Sunday 25 November 2012

Chapter Thirteen - Tipp-Ex


‘I made you a cake but I dropped it on the floor’ Irene told her son.

‘It’s alright mum! The sandwiches are fine’ Frank said.

‘I bit my nails down too much and now they sting like vinegar in wounds!’ said Irene.

‘I do that too!’ exclaimed Lorrie. ‘I do it and I hate it and yet I do it again and again’

Irene and Lorrie show each other their scrappy little nails. They compare them. There isn’t much in it.

‘Who’s are worse?’ Lorrie asks Frank.

Frank looks at the spread out digits ahead of him.
Lorrie’s have bits of Tipp-Ex on them.

‘Why do your’s have Tipp-Ex on them? Frank asks her.

‘Because I temped in an office where I got so bored that I decided to coat my nails in Tipp-Ex. I Tipp-Exed the phone too, and the letters that spelt out my name on the computer keyboard that I used, I Tipp-Exed out the letters and drew smiley faces with fangs protruding from them instead. I don’t know why. I find that when I’m bored I often do things that I don’t really understand why it is I do them, but I guess it has something to do with being in a situation that makes you feel bored in the first place, because really it should be hard to feel bored, y’know, when there’s so much to learn about’

‘I get bored of myself’ Irene said.

‘That’s the truest sort of boredom’ Lorrie replied.

‘I get bored of what my body can’t cope with’ said Irene.
‘And then I get bored of the things it can cope with’
‘I got so bored of eating once that I gave it up for a while, and after a few days I got bored with that too, and then I ate lots to stop being bored of not eating, but then I bored of solids and so I only ate soup, and then I bored of soup and only ate squirty cream, and then eventually I go so bored of how erratic my diet was that I came round full circle and started to eat normally again’

‘I was bored of your dad too’ Irene said to her son
‘When he left me, I was bored of him as the man for me to love, and as the man who should have stimulated my senses, but I wasn’t yet bored of him as the man I could call my husband - that, I was scared of losing, I was scared of not being in a boring marriage, because at least it was a marriage, regardless of its description, but then sometimes you understand why it’s good to feel so bored sometimes, because that feeling should make you find what it is that makes you feel less so, what rids you completely of it, and today I did just that, I expelled boredom from my life'

'How?' Frank asked his mum.

'I fell in love' She smiled.

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