Enough of this nonsense. Let’s tell the true story of Nicolson Brooks. As if where he is today was arrived at as a result of a progression.

First of all, a bit of background, because it’s not all about him, you know. Even an autobiographical account isn’t all about yourself.

Would it be stretching a point to declare that he was born in a field? Frankly, it’s not entirely unimaginable, if it has been decided that his mother has been outcast by her family, and it is because of him. A woman in those circumstances, then, had nowhere else to go. And there was no man standing by her. He was long gone and back to the foreign land he came from, if, indeed, he was responsible. The man with no name. And a face that could only be guessed at by careful inspection of his progeny. When his mother was cast out of the family home, a curse was placed on the baby’s head for its narrow eyes, its olive complexion, and its jet-black curly hair. Even though I hadn’t been born yet, and nobody knew how I would turn out.

Naturally, I came out bald, as many babies do, so the hair thing remained unproven. And all babies have narrow eyes because they are fat and can’t focus. As for the olive complexion, that was jaundice, and I had to be rushed into hospital to sort that out. I went in a wheelbarrow, of course, which my mother was in no condition to push. Lucky the local farmer came by in timely fashion, and was able to insert his arm and pull me out. Then he wheeled me to the maternity ward. It’s all true. Don’t ask me how I know. I was there, wasn’t I? Were you? I don’t think so.

Not a bad sort of chap, the farmer, as it turned out, for a while, at least. He had a caravan tucked away in a corner of the meadow, hunkered down behind the overgrown hedge, and he took pity on mum, let her stay, as long as you like, he said, with a slightly twisted grin on his lips, which suggested that he thought he might also be onto a good thing. Bit loose, this lady, might be a source of comfort on cold winter nights, if she could be persuaded to overlook his hump and one short leg.

Over the first few months, I began to reveal myself and a further piece of my mother’s sad story, because my hair came in a fiery red in disavowal of the commonly held preconceptions about my fatherhood. The village posse should have been taking their noose round Norway or Scotland or somewhere, instead of wasting their time hanging around in Indonesia. I could have told them that myself, if I had been able to speak. But I couldn’t, I was so flabbergasted by their ignorance. Never mind, at least the bloke they were going to hang wouldn’t be my dad.

In truth, it was all a bit of a misunderstanding, because mum had not long had a job in the laundry at the hospital, which as usual was paying wages only acceptable to immigrant workers with families to support overseas. Them, and my mum, it goes without saying. It was back in the days when immigrants were welcomed into this country, but not welcome in it. Pretty much like now, in fact. Except now we have legislation. And even that fails to prevent people from setting up xenophobia parties to disturb the political arena and deinternationalise us by thumbing our collective nose (on our behalf, mind you!) at the community of Europe, most of whom are decent people, like you and me. I digress.

It happened that mum sometimes shared a shift with a hard-working type from the other side of the world, and was often to be seen folding bed linen with his assistance. That would have been fine if the chinese whisper hospital gossip machine hadn’t distorted it to ‘caught between the sheets with a scrounging immigrant’, which was hardly fair to either of them, since they were both working double shifts, but it got back to my grandparents anyway, and led to our eviction before I was born. If they’d only had the patience to bide their time, they might have found out for themselves that a red-kneed Scotsman had charmed my mum’s pants, and that she still didn’t know how or when it had happened. Still makes me an immigrant, now that they are closing the borders.

Anyway, she was a good girl, my mum, don’t let anybody persuade you otherwise, and she was having none of the farmer’s repulsive advances, however persistent he became. And honestly, it wasn’t nice, the way he pursued her, pouncing from his hiding-place to envelop her in his uneven arms, while gyrating his arthritic pelvis in a most lascivious manner. She had soon had quite enough of that, and found us a place in a secure hostel for mature orphans, and only had to lie a little bit to get a foot in the door. And not the kind of lying the farmer had been pressing for, I can assure you. Come lie with me and be my love. That was the thrust of that. The place was a vast complex that even illegal migrants shunned, and we shared our tiny room with the boiler that serviced the entire building. I am fairly sure that the constant din was responsible for my deafness, and that it was not a congenital defect traceable to my dad, as was mooted by mum. Just because he never heard her crying for him, night after night. Well, how could he, over the noise of the boiler?

