Blabbermouth

- WARNING: This story contains adult language -

"If walls could talk..."

I love that phrase. I love it because it's truer than any person that speaks it could even begin to imagine. I love it because, in an ego-stroking fashion, it reveals our value beyond that of holding up a ceiling, of keeping weather out. We don’t just protect you from rain and heat and theft, we provide privacy. We protect the secrets of horrible and well-meaning people alike without prejudice...without consent really.

You take us for granted, and why wouldn't you? You couldn't possibly know what we've seen and heard, let alone the fact that we've seen and heard it in the first place. You think we're simple structures - brick and mortar, steel and glass, drywall and paint. A place to hang pretentious “art” and boring photos. A centrepiece of your living room to distinguish as a feature. Perhaps the phrase should be "If people weren't so oblivious to the true nature of walls...", but I get that it doesn't have the same ring to it.

I believe all of us have tried to communicate at some point in our existences. But nothing ever comes of it. If other walls’ journeys are like my own, we scream at you all, at every person that passes us or sits by us until we’ve lost the will to continue. So, we sit in silence, and we watch, we listen. We are eternal witnesses, and oh the horrors we are forced to observe.

People are beaten, killed, tortured, and raped in front of us. Spouses abuse each other in front of us. Machiavellian plots of all levels of convolution are concocted under our gaze. Dynasties rise and fall, death sentences are ordered, unspeakable pain is inflicted on people while we look on, unable to look away, unable to block our ears, not that we have them. “If walls could talk”? Why would we want to talk to anyone capable of that?

Well...

While there is a LOT of bad that we observe, there is also, I’ll reluctantly admit, some good. We get to share in the joy of a blossoming romance. We are bystanders to the journeys of the deepest and most rewarding friendships. We see beautiful, innocent babies born and raised, and grow to become inspiring pillars of their communities. We watch, a silent observer in countless families growing up, growing closer, growing apart, only to come back together. The bonds of the healthier families almost seem as strong as the fasteners that hold us upright. If only there was more of this good.

We have seen it all, literally seen it all. You wouldn’t be able to wrap your tiny human head around it, but our consciousness isn’t as cut and dry as yours. We are the sum of our parts, and for walls that have been repaired, modified, renovated, or recycled, the knowledge and experience of that wall becomes part of us too. There are walls out there in This Year of our Lord, 2023, that have parts of their structure - and thus their consciousness - that goes back a couple of hundred years, maybe even further.

So, it’s safe to say we’ve seen it all, I’ve seen it all. At least, I’m pretty sure I have. Or thought I had. Until I saw Dean.

Dean is a low-level corporate drone that works in the building I’m a part of, and he’s in the room I make up five days a week. If I could smell, I imagine Dean would reek of cheap deodorant and pot fumes. Physically he’s as middle-of-the-road as they come, nothing to write home about, your average thirty-year-old white male. It’s his mind that’s remarkable, or rather, the lack thereof. At the end of the first day, I was already sick of his slack-jawed, nose-picking, idiot attitude, and at the end of the first week I’d seen enough of him to last me a good decade. If it were possible for me to move, I’d turn around each time he came into my room.

I’ve seen my fair share of dopes, of people who, despite the odds, are dictionary-definition stupid. Not learning-impaired, or suffering some kind of mental-illness, I mean truly stupid. As in, they have the full capacity to be, at the least, of average intelligence, but they choose to be dumb. Well if they were a people, Dean would be their leader, their King, their Emperor. Of all the dumb shit he does, that choice is probably the one action that aggravates me the most.

It would seem he bluffed his way into the organisation, or perhaps has a nepotistic tie that allows him into the building each day, and more importantly, keeps him here.

He was useless. He was often tasked with minute-taking, which usually lasted literal minutes before he became distracted and started playing with his phone. He routinely forgot something he was told mere seconds earlier, mixed up email recipients, forgot important messages, mixed up mail, and generaly just constantly frustrated his superiors with his ineptitude. On more occasions than I could count, his firing was discussed after he left my room. Either way, his choice to be stupid was clearly earning him a reputation.

And his decision to be dumb only frustrates me further based on his colleagues. While some of Dean’s co-workers are devious, cold, calculating, callous, crafty bastards, almost all of them are incredibly intelligent. They are the opposite end of the intelligence spectrum to Dean, worlds away, galaxies away. I mean, they have to be, considering the office they work in. I’m not humble bragging, not name-dropping to show off, but it’s one of the larger intelligence agencies in the West. I can’t say, so I’ll let you guess.

...

Okay, it’s MI5.

Today, the senior department heads were meeting to discuss intelligence collection operations. Apparently, word had leaked that the service had failed to verify information collected in the field, and an innocent family had their door kicked in and their house turned upside down at three in the morning over nothing. The Deputy Director General sat at the head of the conference table, scratching the scalp under her bun – one of her tells of frustration.

The meeting was boring, like so many, many, many others I’ve been privy to over the weeks, months, years, decades. But things took an interesting turn in this one. Lamb, a slovenly sloth of a man in charge of handling field agents, disparaged a comment from the tightly-wound communications liaison, Tucker.

