house of 1000 stories

by me - Gemma Critchley. (it's fully copyright and shit, so don't even think of stealing it) before i start, can i just say that i'm really proud of this, a lot of hard work went into it. of course, i have a long way to go but if you could leave your comments by clicking on here:

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i'd like to hear what people think, even if you hate it. thanks for reading!

Novel
Monopoly:
An extract: the beginning of a novel.

CHAPTER ONE – CHANCE

There’s a lot to be said for living in London. There’s a lot to be said for living at all, come to think about it. There’s a lot to be said, but not much of it’s good, or even worth saying. But I suppose that when you’re homeless, you’re on the streets, on your last quid, on your arse, then there’s a lot more time for thinking and saying; more so than in normal life, anyway. I can call life off the streets ‘normal’, by the way. I’m on the streets now, and I’ve lived on the other side too. That gives me objective enough to call life what I bloody well like. I think it’s rough now, but it’s nothing compared to when I was back home.
I come in from working all day making parts for radiators in some shitty factory for minimum wage, and come home to my mum and dad getting on my back about my girlfriend. My mum in the nicest way possible, of course. Well, as nice as you can be when your only son’s girlfriend has spent the last hour shooting smack in the spare room of your nice cosy semi-detached slice of suburban utopia. Dad’s another story. My bags are packed, thrown onto the driveway. My girl stands there, screaming abuse at my mum, and my dad, and even at me; and I just stand there dumbfounded. Rendered mute by the whole horrible scene. I knew she was off the rails a bit, but she promised to calm down when I offered to let her come and live with me and my parents after her mum kicked her out for about the fiftieth time this week. She’s still throwing a tantrum, and now the neighbours are starting to twitch their curtains, take out their pets, clean their cars, anything to exercise that disgusting voyeuristic pleasure that is intrinsic to human nature – anything to ogle the Morrisons at number twenty five, and their delinquent son and his junkie girlfriend. I’m still dumbfounded as my dad finalises my ousting by throwing the front door into it’s frame, cutting me off and muffling my mum’s sobs only a little. The world keeps turning, but I feel myself buck against it’s movement for a second, and everything is shifted just a fraction out of rhythm. My girlfriend grabs a couple of the bags off the drive and stalks off, her parchment-covered skeleton bending under the weight of a decrepit Reebok rucksack and a bulging Tesco carrier bag that helpfully suggests we recycle it when it’s done with. Autopilot on, I collect the rest of my belongings and follow her down the street. Somewhere between suburbia and the ghetto, I manage to ask her,
“What are we going to do?”
She doesn’t answer, just sucks heavily on a cigarette that she’s liberated from the side pocket of the rucksack and keeps walking.
Half an hour later, we’re surrounded by everything that’s wrong with twenty first century Britain. Burnt out cars, stray dogs, kids running around in broken glass with no shoes and dirty faces; not knowing what school is. Teenagers cradling bottles of white cider, caring less than I ever thought possible about the fact that their lives are going nowhere. Concrete giants penetrate the sky, blocks of flats looming out of the wasteland like modern day sphinxes, people of the estate flocking to them for answers. Then it dawns on me. I know where we’re going. She’s going to the Sphinx to get her prophecy. To know that everything’s going to be alright. She’s going to her dealer, to get whatever amount of heroin she can for whatever lurid act the dealer is going to demand. And I have an Epiphany. I’m moving away. I’m not going to follow her down this road.
“I’m not coming,” I shout to her retreating back. “I’m moving away, you’ve fucked me over for the last time. That’s it,”
Her step falters for a second, and for that moment I fantasise that she’s still the girl I loved, who wanted to be a teacher, who worked hard and played harder, and didn’t have a class A narcotics dependency. Then I realise she just has the heel of her boot caught in a crack in the pavement, and I drop my bags and turn around.
I have no idea what I’m going to do or where I’m going to go as I walk out of the estate. My mind is sort of clear, as if it’s been wiped clean. I don’t feel empty, I just feel as if my head was an etch-a-sketch that had got all messy with squiggles and lines and blots, and it had just been shaken free of all that, ready to start again. That said, I do sort of start to cry. Not out of sadness, but more out of relief that I’ve realised where I was going wrong. Clarity turned on the tap, that’s all.
