Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant (11 page)

I was never purposefully impolite; I did not understand that the purpose of conversation was anything other than to talk about the things that most interested you. I would talk, in very great detail, until I had emptied myself of everything that I wanted to say and felt that I might burst if I was interrupted in mid-flow. It never occurred to me that the topic I was talking about might not be of interest to the other person. I also never noticed if the listener began to fidget or look around, and would carry on talking until I was told something like: ‘I have to go now.’

Listening to other people is not easy for me. When someone is speaking to me it often feels like I’m trying to tune into a particular radio station and a lot of what is said just passes in and out of my head like static. Over time, I have learned to pick out enough to understand most of what is being talked about, but it can be problematic when I am being asked a question and I don’t hear it. Then the questioner can sometimes get annoyed with me, which makes me feel bad.

Conversations in the class or in the playground were regularly impeded by my inability to stay ‘on topic’. I often found my mind wandering, in part because I remember so much of what I see and read and a chance word or name in the middle of a conversation can cause a flood of associations in my mind, like a domino effect. Today, when I hear the name ‘Ian’ a mental picture of someone I know with this name comes spontaneously into my head, without me having to think about it at all. Then the picture jumps to the Mini he drives, which in turn causes me to picture various scenes from the classic film
The Italian Job
. The sequence of my thoughts is not always logical, but often comes together by a form of visual association. At school, these associative detours sometimes meant I stopped listening to what was being said to me and teachers often told me off for not listening or not concentrating enough.

Sometimes I am able to hear every word and pick out every detail that is being said to me, yet still not respond appropriately. Someone might say to me: ‘I was writing an essay on my computer when I accidentally hit the wrong button and deleted everything’ and I will hear that he hit a button he was not supposed to and that he was writing an essay as he hit the button, but I won’t connect the different statements and get the overall picture – that the essay was deleted. It is like joining the dots in a children’s colouring book and seeing every dot but not what they create when joined together. I find it almost impossible to ‘read between the lines’.

Just as difficult for me is to know when to respond to statements that are not phrased explicitly as questions. I tend to accept what is said to me as information, which means that I find it hard to use language socially as most people do. If a person says to you: ‘I’m not having a good day’, I have learned that the speaker expects you to say something like: ‘Oh, really’, and then to ask what it is that is causing the bad day. I would get into trouble in class if a teacher thought I was being unresponsive, when in fact I had not realised that they were expecting me to give an answer. For example, he would say: ‘seven times nine’ while looking at me, and of course I knew that the answer was sixty-three, but I did not realise that I was expected to say the answer out loud to the class. It was only when the teacher repeated his question explicitly as: ‘What is seven times nine?’ that I gave the answer. Knowing when someone expects you to reply to a statement is just not intuitive for me, and my ability to do things like converse socially has only emerged as the result of lots of practice.

Practising such things was important to me, because more than anything else I wanted to be normal and to have friends like all the other children. Whenever I mastered a new skill, such as keeping eye contact, it felt so positive because it was something that I had had to work very hard on and the ensuing personal sense of achievement was always incredible.

I had to get used to the feeling of loneliness that hung around me in the playground. Aside from my walks among the trees, I spent my time there counting stones and the numbers on the hopscotch grid. I often became entirely wrapped up in my own thoughts, oblivious to what others around me saw or thought. When I felt excited by something I would cup my hands together close to my face and press my fingers against my lips. Sometimes my hands would flap together and make clapping sounds. If I did this at home, my mother would get upset and tell me to stop. But I wasn’t doing it deliberately – it just happened – and many times I did not even realise I was doing it until someone pointed it out to me.

The same was true when I talked to myself. A lot of the time I did not even realise I was doing it. I sometimes find it very hard to think my thoughts and not say them out loud. Whenever I am absorbed in my thoughts there is a lot of intensity involved and this affects my body; I can feel it tense. To this day I cannot stop my hands moving around and pulling unconsciously at my lips as I think to myself. When I talk to myself, it helps me to calm down or to focus on something.

Some of the boys in the playground would come up to me and tease me by mimicking my hand flapping and calling me names. I did not like it when they came up very close to me and I could feel their breath on my skin. Then I would sit down on the hard, concrete ground and put my hands on my ears and wait for them to go away. When I felt very stressed I counted the powers of two, like this: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 … 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192 … 131072, 262144 … 1048576. The numbers formed visual patterns in my head that reassured me. Since I was so different, the boys weren’t entirely sure how to tease me and soon tired of it when I did not react as they wanted me to, by crying or running away. The name-calling continued, but I learned to ignore it and it did not bother me too much.

People with Asperger’s syndrome do want to make friends, but find it very difficult to do so. The keen sense of isolation was something I felt very deeply and was very painful for me. As a way of compensating for the lack of friends, I created my own to accompany me on my walks around the trees in the playground. There is one that I remember very clearly to this day and when I close my eyes I can still see her face – wizened, yet beautiful, at least to me. She was a very tall woman, more than six feet in height, and covered from head to toe in a long blue cloak. Her face was very thin and creased with wrinkles, because she was very, very old – more than a hundred years of age. Her eyes were like narrow, watery slits and they were often closed as if she were in deep thought. I didn’t ask where she came from; it didn’t matter to me. Her name, she told me, was Anne.

