Bête de Jour
The intimate adventures of An Ugly Man
Stan Cattermole

For Melanie, with love, and for Ange, with boundless optimism.

…I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks, Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass; I, that am rudely stamp’d, and want love’s majesty To strut before a wanton ambling nymph; I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion, Cheated of feature by dissembling nature, Deformed, unfinish’d, sent before my time Into this breathing world, scarce half made up, And that so lamely and unfashionable That dogs bark at me as I halt by them; Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace, Have no delight to pass away the time, Unless to spy my shadow in the sun And descant on mine own deformity: And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover, To entertain these fair well-spoken days, I am determined to prove a villain And hate the idle pleasures of these days…

Richard III, William Shakespeare

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction

Chapter One Nobody, not Even the Rain

Chapter Two Whiskers of Immorality

Chapter Three Bag of Elbows

Chapter Four Like a Leopard on a Dove

Chapter Five Being is Other People

Chapter Six Picking Up

Chapter Seven Sally Valentine

Chapter Eight Love is Natural and Real

Chapter Nine Sick

Chapter Ten Payback

Chapter Eleven Everybody’s Free (to Wear A Paper Bag)

Chapter Twelve Everybody’s Blogging Nowadays: no Hard Feelings

Chapter Thirteen Lost Weekend

Chapter Fourteen Life & Death

Chapter Fifteen Love Handles

Chapter Sixteen Bad to the Bone

Chapter Seventeen Brains

Chapter Eighteen Welcome to Peckham

Chapter Nineteen Snapshots

Chapter Twenty Pablo, Pablo, Burning Bright

Chapter Twenty-one a Fresh Start: Audrey Tautou

Chapter Twenty-two Speed Dating: Our Time is Running out

Chapter Twenty-three Bestial Oblivion

Chapter Twenty-four Fuck Buddies

Chapter Twenty-five Act of God

Chapter Twenty-six Box of Frogs

Chapter Twenty-seven Love 2.0

Chapter Twenty-eight London to Brighton

Chapter Twenty-nine all That David Copperfield Kind of Crap

Chapter Thirty Turn and Face the Strange

Chapter Thirty-one My Parents and Other Anomalies

Chapter Thirty-two There is No Sanity Clause

Chapter Thirty-three His Name is Stanley Cattermole

Chapter Thirty-four Glad all Over

Chapter Thirty-five Wee Timorous Beasties

Chapter Thirty-six Positive Mental Attitude

Chapter Thirty-seven Throw Your Arms Around the World

Chapter Thirty-Eight the Scottish Play

Chapter Ninety-Nine Hidden Track: Ps I Lied to You

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

A WORD ABOUT THIS BOOK

This book was born of a blog. The blog was born of a dream. The dream was born of a desperation to change things. And the good news is, it worked. Things have changed. My life is now wholly positive and I will never frown, curse, spit, swear, scream, or suffer an overwhelming urge to go on a murderous rampage through South London ever again.

This, then, is the story of my life: the ups, the downs, the sickness, the health, the good, the bad, and the ugly. As it was and as it is. All the names of the people in my life have been changed because, for various reasons, they don’t deserve otherwise. The dialogue has also been polished for purposes of heightened readability. A few of the locations have been changed too, as well as one or two absolutely crucial facts. But the rest is pretty much verbatim. I hope it pleases you. If it doesn’t please you, I am genuinely sorry, and I hope you find what you’re looking for elsewhere. Before you get stuck in, however, be warned…

This book has a happy ending.

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 reaction that other people have when clapping eyes on him for the first time? Well, I guess the theory is that by the time she’d touched his face, Diana had got to know him, without the impediment of having judged his freakishness with her eyes, and to know Rocky was to love him.

I identified with Rocky Dennis an awful lot and, particularly at that time in my life, I felt that my face was not that far removed from his. So, naturally, from the moment I saw Mask for the first time, I was on permanent look-out for a sexy blonde blind girl who would tousle my hair, press her soft lips against mine and not give a damn about my big, ugly face. I actually went as far as to enquire at a college for the visually impaired, but that’s not something we need dwell on.

Then, quite by chance, I met Avril.

