Right, it's been a whole month now, so, to start telling you about my actual life at last, I suppose I'd better start with how things really are in our house.

I may as well start with this morning. I don't usually get up at nine o'clock, but this morning I do, because Nana starts shouting. Our house has four floors (excluding the loft, but including my floor), and for a while I ignore her shouting, but soon I find I'm tossing and turning because I need a wee anyway. Damn my lack of en suite facilities. Nana and Thompson have got en suite, why haven't I?

I reach out and pat my tiny, sticky bedside table until I find a fag and my Zippo. I light the fag, then swing out my legs, pump myself out of bed and head for the door.

There's a tiny landing before the stairs go down to the empty floor above Nana's floor.

Nana's still shouting, but through the echoes I can't tell what she's on about. There's a brief pause, but then she carries on, so I shout, 'Nana!' What I can tell is that she's banging into things.

I start down the stairs. The pattern on the carpet is so dark now it's like a memory of a kid you met on holiday when you were little. These stairs are never hoovered, so the soles of your feet gather grit, clumps of hair and the occasional moist thing that you absently scrape off against the corner of a wall, where it dries and eventually falls back onto the carpet.

When I reach the landing of the empty floor I shout, 'Na-na!'

As ever the empty floor feels like somebody's just left and gone for good. But it's always been empty, I think. It's surprisingly light down here, and the glimpses of clouded polythene sheeting on the furniture visible through the non-shutting doors remind me of packets of supermarket-branded crisps. Why is the empty floor so well painted, so bright and unlived-in? Why does it smell of nothing at all when the rest of the house smells so fruity-bad? Fuck knows!

Nana's voice is louder down here, echoing up the stairs that grow dimmer as they wind down to her lair.

'...coming here...' she says, '...like that...' she says, '...moving my furniture about...' she says, '...blinking ferret that he is...' she says.

Her bulky shadow lurks in the stairwell. She's agitated. Then with a crack I hear her lump against something solid and her shadow tremours like a grey blancmange. 'Oof,' she mutters, and her shadow moves off once more.

'Keep still, Nana,' I say, trying to sound calm as I skip whole bundles of stairs, a little landing at a time, holding my cigarette high above my head. 'I'm coming, Nana - just try to stay where you are.'

As I round the corner onto the big landing there's a crash, and there she is, on her back in a pool of dusty sunlight, an upended turtle, her pinafore making a poor shell.

'Oh,' I say, though I mean to say more. I can see straight up her drawers. Nana's very, very fat, and she's blind. Her eyes remind me of sapphires, but her face and body seem to be made of deep-fried foam rubber.

There doesn't seem to be a rational reason for her paddling her stubby fat legs in the air like this, showing me her knickers, which seem welded to both her thighs and her breasts, but she carries on anyway. 'Uh,' she says, 'uh.'

She's also wheezing quite badly, and seems shaken by her fall. But having just woken up I'm a bit impatient with her for not listening to me, and I pause for a moment to take a few quick draws from my fag. Luckily there's an ashtray on almost every flat surface in this house, so I lay the fag down before skirting around her and resigning myself to plunging my hands deep into her pits.

First, though, I remove the eggtimer from my trouser pocket and upend it onto the occasional table where the ashtray lies. I've decided I'll have her up in thirty seconds - not a second more and not a second less.

I humph and I harrgh and I shift my grip, slowly, precisely, biding my time. I heave her back towards the vertical, then allow us to falter a bit, and again, until finally she regains her feet just as the lime green sands drain silently past that imaginary marking I know means thirty seconds have gone by.

She won't have been able to hear the sands shifting, and for her there's certainly nothing to see, but just to be safe I snatch the eggtimer back into my pocket before I let go of her, then squeeze out a deep asthmatic bagful of exhaustion for effect.

A bit unsteadily she swings - approximately - to face me, and says, 'Eeh, I always said you were a good 'un.'

I bow majestically, and for a moment allow my index fingers to make like little rabbit ears above her thick brown wig, which looks so awfully like the exposed end of a fig roll atop her wan and doughy head.

I tut, then sigh, as if to say, What else would I do, Nana? Then my mouth opens wide, my teeth part, and a string of saliva loops down and joins itself to my chin before breaking and falling, in droplets, to Nana's carpet.

