by Ben Machell
But in the case of Stephen, it seemed to most observers that the only thing wrong with him was his home environment. That whatever behavior he exhibited was the result of the stress, conflict, and social isolation that came with life with his mother and father. An evaluation carried out by a consultant psychiatrist when Stephen was nineteen did not flag the possibility of Asperger’s, even though he’d had years of contact with mental health services. Dr. Suleman, summarizing this evaluation in his own report, writes that it described Stephen as being
an insecure young man who on account of his mother’s longstanding mental health problems and the consequent marital conflict had been inadvertently psychologically traumatised through his childhood.
So if Stephen seemed anxious, depressed, and unable to socialize with other children, then, given his home life, this all stood to reason. If Stephen was weird then, well…look at his parents. The problem was Stephen’s nurture, not his nature.
The truth is that it was both. Asperger’s syndrome is a developmental disorder, which means that it begins to manifest in childhood not because of environmental factors but because of biological ones. You are, as far as we know, born with it. You do not start to “get” it because your mother keeps escaping from psychiatric wards and your father seems to have a compulsive desire for control and never leaves the house.
In other words, Stephen could have had the most well-adjusted parents and stable home life in the world and still grown up with Asperger’s. The fact he had neither of these only made things that much worse. “It was a double whammy,” says Dr. Suleman. By sheer coincidence, during the period of their friendship, Ben Weaver’s father was an intervention worker with autistic children. Although, perhaps this is not a coincidence at all. The fact that Stephen’s only friend had a parent who knew about autism and who had educated his son about it is probably the reason Ben was able to maintain his friendship with Stephen for so long. He was able to accept him for who he was. “I was aware of there being people who are slightly emotionally different, and my family were also very aware of that,” he says. “My father said he was probably on the spectrum, but there wasn’t much discussion beyond that.”
Given that Stephen would shortly embark on an international criminal career that will see him rob a string of banks while successfully evading teams of police detectives, it would be easy to view his Asperger’s as some kind of superpower, a means by which an unremarkable young man could operate as a daring criminal savant. This is not what it was. He did not do anything in a “fit” of Asperger’s. He did not come round from an “attack” of autism spectrum disorder to find he was somehow in possession of thousands of pounds’ worth of stolen cash. These kinds of interpretations play into the idea that inside someone with Asperger’s there is a “normal” person. And that if it were possible to somehow isolate and neutralize the condition, as if it were a cancer, then there would be a normal person left behind, blinking in the light of their newly normal world.
Instead, Stephen’s Asperger’s is woven into him. He cannot be separated from it. It is not the only thing about him, but it informs everything about him: from how he has developed to how he sees the world to how he forms relationships. Dr. Suleman says that in order to appreciate the depth to which Asperger’s forms part of someone, it sometimes helps to regard it as a type of personality rather than a condition. “Sometimes I say to patients it’s like living in a foreign country where you have to live by that country’s rules. You have to keep learning those rules while, for others, it just comes naturally,” he says. “It’s not something that ‘covers’ them. It’s just how they are.”
And while it’s true that none of this would have happened if Stephen did not have Asperger’s, it did not happen simply because he did. If that were the case, then everyone with Asperger’s syndrome would be out there robbing banks or otherwise breaking the law in a ceaseless wave of crime. But they are not. The majority of them do their best to mitigate and manage the effects of their condition in order to live day-to-day lives in which their Asperger’s does not dominate. “I wish I knew earlier because then I could be in a better position to handle it and maybe seek support,” says Stephen. “Just understanding helps. It really does.”
Only he never had the opportunity to do this. His condition did dominate. The consequences of which would, in concert with his own choices, change his life forever.
Chapter Eight
By the time Stephen reached the age of fifteen it was clear that if he was going to receive an education and earn his General Certificate of Secondary Education, it wouldn’t be at Sidmouth College. Things there had become untenable. His anxiety and social phobia meant that he could barely stand to be in a classroom with other children. He spent as much time hiding out in nearby fields and woodland as he did in lessons, and even when he was present in school, his behavior—the rocking, the walking in circles, the mumbling and screaming and shaking—were judged to be increasingly disruptive to other pupils.
Eventually, it was arranged that he would attend a small specialist unit at Exeter College for children who were “school phobic,” a diagnosable phenomenon also known as “school refusal” and which disproportionately affects children with mental health issues or whose home environments are marked by dysfunction and upheaval. Divorce or bereavement, for example, can cause school refusal as a child internalizes anxiety that something bad will happen to a parent while they are at school. That the same psychological process could take place in a child who has often returned home to find that his mother has been removed to a psychiatric ward does not require much explanation.
The classes at Exeter College were small, with only seven or eight pupils present, and often fewer, given that on any given day several would simply not show up. It was here that Stephen met John Paige, a cheerful and eloquent math tutor in his midforties. The pair very gradually formed a friendship that continued after Stephen completed his A levels at eighteen. Although, to begin with, Paige was struck by just how awkward Stephen was around the other teenage children.
