He led us through a black-curtained entrance to the back of a makeshift stage. The murmur of conversation could be heard from the audience on the other side. From the back the stage was a raw structure of planks and scaffolding poles but at the front the platform was sleek and white and well lit. Four chairs had been arranged in a conversational pattern around four microphones. There was a small table beside each one with a bottle of water and a glass. We walked on to the platform and the audience fell silent. The lights were dimmed so that they quickly disappeared into darkness and the brightness on stage seemed to intensify.
‘Have we come to the right place?’ Julian said, speaking into the darkness and looking around himself with pantomimed confusion. ‘We’re looking for the wet T-shirt competition. We were told it was here.’
The audience immediately laughed. Julian shook out his jacket and made a face as he gingerly put it back on.
‘Wet writers are a lot more fun than dry ones. I promise,’ he added, above a second wave of laughter. From the darkness came the sound of them settling into their seats.
Julian had sat in the first seat and Louis had taken the one next to him. The Chair sat in the seat after that. I sat at the end of the row. The Chair was laughing at Julian’s remarks along with everyone else, his legs crossed tightly at the knee, his costive eyes darting around the interior of the marquee. He had a notepad on his lap and he opened it. I could see handwriting on the open page. Louis was watching Julian with his brown teeth slightly bared.
‘I’m told that sometimes I can be a bit forward,’ Julian said to the audience. ‘I don’t always know when I’m doing it – I have to be told. Some writers pretend to be shy, but not me. I say it’s the quiet ones you want to watch, the tortured souls, the artists, the ones who say they hate all the attention. Like Louis,’ he said, and the audience laughed. Louis laughed too, baring his teeth even more, his pale blue eyes with their yellowed whites fixed on Julian’s face. ‘Louis’s the sort who actually claims to enjoy the writing process,’ Julian said. ‘Like those people who say they enjoyed school. Me, I hate writing. I have to sit there with someone massaging my shoulders and a hot-water bottle in my lap. I only do it for the attention I’ll get afterwards – I’m like a dog waiting for a treat.’
The Chair was looking at his notes with studied nonchalance. It was apparent that he had missed the opportunity to intervene: the event had set off like a train without him. Water dripped from my hair down the back of my neck.
All writers, Julian went on, are attention seekers: why else would we be sitting up here on this stage? The fact is, he said, no one took enough notice of us when we were small and now we’re making them pay for it. Any writer who denied the childish element of revenge in what they did was, as far as he was concerned, a liar. Writing was just a way of taking justice into your own hands. If you wanted the proof, all you had to do was look at the people who had something to fear from your honesty.
‘When I told my mother I’d written a book,’ he said, ‘the first thing she said was, “You always were a difficult child.”’
The audience laughed.
For a long time she had refused to discuss it, the writing; she felt he’d stolen something from her, not so much the facts of their shared story as the ownership of it.
‘Parents sometimes have a problem with that,’ he said. ‘They have this child that’s a sort of silent witness to their lives, then the child grows up and starts blabbing their secrets all over the place and they don’t like it. I’d say to them: get a dog instead. You had a child but actually what you needed was a dog, something that would love you and obey you but would never say a word, because the thing about a dog,’ he said, ‘is that no matter what you do to it, it will never, ever be able to talk back. I’m getting all heated,’ he added, fanning his face. ‘I’ve actually managed to dry off my own clothes.’
The place where he spent his childhood – just in case anyone here had had the bad manners to turn up without reading his book – was in the north, in a village that didn’t feature on any tourist map nor in the annals of history, though it was probably extensively documented in the files of the local social services department. It was poverty the modern way, everyone living on benefits, obese with boredom and cheap food, and the most important member of the family was the television. Men in that part of the country had a life expectancy of fifty.
‘Though unfortunately,’ he said, ‘my stepfather continues to defy that statistic.’
His mother was given a council house when he was born – ‘one of the many perks,’ he said, ‘of having me in her life’ – and before long was being courted by various men. The house was a desirable corner property, with an extra half a bathroom and a few feet more crappy outside space than its neighbours: the suitors were literally queuing round the block. He didn’t remember the actual arrival of his stepfather, because he was still a baby when it happened; and isn’t that the worst, Julian said, to be hurt by something before you even know what it is. In a sense he was damaged goods before he even became a conscious being. Coming to himself was like opening a Christmas present and finding that what was inside was already broken.
‘Which in our house,’ Julian said, ‘it usually was.’
Before long, his mother and stepfather had two more children of their own, Julian’s half-sisters, and Julian’s status as an outsider, an unwanted burden, was openly admitted as a fact of daily life.
‘It’s funny,’ he said, ‘how when parents do things to their children, it’s as if they think no one can see them. It’s as if the child is an extension of them: when they talk to it, they’re talking to themselves; when they love it, they’re loving themselves; when they hate it, it’s their own self they’re hating. You never know what’s coming next, because whatever it is, it’s coming out of them not you, even if they blame it on you afterwards. Yet you start to think it did come out of you – you can’t help it.’
His stepfather rarely hit him – he’d say that for him: it was his mother who dealt out the beatings. His stepfather’s cruelty was of an altogether more refined variety. He would go to any length to underscore Julian’s inferiority, questioning his entitlement to food and drink, clothing, even to occupying the house itself. You almost had to feel sorry for him, Julian said, counting the chips to make sure I didn’t get too many. And that obsession, that cruelty, was a kind of attention in a way. It inculcated in Julian the belief that he was special, because the fact of his existence was made noticeable in everything that happened. And that fact was becoming increasingly unbearable to his stepfather, who only didn’t hit him, Julian now realised, because he knew that if he started he wouldn’t be able to stop.