The room was his sanctuary, his separation from the world around him. The angry painful sound of Nick Cave’s “Loverman” permeates the sacred space. A skeleton bare record player salvaged from a yard sale crackles out scratched vinyls of Nomi, Bowie, Doors, Tom Waits, or even Pink Floyd when he was in a less dark mood, which did not happen all too often. Newspaper scraps fetched out the “Evening Standard” sprayed with big tags in bright red krylon, racked from the “old man’s “ colour shop on main street adorn the walls covering up the unbearable white walls of his parental home. A ravaged red kitchen chair nailed onto the ceiling in a furious fit after another angry brawl with his father swayed as a symbol of defiance in the centre of his abode threatening to come crashing down any given moment.
There was no bed any longer, it was broken into pieces, dismantled, thrown out and replaced by a bare mattress on which he spent most of his afternoons after school smoking joints, dreaming or listening to dark tunes over and over and over again. He could not endure the silence of an empty room, the same deafening silence he encountered every time he had dared to raise a question, dared to stand up to his parents, dared to raise a protest. His mother just turned around, walked away. His father yelled at him with his loud thunderous voice to get out of his sight. He had given up fighting, closed off the world outside his room and let his mind carry him away by sounds of despair and rebellions of darkness.