Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant (12 page)

My parents were always concerned that I spent too much time alone in my room and did not make any effort to play with the other children in the street. My mother was friendly with a woman who lived several houses down and who had a daughter about my age. One day she took me with her to visit and to sit and talk with the girl while the women chatted over tea. Whenever I began to talk about the things that interested me, the girl would interrupt, and this made me feel very angry because I could not get the words in my head out, and it felt as though I was unable to breathe. Then I started to become very red in the face, which made her laugh. This only made me redder and redder, and suddenly I got very upset and I stood up and hit her and she began to cry. Not surprisingly, I was not invited back.

So my mother encouraged my brother Lee to let me join in when he went out to play with his friends. His best friend was a boy called Eddie who lived two streets away. Most of the time my brother and Eddie would play in Eddie’s garden – he had many more toys than we had and they enjoyed playing ping pong or football together while I sat on the swing and rocked myself rhythmically back and forth.

In the summer Lee would go with Eddie’s family for a week’s holiday to the coast. My mother suggested that I go along with them and Eddie’s mother was more than happy for me to do so. I was hesitant, because I did not like the idea of being away from home. But my mother was very keen for me to go, hoping that it would help me to feel more confident around people. After a lot of gentle but persistent persuasion, I agreed to go.

Once we arrived, it seemed that everything would be fine. The weather was warm and clear and Eddie’s family were very kind and thoughtful towards me. But after only a day away from home I felt a crushing sense of homesickness and wanted to speak to my mother. There was a payphone near where we were staying so I took the coins I had in my pocket and rang home. My mother answered to hear me crying into the receiver. She asked what was wrong, but I could only reply that I did not feel right here and wanted to come home. After several minutes my credit was almost gone and I asked her to ring me back, then put the phone down and waited. I did not realise that she could not have known the number of the phone to call unless I had given it to her; I had just assumed that she would know it. I waited and waited and waited, standing by the phone for more than an hour before finally walking away. The rest of the holiday went by in a blur of tears. Eddie’s mother was frustrated and annoyed that I would not join in with them, but spent most of my time on my own in the room where the family slept, sitting on the floor with my hands over my ears. It was my first and last holiday with Eddie and his family.

For much of my childhood, my brothers and sisters were my friends. Even when they could throw and catch better than me, and make friends at school long before I could, they loved me because I was their big brother and I could read them stories. They learned, over time, to engage me by doing things together that they knew I would enjoy and could fully participate in. After watching my mother doing some ironing, I pulled all the clothes that I had from the drawers and cup-boards in my room and took them downstairs to the living room. My mother agreed to give me the iron once it was switched off and had cooled, then I proceeded to take each piece of clothing and rub the iron over it. My brothers and sisters were watching me and asked if they could play with me. I had seen my mother spraying some of the clothes with water before ironing them, so I told my sister Claire to take the spray and use it for each item of clothing, then pass the item on to me. My brother Lee wanted to join in too, so I told him to stand on the other side of me, take the clothes after I had rubbed them over with the iron, and fold each item up. I told my brother Steven, who was four at the time, to then put each of the clothes into a pile: one for t-shirts, one for jumpers, another for trousers and so on. Once we had run out of clothes, Steven was told to unfold everything and pass it back to Claire who would re-spray the items before passing them on to me to iron again, and I would pass them on to Lee to fold and he would pass them back to Steven to re-sort into piles – and round and round it went. We often played for hours at a time.

Another game I played with my brothers and sisters involved me collecting every book I could find from around the house – hundreds of them – and putting them in the largest bedroom, which was the girls’ room. There I would sort through each book, dividing them into piles of fiction and non-fiction, then sub-dividing these piles by topic: history, romance, trivia, adventure … Then I put each of the divided piles of books into alphabetical order. I cut sheets of paper into small squares and wrote out tickets for each book by hand, listing its title, name of author, year of publication and category (non-fiction>history>‘D’). I put the books into boxes, with all the books in the correct order, and positioned them around the room for my brothers and sisters to browse and read. Whenever one of them wanted to take a book from the room, I would take the ticket out and put it in a jar and give them another piece of paper with a time on it for them to return the book by. During the summer holidays my parents allowed us to keep the books together in the boxes with their tickets, though at other times we had to remove all the tickets at the end of the game and help to put the books back on the different shelves and tables around the house.

Sometimes when I played with my brothers and sisters I would walk over to them and touch their necks with my index finger because I liked the sensation, which was warm and reassuring. I had no sense that what I was doing was annoying to them or socially inappropriate and it was only when my mother told me so that I stopped, though occasionally I would still touch a person’s neck if I became very excited and the sense of touch was a way for me to communicate that excitement to those around me. I found it difficult to understand the concept that people had their own personal space that was not to be entered and that had to be respected at all times. I had no idea that my behaviour could be irritating and intrusive and felt hurt when a brother or sister became angry with me for what I considered to be no reason.