The echo-location device in Nana's brain is malfunctioning again. She sidles up close to confide in me, but it isn't me, it's the wall.

'Listen,' she says, and for some reason her tongue flicks out like a snake's. 'He was here again last night.' Her finger pokes at the air in random directions.

My ghastly reflex grin fades. 'Who?' But I've been here before.

'Him.' At first her finger points directly at me. 'That cheeky beggar. Thinks he owns the place, he does, shuffling round like a bleedin' prince, looking at me ornaments, sniffin' at them like they was dogs' biscuits or something.'

Now her unseeing eyes are blasting down the dark stairs over my shoulder. Although I'm used to this I shudder, and grab back my cigarette, now Pinocchioed with ash.

With neither a word to Nana nor a glance behind me I bound back up the stairs, four at a time, to the safe haven of my awful and forbidding room, and once again I find myself wishing that our saggy old handyman would get his baggy old arse in gear and fit that lock to my bedroom door. Or did he die recently?

To me, some chocolate biscuits have started tasting of meat. I panic a bit when I think about this too hard. But then my rational voice tells me that the milkman's bottles of orange juice, which I used to market very unsuccessfully on my milk-money collecting round, started tasting of meat after a while too. Still, at least then I used to convince myself that was because he reused his milk bottles for the orange juice - and cows are made of meat, aren't they?

But I digress. I'm meant to be telling you about my life.

Sunday is the only day we eat together, in the big dining room on the ground floor, which is Thompson's floor.

Sometime after noon, the cooking smells start wafting silently up the stairs. They gather in the dark hallways and settle on the dusty landings - sizzling fat, boiling veg, thickening gravy granules - until the very air is swirling with dense clouds of brown and green particles.

At seven minutes to two I collect Nana from her landing, where she's already waiting in her Sunday-best cardigan, and begin the arduous process of getting her downstairs.

Thompson is already seated at the head of the great oak table, our plates are already filled. Her golden hair is tied back in a great big bun. Sometimes, but not always, she wears a ball gown, which I think is a bit over the top.

Each week, as I squeeze Nana into her chair, Thompson tells us we're late. Nana and I say nothing, like naughty children, even though we're never late. I even add on leap seconds each week to account for Nana's increasing decrepitude. By November I know I'll be arriving at Nana's landing at eight minutes to two.

We eat in silence. The grandfather clock in the corner ticks. The meat is nice, but the vegetables are overcooked and collapse when touched by cutlery. We never have gravy. Thompson doesn't believe in gravy.

Yorkshire Pudding's good though, isn't it? It tastes great - the blandness is a huge part of it - and the texture's superb. The smell isn't bad either.

Sometimes I think of how Yorkshire Pudding could be used to reconstruct my face. I could wash with gravy, and swab my crusted eyes with Brussels sprouts.

Once Thompson and I have finished eating, we wait for Nana, who's always last. Thompson and I avoid eye contact at all times.

Once Nana's finished eating, Nana and I nod our thanks at Thompson and I return Nana upstairs, where she belongs. We don't eat pudding. Thompson doesn't believe in pudding.

I can't think of anything to write today, but as usual, the word monkey keeps battering itself against the insides of my brain - and from surprising directions.

Monkey. Monkey. Monkey.

Monkey.

My guitar needs new strings. I should get some. I want to play it, but when I do my fingers taste of rust for hours and my eyelids swell, and I'm scared they might burst.

I started playing when I was seventeen, and now I'm even older. I still struggle with three-chord thingies, but I'm good with one chord and I know I can chug at that one chord with the best of them, but to my audience that's a bit like staying in to watch the washing machine instead of going to the cinema.

Had my guitar been a dog it would have died by now and I could have got another.

I had few problems interacting as a kid, but that was before I lost my parents and bits of my face at the same time. I was thirteen.

I think of Dad with his sideburns. Sideburns! How I wish.

I think of Mam, and I wish I'd co-operated and worn a belt to stop my trousers falling down. All that wasted breath!

I don't like to think of Thompson.

But I do think of Nana when she still had vision, and I pity her. Then again, at least she's still alive - lucky her.

One day when I was twelve, I came home from school unhappy because some kid had called me 'fatty'.

