Keep Clear

by Tom Cutler

  I told her to put him through.

  ‘Good afternoon, Sir,’ I said. ‘How can I help?’

  ‘You have fucked me!’ he announced. His blunt claim took me aback, and though I tried to get to the bottom of his complaint he kept repeating his statement in a guttural accent.

  ‘What would you like me to do?’ I asked. I had the feeling that there must be more to this than met the ear.

  ‘You have fucked me!’ he said again. Though emphatic, he was, I realised, not angry. He was trying to explain something. All at once the penny dropped.

  ‘Oh, I see,’ I said. ‘We’ve faxed you, have we?’

  ‘Yes. Yes.’

  He was delighted that someone had finally understood. I dealt with his query and explained things to the sales department. They laughed immoderately, and the cheerful sales director, who lived in a country house with a flooded cellar full of floating wine bottles, invited me out for a kebab. Waving at the elephant’s leg on a stick rotating in front of the heat he said: ‘Don’t eat that stuff. I know what’s in it.’

  *

  I went to interview the actor Simon Callow at his house not far from the flat over the knocking shop, where I had lived with Alice. Except for a hideous new supermarket, the area was unchanged. One side of a street would be full of smart professionals in skinny white houses, the opposite side a jumble of multi-occupancy dwellings whose peeling exteriors were pocked with satellite dishes and entryphone boxes. Poverty clings to stucco. Under the streaked render of one such building I saw a young couple embracing in a mossy doorway. The man’s trousers were round his ankles.

  I stopped at the pedestrian crossing by the Tube. Ever since a scare with a sports car I no longer dashed across but waited for the green man. As I stood there I perused a beautiful Kinneir/Calvert traffic sign pointing to Crouch End, Hampstead, and Highgate. Jock Kinneir believed that consistency in design was the visual equivalent of grammar in language, and described direction signs as ‘vital as a drop of oil in an engine, without which the moving parts would seize up’. On both counts he was right, and the signs that he and Calvert designed prove it.

  Simon Callow’s house was a beautiful early Victorian cube of yellow brick, adorned with pilasters and volutes. He let me in out of the pouring rain and showed me into what was either a large sitting room or a very large study. I wasn’t sure because, although there was a sofa, stalagmites of books were growing up from most of the floor. On the wall, a mannerist portrait of a bare-chested boy and the huge face of Oscar Wilde looked down at us. ‘My place is absolutely overflowing — to an alarming degree,’ Callow apologised, clearing a pile from a chair. Then, more severely, ‘I can only give you half an hour.’ He strode over to a telephone and dialled a number, ordering a cab for half an hour’s time and making quite a performance of it.

  He had written a book about The Night of the Hunter, a film directed by Charles Laughton, which happened to be a favourite of mine. As he warmed to his theme, continually pouring tea from a gigantic pot, we began to get on rather well. This was, and is, my preferred way to meet new people. Two of us together in a quiet well-lit room; a narrow subject matter known to me beforehand; a definite span of time during which to talk; and no chat. Like a television or radio interview, this was a facsimile conversation with its own reassuring rules. I found I was as relaxed in the question-asking role as in the question-answering one.

  I have always been interested in cinema so the interview turned into a nerds’ discussion. After a while I noticed that I had overstayed my half hour by twenty minutes. Callow saw me out, down the wet steps. Oddly enough the taxi he had ordered hadn’t arrived.

  As I walked to the station I reflected that, though I love cinema, I often get the people of the drama mixed up. I tag them by their glasses, or clothes, but a film featuring two moustachioed men in raincoats or two women with shoulder-length hair will do for me. ‘Is that the man who shot the other man with the pens in his pocket?’ I might ask Lea.

  ‘No,’ she will say. ‘It’s his father.’

  Once I’ve got them visually sorted out I can still be confused by what they are doing.

  ‘Why is she crying?’ I recently asked as we watched a film.

  ‘Because she loves him but she realises that he doesn’t love her,’ Lea explained.