I walk right up to the street where my mum and dad live, and I really do think that everything’s going to be okay. They’ll take me back. I stop to give them time to calm down, and wait to go back and say sorry. After about three hours and nineteen cigarettes, I leave the thicket at the end of the road where I’ve been sitting, and make my way up the road to twenty-five, Player Close. It’s an optimistic journey. I’ve made up my mind that I’m through with the drugs, the trouble, the problem girlfriend. I know my mum will hug me when I walk through the door, call me ‘love’ and make me a cup of tea. I know my dad will be mad for a bit, but soon enough we’ll make up and go to the footy together, or something, like when I was a kid.
What I don’t know is that my house is surrounded by three police cars, darkness crashing down on my mum; a forty year old little girl, stood lost and shivering on the steps that lead up to the house. My dad being carted into the back of an ambulance on a stretcher, his face painted like the sky on bonfire night, an explosion of red and purple. In the police car, my girlfriend sits handcuffed, her lips constricting any words she might have had for me, her eyes denying that she has anything to say at all. I want to stop and ask questions, I want to be in three places at the same time, finding out what happened and what I can do to make this right. But I don’t need to. I already know the answer. I can hear the sirens of police cars giving chase into the estate. Daring to raise my eyes to meet my mum’s, I know that I can never come back. It’s never going to be okay. Her voice is deep with grief and laced with hatred as she fixes me with a look I hadn’t thought she was capable of.
“Get away. Stay away. I never want to see you again,”
Her voice wavers in pitch on the last word, hysterical high notes escaping from under the controlled rage that she regulates and focuses on me. I feel my shiny clean etch-a-sketch mind get scribbled over with black lines, tangling together to preserve this royal mess for posterity. Some divine power is turning the knobs and really fucking up the clarity of it all. I don’t know what to do. I really don’t. I turn around and kind of run, crying for real this time, and out of sadness, not realisation. Crying is funny like that. It can happen for all kinds of reasons, but the etch-a-sketch mess up kind of crying is the worst of all.

CHAPTER 2 – OLD KENT ROAD

Watching your family and pretty much your whole life take a leap off the high dive into a big pool of shit doesn’t make for the best viewing. It’s no fun to see that everything you ever knew has now been shaken up until it disappeared; etch-a-sketch style, leaving just a few faint lines that can’t be erased, the rest of your past just rattling around, empty and in pieces. I walk around small-town Essex, carrying my etch-a-sketch head and my cigarettes, and I realise, I need to get away. I need to leave this place and start from scratch again, get myself a new etch-a-sketch. I’ve never been the kind of bloke who sits and moans when I’ve got a problem. I like to think I’m quite good at being my own counsellor. When I was in school, I think I was about 13, they sent me to see a real counsellor. One that gets paid loads for nodding his head and looking like Julian Clary in tweed. He said I had a problem with authority, and that I basically needed to get my head down and start working hard or I’d end up on my arse. Hey ho, he was right. I never did get my head down, really. When your head’s an etch-a-sketch, you don’t really need to put it down. You can write all you want to just by thinking. So my head stayed high. But I must admit, as things stand at the moment, that shrink was right; I’m quite close to being on my arse.
I walk down to the shopping precinct and find a payphone. Someone’s in it already, a women whose face is so covered in make up that it’s stiff. I lean against the glass and she turns her back on me. Breathing smoke rings into the air, I fish out a couple of twenty pence pieces from my pocket and wait for the lady to finish. She finally gets off the phone after about twenty million years and I pull open the door and go inside; Eau de Phone Box hits me in the back of the throat as soon as I’m in there. Stale piss and old kebabs, with a hint of tramp. I add to the aroma by blowing out my final drag of cigarette and stubbing the tab into the advert panel. It melts the plastic a little bit, so it now reads ‘Sofa, So God’ instead of ‘Sofa, So Good’. Deep. Working one of my twenty P’s into the coin slot, I pick up the receiver. It takes me a while before I can think of anyone to call, to be honest. After a few minutes, I punch in my mate Pete’s number. He went to uni in London, to study Fine Art. I thought London might be a good place to start over – it’s not quite the big apple or the land of opportunity, but it definitely beats sitting in the cold in Essex. No one knows me there; I can sort myself out and try making a go of things. As the phone rings, I fantasise that I’ll get there and be snapped up by some sort of fat cat business man who wants to pay me for my thoughts, who’d want to put me in newspapers, and not The Sun or The Star either, but the big ones that people read on trains, like The Guardian or something.
