I'm short and skinny, my hair's long and limp, and my face should not be described further here. I'm not a skeleton, but in some places I come close to having skeletal features, particularly if you're talking about my teeth, for my teeth are skeletal and constitute my very own partial exoskeleton. Then again, many people have teeth. When I go out I usually wear a mask. I have a number of masks, but none of them are really masks. They're more like extended hats.

We three live in this big and rambling old house, which is seated on a cul-de-sac, backed onto a railway line, tucked into the edge of London. Electricity pylons march along my horizon, and sing to me in the night, la-la-la.

There's myself, there's poor old Nana, who's blind, and there's my sister, Thompson, who's a right cow. You could say that it's Thompson's house because she has the ground floor. But then it's not her house. Not really it isn't. Then you could say that Nana haunts the first floor. And you could say that I live on the third floor. The odd floor out is the second floor, which is bright and airy. It's the nicest floor by far, but nobody lives there, and nobody knows why.

People get to call me BC. I have few close friends. Bridges are useful structures, but it's fair to say they're more useful to some than to others. You either live too close or too far away. It's like that with people too.

I fear times of no thoughts. If I'm not thinking, I'm worrying, or panicking. And I cannot think unless I'm doing something.

Today was the last day of August, meaning that tomorrow is the first day of September, meaning that Summer may as well be over and it'll be Christmas soon. Together, this means one big thing: darkness. So, I've decided to start writing things down. This will give me something to do in the darkness.

It's quite hard to formulate an insightful view into the real world when you're not sure how often you live in it, or if you live in it at all. So please, just bear with me.

I think 31 August is a nice, whole sort of date. But I'll stop now because midnight is about to spoil all that.

I'm going to write this in the present tense, if you know what I mean. But today I'm tired and I can't be arsed to write anything.

I'm off to bed with a mug of hot chocolate, two slices of peanut-butter-on-toast and a couple of pills. One pill stops the imaginary itching and helps me slumber, while the other is for the indigestion caused mostly by the peanuts.

If I take the pills in the wrong order, the door slams shut and I miss a day.

Slowly now, slowly.

This is the room I've lived in ever since I was thirteen. Things change for everyone when they're thirteen, but I know I'm safe in saying that when I was thirteen they changed for me more. It's not just this room I gained, but it'll do for now.

The room's dark, and it's at the top of the house. It's the only room at this height. It's not quite in the loft, as there's actually a loft above me, through the tiny square hole that has no eyelid and lets in a draught. We do have a handyman who comes round every so often, but he's really old, and I'm not even certain that he didn't die recently.

Never mind him or the loft. My room's dark. It's shaped like a shoe box, but its lid slopes up towards the loft like the inside of a steeple. At either end of my room are rectangular windows crossed with smelly wood, with big glass flaps that you can slide up and down if you don't mind the grim screech.

On many mornings, but not every morning, I find a Christmas card pushed under my bedroom door. And often during the night I find a mince pie and a glass of brandy on the closed lid of the toilet - but then I'm not going to complain about this, am I? I know this is all down to Nana, who thinks it's forever Christmas.

I'm on a bus and the weather's nice and sweaty, which isn't a good thing, though in a few weeks' time it'll seem as if it was. I hear a conversation from behind me. It isn't hard to tell this is an elderly couple, although I must confess it would be refreshing to find out those creaky old voices belong to a couple of teenagers. But in all likelihood they don't. Anyway, this is it. Don't get excited. It's the woman's turn first.

'We could get off here, couldn't we? Ferry Lane, it's called.'

'Fairy Lane - that sounds quite nice. Let's get off here then.'

'No, I said Ferry. Boat ferry.'

'Oh. Still, I don't mind. Let's get off here then, if you want to.'

'Yes, let's get off here. It's only a small walk. Oh - it's gone now. Such a shame.'

'Shame, yes.'

I wonder what they've spent their lives doing, and on my short walk home I cry a little bit.

Tonight's darkness convinces me I've got an extra tube. It links my kidneys to my soul. I might go and see if I can have it taken out.

Sunday, Sunday, a grey and rainy day. As the afternoon wears on the fetid smells and sensations of radiator-drying clothes rise up through the house and spread like a disease about my room until I'm left cowering in one tiny corner.

