Think of all the phrases that worry you, that stop you in your tracks when you hear them, make you raise an eyebrow involuntarily, cause the hairs on the back of your neck to twitch, not yet having decided whether they should stand-on-end, or simply at half-mast. We’ve all experienced that dread, the sinking stomach moment when somebody says, ‘I want to be honest with you.’ Or perhaps they whispered, ‘There is something you need to know.’ Can any good come from such a beginning? Experience says no. In fairness, very few of the people who begin conversations this way have your best interests at heart. In fact, anybody who strikes up a conversation this way immediately falls into the enemy camp.
Remember, a friend, on discovering that you reek to the heavens will give you a warm embrace, then stand back and say, “Oh my God! You stink.” An enemy will sneak up on you, and in the guise of friendship will say, “This may sound personal, but…” They will then proceed to ask a million questions about your hygiene routine, your living quarters, your access to running water, soap, shampoo, and an underarm razor. All the time, as you wilt before their eyes, they shall maintain the veneer of caring, a rather diluted smile, one which conveys pity and superiority in equal measures. There is no point explaining that you have just come straight from a 24-hour rave, that the smelly rag which causes them offence has been signed by every member of your favorite band, and that you plan to frame it before falling into bed and sleeping for a week. No matter what you say, this kind of friend will twist your words and will hear only a groveling excuse, while you are not excusing yourself, but celebrating a really good time. Most people are too polite to tell this kind of friend that they do not need their advice on any subject, most fail to immediately turn the tables by giving them a Google map, with directions as to where they can stick their advice, and the majority are, certainly, far too nice to be ‘honest’ right back at them.
However, there are real friendships which can stand the most brutal levels of honesty. But even so, there are marginal calls in certain areas of your life. Take for example the fact that a friend of mine recently gave me a tin of paint. I will admit that this was probably my own fault, one should never boast about cobwebs in your bedroom, or cracks in the wall, which become canyons as they approach the ceiling, at least, not to an interior designer. Hints about mold on the window frames should never be sprinkled before such a person, and never brag about sections of bare plaster on the wall, where minor repairs had previously been attempted but not painted over. If only I had taken my own advice and not rambled on to my interior designer friend, exaggerating my woes as I went along; after all, what harm was there in inflating the truth about such dilapidation if it passed a pleasant few minutes? There was nothing I could do about the situation after all, the room was not mine, nor was the house. I was merely a guest in my mother’s home. Making any modifications would have been interpreted as interference, perhaps even elder abuse by family or friends, or so I persuaded myself.
However, my perverse boasting about the decrepitude of my bedroom backfired and I learned that one should never mess with an interior designer. The next time we met for coffee I was presented with a free tin of paint. It was a put-up-or-shut-up, checkmate move. Her smile declared victory. I had been outmaneuvered, protests about the price of paint were pointless, this was a miss-tint, practically given away to my friend. Demonstration was futile, the paint was mine.
Driving home, tin in the back of the car, I remembered my first attempts at painting a windowsill. My family is more artistic leaning than practical, which explains why my mother chose me to do her small, interior decorating job. As a 12-year-old boy, my ignorance about house maintenance was complete. Decorating was a foreign continent. As far as I was aware, paint came in rectangular boxes, brushes were tiny, and cleaning fluids came from the kitchen tap. The commission to paint windowsills was well beyond my ken. But there was something about the idea which appealed, so I picked up the tiny tin of paint, a half-inch brush, and sought out the landing windowsill.
I don’t know what you make of dream sequences in films. Most, it seems to me, do not work. They are too contrived, more about the director than the story. The 1970s, in particular, was a dreadful era for the dream sequence in movies. Every feature film, it seemed, had long, unnecessary segues into the world of psychedelic acid tripping. Though most people were not interested in recurrent nightmarish LSD journeys, every Hollywood director was forcing us to join him on one. There were some directors who successfully investigated the landscape of dreams, Bergman for one, but most of these sequences are best forgotten.
The thing about dreams, is that they are more nonsensical than psychedelic. And whether they frighten you, or simply cause you to scratch your head in confusion, they have their own language, one which only rarely makes its way into the waking world. My first painting commission, however, seemed to break through this barrier and caused me to inhabit a waking-dream for a full afternoon. The whole event, even as it happened, had that sense of otherness, that sense of being outside your own body, of watching yourself as the nightmare unfolds. It was a Myles Na Gopaleen, surreal world, in which I found myself trapped, with no hope of escape. It was a sealed universe, one of wrinkling gloss paints, made terrifying by custard-like skins which formed even as the fresh liquid was carefully applied to the wooden surface.
