Wednesday 2 March 2011

Fifty Five


There’s a house and it’s a squalid mess: can you picture this scene? An assortment of bits and pieces strewn over what may or not be a floor. I’m not sure, it’s too carpeted with dead batteries and burnt out pens to tell. Later, it would transpire that this was the Schrodinger’s cat of floors: neither here nor there until somebody got rid of all the rubbish.

Anyway, needless to say, this is a proper messy house. It’s a proper messy house and in amongst all the proper mess is an improper little madam, surrounded on all sides by towering cardboard, newspapers and junk mail. It’s like she’s been there for a hundred years and all the rubbish has built up around her. She sits and tappa tappa types on her keyboard.

(Incidentally, tappa tappa typing on your keyboard for years at a time is an excellent way to erase your fingerprints).

And maybe it’s a careless nudge or a wild animal, but either way the tower of newspapers topples over. She jumps; sliding back on a stray Duracell and knocking over the desk, setting off a Heath Robinson contraption of motion. A stray pen flies into a precariously balanced toy car, which rolls down a pile of books and into a bottle of exceptionally old Evian. Which tips, spilling into a cold cup of tea that overflows down the sideboard to the running toaster on the floor. Which sparks, sets alight and thankfully only burns the closed manmade curtains to a crisp, the lethargic (but quick thinking) girl having summarily smothered the blaze in a damp towel she had to hand.

Through the smouldering smoke and her coughing she stops, bewildered. She sees, for the first time in a long time, the light outside.

No comments:

Post a Comment