Avril was thirty-three. She was not what you’d call good-looking in the traditional sense, but she did have astonishingly striking eyes and a large, quite perfect chest. Furthermore, she was bright, articulate, and often viciously funny. On the downside, however, she also had phocomelia.

Phocomelia is the congenital disorder which afflicted many of the children of thalidomide mothers. Apparently the word itself comes from the Greek for ‘seal limbs’, a reference to the flipper-type hands which are a common symptom.

Avril was severely physically disabled and spent most of her time in a wheelchair. She had two tiny legs and a tiny left arm, which she labelled ‘fun-size’, and occasionally ‘fin-size’. Her right arm was slightly twisted but otherwise OK, except for the hand, which again, was a little on the small side.

The first time I laid eyes on Avril, I must admit, I thought, ‘Now there’s someone who might be desperate enough to have sex with me.’ She later confessed that she’d thought pretty much exactly the same thing about me.

I became friends with Avril through her brother, Stu, who I’d worked with very briefly on an aborted radio show. Feeling bad and beholden because I’d ended up working and not getting paid, Stu invited me over to dinner one night. At his place. With him and his wife.

In truth, I didn’t actually relish the idea of spending the evening with a happy couple in their happy home with their happy, well-adjusted baby gurgling happily close by, jerking its tiny fists and having happy, well-adjusted baby dreams. But I did relish the idea of a free meal, so I graciously accepted.

And, as it happens, it was disgustingly pleasant. Stu’s wife, Carolyn, was lovely, Stu was charming alongside her, and—OK, I’ll say it—even the baby was inoffensive enough. I was enjoying myself.

Then the house telephone began to squeal. It was Stu’s sister. She was outside in a taxi, fuming angry. She’d had a big row with their parents. Stu huffed and puffed, apologised, excused himself, then went outside.

While he was out of the room, Carolyn said, ‘I don’t know if Stu’s mentioned Avril before…’ He hadn’t. ‘Well, just so you know, she’s in a wheelchair.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘That’s um…that’s great. Well, not great obviously. I mean, that’s fine. Which is to say, I’ve not got a problem with that. Obviously. I mean, why would I?’

Carolyn smirked at me and briefly limpened a wrist as if to put me at my ease.

I smirked back.

Avril was still in feisty mood when she whirred up to the table. Stu introduced us. Avril immediately picked up on my dithering over whether or not to shake her hand—she was used to it. I had already stood up and was wondering whether even that might be construed as a rather insensitive move. She held out her right arm. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Shake my tiny hand.’ I laughed and did so, and even then it crossed my mind, the old adage about men liking women with small hands. But I thought better of sharing it. Instead I said, ‘Pleased to meet you. That reminds me of the E. E. Cummings poem.’ Then I immediately felt like such an obnoxious, idiotic, ham-fisted oaf. I blushed. But I’d started, so I had to finish. ‘Nobody,’ I quoted, ‘not even the rain,’ I continued, ‘has such small hands.’

Avril pulled a face. ‘What are you saying?’

I blushed some more. ‘I don’t know really. It’s a poem.’

‘I’ve got absolutely no idea what that means,’ she said.

‘Now play nice,’ said Carolyn.

Avril laughed. ‘No, I’m not being mean. I genuinely don’t understand. The rain doesn’t have hands. Or am I missing something?’ She looked at Stu, who shrugged unhelpfully. I wondered whether ‘Am I missing something?’ was a joke.

‘I don’t think it was meant to be taken literally,’ I offered.

‘You don’t think he wrote the poem about a deformed girl then?’ asked Avril.

I shook my head, then changed my mind. ‘Actually I think he did,’ I replied. ‘Yeah, I remember now. He definitely did. He wrote it about a girl with really tiny hands.’

Avril laughed again. ‘Marvellous,’ she said. ‘That’s marvellous.’ I drank some more wine, relieved.

At the end of the evening Avril and I were left alone. Stu and Carolyn were tidying up in the kitchen and making coffee.

‘You know the worst thing about my disability?’ Avril asked me, apropos of nothing.

‘Hold on a minute,’ I said. ‘Let me think.’