“He found it almost impossible to talk in any group setting, or to even look you in the eye,” he says, and describes how Stephen would physically shrink back into his cheap plastic school chair during class discussions. It was not unusual for Stephen to just get up and leave the room if he found things too overwhelming. “If things got too intense, he would sort of physically cringe and just walk away very quickly. He found face-to-face contact with anyone almost impossible. He was immensely tense.”
Stephen and Paige tentatively bonded over a shared interest in space and time. “We struck up because I was teaching maths and he hated maths, but he was completely caught up in cosmology and Stephen Hawking stuff, which I was also slightly caught up in,” says Paige. “We used to talk about that, and I’d have discussions or arguments with him about maths being relevant to the sort of science that he was interested in. He was writing quite a lot of stuff of his own about the Big Bang and the Big Bounce, and they were very sophisticated. I asked to see his stuff, so he would bring it along and we would talk about it and then we would do a bit of maths. It worked.”
While the other teenagers in the special educational unit may have been school phobic, they did not struggle socially with one another. They chatted and joked, read magazines, listened to music, and did all the normal things that teenagers do. All of this was foreign to Stephen. He did not understand the references they were making. He had no interest in soccer, no interest in soap operas, no interest in the charts. To be honest, his lack of fluency in basic pop culture remains impressive to this day. He thought “The Beatles” were spelled “The Beetles.” When pushed, he says he could recall quite liking the Spice Girls. “I remember a few of their songs. But apart from that, I was an alien in that respect.”
The sheer volume of adolescent life was also a problem. The sound sensitivity he experienced as a result of his undiagnosed
Asperger’s meant he struggled to process the noise of people talking at him from different directions; the pace of group conversations, the laughs and screeches and hoots, were all too much for him to process. He went to an outdoor rave, but it was a disaster. “I can only focus on one thing at a time, so when I have noise and then someone trying to talk to me at the same time? I can’t handle it. I’m overwhelmed.”
He continued to yearn for friends and friendship without being quite sure how to go about achieving them. Bonding with his math teacher over cosmology was one thing, but it’s not the same as what all the other teenagers around him seemed to have with one another. It wasn’t even that he was shunned or rejected by his peers. Often it was the opposite. “The shunning was more from my side in many cases,” he says. He remembered once doing surprisingly well on a school sports day and other children then coming to congratulate him. But he would not engage. “I was just suspicious. I thought they weren’t genuine, I suppose.”
As far as John Paige could make out, Stephen’s world consisted simply of his home and his parents. This was a problem, because his relationship with his father was, by now, verging on toxic. “He used to be pretty angry about his father. Very angry about his father,” says Paige. Stephen would say “terrible” things about Peter, although Paige says he remembered the force of the grievances more than the specific nature of them. Peter would shout at his wife and son. He would argue with Stephen about his need for specific food on specific days, and he would argue with Jenny about Stephen, about what was wrong with him and what should be done about it. “As they got older I think they became increasingly unhappy,” says Stephen. “He ended up practically living in the shed at the end of the garden.”
To the people involved in Stephen’s care during this period, it wasn’t the on-again, off-again presence of his mother that was a concern in itself, so much as the knock-on effect it had in his family. In 2000, when Stephen was fourteen, both his physician and his social worker observed this in their notes. Dr. Suleman’s psychiatric report includes summaries of these notes. In one, Dr. Suleman described how in July of that year, John Perry, a community psychiatric nurse with Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services, Exeter, wrote to Stephen’s physician, Dr. Morris.
John Perry wrote that his outstanding difficulties appear to be in his intense difficulty around peer relationships….Stephen had very little social confidence with people of his own age and struggled to communicate with them at any level. John Perry also felt that there was a high level of family conflict particularly between Stephen and his father.
Earlier that year, in April, Dr. Morris himself had observed the strain Stephen was under at home, and believed that
Stephen was at risk of psychological and emotional abuse due to continuing uncertainty of psychiatric illness exhibited by his mother and the constant stress and difficulty that it places on her relationship with her husband and the domestic arrangements.
Stephen occasionally wrote about this in his journals, although he dedicated far less space and time to it than he did to, well…space and time. Or to poetry. Or to phrases and expressions he would try to memorize and learn, or righteous screeds about impending ecological disaster and man’s insatiable greed. On December 25, 2001, at age fifteen, he wrote an entry in which he reflected proudly on the new Waterman fountain pen he’d received for Christmas—“which I am writing with now”—and which he hoped to use for all his subsequent journal entries. He then described how that day he and his parents went for a walk, but that it was “spoiled” by a large row with his father.
I have calculated that each day I will argue with my dad at least three times. It will soon be 2002—why does that sound bad? Perhaps it is the thought of another year of stress, worry and argument. Still, life goes on.
