One morning last summer, Anne Geraghty was woken by a knock on the door. As her husband, Martin, got out of bed to answer, she checked the alarm clock and saw that it was 5.30. At first, she thought something must have happened outside: a passing motorist who had broken down, perhaps. She put on her dressing gown and made her way downstairs. Two policemen were standing outside her front door. "I heard Martin say, 'He's dead?'" she recalls. "Then I was shouting, 'Please let me not have heard that!' I ran downstairs and Martin reached out to me and said, 'Tim's dead.' In that moment, my life changed completely."
For two days after the policemen knocked on the door to let Anne know that her only child had died suddenly in his sleep at the age of 34, she can vividly remember that her lips went blue. She cannot recall much else other than this, as though her mind latched on to that single small detail in order to avoid being overwhelmed her grief. Initially, it was assumed her son had died of natural causes but a postmortem revealed that Tim Guest had suffered respiratory failure after taking a fatal morphine overdose.
There was no suggestion of suicide and his death appeared to be a mystery: Guest, although a recreational drug user, had seemed to be in a stable and happy frame of mind, both personally and professionally. He had recently got married and was planning to start a family with his wife Jo. In 2004, he had published his first book, an acclaimed memoir called My Life in Orange; reviewers praised Guest's "astonishing maturity" and called it "poignant, funny and wise". The New Yorker critic John Lahr said that it was one of the best autobiographies of the decade.
With the publication of his next non-fiction book, Second Lives: A Journey Through Virtual Worlds, in 2007, Guest looked set to become one of the most distinctive voices of his generation. He appeared on television and radio as an expert commentator on virtual communities and the film rights to both books were swiftly bought up by Hollywood. Paul Sidey, his editor at publishers Hutchinson, said that Guest's appeal lay in the fact that he was "always confident, funny, enlightening and provocative". He was already working on a new book when he died.
"The impact was so profound," Anne says now, six months later, sitting in a cafe in north London, her mug of coffee cooling on the table in front of her. "He was unique, absolutely unique. I really loved him." She gives a shaky smile and then starts to cry, the tears coming in a flurry before she mops them up rapidly with a paper napkin. "People who knew us knew we had this… this bond," she says. "You see, we went through so much together."
Tim Guest had an unconventional upbringing. In 1981, when he was five, Anne had taken him from their family home in Leeds to live on an ashram in India run by the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. The Rajneesh movement believed that the traditional family unit was the root of social dysfunction and encouraged sterilisation for its female adherents. Its followers, called sannyasins, wore orange and were given new names to help them along the path to transcendental enlightenment. Children slept apart from their parents and were raised communally. Tim, an only child of separated parents, suddenly found himself surrounded by several hundred mothers and fathers.
Bhagwan, a former philosophy professor who was known to his disciples as Osho, promoted free love, dynamic meditation and the pushing of conventional boundaries to achieve spiritual salvation. He delivered sermons from a dentist's chair, often high on nitrous oxide, and amassed a considerable fortune while encouraging his followers to give up their own possessions (untroubled by his own preaching on spiritual asceticism, Bhagwan built up an impressive collection of gold watches and 93 Rolls-Royces).
Tim, who was renamed Yogesh, spent much of the next six years looking for his mother as she disappeared into a whirling sea of orange. His memoir, published when Guest was just 27, is filled with wistfulness, a longing for her undivided attention. The prose is peppered with sad, lyrical sentences that hint at his childhood loneliness and confusion. "I was always trying to catch my mother's eye," he writes in one of the early chapters. And later: "I felt I had spent my whole life on tiptoes, looking for my mother in a darkening crowd."
But Anne, who had grown up in a repressive Catholic environment, was swept away by the idealism of Bhagwan's vision; she embraced the idea of dismantling the nuclear family and living freely, unfettered by the bounds of social convention. "It's difficult to understand now but back then I genuinely believed that the commune would be a better parent than me," explains Anne, who separated from Tim's father shortly after joining the Rajneesh movement. "Of course, that wasn't true but I thought I'd given Tim the life and freedom I'd craved," she pauses, before adding in a quiet voice: "But I know now that he didn't want that; he wanted more of me. It was the 70s and it was a time when people were full of optimism for society. We wanted to break out of rigidities and social control. A lot of people went to India to connect with a new way, with love, freedom, truth and beauty."
