When I wasn’t drunk and sad, I was hateful and drunk and when I was neither of those I was drunk and asleep.

Downstairs they held illegal gambling bouts all night between a cross-section of races, and would scream at each other and pull knives.

Sometimes when I would roll in incapable; I would go and sit among them and drink stubby bottles of beer for fifty pence. It tasted like death and madness and the money would pile up. As it did they would become angrier and say terrible things in a variety of guttural tongues. Mario was my hall-neighbour from Cyprus and was their gimp and drinks-boy. He slept all day and not once in my time there asked for the only key to the shower.

He was a dirty young vampire. He lived across the hall from me and would often suck my financial blood. I was afraid of Ali his uncle and my landlord, and so I gave often and plenty. He would promise returns but they never came.

I had a routine in the day. It was foolproof. I would walk up to the College and look through the windows, then I would go to The Augustus and drink pints of beer for a quid a hit. There was a man in there who believed he was David Bowie and dressed in a leather trench coat and an old woman with four dogs who had ten degrees and could recite whole books. I encouraged Bowie but not so much the old woman.

If it were cold or warm I would still get some bottles to go and sit in the University Park afterwards. They all talked fast and pointed at files and each other’s clothes. They laughed and made friends and I would suck on a bottle and stretch my legs.

There were always birds singing in there but I liked The Augustus better than the park. I made David cry on a November evening. He had made a fool of himself in the eighties I had said. On the way back to my musty rooms in Hell, I would look through the windows at the sincere faced lecturers giving evening classes, and knew they would like to strip and fuck the young women and maybe the men. “It’s imperative you suck this Lucy, your further education depends on it.” I had no time for any of it and felt very old.

There was a disgusting café and I would eat a disgusting sandwich before I stopped at the off-licence and bought my nightcap. VP Sherry was two pounds a bottle and I would get two. My routine cost twelve pounds a day. This was all I had ever wanted or aspired to. I had been given two thousand to further my studies and in a way I was.

Sometimes if I felt good, I would ask the homeless people for spare change as I went through the station. They would scream or their eyes would fill up. I hated every living thing on Gods aborted earth and my kicks were sometimes cruel.

When I would arrive back at the rooms (usually around six) Mario would often talk to me on the stairs, usually about the possibility of a loan. I might say yes or I might make an excuse. I would always wait until I could hear him downstairs cleaning up for the night’s gambling and piss a little into his mayonnaise in our shared kitchen. This would be stirred in thoroughly and over the course of our domestic bliss he must have drank the volume of my nightcap twice over.

One bottle of VP would go on top of the television that did not work and I would open the blinds, switch off the light and get in bed with the other. My room had once been an office and the window went from ceiling to floor the whole length of it. Twenty paces. I would lie there, drink the sherry and watch Liverpool puke, stagger, shit, cry, dance and swirl from the bottom of London Road right up to the lights beside the hospital.

There were a lot of things that made no sense and I once saw a pack of men stamp a lone man until the ambulance came. Bystanders were crying and holding each other. There was a lot of blood and I later heard he had died. He had just wanted a kebab. I knew Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane existed only in the acid-fogged minds of long gone hippies and I couldn’t listen to the Fab Four anymore. Nothing was fab. It was shit and it knew it.

The feeling I had been born to do this was a lonely but strangely comforting one. I had never wanted anything as badly as this room and this bottle, that bottle, all the bottles, and now I had it.

If you stand drunk at the docks in Liverpool at night or anywhere else and look out across the sea, listening, there’s a low moan on the wind and you will hear it. That’s them, and you and me and it’s not hard to guess why we’re crying.