Keep Clear

by Tom Cutler

  I picked up a book and read some extracts from the diary of John Dee telling of the strange behaviour of his nurse, who, on 29 September 1590, ‘long tempted by a wycked spirit … most miserably did cut her owne throte’. It was plain from the story that this wycked spirit was what modern psychiatrists would call clinical depression.

  There was a tap on the door. It was Alice. Her eyes were huge.

  ‘You can stay tonight. If you want,’ she said quietly, turning and padding down the stairs.

  *

  The next morning in the art department I was talking to Anthony as Alice came in. I winked and her cheeks flushed excitingly.

  We bought bottles of wine and stayed in. We huddled under my umbrella in the hurtling rain. We ate our lunch in the park or spent sunny days on the river, watching kingfishers flashing across the surface. We dozed in the breezy grass under the willows. We went to the Bull and wandered home beside the riverbank casting long shadows in the golden sunlight. One day we swam among the reeds, Alice’s mermaid body twisting like a silken rope.

  At the house, Alice pointed out a cockerel strutting about the back garden under the trees. She said he was ‘Gregory Peck’. He stayed a couple of days. I liked birds. Birds were wise, remote, but not unfriendly. Some would peck seed from your hand. Corvids used tools.

  ‘Anthony told me you bought your zebra finches when you were sad,’ said Alice. I smiled. As Jerome K. Jerome remarked, there is sometimes no language for our pain, only a moan. In Three Men in a Boat he tells a fairytale.

  Once upon a time, through a strange country, there rode some goodly knights, and their path lay by a deep wood, where tangled briars grew very thick and strong … One knight of those that rode, missing his comrades, wandered far away, and returned to them no more; and they, sorely grieving, rode on without him, mourning him as one dead … One night, as they sat in cheerful ease around the logs that burned in the great hall, and drank a loving measure, there came the comrade they had lost, and greeted them … He told them how in the dark wood he had lost his way, and had wandered many days and nights, till, torn and bleeding, he had lain him down to die.

  Then, when he was nigh unto death, lo! through the savage gloom there came to him a stately maiden, and took him by the hand and led him on through devious paths, unknown to any man, until upon the darkness of the wood there dawned a light such as the light of day was unto but as a little lamp unto the sun … And the name of the dark forest was Sorrow; but of the vision that the good knight saw therein we may not speak nor tell.

  Alice, understanding, had led me from the depth of the forest out into the sun. I told her I wasn’t sad any more. We decided that after our final exams we would move to London together.

  *

  In the last two months of the course we had to make final preparations for our degree exhibition. Charley, who had little to show for four years’ ‘study’ got himself a vast roll of canvas and several washing up bowls, which he filled with paint. Nailing numerous sail-sized pieces up on the wall he brushed the paint over them with a long broom, never mind the drips. Once dry they were nicely stretched for him by Tony the technician.

  I caught Charley off guard one afternoon beside his huge splodge-covered canvases. ‘This is just a load of rubbish Charley, isn’t it!’ I said, in my usual unvarnished way. He smiled an intriguing smile. His final show made a big impact, but only really because the paintings were so enormous.

  One of the visiting teachers in the art department was Adrian Heath, a great friend of Terry Frost, of the bowl of cherries fame. Being, like Frost, well heeled and well known, Heath was sycophantically admired by the teaching staff. One afternoon I was hanging my degree show: paintings of people and things with baleful atmospheres and titles like ‘Mrs Febland Becomes Conscious of Her Own Mortality’. Austin Randall, who had always hated my stuff, was leading Adrian Heath through the studios to show him somebody else’s work and was obliged to come through my space. Heath stopped in front of one of my paintings, one that Austin particularly loathed.

  ‘That’s a very good painting,’ said Heath, looking it over for a couple of minutes. ‘Very good.’ Austin caught my eye. I smiled a Cheshire cat smile. He was beside himself with fury.

