No ball games, please

Magnolia is an evil colour. Whichever interior designer it was who first came up with the idea that it speaks of calming and soothing and reassuring and home should be shot in the knees until they dance.

Nine months ago, I covered this wall with three pairs of cats’ eyes in different shades of psychedelia, and talked to the unblinking stares of my feline friends through the night, until the sun made a feeble effort to infiltrate its way between the slits in the dark blue. These days, I murmur nonsense to Gustav Klimt’s dancer and Sarah Bernhardt in the early morning mist. It’s just regrettable that the dancer is strangely silent and that bloody Ms Bernhardt is a terrible conversationalist, despite her drama queen tendencies. Call yourself an actress?

The cats have moved in unison. They now reside in proud seclusion in a space behind my head, from where I can feel their unforgiving gaze boring through my cranium with a splintering chill.

At 4:48pm precisely - it was either half a day too early or half a day too late for proper psychosis, I couldn’t decide which - I suddenly felt the desperate urge to write. Tomorrow might be too late. Tomorrow I might be snowbound for months, strapped tight for my own safety into a white vehicle somewhere to the south-west of here. Tomorrow I might be elsewhere for longer than I care to think about, thirsting for words and sentences but without so much as a blunt pencil to scratch them out with. So it was at that moment that the status bar all too predictably chose not to co-operate. Crawl, crawl and crawl some more. We have errors, it stuttered in slothful suggestion. Database errors. You’re telling me, sunshine, you’re telling me.

This wall, you see. It’s this bloody wall. It’s never forgiven me for deciding to tell it not another whisper of my secrets. I have informed it time and time again that the days are gone when it was my sole confidant, my special one. I can speak with people now, I assert with an attempt at a confident air. I can associate. I talk to people, to real people. But I still have to make pieces with this wall, nonetheless.

Stay a while and - in words of such dumb and vacuous self-importance that I’ve only ever heard them spouted from between greying office ears in even greyer office cells - let’s throw some ideas at the wall and see what sticks.

I throw love. You throw lust. I throw hatred. You throw fear. I throw history. You throw future. No, we both throw the future. I can’t get enough of the shattering sound of its smithereens as it explodes against the smoothly painted surface that covers up such a brickwork catalogue of errors. Same for all ideas of revenge, no matter how much black-hearted pleasure they may give us. Throw it. Throw it and laugh, manically if need be. Smash, crackle and stop.

Sarah Bernhardt blinks, worried for her personal safety and her creamy unblemished skin. Klimt’s muse just stares on, her narrowed eyes and thin smile making clear exactly what she thinks of our childish behaviour.

I want to throw everything, everything and everyone, against this wall. Somehow, you’ve inspired me to irrational acts. One of these long winter nights when I don’t sleep, I may even throw you and see if you stick. Can you scare Sarah Bernhardt? Can you make Gustav’s Tanzerin break?