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?