Look at me, sitting here, drowned in self-pity and physical misery. Champagne and whisky, mistaken bedfellows. Foolish intemperance.

There is a rapping on my brain, a drumming in my skull, a deadening of my lobes. Poisoned by glut, this is the revenge, the unfinished business.

Stiff decorum, starched collar moistened and sweetened by sweat. I am tightly cuffed, reined in. Would like to be naked and float in water like a baby.

My resting belly flab is cut by my tailored vanity.
Should try to lower the weight, but not quite in dire straits yet. Or maybe admit I’m not what I used to be, and get some larger trousers.
I don’t want to be like him though, stomach desperate to escape his heavily pregnant skin.

He looks at me, but I know he isn’t looking. He won’t look unless I talk or move.
He keeps his paintbrushes in a god-awful condition. He bends the bristles to inspect them, and they snap with congealed paint.
His face is bristled too and his hair drags on his scalp like a wildman. He brushes it away from his face and his fingers unwittingly paint it white, going this way and that, a tangled bush of hidden colours and dandruff. Brows splay on his face like hairy moths sinking those staring eyes, sullen in dense flesh.

The woody oil paint and stench of turpentine and polish sterilise the air and drift its toxin into my nauseous stomach. Breakfast was a mistake. Eggy toast nestles into the acidic mess of my insides.

Shafts of light slice through the dreary dulled greys of this silent place, dancing dust, blinding. It’s drizzling. Speckles of water dim the window. Umbrellas and suits. That’s all this city has to offer. Umbrellas and suits, grey paving and confused weather.

Slick wet daubing of the canvas, he creates my form. This wildman is making me. Clinking dilution of paintbrushes in a glass of turpentine. Deafening to my fragile head. His nails furrow into his scalp as he considers. Scratching his head, aiding the processes in his big skull. What is he seeing? When he looks without looking. The contours of my shape, the intricacies of material and dull tone.

He looks like my mother did, but the Neanderthal version. His corpulent bloated body greatly resembles hers. Stuffed breasts and stomach, parched skin and rough, mean eyes. How amusing! A throaty laugh escapes my lips and surprises me and him, who looks. Actually looking. He raises a moth-like brow and his beardy mouth parts as if about to speak. No, get back to your work. Don’t fool about with pleasantries, we will just feel awkward. You are here to paint and I am here to sit. I sit here and you stand there racketing with your colours. I see you are mixing, on your makeshift newspaper palette. Flat green, murky grey, stifling egg-blue.

These are my colours, self-respecting colours of muted sophistication. He looks like my mother, it is blatant to me now.

Crystal decanter on the sill. Do not want to see it. Of course my eyes are most drawn to that I do not wish to see. Catching rainbows, gaudy tints bestowed by the sun. Moody whiskey glows. Certainly a fickle friendship. My eyes burn at the light, at wretched odds with the gloomy room.

I rest my sight on more accommodating subjects; subjects for looking at and talking about with faux knowledge, certainly not for reading. Throbbing volumes, bursting the bookcase, dusty hard spines climbing to the ceiling and shadowing the floor. One at the end is drunkenly unbalanced, a stark oddity.

Scarlet, blues, blacks and yellows but all dampened with filth and age, decaying gold bindings.

An impressive collection. One to be proud of, robust with classical writings. The pretensions of my intellect displayed, my brain unfolded throughout the room. A perfect, precisely chosen manifestation. Alphabetised and categorised, naturally. I am dressed in excellence.

The stiffened books are an inanimate echo of my contrived form, aching with postural discontent and a night of abuse. My hairy Neanderthal mother is oblivious to my morning tenderness, as I dutifully retain my pose and he dutifully paints.

Mix, look, mix, dilute, clink, look, paint, ponder. Repeat. Artistic monotony.

How my darling painter can see through that hairy flesh escapes me. He spends so much time looking at others and perhaps none looking at himself. Well I have to look at him. He looks as if he never sleeps, heavy folds of skin slumped over his cheeks. His mind is focused by activity, mine by inactivity. The lucidity of last night, the fire in my throat has been drenched in sweat and the drizzling daytime.

I woke up in a strange place. This morning I woke in a blurred mystery. It was the same of course, the same place. My room that I have woken up in every day for thirty years. But I no longer knew it for those few, precious last seconds of lost slumber.

Does he wake up with lines, tone and paint in his eyes? Is it in the endless mixing of colours that he is himself? I will find myself again tonight in a glass of champagne and the pensive tones of a chamber choir.

For now my tongue is rough and thick and I can taste the bitter morning.

Scratching, slapping paint, I am immortalised by this medium. I feel a smile faintly flicker around my lips. I will sit on this chair long after I am gone. My ancestors will imagine me in a seated position and this is the only image that will draw to their minds when I am referred to. Sitting in this chair, chastened by whiskey, encased in smart, ordered formality.