'You're not fat!' said my Nana indignantly.

'No,' I said, 'but you are.'

If I remember correctly, she was very upset by that - but, you know, I was in a bad mood. If only I'd known what was to befall me within the year, I might have relished the fat jibes and been more gracious to Nana. Then again, probably not.

And so it has come to this: now I can think of a chocolate eclair and my mind can confuse it with a sausage.

Oh, come on!

Goodnight: and don't forget that things can feel better - ecstatically, lovingly better - even if they aren't really. Things aren't all bad, and those that are bad are just pretending, which is bad enough.

My room could be brighter. It's painted black, but I didn't do it. When I was younger I put up posters to try to jazz it up, but now they're all tatty and lifeless and I can't be arsed to take them down: someone from The Wombles; some metal band when they still had spots and hair; a northern football club - my loyalty is long forgotten, but with their cracked, jaundiced faces they're still my friends. The net curtains are a bit like the posters: yellow where they're meant to be white. Be sure to blame neglect, and know that the rest's down to fag smoke.

In one corner is my bed. It's a dried out slug. In the opposite corner is the black wardrobe. I'm sure it moves. And in another corner, down the far end of the room, by the back window, lurks all manner of computer stuff. This stuff is my lifeline to the world, and even when it's dormant at night its blinking red and green jester lights make me laugh as they silently mock the grumbling passage of aeroplanes in the sky. That blinking gets me past my itching and out again, through the night.

Then in the remaining corner there is nothing. That's my favourite part of the room.

Last, half way down the room, like a single healthy tooth in a corpse's mouth, stands the door. No, I don't think of it as a tooth - that wouldn't make sense. Instead I think of it as a diseased valve whose primary function is to fling at me the dung of the world. Well, at least from time to time it does. No, it's actually a tooth.

Below, the house is silent for most of the time - but that's not on purpose.

My sister Thompson has the whole of the bottom floor to herself, and in some ways she owns us all.

She's thirty-eight years old, she has massive front teeth with a gap between them, and yes, she's called 'Thompson'. Honestly, she is, and the fact she is called 'Thompson' continues to be one of the greatest pleasures in my life.

Thompson this, Thompson that, Thompson is a goofy twat.

That's a rhyme I made up when I was little, before my mother and father died. It's one of the few things I remember from when I was that little.

On Nana's landing, two floors below mine, there's a little old table with three legs that sits in the corner. It seems to emit shadows, all of its own. On it, next to a pot of flowers that crumble when you breathe on them, is a small snow-shaker. It's quite a nice thing, featuring a cosy, domestic, yuletide scene - but then when you look closer you realise that it contains tiny plastic figurines of Nana and Grandad (I never knew him), and when you rattle the thing in the air they both come to life and hop around like mad beasts, and, even worse, invariably end up wrestling each other to the ground. Don't get me wrong, over the years I've grown used to it, but today, when I go down to take Nana for Sunday lunch, I find her silently gazing into the snow-shaker, mewling softly. Remember, she's blind.

As if yesterday wasn't spooky enough, today things gets a little bit worse. This evening, when I go down to brush my teeth, there's Thompson on Nana's landing licking and sucking Nana's snow shaker. I ask what the fuck she thinks she's doing, but she just growls and goes back downstairs.

Right, I'll try hard to be objective about Thompson for a moment.

First off, does she have a clue about computer things? If she did, I wouldn't be writing this, because if she found it she would cut off my hair and scrape at my scalp with a knife.

What does she look like? Well, she's pretty, I suppose. But she does have this huge gap between her front teeth, which is perhaps why she rarely smiles. Of course, in the house she never, ever smiles, unless she's being sadistic, or sado-masochistic (technology is my friend), and outside... well, once I bumped into her in the street, and she was smiling then, but only because she had an old man's hand plastered across her arse.

She's pretty, so is she worth one? Probably, but I'm not the best person to ask.

So, she's pretty and she may be worth one. But is she what some might call cool? Well, Thompson is by far the most tightly woven mattress of cool-and-uncool fibres I've ever known or heard of. She's at once killer blonde and kilted tartan grandma. Put it this way, she rides a Harley, but for some reason she rides it wearing plum-coloured wellington boots and a long, brown, knitted coat.

