asbestosis.

In Sarajevo the snipers shoot the water barrel instead of the man carrying it back to the hideout, and in this way they condemn the people whose thirst he is trying to slake to a slow and tortuous death rather than a bullet-quick, merciful, out-of-this-siege-life one.

We still have no water in the squat. I carry 20 litres up from Limehouse once a day, two 5l bottles in each hand, on the lookout for snipers. What we do have is asbestos. A film of fibrous, dirty white dust everywhere and the knowledge that we ve already gotten a dose of the sheeet from our clean-up operation. Whats left and hasn’t been broken up into a million little pieces is still secreted away in the skirting boards. So neither D nor S want to sleep here at night. They ve been out looking at new places. C seems to have decided she would prefer to be my enemy than my friend, all over a mirror, backwards, reverse psychology, and I m not even sure how she came to be living with us.

I have put on my boxing gloves, Haymaker, and am prepared to fight my blue corner.

Trombone goes off to Turkey for 2 weeks on a fishing trip and because I m squatsitting I don’t get to see him before he leaves. He sends me a message the day he is leaving, looking for weed, and I go down to Limehouse to ask around for him, but no luck. And that’s it. No goodbye, no ‘thanks anyway’, just gone. Poor form if you ask me. Bored with that now. I begin to wonder what it would be like to kiss S, but he s just in the middle of a tricky breakup with his girlfriend, and I am not rebound material.

There are things that drift away, and even if I am sealion-head bobbing in the water watching the ospreys and dreaming of wingtips, I cant catch the current of this one. The one-wheel revolution ratchets past, chugalug electric boogaloo, my earlobes are stretched out into space and beyond by the spanner I have placed there, but I still cant hear the Chinese whispers around the corner. Tight-hipped artists models sing jerksome murdersongs and press keys. The man on the boat offers me sketching classes in return for massage lessons. Yes.

My asbestos research makes me angry, they have known it is dangerous to health since the 1930s, but they doctored the reports, took out all mentions of cancer, and in the UK it was not banned until many more people died – 1999. Any building constructed before the year 2000 is likely to contain white death. The US remains the only country not to have banned it. People continue to die from asbestosis, mesotheliomas, lung cancer.

Slow and silent killers. Like the titanium in my chest (where a heart should be), like the pigeon shit in the kitchen, the tightness around my knees, puckerfish sushi, electric cars cruising on a fast road, carbon monoxide, cervical cancer, boredom, love……….

Maybe I should give it all up and head to Brazil, after all.
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Days later, when I ve been trying to remember those first nights in the squat, with the three of us in the room and tight as all hell and just happy and excited and nervous about every sound that we hear, I find myself scrubbing the kitchen floor clean of the pigeon shit with a washing-up sponge. Because no-one else wants to do it. And the mop broke early on in the proceedings. When its done I need to rinse the bleachy shitty water away – but cant do it without a mop – and my back hurts like a bitch. I try to stretch out on the floor and end up rolling into a ball instead, eyes open, left there, dust bunny.