Nashville Street part 1

Nashville Street. 1994. 

I looked around a handful of houses within the bracket that my mortgage would allow. None of them are what you would in any way call my dream home. They were all terrace houses squished in some out of the way dark side of town. Out of all the ones I viewed, the best was a recently repossessed one which had been in no way looked after. My efforts were in vain as this slipped through my fingers. A few streets away was a house described as a gable end terrace. It was on the corner of a terrace row and had one neighbour running at 90 degrees to that row which put this house on the corner of an 'L' shape. The roof was slanted down where the bathroom was and so to my eyes it looked either partially collapsed from the outside or just simply shoved in where it was never meant to be. But my grandma half knew the old lady selling. There was a chance that my gran could ask how little the owner would take since she had moved into a home for the elderly. 

Even from the outside, I didn't like it. But it was all about the price at the end of the day. 

The decor inside was 'old lady' throughout and the mishmash of kitchen cabinets looked like a showroom for the scrap man. Nothing matched unless the theme was 'awful'. The fireplace was surrounded by grey tiles and the slanted roof prohibited the installation of a shower over the bath. I was told it was a fixer-upper. To my mind it was a knock-a-downer. 

Yes...I bought it. £7000 cheaper than asking price. 

My life lay ahead of me. The possibilities were open to destiny and I sat alone in not just one room anymore, but several. The front room and kitchen led one way to a cellar which split in to a main room and a coal cellar. Up from the front room was a thin dark staircase to a misshapen bathroom and a large bedroom. More stairs took you up to an attic bedroom which had a crawl space door into the other third of the roof space which was just storage at best. 

I was still eager to leave my family nest and spread my wings alone. I slept on a single mattress for a week before a bed was sorted properly. I could hear the neighbouring family bidding each other goodnight as I lay my head on my pillow and heard the daughter climbing the stairs up to her attic room clearly. 

It was maybe the third night that as I struggled to drop off in my new surroundings, I heard footsteps coming down my attic stairs. I sat up and stared at the door waiting for it to open. Nothing. 

Of course not, I thought, this was just me not knowing the normal acoustics properly. After all, I had been used to living in a detached house. This would pass I decided. 

I was always a deep thinker and had a cloud above me like a weight around my neck that I had no reason to carry. But living in this house, the feeling grew. As an easy touchstone I could liken it to how the father is affected in The Amityville Horror.  This is with hindsight of course. At the time I just wanted to live my life. But I had to watch my money. This meant I would write and draw and watch films constantly. I had a relationship quickly begin with a girl a few streets away and that certainly made for a happy two and a half years. Then I ambled for a while with other partial successes relationship wise. As I said in my other posts, I was studying religion in some form for years and even trying praying. I felt like I was being punished for something I had no memory of committing.

I started to draw more and more pictures of me at my writing desk surrounded by floating spirits which I couldn't see. 

But hey, I was into this sort of thing. Kinda not really that surprising. I started to buy less food and more alcohol and that led to debt. I was surrounded by demons of my own making. I started to feel something I'd never witnessed before- despair.