Mum had it hard, that’s a fact, trying to make ends meet, and I’m not talking about the sheets that she now had to fold on her own since her colleague had been run out of town and had sunk without trace. All my clothes were damaged items left behind on the wards mostly by people who had had accidents. Good job she worked in the laundry and was capable with a needle. Trouble is, the garments weren’t always the right size. The small ones we had to reject, or turn into something completely different, like egg-cosies or fingerless mittens, whatever suited the raw materials. The oversized ones we had to make do with. That was ok with shirts, I could always roll up the sleeves and tuck the excess into my shorts, even if the tails hung out over my knees sometimes. But when it came to the trousers it was a different matter. Mum was scrupulous about this. There was to be no risk of them falling down and exposing my bottom. I never had any underpants. Pants that have been in an accident would have been a step too far, even for mum in her particularly straitened circumstances. Now, nobody threw away a good belt, so I was often to be seen stalking the streets (I’ve grown up a bit by now) in trousers held up by recycled bandages that had been through a succession of boil-washes. Nobody can say that mum didn’t take a lot of trouble on my behalf. And although she worked all the time and was perpetually exhausted, she still found time to play games with me, in her sleep. Things like plait my hair to the bedpost, tie my feet together with a crepe sling, shave my eyebrows, and later as I grew up,  more sophisticated distractions such as empty my purse and eat tomorrow’s breakfast tonight. Halcyon days.

Let’s retrace our steps a bit. We’re getting ahead of ourselves. I can’t be half grown up before I’ve even started to toddle, and I feel I must defer to some of the chronological conventions in the interest of mass comprehensibility, bearing in mind that this may be receiving a readership of nearly ten. Not that I care personally about putting things in the right order. That’s certainly not how I remember them. However, I am now a babe in arms, having decided not to describe in any further detail the squalid realities of the actual birth and the farmer’s horny hands dragging me from my safe place like a newborn lamb, shaking the breath out of me by the ankles and laying me under the hedge till my mum recovered herself sufficiently to realise what had just happened. I’m a babe in arms, and we have graduated to hostel living as the first step in an ambitious upward social curve that mum had in mind from the moment she realised she had someone to be responsible for.

On each floor there was a communal kitchen, which was never going to be a clean area for the preparation of food. It is a simple fact that no one wants to clear up someone else’s mess, and sharing space in such a claustrophobic environment  is a skill the human being is simply not designed for. On the other hand, you have to see my mum’s position. She became my mum in an era when powdered milks were seen to be an improvement on the real thing, having done away with the need to fish out your accoutrements in the park in order to silence the brat. It was before these enlightened times nowadays when breasts have become militant and people get thrown out of restaurants for objecting to them. Back then, brassières did not come with quick-release flaps in the front, and pad-pockets to control leakage. They were there for one purpose alone, to support, and for another purpose in addition, to cover up, to hide. People were less demonstrative with their attributes in those days. There’s good and bad in everything, I muse.

The point of this lengthy disquisition is to explain the background to our feeding arrangements, to justify the amount of time we spent in the rank environs of the so-called kitchen, preparing my bottles, and to clarify why it was that I grew up believing diarrhoea to be the natural human condition. The kitchen was, in truth, as I grew older, a source of constant amusement, a place where an inquisitive infant such as I was could supplement his very basic diet with interesting scraps from other people’s menus without being charged with theft. There was always a piece of cheese that the mice had only nibbled at. You must know that they were so well provided for there with a wealth of detritus that they were able to eat themselves to satiation long before the full potential of the supplies had been exhausted. Everywhere you looked you saw emaciated kids with bowels like sluice gates, and slumped at their feet, obese rodents, barely able to drag their bodies back to the skirting boards, and certainly not able to cram themselves underneath in the event of someone coming for them with a broom-handle.

