Terence Blacker

He was no Chatterton, that was for sure.

The hair was dark and matted, splayed across a grey, stained pillow-case. The skin on his face, once so luminously pale, was now blotchy and flushed beneath an uneven growth of beard. Dimensions which, when contained and clothed, had conveyed an air of distracted intelligence (as if his unusual tallness had allowed him to breathe a purer air, less contaminated by everyday life), spilt across the bed in an almost comical attitude, a lanky man running away from life. On his stomach and chest, there were flaky psoriatic blotches of purplish red. Only his eyes, light blue, gazing at the ceiling with a sardonic disdain, as if trying to outstare his Maker, reminded me of the man I had known.

So when, on an October afternoon touched with the first melancholy chill of approaching winter, a man emerged from Brandon Gardens, talking to himself, no one would have looked twice. While his clothes and a certain ascetic thoughtfulness might have set him apart from the nutters and soliloquizers who thronged the streets, there was something studiously anonymous about him. As he reached the High Street, he seemed to merge with the scenery.

An actor perhaps, learning his lines? A businessman rehearsing an address to the board? No, the scene he was reliving and enacting (I was reliving and enacting) was one created by his own imagination. It was from a work called Insignificance.

‘My name is Gregory Keays,’ I said. ‘And I am a writer.’

there was something distinctive about the Keays residence – the way the house (there really is only one word for it) nestled at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac next to the park, exuding an elegant warmth with which inhabitants of other houses in the road occasionally and unsuccessfully tried to compete.

Often, I have heard my wife, Marigold, explain to a visiting journalist the importance of contrast between the interior and exterior. Outside, it is trim, draped in wisteria and creeping vine, a superior woodman’s cottage which stands out, in this bleak urban landscape, like an illustration from a fairy-tale. Inside, another contrast: the décor is white and spacious and almost formal. The house’s insulation from the world outside, combined with this severe lack of clutter is said, by my wife, to induce a state of calm and well-being in those who dwell in it although she has sensibly never expressed this view to interviewers when her husband or son has been in earshot.

That night, as I entered the dream house, the jangle of Marigold’s stress-reducing Sri Lankan wind-chimes above the front door causing their usual knot of irritation in my stomach, a low thud, like a heartbeat, filled the faintly scented air and reminded me that some aspects of domestic life resisted design, retained their essential clutter.

Writer, teacher, family man: I dare to think that a photograph taken of me at this moment would have indicated a man on whom the conflicting demands of art and life had not taken too harsh a toll. While there was a certain fleshiness around the trunk, neck and face which was not evident in the startled, long-haired character to be seen in the second row of the Granta line-up, an easy humour now attended those watchful eyes – a hint of danger and energy which, to a civilian, might have seemed surprising and possibly inappropriate in a man in his late forties.

This week we shall be getting something of a sampler. We have, I hope, each brought a small contribution as an introduction to your own fictional world.’ One or two of the politer students laughed ingratiatingly. ‘But first, I’d like to hear what you’ve all been reading.’

This, by intention, was a surprise – I know from experience that advance warning sends most of my students to their A level reading lists or to the classics shelves of local bookshops. A certain restlessness was evident around the table, as if this divergence from schedule, from creative writing into literature, was in breach of Institute regulations.

He once said, “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.” He never stops to think about what he is writing, whether a particular word is holy, because, as soon as he becomes self-conscious, he is essentially interrupting his character. A lot of our so-called “literary” writers could learn from that.’

Today I shall study my scars. In them, I shall read the story of my life. Every moment of hurt will be a paragraph, every dysfunctional relationship a page. From the ugliness of loss and pain and injustice will emerge the beauty of creation.

‘Perhaps at this point we should read our little fictions. Who would like to start?’

After the briefest of pauses, it was Robert – the neater of the two Roberts – who spoke. ‘I’ll go,’ he said, taking some perfectly typed pages from a folder. ‘It’s a sort of murder thing.’

And so it was. Robert’s unnecessarily brutal and hectically plotted set-piece, which told us rather more about his taste for violence than we wanted to know, was the first of the predictable readings. Scruffy Robert maundered on about his dad. Serafina introduced us, not for the last time, I feared, to the sun-dappled, Blytonesque setting of her childhood. Describing a man being fired, Alan revealed that his feeling for language had been fatally impaired by several years’ exposure to the internal memo. Bev shared with us a conversation with a counsellor which may or may not have been an attempt at irony (confusingly, she herself was uncertain about the matter).

There was a stirring, a complicated untangling of spidery limbs. Peter reached for the folder in front of him and took out two sheets of paper and laid them on the table, with a careful flattening movement of both hands. Single-spaced, with no paragraphs, they looked unpromising and, as he stared down at the paper, Peter frowned almost as if he had brought the wrong story.

Frankly, I didn’t warm to him. I had seen this kind of build-up before. The moody artist, dazed and in thrall to his muse, can play quite well at literary festivals where the audience is hungry for a glimpse of the tortured writer, but performed by an unpublished young pup in a seminar room, it tends to be less impressive. If he had been a poet, Peter might just have got away with it, but novelists, particularly would-be novelists, should be anonymous.

He looked up at me, those wary blue eyes between two dark curtains of hair holding mine, and I wondered briefly whether he had consumed some kind of banned substance. Since he seemed to be asking for permission to start, I encouraged him with a brisk little circular movement of the hand.

Peter’s reading voice, when at last it came, was quiet and classless but with the hint of a northern accent, yet its very flatness conveyed a sort of stunned passion. He spoke so quietly that, even though, as if on cue, the hums and chants of Anna Matthew’s Mind and Spirit class next door had died down (Peter had this odd magical effect on his surroundings), we had to strain to hear him.

The story he told was notable first of all for its simple, pared-down style, so free of embellishment or self-consciousness that, absurd as it may sound, it was almost as if we were getting the experience unmediated by prose, as if he had perfectly enacted Ford Madox Ford’s requirement that the reader should be ‘hypnotized into thinking he was living what he read’. It was a tale told by a three-year-old, a story of death – murder, probably – involving two adults, possibly his parents. Somehow, in 2000 words or so, he conveyed not just the event and its physical and emotional setting but also a sense of the years of blighted life stretching into adulthood that lay ahead of the narrator.

When he finished, we sat in silence for a few seconds before, as it were, starting to breathe again. Then, impassive as ever, he returned the sheets to their folder and sat back