I decide to make a tiger from a cereal box. I put in a crank and cam mechanism that winds its tongue in and out. I admire the beast for a while then wonder what I'm going to do with it. I take it down to Nana's landing, place it on the carpet, then waft her living-room door, once, and retire to the top step of the stairs.

Eventually, out she comes, like a big old pudding of a spider checking her web.

She pauses at her threshold and then, uncannily as ever for a blind person, she stares straight down at the tiger. She frowns and cocks her head to one side - although these motions would likely be imperceptible to anyone outside the family - and advances on the thing. To the accompaniment of the many cracks and pops of her old frame, she leans down and examines the toy with the tips of her fingers. She starts miaowing.

She cradles the tiger in her arms and takes it back into her lair. I decide I've had enough spookiness for today, and pad back upstairs.

Later, when I go down for my bedtime wee, I find various cardboard tiger parts floating in the toilet bowl. The brown and orange poster paints have formed a shiny, rusty film on the water's surface. Wearily I wonder what she's done with the piece of wire coat-hanger I used to make the tongue crank.

I can feel the chill grey wind of depression approaching. Following yesterday's success, I decide to make another tiger to keep me busy. I used up all my poster paints yesterday, and can't face going out to get some more, so I steal some nail varnish from downstairs (Thompson is out, of course) and try using that, but it runs out part way through and leaves my room really stinking of solvent. I feel like I'm about to faint, so I open both windows. The wind blows in and whips my tiger around in an ellipse, and the tiger falls to bits.

I can't get myself together again after that, so I think I'll go to bed.

This evening I buy five pounds of potatoes, and sit peeling them to help me think. When I'm done, I put the potatoes under my pillow to dry, and lie on them, to think.

It's seven days since I've been out of the house. In fact I've done nothing in seven days, so I'll briefly describe what's outside my windows.

The window at the front of my room looks down on the tree-encased cul-de-sac where we live. Here, five bloated houses crowd round the dark space like crapulent old men wondering where their pints have gone after last orders.

At the back you can see our yard and our long, tatty garden, and the cuttings of the derelict railway line that seems home to a million owls and bats who squeak during the day and kill each other at night. Beyond that, more long gardens slope upwards towards their honey-bricked modern houses on the posh estate. And then you look up to get away from it all, and in the distance you see the sky held up by the pylons, and through the wires lies the huge beast of London with its mottled and blurred confusion of rooftops, chimneys, steeples and tower blocks. You hate that bastard. And at night, that bastard's million orange lights flicker and smoke and scream to the accompaniment of the pylons' singing.

During the day, it seems that the back window gets more light than the window at the front, but I could be wrong.

It's three in the morning and there's some kind of fox wailing down in the railway cutting. It's a gut-wrenching sound. Perhaps it's not a fox, but that's not a great thought to have just now.

I can't get back to sleep. I'll give myself another ten minutes, by the eggtimer, then I'll go and rub the banister post, three times, to see if that helps.

The kind of life I have is so unstructured. I try to keep it more structured by relying far too heavily on the eggtimer, whose home is in my trouser pocket. I only ever wear proper trousers during the day, while for bed I wear light and airy trousers.

The phone rings on the second floor landing. I jump down the stairs and pick it up.

'Hiya BC, it's Percy,' he says.

I'm a bit taken aback, but still manage to say, 'Uh-huh. Hiya.'

He stays quiet. How annoying is that? I pull each of my eyebrows, to make sure there aren't any stupid hairs there. Still he says nothing, but I'm certainly not going to.

'Percy,' he says, 'You know... your cousin.'

'I know.' Percy is Uncle Vig's son. I like Vig, but Percy's like a wet piece of toilet paper.

'Your sister said I should ring.'

'Did she?'

'Yeah. Listen, what's your problem? Every time I ring you're like this. You could ask what's going on up here - you could even tell me what's going on with you.'

'I've never spoken to you on the phone before, as far as I remember.'

'Oh.'

'Is that what Thompson said?'

'Yes.'

'Bye, then, Percy.'

'Bye.'

I play with a Rubik cube for a bit, then have a bath.

Heh heh. Let's put our house on wheels and take it to America. Nana wouldn't care, mind or be bothered, but Thompson would freak. Heh heh. That'd put her on the backburner. Heh heh heh.