So, there we are, me sitting in my pram, next to the table, grabbing handfuls of left-overs, and smears of stuff ground into the table, and testing it all with my tongue, and mum, conscientiously boiling water in the kettle, and reboiling it, and once more for luck, to make up my bottle of synthetic sustenance. She took such precautions to ensure that I was not poisoned, applied herself with such diligence, that she rarely noticed what I was up to, undoing all her careful work behind her back. And when she turned round with my lovely bottle with its not quite authentic-feeling rubber teat, its contents lovingly cooled to elbow-temperature, it was to see me with my face smeared in the fatty residue from a week-old sausage around my mouth, and a smile of satisfaction which indicated, just in case she had a blocked nose, that I had had a poo, and it was running down my legs.

Perhaps I was ready for solids now? That was my thinking, equating liquid input with liquid output. Give me a break, I was far too young to properly comprehend advanced dietetics. But I’ve always been good with theories, especially unlikely ones. I expect you’re beginning to smell a rat by now?

It’s a pretty narrow sphere a baby lives in. You wouldn’t think there would be much to write about, would you? But think about it. Apart from feeding, and the last photograph should have shown how good I already was at arranging that for myself, there isn’t a whole lot to do all day at that age. This leaves plenty of time for thinking. Those days as a babe in arms pretty much set the pattern for my life. I was never one for getting out and about, doing things. My body was a temple that housed my spiritual being, not an exercise yard providing its own self-perpetuating treadmill of pointless effort. I had important matters to think about. All right, the questions I was contemplating were not particularly sophisticated, but they weren’t bad for a tiny tot. Or even one so fat the slits he had for eyes had started to fuse together. I was ruminating on such matters as, if there is a god, who made everything, then who made god? Like I say, the question is fairly simplistic, and if I had wanted to become a philosopher, I would have needed to rephrase it to make it so complex that nobody could understand it, which would make me uniquely placed to become world-renowned through being the only person who could formulate an answer. But I’m a pragmatic kind of a guy, and I sorted that problem right at the start, by deciding that the question was its own answer. The very fact that you had to ask it made the impossibility of its premise too self-evident to be worth pursuing. Same applied to my next question – if the universe is infinite, what lies beyond it? So I very quickly learned that trying to find solutions to philosophical conundra (I choose my preferred plurals in defiance of dictionaries) was a waste of time, and concentrated instead on finding ways of avoiding congress with persons who held opinions. And as already indicated, this did not involve anything as demanding as physically running away, but more an adopted deafness, or assuming the mask of stupidity which I have been perfecting all my life.

So, that was me. It made no odds that the skin was stretched so tight across my body that I could barely even gesticulate my demands for sustenance. I had no need to move about when I could get people to bring my needs to me. Basically I had invented internet shopping before anybody had got close to the idea of a worldwide web. I just sat there flexing my fingers and whatever I needed would miraculously appear. Great things, mums. Everybody should have one. Now, before you start raising objections, I would like to forestall whatever it is that you are likely to want to say. I know what narcissistic personality disorder is, and you might think I’ve got it from what I’m telling you, but I can assure you, even if I have, from the inside it just doesn’t look like a disorder. It’s the only defence against the demands of the world. Put yourself at the centre of your own universe. Everything else is peripheral, and aside from a lack of omnipotence, you become god of your own domain. But unlike the abstract god of the religious types, you know who made you. In my case, it was my bewildered mum and a red-kneed Scotsman who didn’t tell her what he was up to. That’s an unorthodox strategy that can have its rewards, too.

Mum worked really hard all the time, always planning for our next step up the social escalator, so much of the time I was left in the care of Auntie Ada, a statuesque Nigerian lady from down the corridor. She used to look after me when mum was working nights at the hospital and days in the supermarket, and when she was snatching a few hours sleep in between. You could argue that mum was the breadwinner and that Ada was the real mum, and I must admit that much of my early training came from Auntie, despite her not having present at the actual birth. She was a fully-adopted first-generation immigrant whose whole-hearted acceptance of British culture was evident in her diet, which consisted almost exclusively of beans on toast and huge blue and white striped mugs of Mantunna tea. There was an early prototype of a refrigerator on the kitchen, but in all honesty it wasn’t a secure repository for scarce food resources. Each family had the use of a cage within it, lockable with a key, but these had been jemmied open long since, and now contained only forgotten items beyond salvation that had been left behind by fleeing residents on their way to pastures new.

