31 Falkner Street

Chapter 1

It was the middle of June when we moved into 31 Falkner Street, and freezing. Also battering down rain - the stinging kind that makes your face and hands numb. My face and hands were particularly numb after filling my ford KA a few times with clothes and the odd cushion, canvas and ornament which I picked up from my old studio flat and emptying them into the new house.

Before the point of actually moving in to the address, I had never bothered to actually view the house, assuming that my two housemates-to-be wouldn't have forked over a deposit split three ways for any old hole. As it happens, 31 Falkner Street was in fact a first class Hole on a Hole of a street in a run-down area. I felt my positive attitude towards the move fade away simultaneously as my positive feelings towards said housemates also evaporated. What were they thinking? I could hear rats running around in the ceiling above the kitchen and I could see the neighbours sitting on the pavement outside the terraced row of houses on their campchairs drinking lager being loud and drunk. And it was 5pm. We wrote the three bedrooms down on pieces of paper - upstairs (big), upstairs (small) and downstairs. I got upstairs (small) which I supposed wasn't as bad as the room downstairs.

After we had put some pictures up by hammering nails into the walls with shoe heels, and putting duvets on the beds and clothes in the wardrobes, Laura persuaded us that we needed to go to Asda for our first food shop. This was met with reluctance by both myself and David. David wanted to set up his new and massive telly which he had put in his bedroom, and I was happy to sulk and sit in the house moaning about the state of the house and how bare it still looked. Anyhow, we did all go to Asda and whilst there had our first row (as housemates, rather than when me and Laura had been in secondary school together and argued over who had ignored who in what lesson etc). We couldn't figure out how we were possibly going to do the food shopping in a fair way. Me and Laura weren't happy about David spending what we felt was an extortionate amount of money on Rustler's burgers. Laura and David weren't happy about me buying food that they didn't like and wouldn't eat. Me and David didn't think it was fair that Laura was buying deodorants with our food shopping money. We were going to have to figure out a different strategy because this was so not going to work.

After we had eaten tea - which had consisted of three microwave meals, we couldn't be bothered with anything else - we figured out how to get channels on our telly in the living room/kitchen and sat watching various stuff and making awkward conversation. This was weird. I had known Laura and David for a few years and wasn't uncomfortable with them at the pub or at house parties, but this was new ground. I knew that there were rules that were yet to be established, and could already see that the three of us had different ways of doing things. I already knew that the three of us had different lifestyles. David came into the living room with a spliff at about 9pm.
'Er, no.' I said firmly.
'Tt's my house too. I'll smoke it in my room.'
'What's wrong with outside? I'll be done for that, you know, just for it being in the house!'
'You can't stop me from smoking it in my room, it's MY room.'
'It'll make the stuff on the maiden stink of weed!' I wailed.
'It won't, the smell disappears anyway after a few hours. You can't even smell it, cigarette smell is worse' Danny said, looking pointedly at me, who was smoking a cigarette on the couch.
I wasn't so bothered about the fact that David had drugs in the house, especially not a class C drug as it was at the tine. I just hated cannabis with an absolute passion...

The studio flat I had lived in up until about midday had also been occupied by my (very recently) ex boyfriend who smoked a hell of a lot of it. This had resulted in a severe lack of personal hygiene, money lending, having to sit in a lot with someone speaking in a stoned voice, and never having any packets of crisps to take to work with my lunch. Obviously, the cannabis use hadn't been the be all and end all, he was a right prick anyway, and I was excited to have moved away from that and to make a new start. I felt free, and independant knowing that I could just do what I wanted whenever I wanted, obviously to a certain extent...but still. So anyway, that's why people smoking weed got on my nerves. I was also in a mood anyway, sitting on the old-school flowery couch with the constantly slipping cushions, with my phone vibrating on the arm of the couch with sad/angry/abusive/apologetic text messages. Someone needed to be on the receiving end of my stormy mood. I shan't be elaborating much on this past part of my life, it's another story for another day. And not all that interesting. I mean, what is interesting about coming home from work every night to watch family guy - again. And to be the only person awake for a good portion of the evening?

