It was light when I woke. There was some noise in this House of Bedsits. A young voice, like a teenage boy; 'I'm not happy leaving you here when a man with a knife comes to your door!'. I think the day may have jaded my memory on this one, or perhaps I dreamt it, or else I wouldn't have fallen back to sleep so easily. There was an undertow of voices through sleep, and it wasn't long before I woke again to the sound of knocking on someones door; 'Am I too loud?' -a girl's voice this time; 'I don't want to overstep my boundaries if I'm being too loud'.
There followed a litany of noises, forcing me further and further away from sleep and closer to my alarm going off at 7:30am. Banging doors, people trying to find the bathroom, people clattering up and down the stairs, bursts of music from Flat 9, just down the corridor from mine. I think it's Flat 9 anyway, someone's just moved in there. About a month ago, when they (she?) had first moved in, I returned from the hated Saturday morning shift at work to some kind of noise on my landing. There seemed to be someone hanging out of the window by the toilet, one foot on the sill of the window of Flat 9, banging on the glass, hanging two or three floors above the ground. Someone inside the room was shouting at them to fuck off.
The noises from Flat 9 and the three beers made work crawl by today. I hate those Saturday morning shifts. Slightly hungover (on three beers!) and exhausted, I came straight home after work, and fell into a deep and heavy sleep. So exhausted was I that I had to call off the barbecue I was going to at Ann's flat this evening.
There was a series of pictures in the Guardian today of prison cells at Wormwood Scrubs. They looked exactly like this bedsit, except there are no bars on the window of course... Hopefully I'll be living somewhere more pleasant and home-like by autumn, and then, just to sort out those bastard Saturday morning shifts at the call centre...