The reality turned out to be more sinister. Over the next six years, Tim was parcelled off to various Rajneesh communes in America, England and Germany, intermittently spending holidays with his father, John, who worked in computers in Silicon Valley. For a time, while his mother helped to run a commune in Cologne, Guest was sent to the movement's Medina school in Suffolk. It was a place where there was no notion of privacy, structure or personal possessions; at one point, Tim hid his most prized Lego pieces in a loaf of bread so that he could keep them safe from the other children. In My Life in Orange, he recounts the disturbing practice of sexual initiation, involving adult men and girls as young as eight. Tim, a sensitive and intelligent child, sought refuge in his imagination, in writing stories and dreaming up alternative realities.
"I did worry about him," says his father over a faint telephone line from Germany where he now lives with his second wife and 16-year-old daughter. "I spent three months at the Medina but I didn't really enjoy it. It seemed like a slightly more adult boarding school; I thought it was a bit grim. The whole structure there was not conducive to being a good parent. The children all lived in their own house and you didn't see much of your kids."
Later, when John was living in America, Tim went to stay for several months, at the end of which his father let him choose where he wanted to live. "He chose to go back to his mother [on the commune]," says John, a touch sadly. "There was not much I could do."
Did Anne ever think that what she was doing was harming her child? "Looking back, I think, 'Why on earth did I let that happen?'" she concedes. "The separation [from Tim] was very difficult. Initially, it wasn't so bad because we were all in the same commune, a bit like a kibbutz, and we could see them whenever we wanted. But when I was in Germany and he went to a separate school I remember weeping when he left and I couldn't stop."
Increasingly detached from his mother, Tim was forced to rely on other children. His best friend from the age of six was Majid, a fellow sannyasin who spent several years with him in Suffolk. Majid, now a 36-year-old computer consultant who lives in Brighton and goes by his pre-Rajneesh name of Barnaby Burch, has a clear image of Tim as a child. "He stood out. He had a mop of curly hair that was always very unruly and missing teeth... Yogesh [Tim] was into fantasy stuff, role-playing games and books of a fantastical nature. He was often looking for ways to take himself out of his own reality, his own life.
"Life on the commune was hard, but the flip side was that there were always other kids to play with. You'd go for days at a time without seeing your mum."
I meet Majid in a busy tapas bar in south London where, still visibly distressed by his friend's death, he swiftly downs strong espressos to sustain him through the draining trawl of memories. He seems oddly out of kilter with his environment, speaking slightly too loudly, with unexpectedly blunt honesty. I cannot quite put my finger on what it is about him that seems different until Majid confesses that, since leaving the Rajneesh movement, he has found it difficult to get to grips with the world outside the commune walls. "As a sannyasin, you were completely open with your feelings," he says. "It felt like you could read someone else's feelings. I still find that hard now because people are often very guarded."
Tim, too, would struggle to acclimatise. At the age of 10, he decided he wanted to leave the commune and phoned his mother to tell her he was going to live with his father in San Francisco. Some time later, just as the Rajneesh movement was imploding in a cloud of its own corruption, Anne left too. By the late 1980s, Bhagwan's empire (now consisting of 126 sannyasi centres in Europe, including 23 in the UK) had fallen apart amid criminal convictions for poisoning and fraud against some senior members of the movement. There were allegations of attempted murder and a plot to fly an aircraft into a building in the US. Tim returned from America to live with Anne and his stepfather, Sujan, also a former sannyasin, in north London. The dream of a better life had died.
Anne burnt her orange clothes in a bonfire in the garden. Sujan took his pre-sannyasin Christian name of Martin. Tim started going to a local comprehensive. For the first time in as long as he could remember, he was allowed to keep his own toys. The commune, with all its warped optimism and sullied reality, receded gradually into the distance as if it had never been.
