Memoires of a Heroinhead

There's been a murder, a young girl, and now I can't sleep.

It happened a little over four hours ago. I woke up to a symphony of banging and screaming coming from the upstairs apartment. In the dark, I lay on my bed, listening to the ruckus. It was a wrestling match. Two bodies tumbling around, kneecaps and elbows making blunt thuds overhead, then someone scrambling to their feet and bounding heavy-footed across the floor, screaming. I lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out like the bored.

From within the melee above I could make out two voices. One was that of a young girl and the other a man. The girl was hysterical, sometimes shouting insults and at other times shrieking as if desperate to to be let loose. The man made mostly angry sounds, like something driven mad. His only comprehensible words were: “WHORE! SLUT! WHORE!” Both voices were ruined with alcohol, a hateful rasp that writhed through their insults.

Woken for good, my eyes adjusted to the dark. On my back I concentrated on the fight, following it back and forth across the ceiling while trying to work out which part of whose body had hit what. At times the thumping and screaming became so bad that I was unsure of just where the fight was coming from. It was as if my neighbours to the left, right, behind and above were all going at it, like the entire apartment block had gone insane and all the occupants were participating in some surreal, early morning, communal bust-up. My bedsit quaked. From the far wall a painting worked loose from its fixing and fell like a dead-weight. It hit the floor standing and stayed there. In a rage I hurled a shoe at the wall. That fell and stayed there too.

Wow, that's phenomenal literary ability.

The toughest thing about being poor was having no curtains. It meant the other kids could see in; could see the bare floors, the beat-up TV, the mouldy sofa, the wallpaper torn back and hanging loose, the crazy dog of bones which **** as it spun cartwheels up at the window. But worse than what they could see was what they couldn't: no video, no furniture, no lampshade, no ornaments. We had no nothing, and when the evening came, and the light went on, we had even less.

On page 24 there were curtains. Thick dark red ones.
Above all else they were my biggest ''want'
That was my thing, you see, covering up what was going on inside.
I jabbed my finger at them on the page and shouted “WANT!”
My brother and Sister followed
eager to point out their picks
“Want!”
“want!”
“Want!”

Dad sat in the middle holding the Argos catalogue
He'd wet his middle finger before leafing over each new page
You could smell the glossy print and the glue of the bind
It smelled like commerce itself

Isn't it?

The Argos Catalogue is also well-worth reading.

"It smelled like commerce itself"

Very nice

There's more, I'm just posting the first few paragraphs as a taster.

Wow, that's phenomenal literary ability.