We live in these little cardboard boxes. Flats they're called. Cardboard coffins I call them. We call them. We can hear everything that goes on in this flea palace. So can the fleas. They can here Jimmy'meboy and they can hear the git upstairs, and the old poofs over cross the way. And it smells in here all over the East End. And we pretend we love in this sty. That Melba up there is not pacing slamming her feet against the floor, round and round the rotten circular rug from of course a flea sale. And smoking like a chimbney all the time. Mad as toast, see I got me humor and wits about me still, at me for being down here with Jimmy'meboy when that's what I want and don't wants at all the same time. Course it's a coarse life. Course its no freedom stand here I'm a'makin. Tells ya the truth, I don'ts particularly like him any better, him with his sour undershirts and his way of mumbling sos I don'ts have know what he's sayings half the time.
And its only fun fer me cause I know she's picturin' me and me man here doing the horizontal dipsy doodle like she imagines and its just not so, little sex would be nice, but with another person ins the rooms, not just him and me imagining each of us being someone else, same as her and me for that matter, lord cook a good goose egg and slaps me silly wit it, as thoughs its easy as that and shes me beard or whatever fag talk they use, and its me and Jimmy'meboy here in the kip close together, not that wes aren't a million miles from each other here and now, like she might as well be me and our rooms identical stink of poverty and pain and all sorts of encumbrances, and its just to bleedin' tick her a little. Just to trot her a little fancy like'n she mights be jealous of me if such a thing can be tucked with love letter or a French tickler I be bound. AS though there's not a orgasm I've done had since I was about 14 and still bys meself and I don'ts needs these fake humans being here skitting round as though they ares real and stuff and me not real at all.
Think they're so bloomin' desperate. They don't knows the halfs of it. They don't knows how I feels when I comes home from the greengrocer's and just all in and out and fed up with the ladies and all their ladadas and me gotta be nicen' to 'em and give a fuck ' bout their bleedin' kidney pies and their jokes and just a bit of rum m'dear for the goose or whatever lie they tell, forgettin' to buy the goose, they so happy they got something to knocks them out for a bit, and that's all they had in minds fer the first place. And Jimmy'meboy naked save for that bleedin' undershirt as though it doesn't count, the sex stufft wit' me and the other guys, I'm not an idiot by damn, as though I'm the ghost of a ghost.