I have always been my own worst enemy - a human paradox whose weaknesses more than cancel out his strengths.
When I was very young, I fell in love with numbers. I enjoyed making lists of times tables, sitting with my head on my chin as I scribbled away at a small white desk. Numbers plucked the strings of my soul - they were my friends in a way that stale, sweating children never could be.
It is an over-exaggeration to state that I was a child prodigy. Irrespective, though, numbers, books and writing all captivated me endlessly. This drew the attention of other people to me; and the more attention I had, the smaller and more insignificant I became. Other people eroded me - I wasn't even ten - until I became a grain of sand or a pinhead or an atom or a quark of self, retreating far into the airless vacuum that had become my body. A cavity, an absence, comprising a single quark.
Everybody loves a freak show. The man with half his face obliterated with MRSA; hirsute females; a child who spent his first years being reared by dogs; the boy who thinks numbers are his friends; the seven-year-old with the cynicism and weariness of an adult.
I blame nobody for acting in accordance with their nature, but the density of these adults' fascination sealed me shut. Not only the demand that I would spew out numbers, perfect, correct, their little abacus, but I would do so with the confidence and poise of a grown-up.
I returned, sick, to the evacuated chamber I had become; pretending to dispense cups of tea from a brick wall rather than turn around to speak. Descriptions, images hurt more and persist longer than real events, and it is because I shrank away, meek and insigificant. A video of John F Kennedy being shot through the head haunted me at the age of 11, grey leaking out of the stricken president and onto the seat below.
The Turin shroud, the mask of Tutankhamun, an anti-smoking advertisement displaying a charcoaled lung. All terrified me, and I refused to sleep in case I woke up enveloped in Christ's blanket, in case all the lights in London and Cairo simultaneously went out, in case the drawling southern American accent talking about the spillage of brain matter should be referring to me. In case my lungs had been plucked out and replaced with hideous black bellows.
I flirted with the past, and with the unlikely, permitting the possible to sweep by as I stood suspended in history and supposition, directing Howard Carter in my sickened astonishment. I pored over relics, dumbstruck, as adults pored over me and cried: he's a genius! It was only numbers, comprehensible ones. I could no more state what x * y is than I could prove Fermat's Last Theorem.
