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nothing wrong with my brain, no lumps or dents in the bone had damaged its fibres; no, only bitterness bent my thoughts. My nose was flattened, but its shape was no worse than the nose of an incompetent pugilist’s, and my hearing, despite the gnarled receivers, was keen, as was the vision in my one grey/brown-speckled eye (its twin, the left one, was useless, mutilated in an incident which occurred in my younger years). I wasn’t tall, but was by no means a dwarf; somewhat below average height, I suppose, which was hardly surprising considering how crooked I was. So on the plus side, I was smart, could see and hear comparatively well, had an acute sense of smell, and my arms and left leg were exceptionally strong (nature compensates, right? Hah!). Despite these small compensations, it was difficult for me to believe that life was God’s precious gift. In fact, was my wretched body an indictment of His will? Did He issue some of us with faulty meat-machines on purpose? Or was it a mistake, an oversight? Or truly deliberate, all part of His Master Plan? Who knows? I only knew my mistake - if mistake it was - was worse than most, not as bad as some. I hardly felt grateful for that.
    In the early years I used to wonder about my mother, mostly as I lay in my narrow cot at night in the dormitory of the boys’ home they - the authorities - had sent me to. Was she like me, a hunchbacked monstrosity, or was it my unknown father who bore the mark? Perhaps they were both like me. You know, it takes one to love another? Maybe they’d been freaks in some age-old circus show, the kind that would be banned for being politically incorrect these days (and how I agreed with that!). I didn’t often think of him, though. I don’t know why; he just wasn’t part of the reverie. My thoughts were nearly always of her alone.
    In my fantasies, my mother was a princess, or the beautiful daughter of some wealthy lord, and it was they, the King and Queen, or the lord, who had forced her to give up the child who had been born with such hideous deformity. The shame for such grand people would have been too much to contemplate. So I’d been stolen away while she was sleeping, or perhaps dragged from her outstretched arms, her pleas, her tearful protests, ignored; and then I’d been lost somewhere, given to the captain of the guard or, more probably, the lowly groundsman to take me away to some faraway place to be left there with nothing to identify my august status. But someday she would defy all those around her and she would search and eventually find me. Then she would claim me for her own and we’d never be separated again. The tears of pleasure and misery those romanticisms would bring me.
    As I grew older, such fancies dimmed to be replaced by the thought that my mother had had no one to help her in her desperate straits, that the unwanted pregnancy was the last straw in circumstances of abject poverty, and she had been forced to leave me on the nuns’ back doorstep, knowing they would not reject me, that I would be cared for if not by the nuns, then by the State, until I became a man.
    And as I grew older still and unhappiness had moulded (and even mouldered) my psyche, that fantasy too, had faded. My mother had been shamed and repelled by the variant she had given birth to - perhaps she had even sensed my awfulness while I was still in her belly - and had dumped me as soon as the umbilical cord had been cut. She neither cared for me, nor was she curious about me: the search had never been undertaken and I was never to be claimed.
    I believed all this until other visions started coming to me, uncertain revelations mixed with night-time dreams that made me wonder if the bitter discontent I had felt all these years, the resentment, the loneliness that only my kind could ever know, was finally leading to madness. Then again, they might only have been due to the drugs.
    ***
    Philo was the first to speak: ‘So what was her