The table was on fire, myself, Andrew and Jim watched it burn, slouched on the couch passing round a big fat one. Suddenly Bateman burst into the living room bollock naked, 
“What the fuck are you fucking doing? The fucking tables on fucking fire, you fucking idiots!” He shouted. The boys and myself sat there in motionless stunned silence as Bateman disappeared into the kitchen, then streaked back in the room, cock flapping and threw a saucepan of water over the table and doused the flames.

“Fucking pyromaniacs! Don’t set fucking fire to any fucking thing else and keep the fucking noise down! I’ve got fucking work in the morning, Jesus Christ on a fucking bike!”
He turned around, presenting us a view of his spotty arse crack, then went back upstairs to bed. The three of us sat there for a few moments staring at the wet smoldering table. Andrew passed Jim the spliff and said “Did you see that? He had no clothes on.”

Shortly after leaving University I moved into a student house-share with my friends, who let me sleep on the sofa until I sorted my life out. There were five of us altogether; Bateman, the hod carrier, Shaun the bartender, Shaun’s brother Jim – an artist who painted pictures of Jesus in fields of magic mushrooms – and Charlie, who was the only genuine student left amongst us. Also our friend Andrew would pop in regularly to demonstrate his origami like techniques in skinning up. He could put together a twelve-skin triple-header crucifix stogie no problem.

None of us had much money. Often we would have the dilemma of whether to pay the gas bill or to spend our money on beer and drugs instead. The answer would inevitably be the latter. We would cane all the beer and drugs and the next day be left in the same situation all over again. Once we were so skint that we sold a car for scrap that did not even belong to us. It belonged to some stoner called Nigel who was a friend of a friend who had turned up one night, got trashed, slept over, and walked home because the following morning his car wouldn’t start, he left it in the drive saying he’d be back to pick it up within a few days. That was over three weeks ago, so we sold it to a garage for twenty-five quid. That night we enjoyed a case of lager and a big block of Henry.

I started working at Tesco stacking shelves. It afforded me just enough money for survival. I would have to get up for work at six every morning, which was difficult because most nights the boys would be up until two o’clock in the morning laughing, arguing, drinking beer, smoking weed and dropping acid. I would have to crawl behind the sofa to get some sleep, a little peace and quiet, but the boys would get mischievous and give me blow-backs while I slept, fart on my head, or sometimes worse. I would get maybe three hours sleep, four if I was lucky. In the morning I would go to work half stoned, half dead, carrying out my duties like a zombie, returning back to the house in the evening where the madness would relentlessly start all over again.

All the nights of boozing, smoking and sleep deprivation were taking their toll both mentally and physically, so in a desperate measure I moved my sleeping arrangements to the conservatory. Sleeping under the stars away from the noise and disorder seemed like a good idea, but the next morning when I got up for work I found one of the cheeky buggers had locked the conservatory door into the house, the outside door had been locked too. I was trapped. I started banging on the door and shouting,
“Let me in, you wankers! Let me in!”
But it was no use, they’d probably been up all night and only just gone to bed, Bateman was the only other one who got up for work in the mornings and he’d probably already left. In my desperation I contemplated smashing the glass door with Jim’s paint easel, but thankfully remembered the conservatory roof window, so I stack up the few bits of furniture lying around and climbed out of the top, sliding and jumping my way to the ground like a pissed ninja.

The following morning someone put Bateman’s work boots in the freezer compartment of the fridge, next to a bottle of vodka. The boots were frozen solid. From the comfort of my blanket in the conservatory, I could hear him shouting, something about not being able to get his fucking feet in his fucking boots, and not being able to bend his fucking ankles to walk in his fucking boots. I smiled to myself, I had another ten minutes sleep before I had to get up for work.

In the living room was a large black dining table with round chrome legs, one evening, after a bit of herbal inspiration Jim decided that it would make a much better skinning up table if it was closer to the ground. He immediately got to work sawing the legs off, until the table was at the perfect height for squatting on the floor with. It was astonishing Jim didn’t cut one of his own limbs off, considering how stoned he was, but made rather a surprisingly good job of it.

The landlord would occasionally come round to check in resigned pathos on the deterioration of his property. He was stern looking man of Bangladeshi origin. I seemed to be unlucky in always being there when he came around,
“Do you live here?” He asked me.
“No.” I replied.
He looked me over for a moment, scratching his beard then frowned unconvinced. He then turned his attention to the dining table that was sat squat on the floor, covered in layers of beer cans, ashtrays and discarded pizza boxes.
“Is that MY table? He asked.
“Nope.” Said Jim.
“Oh. It looks like my table?”
“No, your table is taller.”
The landlord looked a bit confused, then remembered that he had come for rent, and got down to business. Jim handed over his and Shaun’s money, but informed the landlord Bateman and Charlie didn’t have their share. The landlord couldn’t hide his disappointment.
“Please, you must tell them to pay me, three months they owe me, legally there is little I can do, but they must pay me quickly, it is fair.”
I wondered why the landlord would do a daft thing like inform Jim the legal limitations of his tenancy agreement. He obviously thought Jim was a good boy who could be trusted. Little did he know.