The phone had been ringing for about fifteen hours, and some little kid is letting his dog take a dump against the window of the phone box; I’m just about to hang up when I hear a voice crackle down the line.
“Hello?”
“Pete? ‘S Joe,”
“Oh…Hi. What’s up?”
“Well mate, you’ll never guess what’s happened,” And so I go on for twelve pence worth of credit telling Pete about my girl, and my mum and dad, and about me being on my arse.
“So, the thing is, Pete, I kinda need to get away for a bit. Sort myself out. Wondered if you could put me up? Only for a bit, like. I’ll pay you rent and everything,”
My voice is cool and a bit nonchalant, but it feels like there’s a tiny soldier in my chest, firing an Uzi into my ribcage; any second the bullets are going to burst out and maim the ‘Sofa So God’ sign. There’s a pause for a few seconds.
“Ah, Joe. So sorry mate, I’m off travelling for a bit. I’ve rented my place out. But there’s loads of flats and stuff in my block that haven’t been let out yet. It’s not too pricey either. Bet if you came down, you could get one straight away,”
The soldier stops firing. He dissolves into egg yolk and dribbles down into my belly.
“Right, ok. Cheers anyway, Pete. See ya,”
I hang up the phone and bite down on my sleeve, a bit of a habit from being a kid, I suppose. It’s dark outside by now. I’m not far from the train station, and I’ve got my wallet. Should be enough to get me to London. Blowing out my breath in a long stream of smoke, I make my way to the 21.43 train to London Kings Cross and try to not concentrate on how bleak things are.
I end up getting of the train at Petticoat Market. Miles from the centre, in the south east end of the city. I didn’t want to, but some old perv started trying to touch me up. So I lashed out at him, and the guard threw me off, when it was the perv who was causing the trouble. No justice in the world. None whatsoever.
I get off the train and I have no idea what I’m going to do. I decide I might find an all night café or something and buy a paper, see if I can find a flat and a job. After a trip to GT news, and an hour’s worth of aimless wandering down Old Kent Road, I come across Donna’s Caff; if failure was a room, this’d be it. The nicotine stained wallpaper, the sticky hum of grease in the air, the flickering neon sign that read ‘Open 2 hours’. It was trying to say ‘Open 24 Hours’, but the flicker meant it didn’t quite manage it.
The woman behind the counter is Donna, I asked her. I can get a bit nosy like that. My mum’s sister said I’m obnoxious, but I’m not, I’m just curious - I like to know where I am with people, because you can’t always trust everyone. Donna looks like you could trust her. She looks a bit tired and a lot older than what she should. She has the kind of hair that you only get from working in an east end greasy spoon Caff, blonde and straggly, half heartedly shoved back into a scrunchie. Her face has lines from laughing, and her eyes have bags under them from lack of sleep. There’s an ironing board next to a pile of baby clothes that suggest she lives, eats, sleeps and breaths greasy spoon, twenty four seven. But you can tell she’s nice.
Donna puts the coffee machine on to brew and chats to me a bit. She’s got a baby called Chloe, but the dad ran off a long time ago, so Donna works in the caff so she can look after Chloe and get a bit of money at the same time, without having to pay for a childminder or anything. I suppose that’s when Donna’s etch-a-sketch got shaken up. I think everyone must have their own etch-a-sketch that gets shaken up sometime or another. The grainy bits in mine are still rattling around, not quite settling. I don’t tell her what happened to me, I just tell her I’m in London visiting friends, and I’m waiting for them to arrive. It’s not that I want to lie to the lady; it’s just that I can’t really be bothered to tell the story again. After a bit, Donna goes to check on Chloe and I sit drinking my coffee and looking at the small ads section of the East Free Press, looking for somewhere to stay that doesn’t cost four million quid a week. I can’t find anything. I shout thanks to Donna through the beaded curtain that leads into the back of the caff – her home, I suppose – and step out into London.
