Feel As Good As The Skin You're (Sleeping) In!

I was supposed to be staying at a friends house in East London but met a nice girl at a party. When she asked if I wanted to come back to the flat that she had just moved into she did warn me that it was a bit of a mess. I wrongly assumed that she was being a typical girl and that they'd just be a few towels left lying about on the floor or the odd bit of lingerie sticking out of a laundry basket. How wrong i was! We ended up walking for what seemed like miles through the grimy streets to what looked like East Londons version of The Projects. I was led up a darkly lit flight of stairs that were strewn with litter and stank of dank, stale piss into a run down flat that could quite easily have been kindly described as a squat. She lived with two other people who, thankfully, I didn't meet but I knew that I had made a bad mistake when I went into the toilet to take a piss and noticed that inhabitants had been wiping their arses with week old copies of The Metro. Perhaps I should have left then but horniness and, after feeling incredibly lucking for having avoided being gang smashed in downtown east London, self preservation took over, so I went into her bedroom. Talk about out of the frying pan and into the fire! Her room was an even bigger dump then the shambles of a flat that preceeded it. There was a single mastress strewn in the corner, old clothes all over the floor and an empty Fray Bentos pie can laying next to the bed. Worst still was that there were clearly visible racist slogans dawbed all over the walls in big black writing against a bright red wall that had been hastily painted over with one coat of white paint. As i stood looking aghast at C18, Niggers Die!, Buddhas F*ck Off, Pakis Burn etc etc the girl could see I was a bit shocked and said 'Oh I've been meaning to paint over that again!'. I looked at her bemusedly and said 'Yeah, it probably needs another coat or two.' Once again I considered making a dash for it but i had no idea where my mate lived and he had turned his phone off, probably out of spite because I had ditched him, and I didn't fancy walking the streets of Hackney or where ever I was at 3 in the morning, so i took the English stiff upper lip decision and decided to grin and bear it. I turned off the light and tried to block out the mess surrounding me, the orange glow of the street lights shone through the single bed sheet draped shodilly over the window and guided my way through the unholy mess camouflaging the carpet. I lay down on the bed with her on the bare mattress, quickly realising that the sheets had been sacrificed for window coverings. Now you'd really think that that complete horrow show would have put me right off my stride but when faced with triffling moral dillemas such as that I like to revert to the 'When in Rome' theory and throw all caution to the wind, so I started to get down to the inevitable nitty gritty with her. A couple minutes in i noticed she was scratching her arms with increased ferocity. The sheetless mattress was pretty itchy on the skin but this was beyond a joke. I asked her if she was alright and it was then that she told me she had a serious ezcema problem and the horrific, colouring filled Barcadi Breezer drinks she had stupidly insisted I bought for the walk home had set her skin off in a nasty itchy reaction. Well that was the final straw! There's only so much a man take. Only so many hideous faults he can overlook before he decides enough is enough! Wiping your arse with a news rag I can take, living in a complete tip of a flat in a derelict part of London I can just about accept. Hey, I was even willing to ignore the Nazi-esque scribblings on her bedroom wall but i'm afraid i have to draw the line at a woman frantically scratching herself to bits during sex making all because she was f*cking dumb enough to drink 4 bottles of multi coloured piss water which she must have realised would set off her advanced leperocy. With that I pulled on all my clothes and summoned up enough strength through the resentment to just about make a half hearted 'are you alright' noise and left the room telling her that i'd get her a drink of water. In the equally filthy kitchen I turned on the tap and let it run to try and disguise the noise of me desperately ringing my mate to try and get a reprieve from the horrible fate that had once again found me. No answer. After leaving a hushed but despairing distress call on my so-called friends voicemail I slowly resigned myself to the fact that i was hopelessly alone and was going to have to spend the night in this tramps hovel. There didn't seem to be any cups in the kitchen except a handleless mug and a Dolmio jar, with its label wet and faded. After checking with the increasingly irritating girl I was told that the sauce jar was hers and that they hadn't got around to buying any glasses yet. Considering that they hadn't got around to buying toilet roll, curtains, furniture or anything else of any discernible value i can't say that this came as much of a shock to me. I filled it from the browning taps and skulked back into her room before passing it to the doe-eyed vacuous bint looking up at me, who was desperately trying to act all feeble and lady like amongst the shitty mess that surrounded her. As she bleated a pathetic 'Aw thanks, Babe' i realised that i now hated her but would have to hide this best as possible if I was going to make it until morning. Thinking ahead, I told her i had to be up really early and turned the light off again, stumbled towards the bed and lay on it fully clothed with my back to her, my arms folded, fruitlessly trying to block out the sound of her scratching and the thought of her flakey dead skin all over the bed. Tired and feeling sleepy from that nights drinking I shut my eyes and prayed for sleep to take me. When I awoke the sunlight was peering through the bed sheet. I looked at my phone, it was only half six in the morning but I knew this would be the best time to make my escape. Hopefully she wouldn't hear me and the streets would be relatively safe now that it was daylight. Whilst I hurriedly put on my trainers I noticed the girls red raw arms laying ontop of the duvet and the grim dusting of white skin flakes against the dark blue cover like eerie stars in the night sky. I looked down at the black sleeves on my jacket. They were covered in skin flakes too. Feeling repulsed, I crept out of the room. As soon as I reached the front door I started to pull off my jacket. Once outside and with the door quietly closed behind me, I gave it a damned good trashing against the wall in an attempt to remove all the sickening skin crust and ran for my life through the streets to try and flag down the next passing taxi to take me all the way back to Paddington. As i sat on the train back to Reading feeling positively dirty and having severe difficulty eating my M&S Breakfast sandwich for thoughts of the leper skin i was no doubt encrusted with, I got a message on my phone, it read; Had a really fun time wit you last night. Sorry you had to leave early. Thanks for bein so cool bout my xma. Wanna meet again soon? Needless to say I didn't reply and spent the rest of the journey looking out the train window at the fields whistling past wondering why these terrible things always happen to me. She sent me a few desperate messages on facebook, the last of which said, and I quote 'Is this not the dude who drank barcardi breezers with me in our secret garden...?' By secret garden she means rundown, needle filled park next to her dodgy block of flats where we sat and drank the grim booze while I chained smoked and waited to get gang smashed. Perhaps I should have mentioned that bit in the story because we were nearly attacked by an overly tame fox and she nearly got me into a fight with a group of lads who asked for a cigarette. I've just looked at her photo again now and she wasn't nearly half as good looking as i remember. For shame! She said she was a promotions girl but the only thing I'd employ her to promote would be massive f*cking tubs of calamine lotion.