  The mechanical details are of more interest to me than the characters, and I am always particularly on the lookout for snow-and-ice effects. This began when, as a boy, I saw the 1930 Laurel and Hardy film Below Zero. Shot outside in the balmy California sun, the cold-weather effects were a mixture of crude and subtle. Ice cream was used for snowballs, leaving a giveaway oily white trail down Ollie’s face, but the thick ice through which Stan falls was more convincing. I was puzzled how they did it until years later I learned that it was wax. Other highly persuasive snow-and-ice effects have, over the years, been created with cotton wool, washing powder, salt, ash, shredded plastic, baking soda and tiny acrylic spheres known as ‘microballoons’, and, for snow trodden underfoot, particles of paper compressed with water. Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, made just eleven years after Below Zero, contains much better snow effects. For The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) Welles shot some superb snow scenes in a Los Angeles icehouse: the first time that characters’ breath had been visible on the cold air. Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965) used an old long-shot favourite: gallons of industrial foam, though the wind blew it around very unconvincingly in huge globs. Murder on the Orient Express (1974) used the same material much better, augmenting it with wonderful creaking-snow sound effects.

  I have yet to meet another person who shares my special interest in snow effects, or my preoccupation with the design of the special characters used on UK number plates, or my enthusiasm for the wonderful shapes-disguised-as-letters that appear on the Snellen eye-test chart. Odd preoccupations, I now realise.

  Although I do not expect everyone to share my strange interests, some people do ‘get me’. Being visually sophisticated and culturally developed, my friend Mervyn is one of those with an eye for the technicalities that so absorb me. One day as we drove along a main road towards a pub lunch something caught my eye.

  ‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘These road signs look different.’

  The car slowed as we approached a junction and I was able to scrutinise a big sign near the slip road. While remaining essentially the same as the signs I was used to it seemed to have been smoothed and polished. I saw that instead of being manufactured from separate bits of material glued down in place it was now of a single piece. I realised what had happened.

  ‘They’ve digitised them,’ I said.

  Mervyn peered over his sunglasses. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘It works,’ I said. ‘I like them.’

  I was amazed. The new signs resembled a set of much-loved cut crystal glasses that had been replaced overnight with an identical set, but one with a higher lead content: sharper, brighter, and more refractive. I was delighted.

  *

  The journeys to and from work were taking it out of me. Coming home late one night I was buttonholed on the station steps by a bearded person wearing a poncho and holding a smashed-up guitar. ‘If you’re just getting back from work,’ he said, ‘you’re an idiot.’ I hadn’t the strength to kick him, and to be fair he had a point. I walked the twenty minutes back to the house and sat on the bottom stair to take off my shoes. ‘This is insane,’ I said to Lea. ‘I don’t know how much more I can take.’

  I had been mulling over an idea. I remembered the great pleasure I’d had in the eighties writing spoof letters to the paper and the glee with which I had read Joe Orton’s Edna Welthorpe letters. I also recalled Gerard Hoffnung’s spoof letters supposedly from Tyrolean hoteliers struggling with poor English: ‘Do not concern yourself that I am not too good in bath; I am superb in bed.’ Could I write some funny
letters in a similar vein, using language mix-ups? And could I come up with a plausible character who always got the wrong end of the stick? I thought I could, and I had an idea how it might be done.

  *

  One day the MD collared me in the corridor, objecting to the noun ‘nitty-gritty’ in a piece I had okayed. ‘It’s racist,’ she scolded. ‘It’s about the nits on slaves. Didn’t you know?’ She seemed very pleased with herself, but I was sceptical. My reference books mentioned nothing about it, so I emailed the Oxford English Dictionary. They explained that ‘nitty-gritty’ had nothing to do with slaves, and that ‘nitty-’ was most probably a meaningless rhyme attached to ‘gritty’ after the fact. Etymology being one of my interests, I was fascinated. I was also vindicated. I copied the email to the MD — a mistake, as detail, and being wrong, was not her thing.