I don’t reckon much to our capital city, to be honest. It’s cold and dirty, but not in the sense that the temperature is that low, or that the streets are full of litter; more that the actual atmosphere is unclean; the faces on the streets are hard and condemning. I walk around a bit more – I’m getting quite knackered, to tell you the truth, but I keep on walking, probably because I’ve got nothing to stop walking for. It’s starting to get light now, so I meander down to a sort of market place, and think I might sit on one of the stalls and maybe rest my eyes for a bit. I find a stall that’s sort of hidden from the view of the dirty and cold population of London and sit on it, resting against a metal post. It’s the worst bed I ever had. I close my eyes, but I can’t sleep. I open my eyes and try my hardest not to think about what happened before. I know I’m in the shit. You know that feeling you get? It’s kind of a feeling that you know you’ve done something really wrong and you haven’t quite paid your dues for whatever it is you did; but you know that sooner or later, fate or destiny or whatever is going to creep up on you and fuck you over, big time. That’s how I feel this morning. The sky is getting lighter and lighter, but instead of making me feel better, I can’t help but feel like the game is just starting, like I rolled a one and someone else rolled a six, then I got shafted by every unlucky square on the board. I’m not pessimistic or anything, but I suppose that post-etch-a-sketch, you become a bit more wary. Biting down on my sleeve again, I look around the square.
There’s a dog with his arse in the air and his head in a bin. I’m not too up on dog knowledge, but I think it was some kind of bull terrier or something. I watch it for a bit, wondering if it’s in the same predicament as me. I can see it doesn’t have a collar. The dog is searching through the pile of rubbish that he’s dislodged from the bin with the efficiency of an office filing clerk. It knows what it’s doing. After a while, it comes and kind of sniffs around my feet, then cocks it’s leg up and pisses on my trainers. It’s a he. I’m more dejected than angry when this happens, but the anger’s in there somewhere, I kind of half-shout, half-hiss at him for what he just did. He looks at me, unfazed. I sit for a bit longer, watching the day get more and more grey as the sun lends a reluctant glow to the market place, hoisting itself into the pallor of the London sky; and the dog sits with me. I’m quite starving by the time the first market trader arrives to set up his fruit and veg stall, and I feel like I need to pretend that I haven’t spent the night sleeping rough and crying and getting covered in dog piss. So I decide to go and find something to eat. The dog comes too.
I won’t bore you with what happens next. It’s basically the same for the next few weeks. I tried to get a job, really, I did; but you can’t get a job if you don’t have an address, you don’t have an address if you don’t have a flat, you can’t get a flat if you don’t have a job, not just a vicious circle, but a veritable rabid, slobbering, biting vicious circle. A couple of homeless guys tried to talk to me about going on the rob or something, but I wasn’t up for it. Stealing stuff just isn’t me, I suppose. The dog stayed with me. I call him Bud. I know it sounds strange, calling a dog your mate, but to tell you the truth, he’s the best friend I’ve got right now.
I tried calling my mum a couple of times, but the first time my dad answered and basically just told me to fuck off, and the second time, they’d changed their number. So now I’ve given up trying to get in touch and have sort of resigned myself to being, well, homeless, I suppose. Jesus, that sounds bad. It’s not forever though. So yeah, it’s been about a month. I’ve been scraping by. Begging, if you must know. It was fucking horrible at first. But most people in London are complete bastards, so after a while you don’t mind asking them for their spare change; I consider it arsehole tax.
Me and the dog have been keeping each other company for a while now. We sleep in the market place. It kind of reminds me of when I was little, sleeping rough; like when my mum dropped me off at school, I used to get that feeling in my belly. You know the one, like dread was pitching a tent in there, hammering things into my insides to make me feel bad, like I was being left all alone. That’s what it’s like when you wake up and actually realise you’re homeless. But yeah. That’s how I dealt with it, by hanging out with Bud.
Okay, so I manage to scrape about £1.40 this one day in February. It’s really been pissing it down with rain all day, the streets all slick like the surface of a record, a really bad record, like an old Iron Maiden one or something, a rubbish one that never gets played and so is still really smooth. I’m freezing my arse off, and all the Shelters are full for the night, so looks like I had ought to get some food in my belly at least. I know can get a burger or two from McDonalds for the cash I’ve got, and I can see those bloody golden arcs reflecting in the Iron Maiden record pavement from across the road. The road is absolutely chocka. It’s dark by now and the traffic is snaking it’s way out of the city in the slow motion dance of rush hour. The traffic lights keep on changing, so I reckon I can make it across the two bus lanes and the traffic lanes if I just keep my eyes open. I pull my coat around me and stand in the rain, waiting for the traffic lights to do their thing and give me and Bud chance to get across.