And here's a thing I'd call really uncool.

This evening that Eric Challenger bloke comes round. I see him from my window, pin-stepping up the front path like a starving grey squirrel. Perhaps he's thirty-five or perhaps he's fifty-nine - I don't know. When he comes round I hear Thompson giggling outrageously up three flights of stairs and they seem to spend a lot of time chasing each other in and out of the coat cupboard, though I can't believe there's anything serious going on. Then they go quiet and Dad's old gramophone clicks into life, and with a hiss and crackle that fills the dark spaces of the house national anthems start playing. The patriotic nonsense spews and toots for exactly forty-six minutes (my eggtimer tells me this), and then the house goes silent again, until the front door bangs and Eric Challenger walks back up the garden path. He goes to the end of the road, so he must get the bus.

At the exact moment the clock ticks past four o'clock I feel my gut lurch, four times. It takes me a minute to recover. What's going on?

Crikey, am I just being a pussy? I'm sure it's nothing to worry about. Not really.

Or is it that these days I just don't visit Big Ben often enough? How I miss that big, old, silly sod of a thing.

It's Friday again, so it's yesterday, again, and suddenly I realise that I haven't been out for a drink since I met Lord Oliver down by the canal five weeks ago. I've had a few beers in the house, but Christ, what's happening to me? I used to go out all the time. I used to drink all the time.

I decide I'll go and call on Dennis the Chunt and drag him out for a pint. Dennis the Chunt isn't my best friend, despite how hard I try. I suppose I'm in awe of him, and that's nothing to be proud of, not at my age, but I suppose I need at least one role model in my life.

God, how I've always wanted to be Dennis the Chunt. He has spiky hair and a sallow complexion. He didn't used to be quite so sallow prior to dying his ginger hair black, but he doesn't really like talking about that. He has a tiny flat in a grim part of town overlooking what he calls 'the fugle', which is some manner of hot smoking chimney further up the canal. I've never lived within sight of the fugle, and for some reason this has always irked me.

Dennis the Chunt's flat lies at the end of an alley filled with wheelie bins. He doesn't have a bell or a knocker, so I find some stones and throw them up at his window. Perhaps he isn't in. I feel sorry for myself. It's cold and dark and I want a drink.

Suddenly his window scrapes up and a voice shouts out, 'Fuck off, I'm not in.' Dennis the Chunt is a very funny boy. Soon we're inside, drinking lots of sweet cider, listening to old punk 45s. He's got loads of these - he collects them - and many are coloured or picture vinyl. I've never even heard of most of the bands, which excites me. As I get drunk, I realise I hate the music, but what I wouldn't give for these records. If I had them, they would be mine.

The rest of the evening's a sorry blur. I think I'm enjoying myself, but then I find myself running up and down the stairs in a dizzy mess, with Dennis the Chunt goading me on from above. I can hardly breathe and I feel sick. Up and down I go, and then suddenly he's laughing hysterically and peeing down the dark stairwell in a great arc. He's trying to pee on me. This annoys me. I call him a dirty bastard and run straight on down the hallway, open his front door and step out into the night. Still laughing, he shouts for me to come back. I slam the door shut, just as a wave of nausea wells up in me. Without really thinking too hard, I spin round, push open his letterbox flap and vomit into his hall. Now he's angry. He chases me down the alleyway, past the bins, shouting that he's going to kill me. But he's awkward and gangly and he can't catch me.

Today, I get up after noon, feeling pap. I go down the market to the only vinyl record shop in our sorry town. This shop is owned and staffed, both upstairs and downstairs, by the man from ELO, perhaps. People say he sells scratched records. In I stride, as bold as squid ink, thumbs in pockets.

'Hiya,' I say.

'All right?'

'Hiya,' I say again.

What do I want? Shit.

As if reading my mind, the bloke kind of laughs from behind his beard. I rub my hair hard, and feel my palm fizz with the kind of static that can only be caused by my kind of hair.

'Are you after a record?' he says. I nod. 'Which one?'

I shake my head and realise that all I really want is my mam.

I really need to sort out my nights out. I'm losing friends and I'm not really having a good time, am I?

