Darke

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Rick Gekoski. Darke

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Rick Gekoski is a writer, rare-book dealer and former academic. He has written several widely praised non-fiction books including Staying Up, Tolkien's Gown, Outside of a Dog and Lost, Stolen or Shredded. This is his first novel.

In 2005, he was one of the judges for the Man Booker Prize, and was then Chair of the judges for the Man Booker International Prize 2011. He teaches creative non-fiction for the Arvon Foundation, and sits on their Development Board. In 2014 he was elected an Honorary Vice President of English PEN.

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It’s not just my pants and trousers that I stain. I bleed. I get blood on my socks, the cuffs of my shirt, my pants, the insides of my trousers. My face bleeds, and I put tiny swathes of tissues to mop and staunch it. It comes from my scratching. I bleed less but more frequently than a woman, and I scratch more often than a baboon. I have eczema on my psoriasis, my skin itches as if infested by insects. I scratch and scratch, apply ointments and then scratch in the wetness, humid furrows plough my skin, and when they dry, patches of red sores mature into tiny scab fields, which I pick, which then bleed, and itch.

But my scratching of my multiple itches is also recreational. The satisfaction of this has to be experienced to be credited. I moan, I prance, I gibber – though I am not entirely sure what gibbering entails.

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