The place we lived in smelled musty and damp. The wallpaper, yellowed to parchment, curled up at the corners: it would have been bleached plain, but for the streaks of mould spreading from the wall with the leaking pipe. Here and there, his ideas were scribbled on the wall itself; spiders snaking out from the dingy corner that was the centre of his creative activity. The ideas would clamour into his head, you see, clogging his mind like a blocked drain. He couldn’t proceed unless he purged his congested brain by noting down the next twist in his plot or perfectly crafted sentence. Flecking his jottings with colour from her ferocious painting, she sat underneath the mould patches absorbed in her latest masterpiece, twig-like fingers curled around her spindly paintbrush; the expression on her face intense. Her paintings had degenerated since we had been here, from unremarkable landscapes to contorted, grimacing figures. Both were attempting to convey deep political truths through their art; self-styled renegades flouting the Rules by creating works of genius.
To be frank, all I saw was the effort in their work, which, cancelled out any genius. Too laborious. They always were pretentious. But then again, in the endeavour to leave a small trace of yourself upon this perpetually changing world you inhabit for such an infinitesimal moment… perhaps therein lies some success. Perhaps the audacity to try balances out the mediocrity of the work produced.
But what do I know? I did not join in with their furious, flurried activity. I sat there on the festering armchair next to the rotting table and solitary candle; watching them in its flickering light.
***
You do not have to say anything. But it may
“Are you still there?”
“Yes.”
“Still watching?”
“Yes.”
“You could have a go if you like.”
“No. Thank you.”
***
I continued to observe them: her tongue peeping out of the corner of her mouth, a shy animal watching as she shaded the pivotal part of her picture. The centimetre its entire success rested on. The picture that actually looked the same as every picture she’d ever done. Towards the end her fingers shook with cold, her frail body hunched, to offer her Frankenstein-like creation some semblance of warmth. Her cheeks were grey as her painting, as the clouds outside. On clearer days she could see the mundanity of her work, and her heart-deep self-loathing meant days of morose moping. It was my job to drag her out of these states, though I didn’t mind – that way, I had a function. I liked looking at her face, see. I liked him too; saw every idea flitting through his mind etching emotion onto his face. He would occasionally put down his pen, forced to pause by the brilliance of his work. He’d offer her a loving smile, inviting her to exult in his magnificence. I think he genuinely believed he was prodigiously talented; that after his death people would make pilgrimages to our stinking hovel to visit the place where he penned his masterpieces. I sat and noted that his poems were knotty, his plays contrived and his prose indistinguishable from any other’s. And I always knew. No rebellion. No discovery. No genius. This fact is more concrete in my mind now than ever, now that I am wholly alone.
***
harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned
“Go away. I know you’re there. Leave me alone. For God’s sake.”
“It’s good, you know. Very good. I do like it.”
“It’s awful. It’s obscene. It’s the worst of the lot. Stop flattering me! I hate it.”
“I like it.”
A pause. A sniff. A small glint behind the eyes.
***
We met by chance. Scurrying around the streets like rats, delighting in our success at evading capture and imprisonment. Life was immediate, dangerous, beautiful. I remember that. My eyes were drawn to his bright face, flushed with adrenaline-fuelled excitement as he crept up to an apple stall and stole one. It was an odd sight - a man in a bedraggled suit playing the street urchin in adulthood. He polished it on his dirty sleeve and took a bite, glorying in its crisp, succulent flesh. He noticed me; he had that inexplicable sense we all have when we feel the prickle of another’s gaze from the shadows. I followed him to the house. They let me stay without asking any questions. They recruited me seamlessly, like another piece of old furniture. None of us commented on it. We withdrew into our womb. We ceased to exist.
***
something which you later rely on in Court. Anything you
“Art is rebellion. We can’t continue like this, as individuals, as a country. Our every thought regulated by the churches, our every action dictated by the Government.”
“Exactly!”
Smug smiles at shared genius in empty words.
***
I unlocked the door to the cellar one day. I can’t even remember why I was so enamoured by the decaying boards, or why I felt the itch to see what horrors lay resting quietly behind them. But there I sat, probing the keyhole with her hairpin, until the sweet grate of metal on metal revealed hidden treasure. The dusty bottles made her cover my head with her perfumed kisses, and treating me like the sibling she always proclaimed me to be, all the while she chattered like a bird excited by the prospect of a particularly luscious worm. For one perfect week we three existed on minimal food and an excess of wine: potent, luxuriant and red as arterial blood. We loved each other more than our own flesh, and would hold competitions to see whose love was the deepest. Our days and nights merged together to create a perpetual blurry dawn (or was it dusk?), blissful but bittersweet. And they still created their ‘masterpieces’, using instruments cobbled together from the rubbish piles decorating the streets. They called me their ‘little critic’ and rejoiced in my stance as the watcher. They liked a second pair of eyes, but my objective criticism was mere unrestrained praise. We were young, romantically destitute, and (most importantly) beautifully and completely drunk.
***
Anything you do say may be given in evidence. Do you understand?
“I’d throw myself under the eleven o’clock tram!”
“I’d denounce myself and my art! To the highest priest! To the tiptop of the Government!”
“I’d never drink wine again, if that’s what it took to make you happy!”
***
Newspapers were rare. Not illegal – for that would have been too obvious a breach of those intangible things we call rights. It was the unspoken rule that if you published anything untoward, there would be a soft knock on the door. Then a series of harder knocks to your body. They didn’t need a reason to punish you. They still don’t. It was a shock when we finally found out about the rioters painting the towns red with blood. That marked the end of our idyllic honeymoon. Like Adam and Eve brutally tossed from their garden, I became painfully aware. I saw, as if with new eyes, the shoddy work of my prodigious friends and for the first time acknowledged the pain of my status as the outsider looking in. The Government encouraged you to inform on ‘artists’. Dangerous minds threatening the stability of the country... The thought hypnotised me. It was my apple.
***
You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in Court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence. Do you understand?
I understand.
***
And now I’m standing in the empty shell, which we fashioned lovingly and crawled inside to hide. Daubing this story on the curling wallpaper, as he did, using her paintbrush and ink. In my irregular hand, unused to the act of creation, our story unfolds up to this point. The pain is gone, with nothing to fill the void left behind. Do you think I informed? Do you genuinely see me as so bitterly twisted up inside that I could not bear to watch two in love? Simply because one is presented with an apple does not mean one has to take a bite. Unrequited love has been borne by others before me, and I have borne it better than most. Sofa overturned, leaking stuffing and springs; familiar table splintered; candle extinguished. One of them informed on the other for their pathetic, useless art – through jealousy, fear or some kind of distorted love. Perfectly willing to carry on our half-life, sucking up every ounce of their creativity like a sponge, maybe I simply exhausted them. Or maybe they exhausted themselves.
:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D
Commas indicate a pause, but if that were completely true, then news anchors would have commas after every five words. If you wanted a pause after 'which', you would be using 