I thought. The answer that occurred to me was ‘Not getting enough sex?’, but I didn’t voice it, because I didn’t want to offend. So instead I said, ‘Swimming in circles?’, which was just unbelievably, unconscionably, excruciatingly dumb. But she laughed anyway, which was nice of her. ‘No,’ she said. ‘The worst thing about being in this chair, and having these fucked-up limbs…’—she had quite a fruity vocabulary, Avril—‘…is that most men tend not to think of me in terms of someone they might like to fuck.’

Perhaps over-enthusiastically I responded, ‘I know! That’s what I thought, I just didn’t like to say! But I do know exactly what you mean. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but I’m—well, I’m quite an ugly bloke.’

‘Oh, I dunno,’ she replied. ‘You’re no Tom Cruise, but you know, you’re not…’ She ran out.

‘That was a valiant effort,’ I said. ‘And it’s appreciated, really it is. But the fact is, I am a frighteningly ugly bloke, and I don’t mean to demean your condition when I say this, but ugliness, to this extent, is actually a kind of disability.’

‘Oh, come on,’ she said.

‘It is!’ I squeaked.

‘How so?’ she asked.

‘In a way,’ I continued, ‘it’s actually worse. Because at least you have an excuse.’ She raised an eyebrow. Perhaps ‘excuse’ wasn’t the right word. Well, too late now. I moved on. ‘Let me explain. People look at me and their reaction is probably similar to the reaction they have when they look at you. They think, you’re just not in the running. No pun intended. You’re not someone they’d consider—whether for sex, for a job or, nine times out of ten, even for conversation…One of the reasons I work as a copywriter is because I can get a lot of work without having to turn up for an interview. Most of the jobs I get are on the strength of my writing. I don’t have to impress in person.’ I was getting into my stride now, the alcohol filling my mouth with words. ‘I’m pretty much good at everything I do—no arrogance intended—but I’ve never got a job I had to interview in person for. Even if I’ve been perfect for the job. And this is because I’m butt-fuck ugly.’

Avril laughed.

‘Yeah, laugh it up. At least you’ve got rights groups and laws looking out for you. Do you know it’s not even illegal to discriminate against ugly people?’

‘That’s a disgrace,’ she said. ‘Maybe you should start a campaign,’ she said.

‘Maybe I should,’ I said. ‘Maybe I will.’

I didn’t.

‘It’d be a complete waste of time though,’ she countered. ‘You’d still be discriminated against. Trust me. So where did you say you lived?’

The question took me by surprise. I hadn’t said any such thing. ‘Herne Hill,’ I told her. ‘Why?’

‘Just making conversation,’ she said. ‘Do you live alone?’ When I said that I did, she said, ‘Maybe you should invite me round for dinner this weekend then? I promise I won’t discriminate against you.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Maybe I will.’

I did.

So. That weekend, in an act of mutual desperation, I lost my virginity. Actually, that sounds terrible. It was an act of mutual attraction as much as anything. And, as I found out later, Avril wasn’t remotely desperate. It was just me. I had waited an awful long time for this moment, and when it finally happened, it was fun, and it was passionate, and although I didn’t realise it at the time, it was actually rather kinky. We got up to all kinds of shenanigans, and I’m not just talking flipper-play. Then, at half past midnight, she asked me to call her a cab.

‘Don’t you want to stay?’ I asked. ‘You’re welcome to stay.’

‘I’d like to,’ she said, ‘but my husband likes me home.’

‘Your…You’re married?’

‘Did I not mention that? I thought you knew.’

I didn’t know.

Avril had been married for six years. She and her husband had an open relationship. He was also, as she put it, ‘a spaz’, and he liked her to go off and have sex with other men. They would relive it together. It turned them both on. He knew she loved him. She knew he loved her.

Avril asked me if she thought it was weird, but before I could answer, she told me, ‘It’s not as weird as able-bodied men getting off on sleeping with disabled women, or blokes who can only get an erection if a woman has a stump or a flipper. Or wheels.’

I ended up seeing Avril once every couple of months or so for around two and a half years. Then I started to want more. I wanted a proper relationship. Not that a long-term affair with a lady in a wheelchair is somehow improper, but rather, I wanted to be in love.

Five years later, that’s still what I want. Now, however—thanks in part to my faithful companion, Pablo—I’m finally determined to do something about it.