  She called me into her office, seeming peeved. ‘As the managing editor you are doing too much editing and not enough managing,’ she said. Along with my mad commute, this latest of her world-turned-upside-down pronouncements was a signal that it was time to go. I had worked hard but once again my relationships with people, including the MD, had not developed as they might have done. Everything everyone else enjoyed I hated. Everything I enjoyed everyone else found peculiar or infantile. I handed in my notice. ‘What are you going to do?’ asked the sales director, polishing his glasses. I told him I was going to write a book. ‘Christ!’ he said.

  The boss informed me that as a farewell she would be taking me out to eat some food with a lot of the office people. She told us to meet her in one of her favourite bars but she went to the wrong place and left us waiting. What a Freudian would make of that I don’t know. When she finally turned up she demanded that a big table be pulled into place for us all to sit around and there was an excruciating fuss as waiters rearranged the furniture. I explained that this was not what I wanted but she couldn’t hear me. However, the irresistible force had met the immovable object: I picked up my briefcase and left my own leaving party, without so much as a Pan Am smile.

  Someone had asked me: ‘How are you going to write at home? You’ll just be lounging around in a silk dressing gown drinking pink gins,’ but I found that the solitary life of the writer suited me, and my nitpicking and self-criticism were apt for the maintenance of quality. I had dug around in my files and found a spoof letter I had written fifteen years earlier, when Lea and I had been living in the flat opposite the wood. It was by one of my alter egos, Tomas Santos, a young man of indeterminate nationality who was studying at a language college on the South Coast. His English was terrible, but he was blessed with a gift for the inspired guess, though the misunderstandings and double entendres were many and rude. This was the character I had decided to develop for my book of letters.

  The mechanics of language were meat and drink to me, but if I were to pull off this trick I would need to pick my targets carefully. So I made a list. There was a scattering of people I admired, but most were Establishment figures that I hoped to poke fun at or just inconvenience, using as my weapons Tomas Santos and his mangled English.

  Over the next year Tomas wrote letters in tortured English to hundreds of people. He asked the Master of the Rolls for ‘two cheese and tomato on brown, with poopy seeds’. He wrote to the Lord Archbishop of Armagh, wondering why the Church was led by a ‘primate’ and advising him not to eat too many bananas, and to the Queen at Buckingham Palace, ‘Near the roundabout’, asking for a ‘singed photograph’ (a recurring motif). Most people replied, some, like Sir George Martin and Noam Chomsky, with respect and charm, others with ludicrous pomposity. I used to run downstairs in the morning to see what had arrived and got the most fun from the sniffy ones. Sheltering behind the façade of Tomas gave me a wonderful sense of irresponsible freedom, which I found lacking in ordinary life.

  Tomas Santos wrote to the philosopher Mary Warnock, who had intrigued me when she had once bought dinner for my old friend Jon and me after he had exhibited some paintings in a picture gallery with which she had a slight connection. She struck me then as delightfully odd, but it was not till recently that I discovered that she had had an autistic brother, and that her unusual mother had been an independent-thinking eccentric who wore strange clothes and walked with splayed feet — a physical characteristic of note in autistic people. I now understand Lady Warnock’s charming oddity in a new way. In Tomas’ letter to her he asked for her views on a principal of contemporary philosophy, the subject known as ‘causality’. She replied, pointing out that, unfortunately, he had got the wrong idea: ‘I fear you mistook CAUSALITY for CASUALTY — a hospital soap opera,’ she said. I enjoyed the crash of gears that Tomas often produced by his ‘misunderstandings’, but was this not a strange way to communicate with people, and a strange way to enjoy oneself?

  After a year or so I had amassed box files of letters and replies. It was time to try to get published. I had been told that this was best done through an agent but that if I thought getting a publisher would be hard, getting an agent would be harder. For all that, I did what you are supposed to do and bought a copy of the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, circling some of those agencies which said they handled humour. Instead of a standard letter I sent each a Tomas Santos letter. Here is an example:

  Laura Morris Literary Agency

  Dear Laura,

  I am visiting in UK since a short time that I may study in the language college and read many the English book to speak in a well idiom.