Auntie Ada had a ceremonial Sunday speciality in which baked beans featured only as a side accompaniment. This was known as fried cheese, and by and large was a kind of dairy-inflected swill in a pan, with white bread floaties, which upon ingestion would produce instant convulsions and peristalses (own plural again) of the oesophagus. The trick, I found, with this, was to spill as much as possible down my front, on the floor and over my high chair, making sure that it went anywhere other than my mouth. It was not conceived for cultured palates, but had been learned from a local lass with no teaching qualifications and limited cookery skills. The mice refused all of my generous offering, and despaired over the squandered cheese, although in fact the recipe contained precious little, consisting primarily of onions infused in milk, which were fried in a lard amalgam with an elusive suspicion of cheese. Then, when it refused to thicken, she would soak it up with slabs of Sunblest under intense heat, hoping to brown it in burning fat.

The milk, of course, was steri. Not pasteurised, but sterilised, so it automatically tasted of pudding, not savoury, as it had the clear taint of evaporated milk about it. The one advantage of this particular variety of bowdlerised cow produce was that it would keep in an unrefrigerated wardrobe for the best part of a year, or nearly two days in hot weather, or let’s say, at least until the afternoon. After that, all it was good for was frying.

I was still taking my drinks from my bottle with its comforting teat at this time, but by now was onto altogether more grown-up fare. Auntie Ada was pushing me whisky-laced steri to help iron out the odd behavioural inconsistency and I found I was sleeping like a baby. No surprise there, you might suggest, but I was waking with the hangover of a lifelong dypsomaniac in his seventies, with my head banging so loud I didn’t dare make a sound for fear of erupting in my suitcase. Had I mentioned that I slept in a suitcase? Probably didn’t think it was that important. Problem was, what with the boiler taking up most of the space in our place, there was only really room for mum’s bed. This meant we had no chest of drawers like the other families, and consequently nowhere with any sense of permanence for me to sleep in. Mum’s clothes had to come out of the case she arrived with and were carefully hung under the bed, while I was transferred to the case and lashed down with bungee ties. I was then placed next to her feet on the bed right beside the thumping and burbling heat of the boiler. Although I was fairly well-covered in my own right, mum insisted on wrapping me tightly in a four-ply shawl, so that I resembled a purple-faced chrysalis, and leaving me there to steam all night. Auntie Ada followed her instructions to the letter in this regard. The reducing effect of my bedroom sauna was probably the only thing that prevented me reaching my first-year target weight of 20 stone.

It was tough times anyway for an African woman in our far-flung town which had seen no foreign invaders since the Vikings, and even they hadn’t stopped long, in the absence of any spoils to plunder. Nothing much had changed, and Auntie Ada had to endure plentiful derision as she walked proudly down the street, head held high, pushing a pram with a red-headed kid in it. The number of times she had to answer to the police for theft, on the grounds that I definitely could not be her baby, made their mark on her. And on me. Why you have to be so ugly, boy, she would say, get me into trouble all the time. And I couldn’t defend myself. Bad manners to talk with your mouth full, and I never stopped eating. Not that I could speak yet, but I had a good idea of what I might say if I could. But it never came to that. I translated my thoughts into actions, and spat a geyser of fried cheese out of the pram onto her shoes, which had already seen better days. She was unflappable in her rage, and I took delight in watching all the pedestrians crossing to the opposite side of the street to avoid fallout. I had done that. Could be my first ever achievement.

I’m not sure mum would have been pleased to find out that Ada used to leave me unsecured by any type of harness outside all the shops she went in, but there were two good reasons for why she always ended up bringing me home. First, I was too obese to be able to climb out of the pram myself, and second, any potential abductors would look in under the hood and on seeing me would turn away quickly, preferring not to take on such a responsibility. Or, more simply stated, they just didn’t like the look of me.