So it felt a bit strange sleeping in my new room, and a bit lonely if I'm honest. I fell asleep with the telly in my room on purposely as if Cartmen and Kyle's banter could lull me to sleep. I thought it might be a bit much to ask Laura if I could sleep in her bed that night. She might have got worried that I was a closet lesbian and would spoon her in her sleep. Or else, she might tell people that I asked to sleep in her bed with her thus with a resulting rumour going round that I was a bit odd. But the next morning, Laura did make me a packed lunch when she was making her own. I thought I was going to cry, it was nice to have a motherly-type figure on the scene, maybe she would make me a packed lunch every morning with lovely little things in like posh cereal bars and sandwiches with chicken bits. And I stress, chicken BITS not SLICES.

I had to use my sat nav to get home after work that afternoon. How strange, I thought to myself, having to basically follow a map to get back to my own home. Though it would be ok once I had done the route a few times, it still felt like I didn't really have a 'home' home, and I wasn't mad keen on relaxing after work in that empty little house. I parked my car on the cobbled road just next to our house (I was home before Laura so her car would just have to park one house down). Across the narrow road, two girls who were about my age - 19 - were sat in a paddling pool with cans of lager. Cushions, the kind you sit on top of on a couch, were strewn across the pavement and road and one or two people were lying on them. A few older people were sitting out on the camp chairs in shorts. The girls in the paddling pool were in bikinis and were wearing sunglasses. I was wearing a coat on top of my work clothes. Why? Because it wasn't really bikini and sunglasses weather. In fact it was quite cold. Most of the street was in shadow and they all seemed to be huddled in the last little triangle of sunlight, determined to treat June as summer time. Some of them shouted hiya at me whilst some looked on. The girls in the paddling pool carried on splashing and shouting and told me to 'get in'. Much as I wanted to be polite and have neighbours that liked me, I couldn't have fitted into the child size paddling pool if I wanted to, and I didn't own a bikini - I was a student and hadn't been able to afford a holiday for a while. It seemed like a large woman with a skinhead and tattoo's and a man's shirt was the leader and she introduced herself as Jo. The two girls were Stacey and Nina. Another large woman with short hair, a cap and man's clothes was Anna. A man with glasses and a spliff was Anna's brother Ian. An older man, maybe in his 60's, in those pressed pants and shirts that older men wear, was Les.

I had heard about this Jo. She was our next door neighbour, and when we had moved into number 31 the day before and signed the contract with the landlord, he had told us she was a 'bit hard', and when there was trouble on the street she would go and sort it out. To be fair, she did look a bit hard and was doing her best to reinforce this by talking loudly about the time she went to jail the year before for harvesting cannabis in her house. They were all laughing about how Les's ex wife had been at his house across the road watching the police raid Jo's house and put the plants in their van, and had said disgustedly 'Look, the pigs are even taking all her house plants. It's a shame'. Jo said that she had met her girlfriend in Styal prison, who was in for stabbing her violent husband to death. Lovely stuff. As if that wasn't a bit too much information for one introductory conversation, Stacey was talking about some lad she was shagging, Mark. Something to do with him being like Harry Potter for some reason or other. I was wondering when it would be polite to go into the house without looking rude when Laura pulled up in her car. Yes! I was feeling just a bit shy on my own, and trying to think of anecdotes about my girlfriend in prison so that they wouldn't think I was boring or posh or whatever, but Laura was as confident as they came and now she could do the talking. She wasn't awkward-looking in the least as she waved to the motley crew, and we told them that, yes, we would go to their barbeque tomorrow night. Not as high brow as you might think, the houses didn't have gardens that you could put a barbeque in, just yards. But you couldn't fit a barbeque in the yards either, they were about 2 centimetres squared and where you had to put your binbags because there was no wheelie bins. No, the barbeque would be on the pavement outside the row of houses - if anyone had a barbeque. As we went into the house to make some tea, Jo shouted to us that we would need to get ourselves some camp chairs and soonish...

