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.’