'Do you suffer from depression?'

‘Do you suffer from depression?’ she asked.
‘Well..,’ I began, but there was more.
‘Just say you don’t,’ she added, leaning forward. ‘Someone committed suicide there last week. Don’t say another about it, OK?’
I really needed a place to put my head down. Sofa-surfing might sound like fun but it comes with a shelf-life and I’d past it.
Six months of homelessness has displaced my sense of being. There’s an otherworldly quality to it, which is attractive for a while, but in the end it’s all about survival. Normality is a foreign concept, a laughable affair; my eyesight has worsened, my hernias are acting up and teeth aren’t what they used to be. Everything seems to be slowly falling away.
So I went to the council and they put me in touch with a charity that helps homeless singletons find accommodation.
After a few days, I was offered a room at a YMCA.
Room 606.
The room had just been painted. Snots of gloss on the door were still tacky. Dents and scrapes on the walls had been given a lick in a grotesque silk finish.
‘Typical,’ I thought, plonking my bag down. ‘I get the death room.’
I’ve managed to curtail meandering thoughts about how he died.
I saw some red on the window but it was only ketchup, so I wiped it off.
Last Sunday, I went to my room and the milk I’d put on the window-sill had gone. Also, the telly had been moved and on top of it was a coupon for Harvest Crunch.
I’m no Poirot, so I told reception but they had no idea. The cleaners worked weekdays and the religious mob only searched rooms for drugs on Thursdays.
‘Room 606,’ said the man at reception.
‘Yeah, has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it,’ I said, hoping he’d tell me about the dead man.
I wouldn’t mind, but this room is all I’ve got at the moment. It’s my sanctuary, although at times it reminds me more of a morgue.
It’s on the sixth floor (high enough for instant death on impact) but he can’t have jumped because the window only opens a few inches and there are no signs of having been forced.
Maybe it was pills. Maybe my bed was last occupied by a dead man; an open coffin. The bed’s certainly not new and it’s been wrapped in plastic, so it’s not impossible.
Above my bed on a ledge is a multi-coloured figurine of an angel, painted by my three-year old daughter. It’s slightly lopsided but stands up well enough.
What would the children think of their old pa if they knew the pickle he was in?
Fact is, I’m warm, and the food’s not too bad.
I just had dinner. On the way down in the lift, I met one of the lads.
He saw that my shoelaces were undone.
‘Best tie those up, mate,’ he said. ‘An old lady died here today.’ (I was later told she was only 46.)
‘What?’ I couldn’t believe it. One a week?
‘Brown bread. Gone to heaven,’ he went on. ‘Ambulance came but she’d already gone.’
The YMCA has a tough job, supplying local councils with boarding-house facilities for society’s ghosts in need of rejuvenation.
God’s waiting-room, an open prison for desperate troubledours, Death’s door.
Whatever it is, I feel infinitely more vulnerably housed now that I have somewhere to sleep. At least sofa-surfing was with friends. There are some very lost-looking fellas here and I can only imagine what they’ve been through, especially the younger ones.