That night the partying got out if hand. Jim got drunk and set fire to what remained of the landlord’s dining table,
“If those bastards aren’t paying him and he’s not going to do anything about it, then I’m not paying him either. Fuck that.” He said as black smoke filled the room.
After Bateman heroically burst in and put the fire out in his birthday suit, Jim and Andrew took the charcoaled table out into the back garden and made a bonfire with it.

A few days later the post-modern black dinning table had been replaced by a round antique table that would not have looked out of place in Austin Powers shag pit.
“Look,” Said Jim, “This is a great skinning up table, watch this… It revolves!”
He spun it round to prove his point and the laws of physics.
“When you’re really mashed and can’t be arsed to pass the joint around, you can just lay it in the ash tray, give the table a spin, and pass it on that way… it’s genius!”

I started sleeping in the small triangle shaped cupboard under the stairs. I found I could fit in there quite comfortably if I kept my legs bent. I was finally getting some decent sleep, but all the household craziness was coming to head. The lack of a woman’s touch in the all male house meant things were getting dirty and primeval, also the mammoth drug intake made every thing slightly surreal. Charlie for instance, had become addicted to Buckfast tonic wine, which was brewed by Benedictine monks in Devon. Buckfast had the ability to send the excessive drinker quite mad. Charlie called it fuckfast, it tasted like shit, so we’d neck it in rounds like a short. By the end of a nights drinking, it wouldn’t be unusual for someone to be sick, someone to have a fight, or some one to surf down the stairs on an ironing board. Jim meanwhile, had become as experimental with his cooking as he was with his carpentry. Jim’s recipe for Sunday Roast was; Lamb in the oven – skin up for three hours. I once found him in the kitchen frying a whole chicken in a pan marinating it in Stella Artois. This culinary delight was accompanied with a starter of Sangria on toast. The recipe of which consisted of dipping bread into a bowl of wine and then popping it into the toaster. This exploit managed to blow up the toaster and short-out all the downstairs electrics.

One day I had just taken a shower and was coming down the stairs wrapped in a towel. I could see Bateman at the front door talking to somebody outside, peeking over his shoulder I saw it was a TV license man, who was informing Bateman that there was a TV on in the house and that there was no license registered for this address. Bateman was telling him,
“I don’t live here mate.”
The license man looked into the house and saw me coming down the stairs.
“What about him?”
“He doesn’t live here either.”
Despite this being sort of true, the license man seemed unconvinced. He warned us he’d be back with a warrant, and as we’d refused his entry criminal action would be taken against us. He then spun on his heels and goose-stepped off like the Nazi he was. With the clear and present danger of the TV man and the landlord on our case, we realized we weren’t long left for this house. We decided to have a party. A big freaking party to end all parties, the last days of Rome.

We had a DJ that arrived with his roadie mate Matt, who helped set up the decks in the living room then said to me, “I’ve been up partying for three days solid, you got somewhere where I can go and grab forty winks mate?”
I told him that I didn’t live here, after which I told him about the pile of dirty old mattresses in the shed. “Pucker mate!” He said disappearing into the shed as the DJ started banging out loud house music. Word of the party had got around college and half of London, so a mob of revelers turned up and it kicked off big time. A couple of musicians set up in the corridor smoking shit and playing Bob Dylan songs on bongo’s and guitar. People were all over the house dancing, drinking and tripping. There was a serious smoking session going on in the conservatory, a haze of thick smog drifted outside to where people were in the garden drinking beer and falling over. The kitchen was getting suitably trashed with Charlie leading a liver busting, suicide mission drinking game. Shaun was making puke inducing cocktails out of Buckfast, vodka and coca cola. He named his invention the Devils Piss.

I found Jim out in the back garden completely shit-faced, he was looking up into his bedroom window. Someone was moving around up there.
“Oi! Who’s that bastard in my bedroom?” He shouted, “It’s Bateman, what’s he doing in my bedroom? Oi! Fuck off out my room, you cock knobber!”
With this he picked up a brick and smashed it through his bedroom window. Bateman’s head appeared a few moments later,
“Hey you fucking arse twatter, what the fuck are YOU doing, you almost fucking killed me, I’m just looking for fucking skins you fucking tit!”
With this he started throwing Jim’s clothes through the broken window. Jim went running upstairs looking for a fight. Things were getting really crazy. I sighed, it was going to be a long night.

The next morning there were bodies lying everywhere, scattered amongst the beer cans and dog ends, it looked the aftermath of an explosion in an Off License. All the windows were smashed, there were milk cartons stuck to the ceiling and kitchen knives embedded into the cupboard doors. Upstairs a naked dude was asleep in the bath tub, someone else had their head down the porcelain telephone. I surveyed the debris, no one else seemed to be alive. I went back to the kitchen to make a cuppa. Matt the roadie (who had arrived with the DJ) emerged from the shed,
“Thanks man, great party!” He said, even though he had slept through the whole thing. I found Jim skinning up in the conservatory, he’d been up all night. We looked over the wreckage in the back garden; the broken glass, the beer cans, the smoldering charcoaled furniture piled up in a heap.
“I think we’d better move out now.” He said.
Just then a man walked through the house, it was Nigel the stoner who had left his car in the drive all those months ago, Jim passed him the spliff, he took a toke, surveyed the scene with some detachment, then looked at me and asked.
“Hey man, where’s my car?”
I took a quick glance at Jamie, then said, “Um…”