But Tim Guest would never quite leave behind those early experiences. He had a hard time adjusting to life in a big city. In his mid-teens, he drank and took drugs and scraped his knuckles along brick walls to make them bleed. He felt that he did not fit in at school and sought consolation in science fiction books and computer games. He had no understanding of the way the world worked outside the commune and, most of all, he was angry at his mother.
During their first Christmas together in London, he stormed out of the family home and did not return until nightfall. Anne remembers: "I said, 'We've got to sort this out' and suddenly it all came out. He said, 'It's too late, I wanted Christmas with you in the commune. You can't make up for it now.'"
Did she feel guilty for what she had put him through? "Oh yes. I sat there with my head in my hands feeling I'd totally failed in the most important job I had."
Anne, a clinical psychologist, instigated a weekly family meeting every Thursday evening to discuss their shared memories of the commune. "We did that for two years and every single meeting ended with one of us crying," she says. "It was healing and enlightening and painful but the love we had came through again and again and again." According to Majid, the teenage Guest "was just uncertain of what he was supposed to do or who he was supposed to be".
The anger dissipated over the years, partly through the family meetings and partly through the writing of Guest's memoir, which seemed to act as a sort of therapy. After graduating from the University of Sussex with a BA in psychology in 1996, he won a place at the University of East Anglia writing course – one of 13 out of a field of 3,000 – where he studied for his MA under Andrew Motion, who became poet laureate in 1999. It was here that he started to explore his past in prose, encouraged by John Lahr, whose son, Chris, had been one of Guest's closest school friends.
Lahr, an author and biographer, knew instantly that Guest was something special. Every few months, they would meet over coffee to discuss the literature that they loved – Raymond Carver, Joseph Mitchell and the Romanian writer EM Cioran. "Tim was sensationally alert," Lahr would write in Guest's obituary. "Curiosity and swiftness of mind defined him. He had all the equipment to be a writer – a point of view, an inquiring mind, a love of literature and an appetite for glory."
When Guest started to write about his own life, he applied a reporter's economy and restraint to passages of profound emotion, heightening the sense of a child's confusion and loss. It was a draining process and Chris Lahr recalls him turning up at his house "in tears after days of writing. I do think it was a form of exorcism for him, definitely".
Anne says that she "knew he had to write it" and helped with the research. "It had to be done even though I knew I wouldn't come out of it perfectly," she says. "He kind of moved on after he wrote the book. Whenever I brought it up, I would say, 'I still worry about what I did' and he would say, 'Don't be silly. It's a long time ago, it's fine.' In the end, he told me he felt lucky to have had that kind of upbringing."
In many ways, My Life in Orange was an act of reclamation: an effort to make the past his own and to pin down the experiences of his childhood in a way that he had been unable to at the time. It was also, Guest later acknowledged, about his mother and "my journey to find her". When it was published in 2004, Kirkus Reviews called it "a rightly disturbing record of malignant child neglect by people who sought a heaven and made a hell".
For Anne, who found herself pilloried by the Daily Mail as one of the world's worst mothers, it made uncomfortable reading but she remained supportive, even giving interviews alongside her son to promote the book. "I knew he had to give expression to what was his experience," she says now. "And like any mother who loves her child, you give them yourself."
Three years later, Guest's next book, Second Lives, explored the appeal of virtual communities. It was a subject that Guest, who had dealt with the unpredictability of his childhood by retreating into his own alternative realties, found himself drawn to. In an interview for a More4 documentary, he made the link explicit. Talking to camera about the research involved in My Life in Orange, he says that the reason his mother was first attracted to communal living was because she was trying to "find a way to be together under the very isolating pressures of capitalism. What happened when I finished the book was that I realised I was the same age as my mother and I felt the same pressures. In fact, it was worse. There are twice as many people living alone now than there were in the 70s. It struck me that the virtual worlds which I came across were a more modern solution to that same problem: how can we be together when we feel so alone". For Guest, an avatar, too, could be an escape from self, an attempt to idealise and act on impulses outside the strictures of conventional society.