I was actually quite excited to go to this barbeque, and told people at work about the paddling pool in the middle of the road and camp chairs on the streets. I thought I would get some entertainment value out of my Falkner Street incidents, and people at work needed a morale boost anway, what with working with homelessness, mental health issues and substance users all day long. Although it did mean that they were all a bit desensitised to shock factor stories such as women having girlfriends who were in prison for killing their husbands. How crap would that be anyway, I thought, if your girlfriend was going to be in prison for the next 8 years or whatever. You would only be able to send letters to each other and go to visit them every now and then. Were you even allowed to hug and kiss and stuff in prison visits? I typed a couple of risk assessments, made a round of drinks when the office wasn't too busy, sent Laura and David some housey texts and got off just in time to hit the midst of the rush hour traffic as standard.

No sign of anyone in the street this afternoon...did they not have paddling pool parties every day then? I wondered what they all did when they weren't congregated on the street drinking. Jo, Anna and Ian didn't work. Les was on a pension and I was guessing the two young girls were students. Well, assuming. They had southern accents and were living in a shared house so I presumed that they were going to John Moores Uni. I cooked a spag bol for Laura and David and we sat on the couches in the front room eating it, more at ease than the other day, I thought. When Laura and David both went into their rooms after tea I felt a bit restless.

'What you doing?' I stuck my head into Laura's room. She was listening to music and was on facebook on the computer. I wandered around her room, having a nosy at all her stuff. Laura had a lot of 'stuff'. Tutus, feather boas, creams, pieces of material hanging over drawers and cupboards, clothes, fluffy pens, pictures of Marilyn Monroe on her walls, so many different colours it would give me a headache.
'Who's that lad you're looking at on facebook?' I knew I was being irritating, but I was bored. Laura began telling me an elaborate tale about the lad, and his twin brother and how she had gone out with one of them, then possibly she had fancied the other twin or he had fancied her. It was hard to follow. David came nosying into Laura's room then, obviously thinking that we were up to something exciting. Laura put on some cheesy chart type music and we danced around the room - not David, although he was slightly feminine with his straightened and flicky hair. At that point, I realised that I was happy that I had made the decision to move in with Laura and David and have housemates that I already knew. I had always felt a bit envious of my friends who were in student houses with their friends and thought the chaos in the houses which seemed to be constant sounded really fun, with something always happening. Laura and I asked David if we could have some of his beer. He said we could because we promised that we could get more beer for him on our next food shop. Out of curiousity, we decided to drink our beers sitting on the doorstep so we could see what was happening on the street. Nothing! How infuriating! I had expected to see little parties and fights every time we looked out of the window. The street was deserted. We saw Les walking down the road, back towards his house with a carrier bag full of lager and what looked like urine down the crotch of his pants. He spoke to us briefly and said that he was on his way back from the pub down the road. We debated whether to knock on Jo's door to see what was going on with this barbeque but concurred that we were both too scared. Not of Jo you understand, but of making a fatal social error of coming across as a bit desperate. Fine. We would have a few drinks in the house ourselves.

A couple of hours later, I could hear shouts on the street outside, and laughing. There was a lot of 'fuck off, you prick' and we could hear music. Suddenly, there was a bailiff-style knock on the front door and Jo was outside shouting 'are you coming out then, thought you were all coming to our fucking barbeque.' She seemed to be shouting in quite an aggressive way and looked all angry and red, but seemed to be friendly enough as she started shouting about whether we wanted sausages. In fact, she was shouting at the other people standing around outside the front door too and they just seemed to be laughing back at her. Jo had a little barbeque grill just outside her front door which she was cooking 3 or 4 sausages on and there were a few others standing around or sitting on camp chairs. I recognised Anna and Ian but no-one else. Anna was hanging back from the rabble and was stood quietly on the cobbled road whilst Ian had pride of place next to Jo's best camping chair.
'Let's crack open some more of David's fosters then shall we?'