You're thinking, this person's a loser. You're thinking, people try with this person, but this person doesn't try back. You're thinking, this person thinks the world owes this person a living.

Well, let me tell you, I do care, and I do expend a certain amount of energy from time to time. One of the people I care about is Lord Oliver.

It's yesterday, which is a Friday. When I meet Lord Oliver I always meet him in the Pat and Partridge, down by the canal. So when I get his text message late in the afternoon I know exactly where to go. I wear my default mask.

Lord Oliver sits at the bar, his hair standing up like it's been sucked by a treacle tart. I see him, I cross the room, and in that time he manages to slug back a fresh double and loudly burp out a laugh as if he's a happy toilet. That bloke's a frigging disgrace. Lord Oliver's not a lord, you see; Lord's just his first name.

Lord Oliver wipes his mouth on his sleeve, then shouts, "BC! Good to see you!" A few old-timers look up from their pints. My mask has ridden up over my brow. I tug it back down.

'Hiya,' I say and pull up a bar stool. I order another whisky for Lord Oliver and a lager for myself. Lord Oliver asks what I've been up to. I have little to say, so he starts telling me about a fight his dog got into with a badger. His story's kind of interesting at first, but then I realise I'm on my third pint and he's still on about it. The beer's going straight to my head. I'm hot and sweaty and soon I find I've taken off my mask. Lord Oliver's slurring and won't sit down. He keeps saying banjo instead of badger, which makes me laugh. He accuses me of not taking him seriously. Suddenly he pulls himself up tall.

'Anyway,' he says, 'how's Thompson?'

The bastard. He's always had a crush on my sister. Another pint arrives in front of me. I take a big slurp and say, 'I don't want to talk about her.'

'Still as lovely as ever then?'

'She's still a tyrannical blonde tart with big gappy teeth, if that's what you mean.'

He says, 'Tell her I was asking after her, eh?' and I nod grimly. He excuses himself to go to the toilet, but he doesn't come back.

I have a few more, buy some carry outs, pull on my mask and head home.

Along the canal path I trip on something soft, dark and black. My head's spinning and I nearly fall. I've dropped one of my bottles so I bend to pick it up, but it rolls into the canal with a gloopy splash. The sickly rotten smell hits me at the same time as I realise I'm bending over a dog's corpse. The fur seems to be moving. I think I'm going to vomit, but I manage to keep it in. I jog home, swallowing hard, the bottles chinking in my jacket pockets, my mask bobbing up and down like a child trying to see over a wall.

Back in the sanctuary of my cold, dark room, while drinking a beer, I think back and realise that the dead dog was actually a split bag of compost. Oh well.

So this afternoon I head off down the market, and it seems the whole place is swarming with freaks.

Of course I have a bad, bad hangover, which is more body-sensation-based (nausea, out-of-body) than physical-trauma-based (headache, cramps, deep sweats). This is why I choose to wear my half-skull mask. Next to a stall selling refilled inkjet cartridges, a bald, bald woman points at me, baring her teeth and quietly laughing as she says, 'Fackin' 'ell, it's Draclia!' I grimace at her, but the effect is lost behind my half-skull mask.

Much aggrieved, I skulk off to a pound shop and find something that looks like a full-skull mask with a pig's nose. It's squashed flat into its clear plastic packaging, and it comes with a red cape, so try as I might I can't properly work out how it might look on me, and despite the stupid claims of the shop I see it isn't a pound, it's three pounds fifty, so I leave it.

Further along the road I find a pound shop selling a pig in a disco two-piece. I very much like this pig, but when I tip it up to look at the price sticker on the base I find to my horror that it's actually three pounds ninety-nine. I feel a flush of anger, especially given that it's scuffed and mucky, so I march it to the counter and say to the chap, 'Look at the price of this piece of junk - how can you justify that?' The man stops eating his sandwich and for a moment we face each other off over the mucky, dance-frozen pig. I know this shop well, and I know it has no front-line security, so I'm fired up for a fight.

The man chews once, three hundred and sixty degrees of chew, then says, 'Take it. I've been trying to get rid of it for ages.'

I throw a pound over the counter and escape with the pig as the coin traces spirals and grimly rattles to a halt on the chocolatey linoleum floor.