I went to a discount store resembling a low-grade Woolworths and approached the young man behind the counter.

  ‘I want the cheapest wedding ring you’ve got.’

  He drew my attention to a revolving mock-velvet display. ‘This is a medium weight court ring, Sir,’ he said, pointing with his little finger. ‘Is that the sort of thing?’ An ae
rosol of synthetic cinnamon blew across us.

  ‘How much?’ I said.

  ‘A hundred and seventy five dollars.’

  ‘How much is that one?’ I asked, indicating a tin-coloured also-ran at the very bottom. I didn’t have time to mess around.

  ‘That one, Sir,’ he said, making the face you might make when clearing rotting fish from a gully, ‘is thirteen dollars and twenty cents.’ I bought it, declining the fancy box. After the wedding it turned my finger black so I threw it away.

  If I were to do all this again I think I would be more aware of other people’s feelings about things like rings. For me and my autistic mind they had no symbolic meaning, purpose, or value. For many people, perhaps most, they do.

  The night before the ceremony, the tuxedo arrived, swaddled in tissue paper. I tried it on. The trousers and sleeves had been painstakingly adjusted but everything was two inches too short, revealing my socks and half a yard of shirtsleeve. There was no time to change it.

  Lea’s father was pacing up and down, complaining that he was having a heart attack.

  ‘Take one of your indigestion tablets,’ said his wife, who, after a lifetime of nursing knew the difference between pre-nuptial anxiety and acute myocardial infarction. But his symptoms worsened and he was taken to the emergency room.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he asked, clutching his chest.

  ‘You’re having a heart attack,’ they said, and put him in intensive care.

  On the morning of the wedding, I showered and decided to dry my long hair in the hot sunshine. This had the curious effect of making me look like the secret love child of Albert Einstein and Phil Spector. My brother-in-law, who was to be my best man, tried to damp it down but it was hopeless. He’d get it flat in one place and it would spring up somewhere else.