Red Light.
The cars squelch to a reluctant halt in the rain, me and Bud trek across the bus lane and the first lane of cars.
Green Light.
Bud dithering next to me, it’s our turn to skid and stop as handbrakes are lifted and cars groan into action, a thousand bad backs squirm in the seats of their Vauxhalls and their Rovers and their Volkswagens, fingers fumble to find Chris Moyles on radio one. Rubber farts against tarmac and the cars roll on home to their families.
Red Light.
The change in traffic lights is as inconvenient as a power cut in the middle of Eastenders for the drivers, as Bud and me run for the safety of the pavement and the warmth of McDonalds, through the estate cars and across the other bus lane. I reach the other side just in time to see some huge silver wide-boy-mobile come hurtling down the bus lane; driver on his teeny-tiny Nokia picture video phone, the best banging Ibiza club anthem choonz ever volume 59 blaring out of some jumped up top-of-the-range stereo, personalised number plate reading CH4Z. I pity blokes like that, really, I do. I know I’m on my arse and everything, but I doubt I’d ever want to be a wide boy, even if you paid me. It’s just offensive. I just turn to kind of tell Bud that I’m going into Maccy’s and I’ll be out in a sec, when the wide-boy-mobile skids halfway onto the pavement.
A there’s the inevitable soundtrack to rush hour disaster: the tires uniformly screech against the wetness of the Iron Maiden floor, making a bored hiss rather than banshee’s wail; there’s the metallic thus of a car hitting something, the almost-audible cracking of elbows as the hands stop tuning in radio one and move to thrash their car horns in unison. A veritable check-list of a traffic accident. I want to yelp or cry out, but I can’t. I just stand there, as Bud lies in a still heap on the Iron Maiden asphalt, his slick black fur blending with the shining surface of it.
I’m blindsided.
People say that when a tragic event happens, things seem to play themselves out in slow motion. For me, there is no motion. I close my eyes and I can feel the tiny bit of etch-a-sketch that I have left is being fucked up into a million pieces. I must have really done something to piss God off, I swear. I can hear abuse, I can hear sympathy, I can hear the dropouts in McDonalds asking if someone would like fries with that. No thanks, I’d like the last five minutes of my life re-winded, if you don’t mind please.
“Jesus Christ, mate, y’alright?” Public schoolboy raked over with mockney. Jamie Oliver in an Eton uniform. Of course I’m not fucking alright. But I think I just kind of nod, and watch someone wrap Bud in one of those picnic blankets that you take when you go for a daytrip with your parents. It looks like a kilt that my uncle wore for a wedding once, and I can’t help but think how itchy it looks. Bud is kind of moaning softly through his teeth, not quite growling, but if he hadn’t been mangled by the wide-boy-mobile and some stranger had tried to wrap him up like a St Andrew’s Day mascot, he’d do more than growl, I’m sure. As things stand now, he just sort of closes his eyes and breathes heavy, like a sleeping football hooligan after ten pints and a post-match fight. I’m still just standing there, getting more and more wet, when Lord Jamie Oliver gives me a bit of a gentle shove into the back of his wide-boy-mobile and someone puts Bud on my lap.
Bud smells like the inside of a rabbit hutch in the magic-tree atmosphere of the car. The air freshener suddenly makes me very aware that I haven’t washed in days. I’m too proud to be ashamed, but I know my mum would be mortified if she could see me now. It’s bad, but Lord J doesn’t seem to mind, he keeps on prattling about how accidents will happen and how he’s ‘Most dreadfully sorry”. At least he’s had the decency to turn off his bloody music. I put one of my hands on Bud’s head to try to make him feel better, not sure if it will or not, but he seems to not mind when I do it, so I leave it there. I look out of the window as we turn down a side street and into a car park and I sort of have a little bit of a cry and think to myself that surely one of the knobs must have fallen off my etch-a-sketch by now.