CHAPTER TWO WHISKERS OF IMMORALITY

Pablo’s ears prick irritably as, across the street from my house, a woman screams. It’s not an ugly scream, however, but a scream with laughter oozing out of the cracks. It’s like she senses something, something magnificent and formidable stirring nearby. I drag myself to my feet and limp magnificently to the window, twitching back the curtain like a man twice my age.

It’s New Year’s Eve, and a few minutes to midnight. The Festive Season is almost at an end. Thank God for that.

I’ve never been a fan of the Festive Season. Especially as a child. It started well enough, with the slightly forced excitement of the last school day, but it was all pretty much downhill from there. The Festive Season was like dead air. It was slow, tense time between the predictable uproar of the special days, when the banks were closed and television was relentless. I spent this time in my bedroom, in hiding, or else playing darts at my best friend’s house, and if there was a rumpus of some description at home, I kept out of it as much as I possibly could, blocking out the bickering to the best of my ability, ignoring the tantrums, and suffering whatever contact sports Father was mad enough to insist upon with mute disdain and very occasional outbursts of my own.

The Festive Season was fraught.

Christmas was hateful enough, charged as it was with instinctive, seasonal self-pity, but New Year’s Eve always had something particularly ominous and dreadful about it. Unlike Christmas, New Year’s Eve was neither a time for family, nor for God. Rather, New Year’s Eve was a time for drinking heavily, going berserk and breaking things.

By the age of six or seven, I had already begun to associate the end of the year with scenes of extraordinary domestic ugliness. Many of these scenes came to me in eavesdroppings as I lay plastered to my bedroom floor with my ear cupped to the carpet, or else crouched at the top of the stairs like a cat, coiled and holding my breath. Others I witnessed firsthand as I was summoned to make an appearance and coerced into shaking the nicotined hands of the drove of drunken buffoons whom Father had corralled home from the pub. Inevitably, one or more of these soused strangers would leave a pool of urine on the canvas floor of the toilet, awaiting my bare feet in the early hours of the morning.

From the age of eight or nine, if I was at home, Father made a point of pestering me to join him and his friends in ‘drinking in the New Year’. The first time it happened I knew no better. He called me over and bent down beside me with a beaker of cheap whiskey. I was afraid, but warmed by the gesture. I sipped at the lip of the warm glass slowly, excited and grateful. Then the whiskey hit my tongue and I felt like I’d been poisoned. Worse still, I felt tricked and humiliated. Instinctively, I spat out the poison and fled from the kitchen, coughing and wheezing, pushing through bodies and heading for the stairs, where Mother grabbed hold of my arm and laughed smoke and Bucks Fizz into my burning face. I wriggled free and made a dash for it, slamming my bedroom door behind me. Father was laughing and shouting something up the stairs. I never accepted a drink from him again.

During our last New Year together, Father grabbed me as I was sneaking home from a friend’s house. ‘You come and have a drink!’ he demanded, staggering through the house half full of the usual drunken jumble of strangers. ‘It’s New Year’s Eve, for fuck’s sake.’ He led me to the heart of an inebriated throng, half-filled a plastic cup with neat whiskey and fumbled it into my hands. ‘Drink up,’ he said. ‘Happy New Year!’ He knocked back his whiskey and cheered. A few of the strangers knocked back their drinks too, and a short chain of cheers spread throughout the mob and died. Someone turned the music up. It was ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’. The Phil Collins version.

‘Happy New Year,’ I said quietly, raising my glass but not drinking.

Father was silent for a moment. Then he knocked back more whiskey and started shouting over the music. He wanted to know who the hell I thought I was. I didn’t know. He wanted to know why he’d sacrificed the best years of his life putting food on the table for an ungrateful little bastard like me. I didn’t know. He wanted to know if I thought I was better than him. This one I did know.

I thought I was better than him because I didn’t spend my entire life trying to belittle and humiliate the people I was meant to love and nurture.

I didn’t say anything. I tried to walk away, but Father put his hand against my chest and insisted. ‘Do you think you’re better than me?’

I looked into my father’s eyes. They were grey and wet, bulging like infected oysters. I was fifteen years old, full of cider and nihilistic dread. My face was hot, but my eyes were cold, and I assume my father could see something in them that made him slightly afraid. ‘I’m going to bed,’ I said. I tossed the whiskey in the sink behind him and he let me pass, scowling and grumbling.

