Last Night A Cheese String Saved My Life
By
Ged Backland



As I lay here on my back looking at the ceiling, I might as well tell you a bit about myself. Firstly you’ll hate me, for it is me who breaks into your house when you are out doing the decent thing, working for a living, only to come home and find all your house trashed, your knickers rummaged through by my grubby fingers, and wait for it depending on the time of day a shit on your floor. I’ll shit on your floor where I’m standing, just drop my baggy jeans and dump and then wipe my arse on the nearest material, don’t give a fuck if it’s your Laura Ashley curtains or your IKEA rug. It’s the adrenalin you see, the rush, the excitement gets a bit too much. When you’ve stopped crying you’ll find your jewellery gone, the ring your mother left you, the watch from your dead dad, all the little things that money can’t replace, I sell them for a fiver to Bernie for a bag of Smak.
Well done Sherlock, that’s right I’m that thieving little scum bag smak rat that they should bring back hanging for. Go on lets hear it, ‘decent folk should be protected from the likes of me blah fucking blah, heard it all before. So what, when the vicious apetite comes I don’t care, I want to devour, so fuck you and your wooden floors and two hundred CD’s, fuck your stuff and give it to me, I’ll have it all, strip the duvet cover off and It’s my magic sack filled to the brim with all the moments of your posh little life. Your insured aren’t you? Stop pulling the winging little face then, claim for the Rolex when it was an accurist don’t ye, say your system was a new Bang and Olufsen when it was ten years old, your just like me, just the fucking same. I’ve pissed myself, I think it’s piss can’t tell could be blood, Can’t move my head up to see, think it’s my back broken I presume,I’ve lost five days with the withdrawal and turkeyin’ that was a head fuck, pains in legs I can’t feel, pissing sweat, I’ve been pissing it, it’s only now I can think straight, only now I remember where I am, on my back motionless, unable to move anything below the neck, flat out in the cloakroom of Bunty Bear nursery school. Bad karma returned with interest you’d say, timely, you’d say to tumble through Christmas Eve, no fucker back in here for at least another week.
Nobody will miss me, my mum, bless he tired face, will have done me a dinner, she has done for the last eight years, I’ve only ever showed up once, and that was so I could excuse myself at the table and go and nick her charm bracelet whilst she dished out the sprouts in her tissue-paper crown. Still she lives in hope that the little boy with the fishing rod in the gold frame, who beams holiday delight from above the fire will come back. The one who made her those lovely hand made mother’s day cards with the lovely words. The little boy who crept into her bed every night until he was ten, the little boy who she could never cuddle too much. She thinks it’s her fault, the way I am, if anyone’s to blame it’s those middle class rich kids who came up to Liverpool to go to Uni. I was well on course for an honours degree before Sash and Tarek took me to Bavna’s flat for that first hit. It was O.K. for them they’d ring daddy and get him to bail them out of their debts, get swished away to posh clinics and rehab centers. Whereas I was left on me arse with a big habit. That’s surprised you hasn’t it, the university bit, you presumed that I’m some thick fucker from a household that lived on a diet of Jerry Springer and U.K. Living or from a home or just from somewhere that criminals came from some crim town where they give lessons in stealing and thieving in between tattooing your neck.

Fucking sky lights, cheap shite sky lights. Being a thief you get to know a lot about the quality of window fittings. Victorians had it right solid stuff, but now you’ve only got to tread on a glass panel and you’re through, and down like I am soaked with piss and sweat with a broken back.

I’m fucking hungry as well, I’d forgotten what it was like to be hungry, on the way through the skylight and to the floor I splattered a luchbox that was left under one of the kiddies little designer coats that had been left on a peg marked Lucy. Couldn’t get to the little butty or the breakaway but last night a cheesestring saved my life. There’s a song in there somewhere. See us Scousers always laughing always cracking jokes.
“No Jobs, shit houses and no future but what a great sense of humour you Scousers have got,” Sash used to say. Fucking Cow she used to pretend to be from Liverpool when she got drunk it was nauseating.

I’m rambling now because I can feel it all closing down.


“Look Mummy Santa’s hurt himself coming through the roof1”

“Oh my God here Lucy Darling, come away.”

The End