LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER ONE NOBODY, NOT EVEN THE RAIN

      I have been led to believe that when I was first presented to my mother, her face collapsed in on itself like a failed soufflé. All of the joy and lust for motherhood leaked from her body, face first, like she’d just been handed a baby with little more than blunt stumps for limbs, or a baby with its heart on the outside of its skin, clinging to its chest like a silver bell on a kitten’s bib, beating and bleeding and raw for all to see.

      But really there was nothing wrong with me. I was just a bit ugly.

      It was often said, by my father, to his friends, that I had the kind of face only a mother could love. Just not my mother. How Father would laugh.

      Mother wanted to know. ‘What’s wrong with it?’

      ‘Nothing’s wrong with him,’ she was told. ‘He’s a perfectly healthy baby boy.’ As it happens, this was true only to a certain extent. I was healthy, yes, but I had a couple of conditions which would in time necessitate medical intervention.

      ‘But,’ Mother insisted, scandalised, unable to stem the flow of fat, affronted tears, ‘but he’s so ugly! How can he be so ugly?’

      Father was there too, sweating pale ale and chip fat. It is to him that I owe this account of Mother’s reaction. Although Mother did later confirm it.

      I was born with a large face, shaped not unlike a lozenge, or even—if one were feeling particularly cruel—like a gravestone in a rough part of the cemetery, defaced, vandalised, and overgrown. I had the dark patches of skin—intrinsic atopic dermatitis—which were later to become my trademark. Added to which, my eyes were further apart than was strictly necessary and, irritatingly, they were staring out in opposite directions. This was rather unpleasantly pronounced strabismus, which I am ecstatic to say was later corrected with surgery. When I first opened my eyes, however, it was apparently something of a shock. Oh, and also—for a baby—I did have rather a large nose.

      In short, I was a beast.

      I was, however—if anyone was interested—in predominantly very good health.

      Unfortunately, my health was not at the front of my parents’ concerns. They were rather superficial people who apparently had their hearts set on a beautiful baby, a beautiful baby boy more specifically, of the bouncing variety. I didn’t bounce. They were disappointed, and for reasons best known to themselves, they never attempted to conceal their disappointment. Rather they muttered and cursed, mocked and sneered, shook their heads and prayed to their malevolent God that my ugly face would prove ephemeral as puppy fat, and that in no time at all I would grow out of that and into great, unutterable loveliness. Tragically, their prayers remained not only unanswered, but also cruelly ridiculed, as rather than gradually transforming me into a handsome swan as they’d requested, their malevolent God had me bound through my childhood like a kangaroo in a minefield, exploding into one physical aberration after the other.

      My parents were embarrassed and ashamed, and it didn’t seem to mitigate their shame at all that as I got older I began to excel at school. On the contrary, I think it may have made things worse.

      In time I came to realise that when they were schoolchildren themselves, my parents were most probably vicious, vindictive bullies, for whom kids who had the temerity to actually enjoy reading were alien and fearful. Having one such child under their very own roof was, I suspect, an unpleasant reminder of their own cerebral and parental shortcomings, and yet another reason for them to despise me. They seemed to think that because I read books and they did not, I presumed I was better than them. They were right. I did. So they would deride me, cruelly. They would call me ‘smart arse’, ‘clever shit’, and ‘Little Lord Fauntleroy’, an adaptation of which they had seen on television, but not really understood.

      For my own part, I had no choice but to take refuge in other people’s words. Time spent reading was an escape from my parents, from the persecution of schoolfriends and, of course, from myself. It was the only time when I began to see that life had the potential to be a thing of beauty, and so I did my absolute best to immerse myself in the lives of fictional people as often as I possibly could. Indeed, for a very long time, fictional people and fabulous, anthropomorphic beasts were my only real friends.

      I had no brothers and no sisters, and although it was alleged that extended family members did exist, I rarely saw them. There was an uncle, who posed for photographs with his penis hanging outside of his flies, and a paternal grandfather, from whom I inherited not only my clumsy name, but also my uncomely face. I saw an ancient cracked photo or two of my grandfather and it’s true that, as far as appearances are concerned, the man was a monster. Apparently, the one thing that made him an attractive enough proposition to eventually snag a female and procreate was the fact that he owned a farm. In those days, of course, farms were all the rage. Owning a farm back in the day was like driving round in a gold-plated Ferrari today, pissing pearls.

      I don’t have a farm.

      I don’t even have a window box.

      All I have is this unfancy face, full of terrible fortune, half-resignation, and the fading scars of dead eczema. So I suppose it’s not really surprising that people are intrigued by the idea of me having sex. I’m intrigued myself.

      I’ve had sex with two women in my life. And the fact that I’ve had it before must surely mean that I can have it again. The first time came out of nowhere—like a spear of frozen urine from an overhead toilet facility—when I was twenty-four years old.

      Her name was Avril, and she was my Diana Adams.

      Diana Adams is Rocky Dennis’s salvation in the film Mask, a film which had a profoundly salubrious effect on me and helped me through many a low ebb during my teens. When I was desperately down, excruciatingly alone, weeping and wishing I’d never been born, Mask came to me, like a deformed genie wrapped in a daydream, and it gave me a good old kick up the arse, in much the same way as Jesus does, for many otherwise rational people. Before Mask it was The Elephant Man. But Mask was much more important because, not only was it set in a world with which I could much more readily identify, but also, it had kissing, and I had always been inordinately fond of the idea of someone kissing me.

      No one kissed the Elephant Man.

      Poor Elephant Man.

      Rocky Dennis was born with craniodiaphyseal dysplasia, an extremely rare bone disorder which causes a calcium build-up in the skull. Instead of a head, imagine a giant cough sweet in a ginger wig. That was Rocky Dennis. And Mask is the true story of how he overcame the daily torture of physical deformity and lived as ordinary and fulfilling a life as he possibly could. At least, until he was sixteen, when he died.

      For all his physical misfortune, however, Rocky had two things which I never had when I was growing up (three if you count a great porn name): he had a supportive circle of family and friends; and he had Diana Adams, played in the film by Laura Dern.

      Diana Adams was—believe it or not—a blind girl. Which makes you think. Firstly, it makes you think, yes, that makes sense. For only a blind girl could see beyond the cough-sweet skull and discover the worth in such a shocking-looking young man. But then, secondly, hold on just a minute—surely, when she got round to touching his face, wouldn’t she have pretty much the same

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