My heart was racing. I hadn't slept in days. I didn't even know what city I was in. I had never felt so lonely. But then it's tough when you're on a two-month lecture tour. The phone rang in my hotel room.

"Is that the world's most abused man?" asked the voice.

My blood ran cold and I answered in the affirmative. "I'm sorry to tell you that Dan Brazell has died."

Who was Dan Brazell? He was the man who had once fixed my bike, but I had yet to mention in print. Those three years I had never written about because they seemed too boring, suddenly assumed an unbearable poignancy. I could feel another book welling up inside me.

Everyone picked on me in school because I was in foster care. They could sense the abuse I had suffered and bullied me for it. But within days of my foster parents, the Welshes, moving to Duinsmoore Way, it felt as if a cloud was lifting from my tormented inner self. Here I met Dave Howard and Paul Brazell, the first two boys of my own age not to judge me for my lack of self-esteem.

After a few weeks I decided I could confide in them.

"You have to know," I whispered, "that I am the world's most abused person. My mother called me 'It', locked me in the cellar for days on end, set me on fire, made me eat ammonia, bombarded me with sub-atomic particles, ran me over with a steam roller and fed me to a great white shark."

"Actually, we'd read it all before in your other books," they yawned, "and we're bored stiff with hearing about it."

This was the acceptance I had always craved.

Paul, Dave and I did a lot of crazy things in those years. Occasionally we would break the speed limit and once I narrowly missed hitting someone when I lost control. "Wow," said Paul, "that was close." "Cool," said Dave. I had done something right in someone else's eyes.

I could feel my confidence rising and I once plucked up the courage to ask a girl out on a date. To my surprise I could sense she found me not unattractive and I bent forward to kiss her. Her mother rushed out and ordered me to leave. "Is it because I is abused?" I asked. "No," she replied. "It's because you're so boring."

Dave and Paul stayed on at school, but I felt the need to get a job. As a victim of abuse I still needed to prove myself. One day Paul moaned about his dad. I snapped. "Your dad is great; he once fixed my bike. My dad never told me the three words I longed to hear: 'You are famous.'"

The three of us went our separate ways. I became a war hero before going on to critical acclaim as a professional victim. They amounted to nothing much.

At Dan's funeral, Paul asked me whether closure could ever be achieved. I checked my bank statement. "Not for the time being."

The digested read ... digested

The world's most abused man sinks to new lows of literary degradation