And the aftermaths, such as today, are of course even worse. I'm sitting here at my computer and my head feels like a soft-boiled egg. I can't concentrate and my hands don't want to type. I sit and sharpen a pencil at both ends, then use it to prod the top of my head, which isn't the best thing to do with a hangover.

Space is freaking me out. Not the Universe in general, just space. With a jolt I realise I don't like the space I'm sitting in, so I move my chair and try a different bit of space. Then I get perturbed - a bit hot and sweaty - at the thought of the previous space I was in a moment ago now being empty.

Not for the first time it occurs to me that I'm an organic machine with millions and billions of working parts. What if even just one nerve becomes blocked? Yuk. I suppose it happens all the time. Still, I don't want it to happen right now.

I start trying to whistle chords. If I blow hard enough I can kind of do it, but it's not very musical. Anyway, soon Nana's shouting up the stairs, telling me to go away.

Sod this, I'm off to the pub. On my own. Hair of the dog.

Right, I haven't been well for over a week now. Last Saturday did me in. It was my own fault of course - God told me so.

It's dusk, last Saturday. I walk along the closing market. The dim rows of shops on either side cut a V of sky filled with a luminous cool blue. A plane's silhouette chops the pink-tinged vapour trails that already criss-cross the space; at the tips of its wings, a ruby and an emerald blink their silent warnings.

Street cleaning vehicles whirl darkly about me, their drivers thirsting for the pub. This is more like it.

The pub is warming up - a slowly exploding chasm of light and, as yet somewhat subdued, mirth. I'm sitting in the corner with the New Scientist open on my knee. I'm wearing my tweed mask. I've already had two pints of Stella, and for the first time all day I feel able to light up a fag.

A couple come in and sit at the table beside me. He's fat, huge; I think he's either a Scot or from the West Country. She's clearly from Essex, and this isn't her first pint tonight. My neck aches as my face dips deeper into my magazine.

The woman - thing - slurs, 'This place is smaller tonight.' The man sips from his pint. She starts singing, or rather going something like, 'Hey, hey, hey-h-EY.'

Eventually the man says, 'You want to go home already?'

'Fuck no. I didn't even want to come out. I nearly didn't.'

'Oh,' says the man.

The woman sings again, using more of a wey sound this time, then shouts, 'It's shit here.'

'You said you wanted to stay.'

'I mean here, hee-arr. This table. It's shite - you can't even see what's going on.'

I drain my pint, which now tastes of sweetened salt, scoop up my things and leave.

The market is dark now; the stinks of fish and disinfectant have thinned, whipped around by the evening breeze. I skirt an arc around a burger van being towed home. It's a warmish evening for this time of year. The planes leaving the stack over Essex grumble overhead, not really a bother to anyone.

I decide to go for a curry and get another pint. The waiters seem ruffled by my presence. I must admit, I've never been sure about my tweed mask. Still, I'm sure they can handle it. But for some reason they seem to keep calling me 'Nobby', or perhaps I just don't understand their accents. It's probably paranoia.

Half way through my main course a waiter puts a dish of orange powder on my table and with a wink he says, 'Yum yum!' I lose heart and get up and leave. It's still quite early, but I've had enough of this lonely night out. I go home. I wake on Sunday to find I've downed a bottle of whisky. I go back to bed.

So I miss Sunday dinner, and because I'm not there to help her down the stairs, so does Nana.

Thompson of course does not, and would not, go to collect her. With a shudder I picture her in her ludicrous scarlet ball gown, her hair tied high in a bun, eating alone, self-righteously stuffing herself as the heat evaporates from the two plates of dinner further down the table. Bitch.

I spend most of the week in bed. The house is eerily silent. I worry that my liver simply isn't there any more as I wait for Thompson to come up and vent her rage at me. She must still be boiling. I dread the storm to come.

This morning there's a sharp bang on my door. I'm feeling a bit better, more able to cope with what's likely to come at today's Sunday dinner, so I hurry over only to find there's nobody there. At my feet is a note. I pick it up.

BC - it reads - Hallowe'en Party tonight, Ground Floor, 7pm (Sunday dinner cancelled). Family only. No need to dress up.

This is both ominous and a relief. And it's insulting. Then again, perhaps I need to tame my paranoia. Perhaps that last sentence wasn't actually intended as a slight on me.