For women, it is usually sex or battering or madness that has brought them to this condition. Men outnumber women ten to one on the streets. Self-confidence is their main problem and, if the professionals can get hold of them in the first few months, they’ll be back at work or at least in settled, long-term accommodation within a year or two. Their daughter has been killed in a car crash. There are those who were doing all right beforehand, but have suffered a temporary setback because their wife has run off with another man (or, surprisingly often, another woman). There are numerous types of homeless person: Stuart phrases it another way, then: ‘Something what people will read.’ You are an ex-homeless, ex-junkie psychopath, I do not add. ‘But you are not an assassin trying to frazzle the president with anthrax bombs,’ I point out. He’s after a bestseller, ‘like what Tom Clancy writes’.

He doesn’t admire ‘academic quotes’ and background research. Put briefly, his objection is this: I drone on. I know you put a lot of work in,’ Stuart offers. Outside, it is getting dark the trees in the garden have started to grow in size and lose their untended shapes. One arm remains, as it landed, squeezed in beside his thigh. He fumbles in the lumpy bulges of his pockets, looking for roll-up papers, then drops into my armchair and pushes his face forward, surveying the drab collection of twigs and dead summertime experiments on my balcony. Two years’ worth of interviews and literary effort. Through the pale Tesco stripes of his supermarket bag I can see the wedge of my papers.

Stuart a life backwards