The square Mr Ducksworth

17Feb08

Mr Ducksworth and I stay up late into the night, until we complain of eyelids scraping sandpaper sounds with tiredness. We hold philosophical and existential conversations. I prop my head up with a fist when Mr Ducksworth gets too intense with his side of the talk. He is always, always sitting up, back rod-straight, mouth pulled downwards into a grimace of intelligence and heavy thoughts.

These late nights often have me throwing myself back against the pillows with expulsive sighs of exasperation. Sometimes I miss and hit my head off the wall, sometimes the radiator behind the bed with a clang of hollow painted-white metal and hurt. He ties me up with sturdy chains of sense and logic, and in attempting to escape I tangle them tighter around my wrists and neck and feet with my skewered, feeble dental-floss excuse for a counter-argument.

From this lower angle of frustration, his mouth looks happier. Occasionally I zone out on what he’s saying, and fixate on his mouth as slide my head further up the pillow, and then back down. A sliding scale of happiness in the contours of a mouth, a practice in perspective.

If I think too deeply into what he’s saying, his conservatism gets me. He is the epitome of square. I say sometimes, after he’s ripped my dental-floss excuse for a counter-argument to little shreds, and with self-important courtesy untangled his sturdy chains of sense and logic from my limbs, yes, even from between my toes where they catch the softest, most tender skin on my body, I say, Mr Ducksworth, you square. Because I can’t think of anything witty and non-conservative and non-square to say back to him to wipe the gravity from his face, yellow-tinted with tiredness and something else not quite human.

(On a bad day, or with too many lights switched on in the room, he appears distinctly furry.)

Sometimes I don’t even say that, and simply laugh at the odd orange and yellow speckled lacy thing he has wrapped round his neck, tied in a little bow. Who’re you wrapped up so pretty for? I tease. Most times with this, at least, I get a scowl out of him.

I suspect he does not fully grasp the concept of square.

Filed under: Uncategorized   |