Toy Musical Saxophone

LOS started life a long time ago.. after more than ten years i am relieved to be finally putting it out to agents etc early in the new year.

the page below was posted some time ago and has changed a little.

Life of Stone Chapter 1

1

The man slept noisily but peacefully in his bath tub. The sound of his snore bounced off of and around the bathroom tiles filled the empty house. The snore resonated, echoing up through the steep stair well and in to his empty bedroom, furnished only with a mattress and a carpet of dirty clothes and rubbish. The house was four storeys. Each storey had two rooms. On the top two, both rooms were bedrooms. On the ground floor there was a kitchen that was only a kitchen because it had a sink in it, in the same way that the bathroom was only called the bathroom because there was a bath in it. All the rooms resembled bins, the only difference being that bins don’t have doors. The bins in them were in a way responsible for this similarity, as they quickly filled to capacity, so rubbish erupted from them across the floor. The second floor had the bathroom and another bedroom. The concentration of filth and the unhygienic style of living afforded to by the occupants filled the whole house with an odour reminiscent of school shower rooms, public toilets, and tramps. How it smelt was irrelevant to any of the houses occupants, when they were there, as they no longer noticed it. The smell was particularly irrelevant today, because today all the occupants were leaving the house. Some forever, some temporarily. Not too far away, a church clock struck the hour of ten. The man in the bath wasn’t supposed to be in the bath. Not that any one is ever really supposed to actually be anywhere, but if there was somewhere this cat wasn’t meant to be, it was in a bath. He was supposed to be in a converted ice cream van driving south, out of London, out of England. He was supposed to be doing it with the two people he was squatting with, who just happened to be his best friends. The ice cream van he had. It sat on a double yellow line outside the house quietly collecting parking tickets that no one would ever pay. The plans for its conversion he had, although these consisted of simply taking his mattress and all his clothes and transferring them from the stinking room in to the stinking van. He was missing two friends, and consciousness. He should be awake. He should have been loading the ice cream van with junk. He should have been trying to remember where the party had been, and trying to drive there to pick his friends up. Instead he slept, noisily, in the bath.

The previous evening had seen them leave the house, some forever, some temporarily, to go to the pub for one last goodbye drink with a few friends before going home for an early night so their batteries were all fully charged before they hit the road early the next day. One drink. Only the man in the bath had returned, staggering, exhausted and drunk through the front door as the sun began to rise over a dreary city on what would become a hot summer day. The man slept, cast away in his bath, floating on a sea of discarded oomska and detritus. On his hand, scrawled almost indecipherably were the words;

‘Stone Ferry’

In blue bookies biro.