  The class of degree you were awarded hung on the whims of the teaching staff. A dissertation was part of the assessment process so I deliberately inserted three pages upside-down in various places, and stuck a couple of pages together with a dab of Cow Gum, a now defunct latex cement which you could roll into huge bouncing bogies. The dissertation came back with the pages still upside-down and stuck together. It had not been read. I didn’t make a scene; my mind was already on London and getting away.

  Boozy Charlie and Big Lil, who couldn’t make brown, got very good degrees, as, quite properly, did Anthony. The tutors could hardly give me a final punishment beating or the vice chancellor would be down on them like a falling piano. So they damned me with faint praise, awarding me a middling degree. I decided not to go to the ceremony in the Great Hall to kiss the vice chancellor’s ring, or whatever it was, and they posted the certificate to me. The envelope was less sumptuous than the one the vice chancellor had caused to be hand delivered all that time ago. I slipped out the certificate, gave it a look, folded it in quarters, and dropped it in the bin. In none of the jobs I was later to do did anybody ever ask to see it.

  My old friend Jon, who was still at the Slade, asked if Alice and I would like to move with him into a large flat he had found in north London. I looked at my prospects. I had no money, no promise of any kind of job, and a degree that qualified me for nothing. But London flats were much cheaper then, and attitudes were different. Thousands of graduates were to be found bumming around the city before deciding what it was they wanted to do with their lives, while others squatted happily in a fog of joss stick smoke.

  At school it had seemed that everybody was on my side. At university I had learned that many people were not. It was a sobering lesson, and one which knocked off a little of my naivety. I was eager to get away and I knew that in London, ‘the Old Smoke’, I would be among friends. Bill Bradshaw was already living in a wheelchair-adapted flat in Waterloo. Diana had bought a place in Stoke Newington and Anthony was going to move in as her tenant.

  I cannot remember whether Alice and I worried about how we would pay the rent on an income of zero, but a dictum of the fourteenth-century Christian mystic Mother Julian of Norwich came to mind: ‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.’ I found this an uplifting maxim, and always have. Things would be okay. Something would turn up. London would be an adventure. I looked at Alice. She nodded purposefully. We told Jon yes.

  Gazing across the pink roofs of the town, lightning flashes of memory lit up my mind: the dirt under Austin Randall’s nails; Mr and Mrs Chambers dressed in their ‘refinery’; Anthony falling down the steps of Paris; Alice’s smile; and the vacant Fleeta Swit ambling across the quad, a pennant of toilet paper fluttering from her shoe.

  I had long sensed that I was somehow different, but now, for the first time, I realised I could be happy. I squeezed Alice’s hand.

  ‘Whatever happens in future, if I seem … if I can’t …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You will forgive me, won’t you?’

  She laughed and threw her arms around me.

  ‘Come on,’ she said.

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘London, silly.’

  We picked up our stuff and shut the door.

  Chapter 5:

  Road narrows

  If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

  HENRY DAVID THOREAU

  For many years, flocks of artists, musicians, and students had been drawn to the ‘urban village’ where we had moved
, warming to its cheap bedsits and convenient pubs. Though the first flickers of gentrification were becoming visible — a fancy café here, a skip on the pavement there — we felt at home in this bohemian corner, just five miles from the centre of London.

  The flat was on the ground floor of a purpose-built post-war block at the top of a hill. It was a roomy place, easily big enough for Alice, Jon, and me. It was clean, well maintained, and regularly painted.

  At the foot of our hill, God had pushed his thumb into the clay, making a dip in which the village had grown up. A banded clock tower crowned with a weathervane stood at the hub with roads radiating out like the legs of a spider. Going anywhere from this point meant climbing a hill.

  I went for a walk past a disused Victorian–Gothic church which was to become a friend. I would give it a pat whenever I passed and say a few words, just as I had done with the lampposts of my youth. I found I could form reliable relationships with buildings. Being objects rather than people, they never confused me. This attitude is not uncommon for those on the autism spectrum. Wildly amusing autistic lecturer Ros Blackburn has even described the sexual affair she had with her ice skates.