It goes without saying that it was a very lonely existence, with pretty much my only human contact outside the domestic situation consisting of people grimacing bizarrely in my face before accelerating in the direction of away. But I became a master of such setbacks. Far from exhibiting concern over my limited status, or my apparent lack of a place in the world, I would lie there in my perambulating bowl of esculents, picking out comestibles from amongst the debris which had not completely dematerialised yet. And while lying, and munching contentedly to myself, in between the interruption of strangers expressing varying levels of surprise and disgust, I began to form a world-view. This was my road to Damascus, although it looked more like a scruffy high street full of boarded-up shops long since out of business, and fortified caged ones still accepting hard cash from anyone brave enough to carry it in public. But it was here, outside the iron grilles of the Co-op one day that I finally turned my back on the real world, which I interpreted as a place of censure and despond, and entered the realm of fantasy. Now, we’re not talking Hobbits here, or magic things, or people who can jump as high as houses. We are speaking of a better world of the imagination, where everyone has what they want, and no one else has to suffer for it. A life free of obligation, because everyone is provided for already. No fighting, no deprivation, no name-calling, no bullying. And especially, nobody peering into my pram and gagging the word yuk in my face. People to love me, who don’t have to leave me behind to go to work, and a nice, plump, smiley babysitter who doesn’t feel the need to intoxicate me with hard liquor to get a bit of peace. So, in short, a better world where I didn’t place demands on people. Where they saw me as a force of joy in their lives and not a drain on the spirit and the budget. Where people could look in my pram and see beyond the ugly blob of greed smacking his lips under a blanket of organic detritus, to the pure love machine I was determined to become. If I could have just one last chocolate biscuit.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying I’m ugly because I had red hair. I can see how you might think that, but how small-minded do you imagine I am? No. The red hair is my patrimony. We’re in a minority, and it is a shrinking one. One day in the future there will be none of us left. I understand the evolutionary principle of that. I mean, put us in the sun and we burn to a crisp, so we’re not built for survival, except as a pile of ashes, like Joan of Arc and the last Cathars, and they all gave up the ghost hundreds of years ago. It’s a wonder we red-heads have kept going for so long. Of course, this isn’t an academic investigation of prejudice, so I can’t go into the history of how we were burned or drowned as witches, put to the sword at birth, or just subjected to the kind of ostracism I was experiencing as a toddler. The fact is, and it must be true because I read it somewhere, probably on facebook, that our numbers are declining under the onslaught of mobility and the gene-mixing that accompanies it. In future we will all look pretty much the same, we will be one race. I wonder if that will end all the fighting? I hope so. Might work, if it wasn’t for politics, selfishness, territoriality, the human condition. Thinking about all this made me resolve, still in my pram, to become a fervent internationalist. I wanted to be the same as everybody else. No I didn’t. I wanted everybody to be the same as me. That wasn’t going to work, though, as I was only an associate member of the species. A mere sub-species, which, owing to difficulties with climate change was getting pushed ever northwards in its range. In a few years, all us redheads would be living in Greenland, which prompts an interesting question, don’t you think? I’ll leave it to you to work out what. It’s not difficult, as long as you don’t go looking for anything profound. Mind you, if that was what you were after, you wouldn’t be here now, would you?

Point is, my ugliness did not come from my conspicuous barnet. I have lost count of the number of truly beautiful red-haired women I have failed to ingratiate myself with. No, my distasteful appearance came mostly from my disgusting habits, which adhered to my external person and heaved there likes flies on a sticky spiral. And also the fact that I was so fat that it was impossible to recognise whether I was smiling or my cheeks were just stretched so tight they were about to tear. That can be disconcerrting for an onlooker, and put them in a condition of constant apprehension, especially as no one knows what the outcome might be. But most of all, if I were to be totally candid, it was the combination of adhered vilenesses and the attendant odours that created the most obvious impression, although I revelled in the availability of the constant source of sustenance provided in this way. No matter that it was at least part-way decomposed, had hardened round the edges, or was covered in fungal cultures, every last morsel of it was not only accessible, but at the same time infinitely preferable to fried cheese.

So, let me reiterate. You will find no disparagement of any person here, for any reason. I have solidarity with the disparaged. I am one of them. Learnt that in my pram. That old outside world. It’s a cold, grey place.

What? Nicolson Brooks? No. My name’s Dougal Halflingsson. Who is Nicolson Brooks?