The science of sleeplessness
For a while I lived in a bit of the city where the rent was low, ceilings high and the flat seemed to have most of its original features, though some of them didn’t work. At the epicentre of bad rock clubs, sweet shops that looked like pharmacies and twisted tram drivers, and the mercy of an unstable flatmate who stole tea bags and waged frequent passive agressive note campaigns.
The hate mail didn’t really bother me – I couldn’t read the handwriting. But having the melatonin tapped out of you with a wooden table leg on a tiled floor on a nightly basis does strange things to people.
Every night. Half twelve.
I’d start drifting off. Then, the low buzzing of music made by snare, speaker and trapped flies accompanied by moving every fucking item he owned being systematically moved around, about, up, through the floor between my head and his clumsy, brick-covered feet as he went about his misanthropic business.
Every night. Half twelve.
And after each pointless feng shui session I would be rendered sleepless and more resentful, somehow more suprised than the time before and maintaining moral superiority by refusing to acknowledge his infantile territory marking.
Until one night. Half twelve.
The minute I hear the sound of resonant mice being ground under a hefty ladies’ tea party, scuffing across the tiles and thumping around the room, I am up the stairs. Pounding on the door, barging past the bemused excuse for an ASBO and in the living room, where I move every bit of furniture in the middle and stack it until its a precarious abstract homage to screwdrivers and a flatpack.
After that, I slept easier. Not because he stopped – he didn’t. I had this feeling that we’d reached some sort of higher understanding but he moved out the next month and was replaced by a guy who spent his time listening to Goa trance with bongo-loving associates who were equally averse to light and holding down jobs.
