At the bottom of the garden there was a shed which nobody used – his stepfather wasn’t exactly the DIY type – and which was basically full of old junk; Julian couldn’t remember exactly when this shed became his permanent home, but it must have been after he’d started school, because he remembers his mother making him promise not to say anything to the teachers. But from a certain point Julian was no longer allowed in the house: a space was cleared out there for a mattress on the floor, his meals were brought out to him, and he was locked inside.
‘A lot of writers like sheds,’ Julian said thoughtfully. ‘They use them to work in – they like the privacy.’ He paused, while a faint ripple of uncertain laughter rose and died away again. ‘A Shed of One’s Own,’ he added. ‘I did consider that as a title.’
He wasn’t going to say much about what he felt in those years – which lasted until he was around eight and was readmitted, he didn’t know how or why, to the routine cruelty of the house – the fear, the physical discomfort, the animal-like contrivances he came up with to survive it: that stuff was all in the book. Writing it had been both a torment and a relief, like pulling a knife out of his own chest: he didn’t want to do it, but he knew that if he left it there the pain would be worse in the long term. He made the decision to show it to his family, to his mother and also to his half-sisters: at first, his mother accused him of making it all up. And part of him almost believed her: the problem with being honest, he said, is that you’re slow to realise that other people can lie. It wasn’t until one of his half-sisters corroborated his story with her own memories that the subject became open. What followed were months of negotiation: it was like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but without the assistance of Kofi Annan; there had been some unpleasant scenes. He wasn’t obliged to get his family’s permission but he wanted it anyway, because it wasn’t enough for it to be simply his truth, his point of view. Point of view, he said, is like those couples who cut the sofa in two when they get divorced: there’s no sofa any more, but at least you can call it fair.
When he was fourteen, he was on his way home from school when his eyes were met by the extraordinary sight of two men, two foreigners, standing outside the village shop. They were from Thailand; they had bought a house in the countryside nearby, a sort of stately home, with enormous formal gardens. They had come into the village to place an advert in the shop window, for someone to mow the lawns once a week. Julian had been stopped in his tracks by the sight of these two exotic creatures, these apparitions in the grim, grey landscape he knew to death. The shop was closed and the men asked him if he knew when it might reopen; and then, looking him frankly over as he had never been looked at in his life, asked him whether he himself might be interested in the job. The lawns were extensive; they thought it would probably take a whole day each week to mow them all. He could do it at a weekend when he wasn’t at school; they would be pleased to drive him there and back, and to give him lunch.
For the next two years, he spent every Saturday pushing the mower up and down the vast, tranquil green lawns, up and down and up and down, so that it felt like he was slowly unravelling his own life, unwinding it and going back to the beginning. It was like having therapy, he said, except that I got very sweaty, and lunch was included. Those lunches – elaborate, fragrant meals eaten in the formal dining room of the house – were an education in themselves: Julian’s employers were highly cultured, well-travelled men, collectors of art and antiques, versed in several languages. It took Julian a long time to piece together the nature of their relationship, two grown men living in luxury together without a woman in sight. For a long time he was simply too stunned by his change of circumstances even to wonder about it, but then, gradually, he started to notice the way they sat side by side on the sofa drinking their post-prandial coffee, the way one of them would rest a hand on the other’s arm while making a point in conversation, and then – they’d got to know him better by this time – the way they kissed each other quickly on the lips when one or other of them left to drive Julian home at the day’s end. It wasn’t just the first time he’d seen homosexuality: it was the first time he’d seen love.
These two men were the first people he ever told about the shed. He’s often been called brave for writing about it, but in fact, once he’d done it once, he’d blab his story to anyone who’d listen. You only need one thing, he said, you only need the door to be left unlocked once. For a long time, after he’d moved to London and started the process of becoming himself, he was a bit of a mess. He was like a cupboard rammed full with junk: when he opened the door everything fell out; it took time to reorganise himself. And the blabbing, the telling, was the messiest thing of all: getting control of language was getting control of anger and shame, and it was hard, hard to turn it around, to take the mess of experience and make something coherent out of it. Only then did you know that you’d got the better of the things that had happened to you: when you controlled the story rather than it controlling you. For him language was a weapon, a first line of defence – he might not be brave, but he’d certainly answer to bitchy. The thing is, he said, once you’ve been picked out, once you’ve been noticed, you won’t ever fit back in your box. You have to walk around naked for the rest of your life, and if there’s something of the emperor’s new clothes about writing, there are worse ways of hiding your nakedness. Most of them, he added, are terrible for your health, and a lot more expensive.
Anyway, he said to the audience, he’d taken up enough of their time. Agonising as it was for him, he had to let the others get a word in. And on top of that he’d gone and done what he always did, which was give away the whole story so that some of them might think he’d saved them the trouble of reading it themselves. Frankly he didn’t care whether they read it or not, so long as they bought a copy: he believed there were some for sale on the way out.
The audience laughed and broke into spontaneous, heartfelt applause.
‘I’ve been called a self-publicist,’ Julian added, above the noise, ‘but I learned everything I know from him.’
He pointed at Louis.
‘On the contrary,’ Louis said. ‘I spend so much time in your shadow I’m starting to get a vitamin deficiency.’
The audience laughed again, with only a little less enthusiasm.
The trouble was, Louis went on, his book had come out at the same time as Julian’s and so they kept turning up at the same events, like two travellers who keep meeting at the same staging posts.
‘Sometimes it’s a relief,’ he said lugubriously, ‘to see a face you recognise in an unfamiliar place. Other times you think, oh no, not him again.’
There was a faint, uncertain smattering of laughter. It’s limiting, Louis went on, to be known: you can’t behave without inhibition. You can go to the ends of the earth but if you meet someone there who knows your name, you might as well have stayed at home.