'Whoosh!'

"TAKE THIS, AND THIS, AND THIS TOO! AND DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT BRINGING HER - THAT, THAT TROLLOP AROUND HERE!"

They've been at it for hours now. My parents, I mean. It began with a barrage of hisses and whispers in the carpeted hall beneath my bedroom. Some bullshit about wanting to protect me, I can only assume, though really they have only succeeded in insulting my intelligence. I'm not a fucking retard.

Anyway. The hushed accusations and curtailed responses quickly gave way to well-aimed snipes and sonophonic self-indignance. They must have known enough to realise I could hear - hell, Van Gough could have heard, and he's dead and missing an ear - but this particuar concern diliquesced with the first eager fist-fulls of mud.

I like to think of it as having come out of storage. It's strange to picture. A lurid orange Kennard's garage in some way-off, gentrified industrial zone, still seedy as a grain silon. The flourescent lighting would be dull, and would flicker like the tasteless pink neons decorating cheap motels on barren highways. The aluminium security door would be corrogated, and serve as canvas to budding graffiti artists sporting grubby cans of cheap, red spraypaint. And here among the ramshackle ruins of disused possessions would sit the barrels.

Rough, copper-rimmed barrels filled to the brim with viscid black mud. Each barrel would be clearly tagged: 'The Vanauatu Disagreement'. 'Petition Against A Vasectomy'. 'The Week You Made Me Spend With Your Mother'. 'Comments Made About My Weight'. Some flaunt spatterings and disjointed handprints from previous fits of slinging, and though much of the mud has crusted with age, both parties can account for every barrel.

"IF YOU THROW ONE MORE SHIRT OUT OF THAT WINDOW, I SWEAR CAROL, YOU'LL REGRET IT!!! EVER STOPPED TO CONSIDER HOW MUCH OF THIS IS ACTUALLY YOUR FAULT?"

"KEEP QUIET!! JAMES WILL HEAR!"

Ah. I was wondering when I would make a reappearance in the squabble. Typically, as a detour from the main issue. The screaming match that can account for the Mexican Wave of raising shutters along our street has now turned to the subject of myself. A new barrel of mud - only to me, they hit like clods with heavy rocks at the centre, leaving sprawling purple bruises in their wake. I suddenly don't want to listen anymore.

I turn to pluck a tissue from the table beside my bed. I like the noise it makes as it glides between the plastic. 'Whoosh!' The fiasco on the lawn is muffled.

I take another. 'Whoosh!'

'Whoosh!'
'Whoosh!'
'Whoosh!'
'Whoosh!'
'Whoosh!'

I begin to imitate the sound as I pull each translucent square from it's flimsy house of cardboard.

'Whoosh!'
'Whoosh!'
'Whoosh!'
'Whoosh!'
'Whoosh!'

Soon, too soon, the patterned box is empty, my room strewn with discarded sheets of disposable erasers for overwrought emotions. I am left to find another means of muting the argument.

Tissues are so simple. The 'Whoosh!' is simple too. It's like a sniff. We hear it, we know someone is snivelling. They are the surest and most honest way to signify melancholy to the world as it lies in wait, doglike, for it's ears to be pricked. An easily discerned means to an end...something to demonstrate unhappiness, but something to quench it too...to force back the tears.

Or perhaps they really an invitation to them?

If only they would sit down...each either side of a box of tissues. If they had told one another how unhappy they had been, maybe none of this would ever even have happened to begin with.

Why couldn't they have been more like the tissues?