Pepper doesn't make you sneeze. It's a lie. I was grinding pepper tonight, making dinner for the lot of us, and it suddenly occurred to me... the whole set-up is one great big lie. One stripey, stinking lie. Massive, out in the open, - acknowledged, even...
It's like Santa Claus. It's Punch And Judy, or not slipping on a banana skin. Our society is a delicately interwoven fabric of lies, meshing like cogs, turning slowly to make normality occur
Beneath our feet, as the lasagne cooled on our plates, the detritus of a middle class dinner party accumulated. Bitten-off fingernails mingled with small shreds of accidental lettuce; not the common sort - we had the posh stuff that comes in small plastic bags and is bleached into submission somewhere between the field and the supermarket. Except even that's common now; everyone can have everything they want. And to think that we feared the red menace so long ago; don't we see that the future is nothing to fear, whatever colour we brand it?
He was there, and I watched him. His fingers, mostly. They seemed to sneak into my mind as I ate, and I tried so hard to concentrate on the dinner-time chat, the discussion of Susan's daughter's clarinet lessons, and how her three year-old, left for the first time ever with a babysitter (god, how did they cope?), was clearly a genius in the form of an infant.
"Reminds you of that ABBA song," I said loudly at around half past eleven. Five faces turned to look at me. "I'm nothing special," I said. "In fact I'm a bit of a bore. But do go on."
This middle class veneer is a lie. And to think that a single drunken slur could break me out of this mahogany cocoon. I'm stuck, lying here in the dark with only the glow of a monitor to remind me that the world exists. They're still laughing next door, thinking I'm in some kind of sulk. A thirty-four-year-old-man-sulk. I heard her apologise for me as they moved onto a seventh bottle of wine, and felt bad. Not very bad, but enough to wish I had more wine.
It's all a lie. My life, and theirs. Society is built on lies, and we propagate them constantly. More wine - it's the only way to li(v)e.
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