Film rights for both his books were sold – Lone Scherfig, the director of An Education, is adapting My Life in Orange, while David Fincher, director of Se7en and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, is slated to direct a version of Second Lives. Professionally, Tim seemed to have hit his stride, writing regularly for newspapers, including the Observer. He found happiness in his personal life too after meeting Jo Manderson at the Notting Hill carnival in 2006. "I knew straight away," recalls Jo, a vivacious 33-year-old who talks in a rapid, expressive stream, gesticulating to emphasise each word. "I went back and told a few good friends, 'I've met the man I'm going to marry.'
"He was extraordinary: kind, open, empathetic. We found true happiness with each other. Every day he'd say, 'We're so lucky. So many people don't have this in a lifetime.'"
They married in a low-key ceremony at Islington Town Hall in October 2008. They talked about starting a family but, says Chris Lahr, Guest's restlessness never quite left him. "Tim was always… not troubled, but never settled. He was always on tiptoes, looking around. He was so furtive, so intelligent, he needed a lot of stimulation."
He had myriad interests and an inquisitive cleverness. Among his acquaintances, Guest was famous for his verbal dexterity and being able to complete cryptic crosswords more quickly than anyone else. His friends came from disparate backgrounds, reflecting Guest's passions – for music or computer games or science fiction or samba. He was full of questions and diffident about his achievements. Again and again, the friends I contacted talked about the "deep connection" they felt with him, and how he spoke "as if he wanted to learn from you". Having grown up in an environment without emotional boundaries, it was as though Guest could cut through the layers of social politesse to get straight to the essence of any given conversation.
"He wanted to understand how people worked," says Majid. "He was fearless." And yet, at the same time, "he was always looking for something and I don't think he knew what it was and I'm not sure if he ever really found it".
The drugs he had dabbled in as a teenager became a more permanent, recreational part of Guest's life. He experimented with heroin, opium, cocaine and crack but he never seemed to tip over into addiction or dependence, so that even his closest friends had little inkling of whether it might be a problem or not. "I knew that this was going on in the background but I didn't know how regular it was," says Chris Lahr.
"I thought he was addressing it. I encouraged him to seek help for it. I suppose you just go over a line… his instinct was saying his relationship with it [drugs] was unhealthy. He was stubborn, but he wasn't stupid."
To many of his friends, Guest's occasional drug use was a product of his inquiring mind. "He was an experimenter, he wanted to see what life had to offer," says Majid. Sometimes, says Chris Lahr, he simply needed to switch off and submerge himself in a protective cocoon of emptiness in the same way that "he used to retreat behind the sofa to read his books. I think, for Tim, drugs allowed him to retreat into his own space".
There is an unspoken sense, too, that Guest was trying to escape something deeper: his difficult relationship with his uprooted childhood, perhaps, and the feeling that he remained slightly lost in the world around him. In the opening chapter of My Life in Orange, he writes of a boy who hanged himself at a Bhagwan community in Britain. "I knew the boy hanging from the swing could have been me," he writes, unflinching.
Although his friends are as certain as they can be that Guest did not intentionally kill himself, it seemed none the less as if his commune experience had cast a long shadow and he was never entirely sure whether to embrace its legacy or try to escape it. "From what I heard, he was quite good at concealing things," says his father. "He wasn't always quite honest about what he was doing in terms of whether he'd been drinking or taking drugs but he made a serious effort at the beginning of the year to stop."
It was an effort encouraged by Jo, who knew better than most the extent of his dependency. "When I met him, he was leading the single lifestyle," she says, carefully. "He was partying and going out a lot to nightclubs but he'd stopped because we were going to have children. He was open about the issues he'd had with drugs, he was in therapy, he was following an abstinence programme [with the Drugs Advisory Service]. He didn't want drugs in his future, he wanted to grow out of it."
He had a relapse in January 2009. "He just took too many drugs and collapsed," says Jo. "That's when it all came to a head. I spoke to Anne on the phone and said, 'Actually, there is a serious problem; he needs to recognise it and get help.' No one knew [he was taking drugs]. I barely knew.