There were lots of things that I found difficult, like brushing my teeth. The scratchy noise of teeth being brushed was physically painful to me, and when I walked past the bathroom I would have to put my hands over my ears and wait for the noise to stop before I could do anything else. Because of this extreme sensitivity I brushed my teeth only for short periods and then often only with the intervention of my parents. I was very fortunate that I rarely had toothache, probably in large part because I drank lots of milk and did not eat much sugary food. The problem continued for several years and led to frequent arguments with my parents who could not understand why I would not brush my teeth without them having to compel me and often brought the toothbrush and paste into my room, not leaving until I had used them. It was not until the start of puberty that I realised that I had to find a way of brushing my teeth regularly. In particular, my brothers and sisters and the children at school were noticing that my teeth were discoloured and teased me about it, which made me more and more reluctant to even open my mouth to talk because of the insults that would ensue. Eventually I tried putting cotton wool into my ears so that I could not hear the noise as I brushed my teeth. I also watched the small television that I had in my room at the same time to take my mind off the fact that I was using the toothbrush; otherwise it would make me gag. Together these small efforts helped me to clean my teeth from day to day. On my first visit to the dentist in many years I used cotton wool in my ears to help block out the sounds of the drill and other equipment. Nowadays I am able to brush my teeth twice each day without difficulty. I use an electric toothbrush, which doesn’t produce the painful scratchy noise that manual brushing does.

Learning how to tie my shoelaces was just as much of a problem for me. However hard I tried, I just could not get my hands to perform the manoeuvres shown to me over and over again by my parents. Eventually my mother bought me a toy – a large Mother Hubbard boot with thick, coarse shoelaces – to help me practise. I spent many hours practising, often until my hands were red and itching from prolonged contact with the boot’s laces. In the meantime, my father did my shoes up for me every morning before taking me to school. I was eight before I finally mastered my laces.

Then there was the problem of telling left from right (something I have to concentrate to remember to this day). Not only did my father have to tie my laces until I was eight, he also had to put my shoes on for me first. Sometimes I got frustrated when I tried to put the shoes on myself and would throw them in the heat of a tantrum. My parents had the idea of putting labels – marked ‘L’ and ‘R’ – on each shoe. It worked and I was then finally able to put my shoes on by myself and to understand simple directions a lot better than before.

When I walked, even out on the street, I always kept my head firmly down and watched my feet as they moved. Often I would bump into things and suddenly stop walking. My mother walked with me and kept trying to remind me to bring my head up, but even when I did it would quickly fall back down again. Eventually, she asked me to pick out a point – a fence or a tree or a building – in the distance and to keep watching it as I walked. This simple idea helped me to keep my head up, and over the following months my coordination improved a lot; I stopped walking into things and my confidence grew.

For the Christmas just before my ninth birthday I was given a bicycle as a present, as was my brother Lee. My parents put stabilisers on both bikes, though my brother was able to take his off very quickly whereas mine remained on for many months, even though Lee was more than two years younger than me. I had poor balance and coordination and found it hard to steer and pedal at the same time. I practised by sitting on a chair in the kitchen, holding a long wooden spoon in front of me while trying to move my feet in circles against the legs of the chair. With enough practice, I was able to ride with my brother around the streets close to our home. He would race me, going much too fast, so that I would panic and stumble. Falling off the bike was something I quickly got used to, along with the many scratches and bruises on my hands and legs.

My poor coordination also made learning how to swim a slow and frustrating process; I was the last child in my class to be able to swim even a width of the pool. I was frightened of the water, of being pulled under and of not being able to return to the surface. The pool instructors were sympathetic and gave me armbands and foam blocks to help me float safely, but my difficulty only helped to reinforce the sense that I was different and separate from my peers, who could all swim seemingly effortlessly years before I was finally able to make my first strokes. Only as I approached puberty did I finally and suddenly lose my fear of being in the water and found that I could float and move by myself, without my armbands. The sense of exhilaration was enormous and it felt as though I had taken a huge step forward. My body was finally beginning to do the things that I wanted it to.

It was in my final year at primary school that a new addition came to the class, an Iranian boy called Babak whose parents had fled the Khomeini regime. Babak was intelligent, spoke fluent English and was very good at maths. In him I finally found my first real friend. He was the first person to make any real attempt to look past the things that made me different and instead focus on what we had in common: our love of words and numbers in particular. His family was always very kind to me too – I remember his mother giving me cups of tea to drink while I sat with him in his garden and played Scrabble.

Babak had lots of confidence and he got on well with everyone in the class. It came as no surprise when he was picked to play the lead role in the school’s ambitious production of
Sweeney Todd
, a gruesome story of a murderous barber whose victims are used to make meat pies. Babak attended rehearsals every day for several weeks and invited me along to watch. I sat on the costume box in the corner, out of sight, and read the lines of dialogue as they were spoken. I attended each and every rehearsal with him. Then on the day of the production, Babak did not appear for the final rehearsal; he was ill and unable to come in. The teachers began to panic and asked if anyone else could fill his role. I realised that from my serial attendance of the rehearsals I had learned every word of the story, and nervously agreed to take part. Come the evening of the performance I recited all the sentences for the character in the correct order, only occasionally missing my place because I found it difficult to listen to the other people on stage and could not easily judge which lines were for the audience and which were for dialogue between the different actors. My parents, who were in the audience, later said I did not show much emotion and kept looking down at the floor, but I had made it to the end at least and that was success enough for them and for me.

6