To this day the smell of gloss paint causes flashbacks to that endless afternoon of chemical torture. Like Alice stumbling into a bizarre, parallel universe, I landed in a territory so strange, with rules so complex as to confound anyone except a professional painter. It is an odd thought that everyone believes painting is a simple craft, and while few would ever think of plumbing-up a shower, most people think that even a 12-year-old can paint a windowsill. The fact is, they cannot. They have no training, no understanding of paint – a world of chemical compounds, far more complex than most people realize. Gloss paint, in particular, must be treated with respect. If not understood and given due deference, it will misbehave as it did with me. It is essential that you put down an undercoat before applying the paint. But what did I know of undercoats back then? You’ve guessed it. And any of you who have ever approached a windowsill and failed to apply an undercoat know what I mean. It can be a harrowing lesson to learn.
You see, gloss paint readily allows itself to be applied to any surface. However, it does have phobias you need to be aware of. It has intimacy issues when it comes to other glossed surfaces – rather like magnetic fields, where opposites charges attract and identical ones repel. Painting gloss onto gloss is like attempting to force the North pole of two magnets together, it is not going to happen. In fact, in the case of gloss-on-gloss, the topcoat tries to escape friendly contact by shrinking away from the surface beneath it. It wrinkles on contact, practically screaming for help.
I was unaware of all of this as I faced into the job. To begin with, there was the challenge of opening the microscopic tin of gloss, which was followed by the pleasure of stirring up the separated liquids and of enjoying that first whiff of oil-based paint. Then it was time to dip the brush into the pungent liquid. Soon afterwards came the excitement of that first stroke, the concentrated, tight-lipped intensity of a boy trying to avoid painting every surface in sight. There were drips of course, but nothing major, and after what seemed like an eternity, I stood back from my first painted windowsill and viewed the shiny, silky surface with all the pride of a Michelangelo contemplating the finished Sistine chapel.
Then it was onto the next room, and the one after that. Finishing my third and final windowsill, hunger called me to the kitchen. However, my gallop towards the food source was interrupted by what I discovered on the landing. My first windowsill, after seemingly accepting all the paint applied to it, had gone rogue and was counter attacking. The fresh paint looked like a rubber mask, desperately pulling itself away from the paint beneath. There are week old custards that I’ve seen looking less wrinkled than that windowsill. My twelve-year-old self did what every 12-year-old would do when faced with such a situation, he spent a few seconds smoothing out the surface before heading off for a well-earned lunch.
After stuffing myself with whatever edibles I could unearth in the fridge, I returned to learn that a serious paint problem had escalated in my absence. My morning’s work was a disaster. All the sills had followed the first one’s lead and were taking the aged-skin-look a little too far for my liking. So, I spent one of the longest afternoons of my life in a Kafkaesque world, running from window to window, ironing out wrinkles which had no intention of disappearing. I do not remember when I became worn down enough to bow to the inevitable but bow I did. It would be years before someone explained undercoats to me and why disaster struck. In that pre-Google universe, libraries, not YouTube, held the answers to our most pressing questions.
One thing is certain, there was a loss of innocence that day, a threshold was crossed, leaving emotional scars behind. It took many years for the Post Traumatic Stress to diminish enough so that I could open a tin of paint without feelings of foreboding overwhelming me. And now, years later, there was a tin of paint in the boot of the car demanding I face my old demons once again and get down to some serious, surface preparation. My mother raised no objections to my painting the room, so age abuse was no longer an excuse I could hide behind. The paint was applied to the walls of the bedroom, leaving not a wrinkle in sight. The place now looks more glamourous than derelict and I suffered only a few nightmares during the whole process, one I do not want to repeat any time soon.
The lesson learned, though, is that ‘loose tongues’ do more than ‘sink ships,’ they can also cause bedrooms to be painted. But still, there are very few friends who can give me a tin of paint and not mean it as an insult. There are fewer still I would take it from.
There will be a podcast to follow when my voice has recovered after a recent Covid infection.