"There was a pattern of when he did it that I'm aware of in hindsight – often after a hangover or a moment where he was uncomfortable and wanted to switch off his nervous system – but when you're living with him and he's saying, 'Of course not', you believe him because you love him and because he was living an everyday life."
The couple moved into Jo's parents house in Muswell Hill, north London, while Tim got clean and for several months, the abstinence programme seemed to be working. At the end of June, they spent a week at Anne and Martin's home in the Lake District and then went on holiday to Barcelona. "He called me up and said, 'Mum, this is the best holiday I've ever had,'" says Anne. Another of his closest friends, Nabil Salah, remembers meeting him at this time. "He was so jolly, making jokes," Salah says. "He would repeatedly say, 'I'm so happy.'" Once again, Jo and Tim started talking about having a family. "He would have been an amazing father," says Jo. "He said to me, 'Our kids are going to have so many soft toys.'"
But then, on Friday 31 July last year, Jo returned from work in the early evening and got a call from her husband. "He sounded drunk," she says. "I said, 'Have you done drugs?' and he said, 'No, I've just had a bloody mary.'" Guest came home and Jo, not wanting to confront the issue until the sobriety of the following morning, went out with a friend for a drink at around 9.30pm. "He said, 'I love you' as I was leaving and I said, 'I love you eternally' and then I left the house."
She returned a couple of hours later. Tim was lying in bed in his boxer shorts, with Radiohead on his iPod. "I knew he was dead," says Jo, her face pale, her voice swollen. "I called an ambulance and they tried to resuscitate him, putting pipes down his throat, but I could see it. I knew there was no way to revive him."
She tried to call Anne and Martin in Cumbria but they were asleep and the phone did not wake them. "Your body goes into complete shock," says Jo. "You're raw but full of adrenaline which I imagine keeps you alive." For weeks, she did not wash the bedlinen because the pillow still smelled of Tim.
No one knows why Guest took the drugs at a time when his personal life seemed so contented and when he was on the cusp of a Hollywood breakthrough. Majid thinks it was an accidental overdose and that Guest had misjudged the strength of the morphine – the postmortem would later reveal that he had 1,020 micrograms of morphine per litre of blood. "You don't know what's going on in someone's head," Majid says, finally, "how much they knew what they were doing."
Of course, part of the difficulty of never knowing is that there is no definite conclusion or explanation that can make sense of Tim's death, no firm line that his grieving family can drawn under it. How often has Jo been angry about what he did, I wonder? "Sometimes," she says, "sometimes I just think, 'You stupid fucking boy.' I punched a few pillows after he died. Of course, anger is one of the symptoms of grief..." she trails off. "Because I loved him so much."
In the eight months since his death, she has given up work and is concentrating on completing a novel that Guest had started before he died. "At the beginning, I was thinking, what on earth am I going to do with my life?" Jo says. "I write a bit every day. It's a slow process. Sometimes I'm crying for an hour. It's emotionally exhausting."
Thirty-three is too young to be a widow. She is aware that, at some point in the future, she will probably have other relationships. "In my heart, I think it's going to take me a long time because I loved Tim so much and I'm going to compare and contrast everyone and it's a bloody high standard."
Shortly after his death, Jo began to have dreams about her late husband. At the start, she would wake up desperately pleading with him to come back to her. "Now, he's in my dreams but he's walking alongside me," she says. "I don't wake up thinking, 'Oh no, he's gone.' I've accepted it."
She takes a deep breath and sits back in her chair, smiling at the thought of him, at the thought of his inquiring mind, the constant questions he posed of life and his talent for expressing the answers. Tim Guest was a man fascinated by the possibility of other worlds, by the idea of escape and of living a freer life unconstrained by conventional rules. He might have died without fulfilling his true potential but perhaps there is some small comfort to be had in the knowledge that he continues to exist in the books he left behind, in the films that will be made of them and in the alternate reality of other people's dreams.