The crackling could be another Indiana mouse, hacking its way through the jungle of candy wrappers and empty chip packets that line the wastepaper basket.  By day they are confined to the dingy alleyways between the cupboard and the wall, and they scurry between cavities deep within the mounds of unwashed socks and scrunched-up plastic bags that are littered in post-apocalyptic chaos around the room.  At night though, they roam free in the dark streets paved in hair and crumbs of paper.  The carpet is an unsteady landscape, broad and dangerous, promising adventure and uncertainty.  Ravaged by age and abuse, its face is pockmarked by chair leg indentations, painted in whorish coffee-coloured stains and cosmetic bleaches, trampled by kings and ants alike.  The desk, pushed unceremoniously against the wall, is a leaky prison, the drawers pulled out at different levels like the convoluted steps of a pyramid, and the paper villains they hold are escaping through the cracks.  Atop, a lamp groans in its bondage, tethered to the wall for years and draped in socks and graffiti.  What mockery; it stares disconsolately at the wasteland, a no-man’s land.  Beside it there are a jumble of folders, pencils, books, paper, earrings, a small ceramic tiger, two glasses cases, tubes of face cream, pens, a hole puncher, broken keyrings, a stapler, a cassette tape, the grey bits of things that come off when erasing something.  A roll of stickytape scales down the side of the desk, yo-yoing dangerously close to the carpet.  Next to the desk, vines of cables snake around each other, twisting in complicated figure-eights like salacious serpents lasciviously lusting for turns at the plug point adapter.  They corkscrew up the chair legs, and snake around the wheels of the off-white portable heater, their lecherous promiscuity the disgust of the rest of the room, but they throw leering looks and promise silence, and the mice take pleasure in getting entangled in their contortions.
             The bed, surprisingly, is the least wanton in its reputation.  It lies amongst pillows and crumpled linen, wise and silent.  The cables eye it lustfully, the mice dream of scampering across the blue and white cotton, leaving trails of excrement to flag the land as their own.  But the bed never says a word, and it keeps its legs closed.  Around it are scattered corpses of those which tried to claim it – a broken watch, a button, a rubber band, a plastic bottle.
             The yellowing walls loom over the proceedings, scarred in war by scuff marks and drilled holes.  The posters that line them make the room seem smaller, though arranged in a colourful display of symmetry and glossiness.  A corner of Nelly flails and droops, unable to keep up the cheerful spirit its surface propagates.  Beneath, more scuffs and bluetack marks, tattooed on plaster skin lest it forgets the past generations that lived and died in this place.