The flat I lived in had these big, heavy fire doors which banged shut all the time, so I felt like I was living in a prison.  They banged all through the day and night (the flat was shared between 8 people, most of whom I would rarely talk to – and then only when I had to).  I could only sleep if I was pissed.  If I didn’t have my mother’s house to retreat to at the weekends I would have been drunk 7 days and nights a week and a raving lunatic. The French bitch who used to live down the hall eventually moved into the room next to mine and used to play her awful shitty Euro pop at all hours.  She was rather rude to me (ignoring me when I would say hello and the like) so I stopped talking to her entirely.  She phoned people and spoke to them in French at 7am.  The phone was right outside my room, so I could hear every word, although I didn’t understand any of it.  Another cunt would put the radio on in the (shared) kitchen loudly at around the same time and a few of the residents had happy-clappy communal breakfasts which woke me up.  I stole the radio from the kitchen once (it was my mates, who’d moved out) but they seemed to find another one.  Some of them didn’t even work, so why they wanted to get up so early and have breakfast was beyond me. I did not like living with people and hated having to share a kitchen and bathroom with them.  I made no effort to fit in or socialise.  I did slightly when I first moved in, but could only do so when I came home pissed, so quickly got a ‘bad reputation’.  I just found it hard to deal with people.  I didn’t get it – how were you meant to do it?  At least there were 2 bathrooms in the flat.  One was the ‘nice’ bathroom, which meant it was the one which everyone wanted to use.  It had a shower, a toilet and a sink, and was kept ‘nice’.  People left their toiletries in it and it smelled of perfumed soap and shower gel.  The other bathroom was right across the hall from my room.  It had a toilet, a sink and a bath, but was nowhere near as ‘nice’.  The toilet was often blocked and the flushing mechanism sometimes failed to work, so it would stink.  No one left any toiletries in this room and the floor was often covered in a sticky brown substance which I took to be piss.  Still, this was the bathroom which I tended to use the most, as it was closer to my room and I didn’t need to pass the kitchen to use it, and run the risk of actually seeing any of my housemates. Sometimes I would bump into one or more of them in the hall, despite my best efforts.  I would always say hello and get back to my room as quickly as I could.  The kitchen was to be avoided as much as possible.  I would rarely venture in there except in the morning to make a quick breakfast, and only when I could hear that no one else was using the room.  I often felt like I shouldn’t really be living there at all – as if I were some sort of intruder.  But, of course, I knew I was not.  I paid my rent like every other fucker and was entitled to use the facilities.  It was just the fact that I may have had to engage in conversation that I could not stand.  I was forced to live with these people, so I chose to gain some control by limiting my time with them as much as possible. The guy in the other room next to mine (the one on the other side from the French bitch) was in the flat seemingly all day and night.  I hardly ever saw him go out and, when I did, it was only for brief visits to the shops round the corner.  His name was Alex and he looked as if he never washed himself or his clothes.  I would bump into him sometimes, by accident of course, in the kitchen.  He had the habit of sitting at the kitchen table smoking his roll-ups and reading the paper, in total silence, so I would assume that the kitchen was empty until I walked in and discovered, too late, that it wasn’t.  He would make what I presumed was coffee in a giant mug and the liquid in it looked more like dirty dishwater than coffee. On the occasions when our paths crossed, Alex would talk to me about football, about which I had little interest, and about the problems he was having with the housing benefit people.  He said he had lived there for years and was friends with the landlords. A friend of mine (the same one who had moved out, leaving his radio behind in the kitchen) told me that Alex had been in the papers for stalking a newsreader from the television studios down the road.  He also said that he used to pretend he had a job and go off each morning in a suit, but really he would hang out all day at the local library. Despite all of this, Alex seemed to be the only other person living there who wasn’t really into mixing with everyone else.  For that reason, I suppose I had a strange kind of fondness for him.