  I am reminded of a day, years ago, when I was on the beach with one of my nephews, a toddler who has some autistic traits. We were throwing pebbles into the water, and I explained how the receding waves tended to drag them out to sea. He looked anguished. ‘I don’t want to throw them any more,’ he said. I wondered what was wrong and then the penny dropped. ‘Oh, I forgot to tell you,’ I said. ‘When the waves come back in they bring the pebbles back onto the beach again.’ He thought for a moment and resumed throwing. He saw the lonely helpless pebbles being dragged out to sea in the same way another child might see a person, or a pet rabbit.

  I registered with an irrepressible doctor whose father had been murdered by the Nazis, and made an appointment with my new bank manager to discuss transferring my account and getting a chequebook. These then routine meetings now read like archaic rituals officiated by gentlemen in top hats.

  One night we got back late to the flat. When I opened the door the floor seemed to part like a torn sheet. The carpet was a mass of cockroaches scurrying for their burrows under the sudden brilliance of the hall light.

  We tried deadly powders and sticky insect traps, we complained to the management and made little headway. In the end, since the greasy insects never crawled across the dinner table or dropped onto our faces in the night, we learnt to live with them.

  I got a job working with children in a play centre near Marble Arch. The money paid the rent and I was spending most of my time away from the hall of mirrors of adult life.

  The area was a mixture of poor and rich families. There were youngsters from the Lisson Green estate as well as the sons and daughters of diplomats from the Mayfair embassies. Some children could name the countries of the world and speak French, Urdu, or Persian. Others could barely read. The tiny mother of one of the quieter girls worked at St Mary’s hospital, nearby.

  ‘What does your mummy do?’ asked a nosey parent.

  ‘She cuts up dead bodies,’ replied the girl.

  On a trip to the Kent countryside one boy saw his first cow.

  A family of four Ugandan boys used to visit: David, Stephen, Silver, and Timothy. Silver was able to put his entire fist into his mouth, to the great delight of everybody who saw the performance. Their father Musa, a self-possessed, dignified man, looked after his sons on his own, having left his wife in Uganda the day he brought them to England.

  One day, we were on an organised trip to the Imperial War Museum and, as I rounded a corner with the Ugandan boys, a display case housing a stack of First World War rifles came into view. They froze, clapping their hands over their ears in terror. I had to lead them out into the fresh air.

  Back at the play centre, their father asked if he could have a quiet word. I took him to a private room and we sat down. He told me about his country during the dying days of Idi Amin’s dictatorship, where he had been arrested and imprisoned for I don’t know what. He said he had been repeatedly beaten and made to parade daily with the other inmates while a uniformed solider came down the rows, whimsically picking out the men to be shot that morning.

  One day, the soldier stopped in front of him. ‘I know you,’ he said. Musa looked straight ahead. The man pulled him out and marched him towards a building, where he shoved him into a dingy room and closed the door. This was it. The soldier spoke to him in an urgent whisper. ‘You helped my brother,’ he said. ‘Go! Leave! Take your family.’ He unlocked another door and pushed Musa out of the prison. ‘Cover your face at the airport,’ he hissed. ‘They will see the bruises.’

  Musa gathered his children and a hatful of money, wrapped a scarf around his disfigured face, and bought five tickets out of the country. He could not take his wife; she would join him later, they hoped. Shaking with fear, he made the long walk across the airport tarmac with his boys. He was not stopped. He climbed the steps and boarded the plane.

  As Musa came to the end of his story a single tear ran slowly down his cheek. I was very affected but I did not understand how to express my mood. My face remained blank. I could never have touched his arm, much less embraced him. We returned to the playground so he could collect his boys, for whom museum guns were not neutral objects. They flung themselves around him.