  My intensively reading incorporated some the classic, like Charles Dickens: Oliver Twit, L. M. Montgomery: Anne of Green Bagels, and Grahame Greene: Travels With My Cunt. I ever wished to wrote the book, but in my home land ours military leaders precluded seditious writings so I must hid them in the hole in my uncle’s back passage. Now, however, it my big chance and I have the idea for the book that is ‘ready to go’. This are my Collected Correspondences that I collected him hunderds letters in a only year. Here what some people said that my letters:

  ‘Our sauce contains tamarinds – a tropical fruit – not tamarins, which are monkeys!’

  HP FOODS

  ‘“Primate” is an ecclesiastical term …’

  ARCHBISHOP ROBERT EAMES

  ‘I am happy to be Patron of your band, Wind, String & Faggots.’

  TONY HAWKS

  ‘We do not allow indoor BBQs within the Ritz Hotel.’

  RITZ HOTEL

  ‘Very funny letter. You should be published.’

  VICTOR LEWIS-SMITH

  ‘Obviously you need help.’

  THE SAMARITANS

  I anticipate to ours excitable pratnership Laura and I put the stamp for good responding manners.

  Yours friend,

  TOMAS SANTOS

  Some agents replied, others didn’t bother, despite Tomas enclosing postage. Laura Morris, the addressee of the above letter did reply, asking me to visit her, bringing everything I had ever written. ‘Everything I had ever written’ amounted to these letters, so I made a collection of a few of my favourites and went to see her. We talked about Sherlock Holmes, Alfred Hitchcock, painting, and writing. She thought we had a book in the offing and said she would try to find me a publisher.

  Like the best agents, Laura made allowances for my foibles. She called me ‘A complete original’, which is a kind way to describe the idiosyncrasies that many find so disagreeable. She has been my agent, and friend, now for more than fifteen years.

  Women have always been important to me, and most of my few friends are female. One day one of them gave me a book. It was by a man called Mark Haddon and its title was The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. I didn’t like the cover or the typography but I recognised the title as a quotation from Sherlock Holmes so despite its being fiction I decided to read it. The text had been set in a sans serif typeface, which made it tiresome to read, because serifs guide the eye horizontally as you go
. It was also sprinkled with careless setting mistakes. I noticed an extraneous letterspace between the words ‘logic’ and ‘can’ in line three of paragraph two on page eighty-two. All the same, I was intrigued and strangely touched by the story. I found that the interests and feelings of the main character, a boy called Christopher, tended to reflect my own: his dismay in busy railway stations; his liking for details, and patterns, and rules; his confusion when meeting new people; and his interest in Sherlock Holmes. Someone told me the character was autistic but I dismissed this on the ground that his thoughts and behaviour were not autistic: this was how everybody felt. By ‘everybody’, I now realise, I meant ‘me’. I completely failed to make the connection.

  *

  Laura had had a great response from a publisher to my Tomas Santos book. But he wondered whether, before he published the letters, Tomas could first write an English phrasebook for foreigners. Like the jobless actor who is asked by a film producer ‘Can you speak siSwati?’ I automatically said yes.

  So I got to work, writing dialogues such as In the Restaurant, To Speak with Childrens, and To Met the Queen. Because I now knew Tomas Santos intimately it all flowed quite easily. I called the book, Speak Well English: an guide for aliens to successful intercourse in the correctly English mode and when it was done I sent it off. When it came out various radio stations wanted to interview me and one asked me to do it in character. I had to improvise, which was exhilarating and terrifying at the same time, but it played to my exhibitionistic Asperger strengths. After five minutes, they asked if I could stay for half an hour. I said yes, and in that time I reduced the whole team to incapable laughter. I have never felt happier; when I came out into the street afterwards I was floating.

  The publisher told a colleague he thought the book ‘the funniest thing we’ve ever published’, but the reading public were not so enthusiastic and it sold less well than hoped. It seemed that the professionals were as ignorant as anyone else about what people would and wouldn’t buy; otherwise, I supposed, they would publish nothing but best sellers. You couldn’t tell the reading public what they liked: they told you.