welcome home, stranger.

The house on Maury Road had red paint on the bathroom door. A space invader had been painted on the tiles over the bathtub.
There was a fig tree outside in the garden and when we first moved in and all we had for furniture was a mattress, i used to bring in the leaves and put them on the carpet as decoration.
The cockroaches loved it, from their HQ in the clapped-out fridge. Moli and I painted the kitchen in tiger stripes – orange, black, white. We kept a metal box outside the back door to keep the milk cold and sometimes D grew wheatgrass there.
The house had been repeatedly squatted and left empty over the years so there was already artwork on some of the walls by the time we moved in, just before Halloween. We didnt break in- someone had already kicked a hole in the door by the time we arrived. Whoever it was drank two beers inside and left a shit in the wardrobe of one of the bedrooms before heading off.
There was 5 of us this time – and the cockroaches. There were no bats in the attic, despite what the neighbour told us.

I painted my room forest green. I papered the floor with the Financial Times. For the first time in years I had my own room again, something that hadnt happened since Leeson street, a tent a tarpaulin and a few dodgy hostels later. No large Brazilian snored on the bunk bed below me anymore. It was my room.

I didnt resent Red moving in  – hah, but now I ve typed that its made me wonder. I resent him moving in for the wrong reasons.

Still, even that was utopia for a while, too.

For Christmas at Maury Road we had a full house – there were 4 Spanish people staying in the basement room and a lot of Italian visitors – our cupboards were full of food we had pulled out of the bins of the Iceland up the road – and a man in a van saw us nosing through the rubbish and gave us a bucket of hummus and some cheese – I worked through the ice and the snow, pedalling my bicycle, making deliveries, coming home to no hot water but rather whatever heat we could get off the electric heater and the prospect of a wash in a bathtub filled from a builders tea urn – one night we decided to go to a party nearby but it took us 4 hours to leave the house and get to the end of the road – halfway down Alex thought he was a God – it was hard to concentrate –

The first time the housing association tried to evict us, they forgot to go to their own court case. It was 3 months before they managed to try again. We left peacefully rather than resisting.

Maury Road was renovated. All the amazing artwork on the walls was painted out, painted white, the whole thing was white washed. The space invader over the bathtub is gone. Tim Burtons Melancholy Oysterboy painted on the stairwell – gone. The intercom phones we made direct lines to Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix with – gone. The safari kitchen with tiger stripe and jungle bunting – gone.

Maury Road is currently empty.