  Life in the flat ran smoothly. Jon was busy at college and Alice and I tended to do our own thing, especially at weekends. We would walk into London or go to the pub. Sometimes we visited Brighton for the day or took our sketchbooks into the park. After a few months we decided to look for a place of our own.

  In those days, flat hunting was done with the aid of newspaper ads and a copy of the A–Z map book. Someone had also given us the name of Eugene at the Busy Bees Agency, which tracked down flats for people. I rang him from the work phone, which had a pale brown body and a darker brown handset. He found Alice and me the perfect place: a first floor flat on a busy crossroads, a mile north of Euston. An elevated section of the North London line passed close by the living room window. Trains chugged by all day over an ugly Victorian bridge while lorries thundered underneath, being supplanted at night by screaming police cars and singing drunks. For a person so sensitive to noise and overstimulation it seems curious that I could stand all this, but the urban bustle merged into a background rumble. I found it deeply romantic and slept soundly. It was the quiet nights and hooting owls of the countryside that drove me bananas.

  The flat was above a knocking shop dressed up as a massage parlour. I would meet the girls shopping for cigarettes and sandwiches, and hear about their sore feet. We were flanked by a pie, mash, and eel shop and a small sausage factory, which, every Wednesday, took delivery of mountains of white pork belly dotted with nipples that would nevermore suckle a piglet.

  One night, when I was about to push off to bed, the doorbell went. I trotted down in my dressing gown, and there, silhouetted against a streetlamp, stood the figure of a middle-aged man in a suit. He looked me over doubtfully.

  ‘Do you do massages?’

  ‘Next door,’ I said.

  ‘What, sausages?’

  ‘Other side.’

  In an upstairs flat lived two young men; the balding father of one used to present serious programmes on television. I passed him once on the landing as he went up to see his son, his crisp suit and tie clashing with the dust, shredded stair-carpet, and unopened bills that littered the floor.

  We tried the pie and eel shop. The food consisted of a yellowish meat-filled pastry, served with dollops of watery potato engulfed in ‘liquor’, a hot sauce purportedly made with parsley and boiled eel juice, but actually just a flour gruel turned green by unholy quantities of food colouring. With your pie you could have a dish of hot, or jellied, eels. The jellied variety looked like something from an autopsy so I tried the hot ones. My disgust mechanism is fine
ly attuned and the sensation of sucking the flaps and scraps off the snake skeleton made my skin creep. ‘Why do you criticise everything?’ asked Alice, not angrily but in search of understanding. I didn’t know and couldn’t say.

  My zebra finches were getting on a bit, but they still hopped from perch to perch and squawked happily, or it might have been aggressively, whenever I put Gerald Finzi’s Dies Natalis on the record player. Through Finzi’s settings I discovered the haunting poetry of Thomas Hardy, whose novels I had always found so tedious. Finzi and Hardy remain golden threads uniting Then and Now in the ribbon of my life. Not long afterwards, both my birds died: first one, then the other. I felt the loss for a long time but kept the feeling a secret.

  Alice got a job as an artists’ model. When someone asked me whether I was happy with a lot of people looking at my nude girlfriend I said that what counted was whether she was happy with it. I knew that an artist in the studio becomes as emotionally detached as a surgeon performing a breast examination. Alice worked in the London art colleges and wherever else people needed a model. One day one of the ladies from a drawing class near Hampstead gave her a lift home. She told her that her husband Freddie had written a thriller called, The Day of the Jackal. Had she heard of it?

  Somebody from Madame Tussaud’s rang to ask Alice to model part of the torso of a young actress called Nastassja Kinski, who had not had time to sit for the sculpting of more than her head. They cast her hands and forearms using dental alginate. How strange to think that hundreds of thousands of people would soon be traipsing unknowingly past replica bits of my girlfriend. Somewhere today there are tucked away in forgotten holiday albums around the world a few faded snaps of Alice’s young limbs. Would I recognise them?