Time was spent swerving between the dole and crap jobs; selling shoe cleaning sponges in Woolworths on Oxford Street and working as a nightclub hostess off Piccadilly, where I would drink watered down wine, dance with fat businessmen and light their fags while their eyes rolled from the whiskey and their thighs sweated at the promise of young female flesh. I lived in a succession of terrible rooms, where beetles crept up between the bare floorboards; small creatures in April that grew fat and crunchy underfoot by August, and where you had to side-step pools of piss to get into the bath. One stretch of homelessness I had a key to a student hall of residence and sneaked into the television room some time after midnight when the programmes had finished, putting chairs together to sleep on, and sneaking out before the cleaner came around at six the next morning. I dreamed of railways and owning a car - towards, towards, towards something better. French scent, silk underwear, hairdos like Dietrich, electric guitars. A kitchen, a bathroom, a sofa to sit on.
do NOT be a cute girl working as a tour guide at a military history museum on the one week when Ghost is forced to take leave and has nothing better to do than stalk around the building and interrogate you about the missile collection while you cheerfully answer all of his questions (because it's your job)
It was as if we were swimming against a tide that changed direction whenever we tried to swim for another shore. There was no way through, no matter how true our compass points were. Buffeted by impossible waves, we began to tire. The walls inverted and suddenly I was on the outside again, a refugee from the Tower of Babel as the people who shared our language faded away like ghosts.
What an irritating paradox. A real outsider will always remain outside, doomed by their very nature. After all, once they're on the inside, how can you ever be sure that they meant it, that they were what they appeared to be from the other side of the wall?
But there's no time to ponder this now. It's getting late, and I must go out, for there are still three hundred and twenty six fire escapes left to be accounted for in the London dusk.