Street Sadness

    Just now I began hearing the screams of a child I thought was having a tantrum downstairs. Then I heard the father shouting at it. The child kept screaming. It sounded about six-years-old. All of a sudden the father bellowed, "Shut yer fuckin' mouf!" The child kept screaming. And then the mother's voice began to wail also - a high pitched, desperate noise. There followed an indistinguishable background rumble of the father's anger. Something was smashed. I went to the window. The battle was taking place in the flats across from mine. The child's voice had now risen to an even higher level of hysteria. The father was yelling, out of control. And then, an ominous sudden silence. A few minutes later the mother began screaming. Something else smashed. The child's wordless, screaming voice sounded like a young trapped animal. It was a horrible sound that I hope never to hear again in my life. The mother yelled, "Give me my keys! I want my...

    I left Kennington tube station and started to walk back home. I saw a group of policemen standing around a tall, wiry young man in his early twenties. The boy's mother stood to the side holding onto a push chair in which sat a small girl, the boy's daughter, I assumed. The boy's hands were cuffed behind his back with black plastic strips. He was crying and rocking from foot to foot.     His mother said, "Well, I'll just take 'er 'ome then, will I?" He looked tearfully at her and  replied,  "Yes, Mum, take 'er back, will yer?" He started to cry again. I walked over and sat at the adjacent bus stop, the better to listen in, and to try to find out why he had been arrested. One of the policeman, a squat fat man with a beard, tightly gripped the boy's upper arm. A yellow-haired policewoman with a lifetime of spite etched into her hard little face decided to make things worse for the boy by saying,    "You've been very silly ...

    Couldn't sleep very well last night. I was awake till around 4.30 in the morning. The foxes were roaming the estate for many hours, clambering into the rubbish skips for their dinner. Their eerie yelps and barks sounded like a woman being strangled, or stabbed, out there in the dark. And at 3.30 there was a domestic row between a husband and wife right in the middle of the concourse below my open window. He wanted her to come back inside their flat. She was having none of it,  "Oh, fuck off back inside, you ANIMAL!" she screamed at him, "Oh yeah, yer a big tough man ain'tcha? Jus' fuck off and leave me alone. Didya fink I wouldn't know you went frew me purse, scroungin' for what yer could get? Fuck right off! You belong in a fuckin' PSYCHO ward, yer cunt!" I knelt at the window to watch them. She was hidden by the leaves of the big plane tree just below. He was drunkenly walking a wobbly figure eight on the tarmac with his head lowered ag...