Every playtime was spent in long, thoughtful conversations with Anne. Her voice was soft and always kind, gentle and reassuring. I felt calm being with her. Her personal history was a complex one: she had been married to a man called John who had worked as a blacksmith. They had been happy together but had had no children. John had died long ago and Anne was alone and was as grateful for the companionship as I was. I felt very close to her, because there was nothing I could say or do that would make her dislike me or want to leave me. I could unburden myself of all my thoughts and she would stand and listen patiently, never interrupting me or telling me how strange or weird I was.

A lot of the time conversations that we shared were philosophical, about life and death and everything in between. We talked about my love of ladybirds and my coin towers, about books, about numbers, about tall trees and the giants and princesses of my favourite fairy tales. Sometimes I would ask Anne a question that she would not answer. Once I asked her why I was so different from the other children but she shook her head and said that she could not say. I worried that the answer was terrible and that she was trying to protect me, and so I didn’t ask her again. Instead she told me not to worry about the other boys and that I would be fine. A lot of what she said to me was meant as reassurance and it always worked, because when I left her I always felt happy and peaceful inside.

One day she appeared as I walked as usual behind the trees, kicking my heels against the thick, scabrous bark as I went, and she stood very still, in a way that I had not seen before. She asked me to look at her because what she had to say was important. It was difficult for me to look her in the eye, but I pulled my head up and looked at her. Her mouth was clamped tight closed and her face was softer and brighter than the few occasions that I had seen it before close up. She did not say anything for several minutes and then she spoke very, very softly and slowly and told me that she had to go and could not return. I became very upset and asked her why, and she told me that she was dying and was here to say goodbye. Then she disappeared for the last time. I cried and cried until I couldn’t cry any more, and I continued to grieve for her for many days afterwards. She was very special to me and I know I will never forget her.

Looking back, Anne was the personification of my feelings of loneliness and uncertainty. She was a product of that part of me that wanted to engage with my limitations and begin to break free from them. In letting go of her, I was making the painful decision to try to find my way in the wider world and to live in it.

While other children went out onto the streets and parks to play after school, I was content to stay in my room at home, sit on the floor and absorb myself in my thoughts. Some of the time I played a simple form of solitaire of my own creation, with a deck of cards in which each card was given a numerical value: ace as 1, jack 11, queen 12, king 13, while the numbers on the other cards determined their values. The object of the game is to keep as many cards as possible. At the start, the deck is shuffled and then four cards are played onto a pile. If, after the first card, the total value of the cards in the pile is at any point a prime number, then those cards are lost. This is where, like many other forms of solitaire, an element of luck comes in. Imagine that the first four cards are: 2, 7, king (13), 4. This pile is safe so far, as 2+7=9 which is not prime and 9+13 is 22 which is not prime and 22+4=26 which is also not a prime number. The player now decides whether to risk putting another card onto the pile or to start a new pile from scratch. If the player decides not to risk a new card on the pile then the cards from the pile are safe and are retained. If the player plays a new card and the total reaches a prime number at any point then the whole pile of cards is lost and a new pile is started. The game ends when all fifty-two cards in the deck have been played into piles, some lost and some successfully held. The player counts up the total number of safely retained cards to work out his final score.

I found this game fascinating to play, because it involves maths and memory at the same time. Once the player has a pile of four cards that have not yet totalled a prime number, the decision of whether or not to continue with that pile or to start a new one is dependent on two factors: the total value of the cards at that point, and the values of the remaining cards in the deck. For example, if the first four cards are as in the earlier example: 2, 7, 13 (king) and 4=26, then the player must first consider how many possible primes could be ‘hit’ with the next card if the pile is continued. The next primes after 26 are 29, 31 and 37 (because the highest value card is 13, the king, there is no need to consider numbers higher than 39 in this example). So a 3, 5 or jack (11) would lose the pile, but any other card would allow it to grow safely.

Remembering the values of the remaining cards in the deck also helps the player. For example, if you were to reach a total of 70 from ten cards with three cards in the deck remaining, it is obviously an advantage to know that they are, say, a 3, a 6 and a 9. In such a situation, the player should keep the ten cards and start a new pile because 73 and 79 are both prime. I remembered the values of all the cards remaining in the deck at any given point in the game in this way: there are four of each type of card in a deck (four aces, four 2s etc.) I visualised each set of four cards as a square composed of dots. The squares had different colours or textures, depending on the card value; for example, I would see the set of four aces as a brilliant, bright square, because I always see the number one as a very bright light. I see the number six as a tiny, black dot so I would see the set of four 6s as a square-shaped black hole. As the game is played and each card is turned up, the different squares in my head would change shape. When the first ace in the deck appears, the bright square changes to a bright triangle. With the first 6, the black square becomes a black triangle. At the time that the deck produces the second ace the bright triangle becomes a bright line and with the third ace, a bright dot. As all four of each card value are played out from the deck the shape in my head for that set of cards would disappear.

The cards help to illustrate a particular quality of prime numbers – their irregular distribution. In the game, certain total values for a pile are better than others. For example, a total of 44 is better than a total of 34 because from 44 the player can only hit two primes – 47 and 53 – whereas from 34 it is possible to hit four primes: 37, 41, 43 and 47; twice as many. A total value of 100 for a pile is particularly unfortunate as it is possible to hit five primes with the next card: 101, 103, 107, 109 and 113 (with an ace, 3, 7, 9 and king respectively).