4. Lights down...

Monday 5th December 2005 ' 12:17 am

A very good while later, after we'd put some more air in that whisky bottle, Sherlock and I stepped out into the night and Denise locked the door behind us. Everyone else had long gone. Sherlock stood in the lee of the door and fashioned a rollie, which he lit with the Zippo he keeps on a string around his neck. Looking up, I saw Denise's light go on in the room above the bar. Her shadow passed across the blinds and dropped out of sight as she collapsed on her sofa.

I knew that feeling.

We slouched homewards along the damp, windy seafront ' past the shuttered arcades and Bed and Breakfasts. At one point, Sherlock sucked down a lungful of smoke and nipped out his fag.

"Where are we, Al?

Far up along the prom, Lantern Jetty poked into the waves like a finger. Behind it, the sodium-lit streets to the west of the town glowed on the hillside like a raked up pile of cinders.

"Here, I said.

"'Sackly, he said. "No place. Nobodies in no place.

We reached Shanty Square and turned in, out of the wind at last. Square's a misnomer, really. There aren't any corners. It's a circle of four-storey rooming houses, hollowed from the main face of seafront buildings, like a knot-hole in a slab of wood. In the middle is a circular island, with an skeletal chestnut tree and a wooden bench. You can just about drive around it with a full steering lock. I always think it's like walking into a castle tower turned inside-out. My place is high up under the battlements at 11 o'clock. Sherlock's is over at quarter past. A few lights were on in some of the rooms. The flicker of TV sets. The tinkle of chimes on someone's balcony.

Wanting my bed more than anything else, I headed for my front door. Sherlock, though, sat himself down on the bench and took out his bong. He looked like one of those cartoon characters marooned on a desert island. He got himself going and blew a long line of smoke, like steam from a whistle, up at the stars.

"If I had a quid for each of them bastards, he said.

I dug my key from my pocket. "It don't make you happy, mate, I said. I was getting cold. It was the best I could come up with.

Sherlock chuckled. It didn't sound like it had much joy in it, though.

"Neither does my dick, Al¦ but I still want it.

Inside the door, I began the most difficult part of my journey: the four flights of stairs to my flat. Sober, I could do it two stairs at a time. Now, it was both feet on each step before taking the next, feeling my way along the cracks and bumps in the wall. Brewer's Braille, as Sherlock calls it. At the top of each flight I hooked my hand over the bannister rail, using my body's momentum to swing myself around for the next stage.

As I went, I saw the odd strip of yellow light under a door where someone was burning the late oil. Except for Yoyo's flat on the third ' the one below mine. Here, the light was a striking shade of neon green. Yoyo's got a fish tank ' a huge thing, almost half the length of one wall, holding Christ knows how many gallons of water. In it he keeps a single goldfish ' or it would be gold if the sides of the tank weren't covered in green plastic film. Yoyo says it's to calm him and aid his insomnia. He says that watching the fish mouthing its goggle-eyed way to and fro in its very own miniature ocean is wonderfully relaxing. I can quite understand why. He calls the goldfish Edith. Sometimes, in the late hours, I can hear him crooning to it.

The last flight was the hardest. The vital curving bit of the bannister is missing there. I sawed it off one day to allow for the passage of an old upright piano, bought on a whim for a tenner from a geezer at the pub who was trying to fend off the bailiffs. I'd always fancied learning to play. But after picking at a few tuneless notes, I put the lid down and locked it and then promptly lost the key. Since then, I'd always meant to replace that piece of bannister. But there it sits, like half a giant doughnut, on top of the piano, along with a great deal of other things that need things doing to them that never seem to get done. A busted cuckoo clock. A computer monitor with a cracked screen. A German typewriter that types all the wrong letters (or maybe it's a prototype Enigma machine). A portable stereo with no speakers. Half a pair of binoculars. A hammer, but no nails. A complete set of Bee Gees LPs.

I suppose I could always make use of the hammer.

I switched on the light, and my living room appeared like an over-exposed photograph: one of a head-on crash, so it seemed, between my electric cooker and my sofa bed. The cooker had been pranged up the arse by the following-too-close fridge, and their combined force had rammed the sofa into the desk. The coffee table had pulled up alongside the wreckage, closely followed by the bookcase. The debris field around them was scattered with the tragic litter of domestic failure: open books, empty beer cans, empty bottles, CDs, newspapers, take-away cartons, forks, ashtrays, cushions, socks, underpants, cups, orange peel, shoes.

I picked my way through the carnage and opened the fridge. There were few survivors in there. The mangled corpse of a loaf. And a lidless pot of margarine, which had been stabbed so many times with a Marmite-coated knife that it was beginning to look like vanilla-chocolate ripple ice cream. At that moment, I wished it was. But I rescued them, found a knife in the sink, wiped it on the dish-cloth, then spread a couple of slices of the bread thickly ' like a cack-handed builder slapping semi-hardened plaster on a wall made of wet cardboard. I slopped a load of peanut butter and tomato sauce on to bind it together. Then I crammed the whole thing into my mouth. And it tasted better than anything else in the world. I washed it down with a mug of cold water and went and had a piss.

Afterwards, I switched off the light and fell on the bed. But before nodding off, I poked my head under the curtain. The Square was glowing dimly, like a grotto, with the light from half a dozen windows. Sherlock was still sitting on the bench ' arms draped along the top like he'd been crucified there ' staring out across the promenade and the sea into the cavern of the night sky. I looked up there too, and saw the flashing lights of a plane going over. I wondered briefly if anyone on board was looking down on our coastline, etched into the darkness like a string of cheap fairy lights. Were they were wondering what type of place this was? Who the people were? What went on there?

The plane disappeared behind the rooftops. I glanced down to the Square again, but Sherlock was gone. I searched in the shadows ' nothing. Then I saw him standing on the other side of the tree, offloading the evening's cargo. He finished, shook himself off a couple of times, then shambled ' like a man carrying a heavy and awkward weight ' over to his door. A thin wedge of light fell on the steps as the door opened. I saw him pass in. Then it was dark again.

I dropped the curtain, unbuckled my jeans, and turned my head to the pillow¦

¦and the next thing I saw was the ceiling above my bed on Monday lunchtime, and the gravy-coloured, heart-shaped stain there from the leak in the roof. My mouth felt like I'd eaten the in-soles of a lorry driver's trainers marinated in rancid yoghurt. I looked at the stain and realised, for the first time, that if I turned myself around to look at it the other way, it would look like a bum-print. I could hear the sounds of the gulls screaming at each other across the roof-tops, the rain pattering against the window, Yoyo pissing in the toilet downstairs ' sounding like a waterfall in a storm drain. And I knew, without having to look, that I was out of coffee and tea bags and milk and sugar. And aspirins.

My life, I thought.

Yoyo pulled the chain, but not before he'd let out a fart a flatulent whale could have sunk a ship with.

My life¦

I need to do something about my life.