Later that night Mother fell on top of the television and cracked a rib.

This kind of nonsense went on all year round, of course, but New Year’s Eve always came with a special tension. All that forced introspection; all that vain expectation; all that shame.

Meanwhile, feeling no shame whatsoever, the woman across the street laughs uncontrollably as her boyfriend holds her against a wall and kisses her roughly. One of his hands disappears inside her skirt, which is, it has to be said, little more than a belt. My right hand caresses my left eyebrow instinctively, and my breath clouds up the window. She must be jolly cold. She pulls away from the man and trots off, dragging him behind. ‘Let’s go!’ she tweets. ‘It’s ten to!’

They disappear into a party to see in the New Year. I hobble back to the settee, pull the duvet over my body and unmute the TV with the remote.

I’m limping not because of nascent arousal, but because I have a severely bruised coccyx from a fall yesterday morning. I was inching down the metal staircase outside my house when I slipped on an icy step and fell like a sack of cement on to the small of my spine. I am still in considerable agony.

Pablo hops into my lap and regards me with a certain disdain.

‘What?’ I ask. ‘What’s your problem?’

He says nothing, just blinks softly as if to say, ‘What kind of loser sits home alone on New Year’s Eve talking to his cat?’

‘Oh, piss off,’ I snap. ‘You’re no better.’

Again, his eyes do the talking. ‘Ah, but cats don’t celebrate the passage of time,’ they say. ‘We have better things to do.’ And, as if to prove his point, Pablo pads three tight circles, then curls up and closes his eyes.

On television, this year’s celebrities are prancing and gurning, all shrill glibness and crass, forced jollity. There is less than a minute to go. Thirty seconds. Ten. Nine. Eight. And so on, till another exhausted year takes off its timeworn hat and with a wildly over-theatrical gesture, replaces it with another, identical hat. Which is not to say that this year will not be different, because this year most certainly will. Recent events have brought change, and the course of True Love is one on which I am suddenly very eager to enrol. I know what must be done, and it shall be done, but not just yet. Tomorrow is another year, but for now I make myself comfortable and listlessly pleasure myself to the familiar grunts and slaps of online pornography.

After which, as I’m removing the sock I have used as a cotton catcher’s mitt, I inadvertently knock Pablo awake with a loose knee. As he eyes me with thinly disguised contempt, I flash back, with shame and confusion furrowing my brow, to my sweaty adolescence, and a sweet little kitten called Mavis.

Mavis was no more than six months old at the time, and one afternoon I was home alone, much as I am now, watching TV in my room and eating toast with Dairylea triangles and too much Marmite. Inadvertently, some of the Marmite found its way on to the back of my hand. Rather than wash it off thoroughly, I merely licked it off lazily with a Marmitey mouth. Then, later that afternoon, still in my room, Mavis began licking the back of my hand with unusual attentiveness. One might even say passion. ‘Hmmm,’ I thought. ‘Interesting.’

A few days later—hours, minutes, whatever—I decided to conduct a little research. I popped down to the kitchen, returning moments later with the lidless Marmite jar. I undressed myself, lay on the bed and smeared a tiny trail of Marmite on—at first—my nipples, which are particularly sensitive, then later, when that proved an enormous success, on the end of my burgeoning boyhood. I’m not proud. But I’m not ashamed.

When I imagine the scene objectively—a teenage boy with a bulbous head lying naked on an unmade bed in a rank and rancid bedroom, the dying summer sun trying and failing to squeeze its fingers through permanently closed curtains—I feel bewildered and amused by what I regard as innocent, albeit slightly bizarre experimentation. Much like the time I pranced in front of the bathroom mirror wearing nothing but my mother’s brassiere and lipstick, or the time I tore my dead uncle’s penis from a photograph and carried it around in my jeans pocket for weeks.

At the time, as I lay on my side, holding myself in my right hand, a tiny black kitten lapping at the tip of my youthful johnson with its tiny, sandpapery tongue, I remember suddenly feeling baffled and incredulous.