* * *
—
Then, at the age of seventeen, something significant happened: A relative came to stay. Julian Jackley arrived in Sidmouth midway through Stephen’s A levels and lived in the room at the bottom of the garden for over a year. Julian was Peter’s cousin. He was a skinny, shaven-headed man in what Stephen guessed to be his midforties. He came from London, preferred to dress in black, and wore large sunglasses and a leather jacket. It was not made clear to Stephen why Julian was suddenly staying with them, and to this day he still does not know exactly what the circumstances were that led him to decamp from London to come and stay in a glorified shed with a family of people, each with their own fairly severe psychiatric concerns. All Stephen’s father said was that Julian worked in the building trade and was a “black sheep of the family.” One of Stephen’s older relatives once described him as a “blackguard,” though this didn’t particularly register with him. “I didn’t know the meaning of that term then.”
But what Stephen did conclude is that Julian was cool. He smoked. He gambled. He spent whole days sitting in a pub. Where Stephen was naïve and idealistic, Julian was cynical and sarcastic. Stephen loved the outdoors, but Julian would cross the road just to avoid being in the sunlight. He had a nihilistic outlook on life. He listened to the Doors and read a lot of Spike Milligan. Very quickly, Stephen found that he was in thrall to him and came to view him as an older brother figure. Having spent his entire adolescence almost completely insulated from socialization and friendships, Stephen was malleable. Open to suggestion.
“Whenever a strong character crossed my path and conveyed a certain viewpoint, I was inclined to adopt it,” he says today. “When you are younger, you’re like that anyway. But perhaps it was even stronger with me because of the limited social interactions I’d had. It was like…this is it. This is how normal people should think.”
Julian let Stephen tag along with him. He introduced his teenage cousin into what Stephen called “the drinking scene,” by which he simply meant that he took him to the pubs of Sidmouth and Exeter. They drank beer and whiskey, a disinhibiting experience that Stephen enjoyed. Julian also took drugs, something he made no attempt to hide. Stephen started to notice that he always seemed “happiest at night, ideally after a few drinks and lines of cocaine.” This really stood out to him. The fact that most people, in general, often seem happiest after drinking or using cocaine didn’t seem to occur to Stephen. It was not long before he was smoking cannabis with Julian and experimenting with cocaine, snorting it in pub toilets. Almost immediately, Stephen observed something interesting. The drug seemed to wash away his social awkwardness and anxiety, allowing him to inhabit the noise and jostle of a busy pub on a Friday night in a way that would have seemed impossible a few weeks earlier. “It had the effect of numbing that side of me, making me more confident and letting me do stuff I otherwise would not be able to.”
Julian introduced Stephen to betting on horse races. And it was this, more than anything, that the pair bonded over. For Stephen, gambling became an obsession. He was shown that money could be made from…nothing, a concept that fascinated him as much as anything Stephen Hawking had written about dark matter or black holes. In fact, it quickly superseded his more esoteric interests. “I moved from being a studious but socially awkward A-level student to reading the racing pages of newspapers in classes, and skipping them in favor of reading the form in dark pubs or bookies where I could.”
It didn’t help that, at least to begin with, Stephen did very well as a gambler. It seemed he had a knack for picking winners at long odds. His family’s money problems were more acute than ever, which meant Stephen never allowed himself to place bets of more than £20, though he developed a “formula” for picking which horses to back, one that incorporated and accounted for a host of variables: the horse’s previous record, the success rates of its jockey and trainer, its preferred ground and distance, its handicaps, and the odds. It wasn’t an infallible system, but Stephen won hundreds of pounds using it over the course of a year or so. One accumulator won him £800, his biggest single take, and he began to entertain the fantasy that he c
ould simply gamble his way out of his family’s poverty.
Stephen completed his A levels in physics, geography, and classical civilizations, but all that time spent with Julian in the run-up to his exams meant his results were not what he had hoped for. Still, they were strong enough that he could apply to university if he wanted to. But he didn’t. Instead, he was set on getting a job. So at the age of eighteen, he began the process of applying for dozens of different positions with different companies, ranging from energy suppliers to landscape surveyors. Initially, few companies even acknowledged his application, though as the weeks passed he did get invited to come in and do some interviews. Stephen says that, on reflection, this may have been a result of the fact that he forgot to put his date of birth on his CV, which meant that his potential employers didn’t know they would be interviewing an eighteen-year-old until a skinny figure walked into their offices in a school shirt and borrowed necktie and introduced himself as Stephen Jackley.
The majority of these interviews did not go well. Stephen’s Asperger’s made it very hard for him to connect with the people in front of him with ease, or to adopt the appropriate tone when speaking to them. It’s not that Stephen was always withdrawn, although he did have “a lack of confidence and self-esteem,” but rather that he could sometimes be too direct. He told one interviewer that they were “ageist” for not wanting to employ him, which didn’t go down very well. Rejection followed rejection. He couldn’t seem to make a good impression on anybody. The only piece of positive feedback he got was when one interviewer told him that he was obviously a very curious young man because of all the questions he kept interrupting them to ask. But beyond that? Nothing.