Talk to the wall

I really should be tending to the plate of chicken chow mein congealing in front of me but I just can’t keep my eyes off the woman a couple of tables down. I try to force my gaze back to my paperback and my fork to my food, but it’s no use. Her forehead has captured me and I am trapped, transfixed and mesmerised by its silent Siren song.

I really only came down to the refectory for a change of scene and a yoghurt. Don’t get me wrong; my new office is very fine and I have a grand view from the sliding full height glass door on the third floor. If I put a foot onto the forbidden balcony and swivel my neck to the left as far as it will possibly go I can even glimpse the park that lies beyond the utilitarian yellow bricked halls of residence. But a person can only take so much solitary reading on a spiny flocked charcoal chair and I’m in need of a break.

The woman is in earnest expressive conversation with a companion sitting opposite. Or rather, most of her is. Her forehead doesn’t budge even as her arms gesticulate and her mouth mouths words that I can’t quite hear. She is certainly striking, dressed completely in black and with an impressive bouffant of wild curly hair that elevates her height by a good ten inches. From her skin tone, her lips, the slight impression of jowls just starting to melt from her jaw line, I estimate that she is maybe in her mid fifties. Except for her forehead, which, shiny and smoothly isolated in its own age zone, is just beginning to breech its early twenties.

Perhaps sensing me looking, she glances up at me and I see her eyes scan my face for a seed of recognition. I smile back, hoping that she’ll attribute my not-quite eye contact for a lazy eye or similar optical malady. Failing to find a flicker of familiarity in my face, most of her face frowns a little and she turns back to her companion. I shovel a mouthful of cold noodles and take a swig from my bottle of Diet Coke and it reminds me of that long-running tag line for fizzy orange Tango: “You know when you’ve been Tangoed”. Except in this case, I think, “You know when you’ve been Botoxed.”

I’m feeling restless so decide to mix it up a bit by taking a different flight of stairs back up to my office. To distract my mind from the effort of hauling my overly full self up the endless grey treads, I count the stairs. Six half flights of gleaming black-edged tiles with a turning point landing at each juncture, one facing into the building and one facing the modernistic gable end of occluded glass and exposed brick wall. I count, and then re-count. Eleven steps per half flight, sixty six to the top. How strange; if one uses the wider and grander main flight in the centre of the building there are seventy two to reach the same destination.

Back at my desk once more I peel three blood oranges and read the newspaper online. Snatches of dialogue from the training course running in the meeting room opposite waft in from the corridor. A crow caws noisily outside. I check my mobile phone to see if it’s home time yet. It has been something of a quiet news day I think.

I took this photo of the 'talking wallpaper' in the refectory on my mobile phone.