As it happens, the experiment didn’t last very long. Not because I discharged myself in poor Mavis’s tiny, startled eyes, but because at some stage—more or less exactly the same time that she began to get a little bitey—I guess I saw what I was doing, objectively, as if watching a documentary about bestial teens, and I felt alarmed, and not a little dismayed. So I stopped. Then I went and washed myself, took Mavis downstairs and gave her some proper food. We said no more about it. Least said, soonest mended.

I remember all this as I pull up my pants, with Pablo curled up close by. I remember it every time I pleasure myself when Pablo’s in the room, and I always feel just a little bit guilty. But not ashamed.

Pablo cocks his head and looks at me now as if he knows all about Mavis. But he doesn’t. I never told him and I never will. This is why he relents at my touch, closing his eyes and purring when I scratch his neck, rather than hissing at me and calling the Cat Protection People. There is, however, a note of distrust in his eyes. As far as he’s concerned, I’m still on probation after the distressing behaviour he witnessed only weeks ago, when I flapped around the dark flat helplessly, shamelessly flailing in the jaws of a giant, inertia-induced doldrum.

After not leaving the house for eight or ten days, maybe more, I’d reached a legendarily low ebb. Pablo had enough food to last him a few more days, but I was completely out. The last thing I wanted to do was leave the house, but I was becoming painfully hungry. My gut was screeching like dolphins. Which is when it happened.

I was feeding Pablo, spooning fish-flavoured meat from a tin to his bowl, when I wondered, ‘How bad would this taste if I heated it up?’

Minutes later, I stood with a single chunk of meat before me on a spoon. It was every bit as succulent, I’m sure, as meat one might find in the guts of a Goblin Meat and Gravy Pudding, for example, but that didn’t stop me retching slightly as I moved it closer to my open mouth.

Pablo was watching me. His head was hovering above his bowl, his eyes focused on mine as if to say, ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

I turned away, stuffed the meat into my mouth and gobbled it down. It wasn’t so bad, but still my face was twisted with disgust. Suddenly I saw myself objectively, and I despaired. I felt the kind of despair that only a man spooning cat food into his mouth can truly feel. Thankfully the despair seeped into disgust, and the disgust slapped me hard across the face and prompted action.

I apologised to Pablo and immediately went upstairs to get dressed. Then I left the solitude and hopelessness of the sanctuary of my home, because they were making me unwell, and I forced myself on to the street which marched me swiftly, slightly too swiftly, into bustling Brixton.

Brixton is generally a fairly easy place to feel anonymous, but on that day I was feeling unusually conspicuous. I felt that people were staring, more so than usual. There was disapproval in the air. Condemnation. Despite the cold, which I felt intensely, my skin was clammy with sweat. I was feeling paranoid. Then someone offered to sell me a skunk called Charlie and I freaked out and ran into the Ritzy Cinema, where a young lady with a sleepy face let me hide in the bathroom for ten minutes.

I hadn’t had a panic attack in over ten years. Not like that.

When I got home that afternoon, I sat myself down and gave myself a good, stiff talking-to, if not more of a shouting-at.

My life was a mess. I was spending most of every day smeared across the futon like a rash, like bed-sores, propped up in front of bad TV and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 on unruly piles of pillows and cushions, incapable of finding the impetus to move. The curtains were permanently closed to keep the day at bay, and my waking hours, mostly at night, were filled up with DVDs and packet after packet of Sugar Puffs, Jaffa Cakes and chocolate HobNobs. I rarely left the house. My weight was inching up to the 20-stone mark. My flesh was the colour and consistency of yesterday’s gruel, and although I was pretending to be dead to the fact, I was well aware that I was about to turn thirty. And I had never had a girlfriend. In the conventional sense of the word.

I had even stopped self-pleasuring, which is a very, very bad sign. When you can no longer take even the most fleeting physical pleasure from your own body, and your own brain, that’s when you know you’re in trouble.

I realised that, unless I acted, by the time I was thirty-two I’d be one of those tragic souls who has to have the walls of their house removed so they can be lifted by crane to the nearest hospital for gastric-bypass surgery. Libido would be a thing of the past and I would neither remember nor care. I would survive on a diet of puffed wheat, sugar and cat food. Pablo would long ago have left home.

I had to do something. There had to be change.

And on the night of my thirtieth birthday, there was.

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