Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

He nodded dumbly and I took a chance.

‘Look,’ I said, and I put my arm round his shoulders and squeezed. ‘That’s what friends do in a natural world. It’s affection and support in a universe where we all need affection and support. But in this place it’s “queering” and it makes people point and sneer. You and I know it’s friendship, but when someone like that vile cunt in your House tries it on with you, he kids himself that it’s your fault. Always remember that he’s the one who’s scared. He may insult you but secretly he’s terrified that you’re going to tell your brother or your housemaster or the whole House. That’s why he’s trying to kid himself that you led him on. It’s the old, old story. Just like Potiphar’s wife and just like every rejected rapist the world over. But don’t let what your brother said worry you. He meant well but he’s obviously made you doubt everyone’s motives towards you. Those millionaires who are convinced that people only like them for their money, you know the type? Well, you don’t want to become the equivalent, do you? Someone who only believes that people like you because you’re good-looking. You wouldn’t want to live like that. That’s nothing but the lack of confidence trick.’

He had allowed my arm to stay around him without protest. It was dark. No one could see us.

It was the finest achievement of my life so far, arrived at with bluff, deceit, hypocrisy, manipulation, abuse of trust and a few exploitative elements of gimcrack wisdom and genuinely good advice. Good advice, like a secret, is easier to give away than to keep.

I let my arm drop and returned it to the warm interior of my greatcoat pocket. ‘Do you think you’re pretty?’ I asked.

He shook his head.

‘Well there you are then. You can’t live your life in the shadow of other people’s opinions, can you? As I say, keep it simple.’

‘Thanks, Fry,’ he said. ‘I wish I knew how you know all these things.’

‘Hey, come on. You’re only in the second term of your first year. You’re thirteen years old. You’re not expected to know the secrets of the universe.’

‘I’m fourteen actually,’ he said. ‘It was my birthday last week.’

Jesus, he was only… what, six months younger than me?

‘Well, fourteen, then. Still, you can't…’

‘The same age as you. But you just seem to know everything.’

The bass-line to the badly produced dance-track of my life. ‘How come you know everything, Fry?’

I want to reply, ‘How come you think I know everything? Or, how come you think I think I know everything? How come that?’

Well, I must be honest, I do have some idea how people might believe it.

Take for example the selection of photographs to accompany this book. What a job. To find a single photograph of me in which I don’t look like a smug, self -satisfied creep who has just swallowed a quart of cream and knows where he can get his complacent paws on another. That photograph of me, standing next to my brother dressed for his first day at Chesham Prep, my smugness there qualifies for swagger, pride in him at least. You should see the photographs I had to discard.

Every time I pose for a photograph I try and smile a friendly smile, a sort of ‘Hello there! Gosh! Crumbs! Isn’t this jolly!’ sort of smile. Every time the photograph comes out I see a silken smirk on my face that makes me want to wail and shriek.

Vanity of course, as the preacher saith, all is vanity. Maybe I should have let you see my graduation photograph and a few other pictures that would have sent you doubled-up to the vomitorium.

So that look, that oh-so-pleased-with-himself look, combined with a lamentable propensity to explode with unusual words, to spout like a thesaurus and to bristle with look-at-me-aren’t-I-clever general knowledge… I’d be the fool of the world if I didn’t see how that might give others the impression that I thought I knew all the answers. But then you see, I am the fool of the world.

Matthew was no exception to the general view of me. He looked up to me, physically because I was a foot taller and intellectually because he sincerely believed that I had access to wisdom and knowledge that were denied him. I did a lot of reading, and I had a good memory, everyone knew that of me. He thought that this knowledge gave me power, even when he knew, as everyone knew, that I was always getting into trouble, getting into more and more trouble all the time: he couldn’t have known that so much of that was on account of him or that I was on the verge of getting into the most serious trouble of my life so far that very week.

Still this persists. Enough people know by now what a mess my life has always been, yet they continue to believe either that ‘It’s all right for you, Stephen, you’ve got it sorted’ or that I think it’s all right for me and that I think I’ve got it sorted, neither of which – however many times I scream it and however many times history and circumstance prove it – is true.

This whole thread somehow started with my speculating about the gentle kindness of Ronnie Rutter and wondering whether maybe he saw. Perhaps it was written all over me, this agony of love, I wondered.

That has been the big cleft stick of my life. It was around this time that I started punstering like a maniac, mostly dreadful nonsense, but I do remember being struck by discovering the happy accident of this:

Compromise is a stalling between two fools.

It’s sort of too neat and too perfect (perfect in the wrong way) to be amusing or even interesting, just another example of the weirdnesses thrown up by our extraordinary language, but the two stools that I fell between, and daily fall between still, are best described as being defined by the circumstance that I was and am both transparent and opaque, illegible and an open book.

Sometimes I wonder what is the point of all my dissembling and simulation if so many friends, acquaintances, enemies (if I have any) and perfect strangers are able to see through my every motive, thought and feeling. Then I wonder what is the point of all my frankness, sharing of experience and emotional candour if people continue to misinterpret me to such an extent that they believe me balanced, sorted, rationally in charge, master of my fate and captain of my soul.

My guess is that the instinct of Ronnie Rutter was that I was an ‘unhappy boy’ and that he was too scrupulously well mannered or too trusting in the benevolence of time and fate as to enquire into the whys and wherefores.

Matthew, the source of all my misery and all my joy, all my feeling and all my inability to feel, was completely blind to my absolute need for him, too lacking in imagination to be able to see that my happiness was entirely contingent upon him, and I blamed him for that without being able to see that I was trapped in a hole that I had dug. How could he possibly have known? How could he possibly have guessed? Until someone has loved they cannot possibly know what it might be like to be loved.

Such then was the spin of my madness. I expected the illegible and the deeply buried in me to be read as if carved on my forehead, just as I expected the obvious and the ill-concealed to be hidden from view.

When I wrote the phrase, many pages back now, ‘unrequited love’ I giggled to myself, for at the first go I committed the Freudian keyslip of typing unrequired love.

It is, I know, for I have experienced it perhaps twice in my life, an awful privilege to be too much loved and perhaps the kindest thing I ever did in my life was never to let Matthew know to what degree he had destroyed my peace and my happiness. He, after all, was to prove brave enough…, but that is jumping the gun.