Free Double Talk by Patrick Warner

mostly silent objects that rang with a fearsome jangle, and rarely for me. But this red phone was something else again: smooth and curved, light in the hand, it beckoned to me through the long dark evenings. At first, I wasn’t even sure how to use it. There seemed no way to dial it until I discovered twelve buttons clustered in the hammock between the earpiece and the mouth piece. White and small as milk teeth, each button glowed green around its edges and gave off a musical note when pressed.
    Loneliness lived in the house as a series of creaks. She hovered on the stairs, worried the floorboard outside my bedroom door until it gave out a slow, high-pitched squeak. Sometimes, on bad nights, she lived in the radiator pipes as a rhythmic knocking. I would lie in bed, under a weight of blankets, imagining I was trapped in a mine and those distant knocking sounds were the efforts of family and friends, with picks and shovels, trying to tunnel in.
    Keeping busy helped. I became fanatical about getting my university assignments in on time. I maintained a B-minus average, which I was pleased with, having only pulled off four borderline honours in the Irish Leaving Cert exams. There was also plenty of work around the house. In late November, I prised open the cans of off-white paint Wallace had stacked in the hall and began to attack, with a vengeance, the paint job left by the previous tenant, an old lady. She had painted the walls all through the house in bright high-gloss oils: the living room gold, the dining room lilac, the hallway silver and the kitchen a fire engine red. She had then taken a turkey wing and, dipping its tip in metallic paint, proceeded to daub a feather pattern all over the already brilliant base coat: silver on gold, gold on silver, red over lilac and black over red. The brothel, Darcy called it.
    And how those marks resisted paint; it didn’t seem to matter how many times I rolled over them, the colours and patterns still bled through.
    â€œDid you prime it?” asked Wallace.
    â€œShould I have?”
    â€œWell, you’re painting latex over oil. You need to prime it first.” And all along I had thought he had just bought cheap paint. It still took five coats to cover the walls in the living and dining rooms, and six to cover the hall. Even so, forever after, when the late evening sun flooded those rooms, feather marks were still visible. They were like obscene moles, indelible birthmarks.
    If an empty house in Newfoundland became our meeting place, it was marijuana that animated my courtship with loneliness. Wallace and Geoff kept a quarter-pound bag of it in the basement deep-freezer. More and more often I found myself dipping in. There were roaches and half-joints all over the house; I rarely had to walk more than a few yards to top up my high. I practiced my rolling: one skin, one skin rolled with one hand, three skins, five skins, six skins. And then I perfected “the pipeline” — an eighteen-skin masterpiece that would win me acclaim with Keppie and the gang in the months to come. Grass did not make loneliness disappear, but it made her easier to be with, gave her a form and sometimes a voice. She spoke to me in low whispers. And sometimes, late at night, when she creaked outside my bedroom door, I would draw back the covers and call her to come in.
    More often, though, she came to me as something more poetic, as a kind of ennui. I would stand in the upstairs bay window of my new home, gazing out over the bare trees of Victoria Park and remembering how it had been in the last few months before I left Bridgetown. With most of my friends having already made good their escape, I had little reason to go into town. Instead, I began to take long walks by myself, visiting those places where I used to go to be alone. I wanted not so much to see my favourite haunts one last time, as to gather something of their textures. I would stop and run my hand over the rust that