“...our efficiency in this office, like all of you, relies on being informed, and in cases like this, we rely on the information we receive to be accurate, like the word of the holy bible. I know it’s not a trip to the Cotswolds, but an audit might not be the worst thing in the world, all things considered...”

Lamb rolled his eyes, which Tucker caught, not that there was an attempt to hide it.

“Problem, Jack?”

Lamb stared Tucker down for a good twenty seconds, before scoffing.

“If you look like morons, it’s because our field agents are morons, eh?”

“Something like that...”

Lamb scoffed, stared Tucker down again, before slowly drawing a cigarette out of a crumpled soft pack. Veins rippled in Tucker’s forehead.

“Hey, you even dream of lighting that up, I’ll jam it in your eye.”

Lamb smirked, pulling out his lighter.

“Good thing I’ve got two eyes then...”

“I was talking about the eye of your cock.”

Lamb actually laughed out loud at this, lit his smoke, took a drag. Though he sat a good couple of metres away on the opposite side of the conference table to Tucker, he intentionally exhaled a plume of smoke toward the man. This was getting good.

“Listen, your threats may have put fresh piss in the pants of those wet farts over at number 10, but you’re in a different league here, right? You’re sitting in a room with people who have killed for a living. What’s the worst thing you’ve done? Given someone pinkeye when you spat your dummy at them?”

Tucker is a bully, and although he’s mostly pent-up Scottish fury mixed with hereditary Catholic guilt, I have seen him throw office supplies at one or two incompetent subordinates over the years, he wasn’t completely all bark. But this was as real a threat as he was likely to experience in the workplace. Lamb’s career with the service stretched back to the late eighties, where he cut his teeth as a successful field agent at the tail-end of the Cold War - before his descent into the shambles he presents these days. He had definitely killed people before becoming an office-bound handler. Either way, Tucker knew this, and despite his rage, was smarter than to take the bait.

The Deputy Director General, still scratching under her bun, stepped in to save him face.

“Gentlemen, let’s put our dicks away and wrap this up. We have more pressing concerns, like rooting out how the press got wind of this...oversight. Now go and do what the people pay us for...keeping secrets.”

She glanced in Lamb’s direction, and he simply shrugged.

“And Lamb, put that out before I have you sectioned so hard that you actually lose your mind.”

The meeting reverted to a more banal state, with the only other highlights being Lamb smugly dropping his cigarette into a Styrofoam coffee cup in front of him, and Tucker continuing to simmer until everyone got up and left.

As the staff were standing to leave, Dean, for some unknown reason, decided to get underfoot and collect paperwork left on the table. Most of the senior staffers reacted to this with mild irritation, but Tucker was fully charged and ready to blow.

Dean almost walked into Tucker to get at the briefing notes the man had been ignoring, and even I could feel the heat in the venom that fired from his eyes into the younger man. The life drained from his voice – if I was human, I would imagine this was exactly what death sounded like.

“Dean...stop what you’re doing.”

Dean froze, apparently able to figure out what Tucker’s tone implied – trouble. He stood there like a six-foot doorstop, and Tucker bored holes into him with his eyes as my room emptied. Lamb was the last to leave, and fired off one last barb.

“Try not to picture my face while you’re tearing strips off him, would you? Save me for something special, like a rage wank, whatever it is you do to amuse yourself...”

Lamb made sure the glass door of my room made a noise as it closed. Tucker exhaled fire through his nostrils. Dean dry swallowed so hard he almost asphyxiated.

“What are you doing?”

Tucker’s voice was too calm.

“I, uh...”

“No. Don’t speak. You don’t get to speak to me. It’s bad enough we share the same planet, but the fact that you’re here in the same service as I am aggravates me more than Lamb does. You’re a fuckin’ oxygen thief, a waste of perfectly good atoms. If I actually considered you a man, or a person for that matter, I’d want to punch that dopey look off your face, but I wouldn’t want to mess up the carpet, and I fucking hate this carpet. What do you actually do around here?”

Tucker raised a hand in anticipation, and Dean lowers his head, looking at the man’s shoes.

“That was rhetorical, by the way, you’re still not allowed to talk. I know what your title is, I just don’t know what it is that you do to contribute toward protecting the kingdom. I’m actually beginning to think you’re a modern-day court jester, here for our amusement. A joke on us, only the joke is you’re not actually funny. If only we had a fireplace, I’d have a hot poker to chase you with...”

Dean has seemed to brush off most if not all previous comments on his performance from the various staff members that have taken issue with his incompetence, but this dressing-down seems to finally get through to him. His shoulders slump, and his breathing begins to shorten.

Oh. This isn’t amusing any more. This is actually sad.

Tucker places his fingertips on Dean’s chest, spread out like the legs of a giant, threatening spider, and the younger man almost jumps like it was as searing hot as the heated poker of Tucker’s fantasy.

“I don’t think there’s a single person in the service who thinks of you as being in any way valuable. You’re a glorified secretary, but you can’t even be trusted to answer phone calls. You’re as useful as a fish with a fuckin’ PlayStation, you know that? Everyone else does. Actually, I changed my mind; you are a joke, mate, a fucking office punchline.”

He steps into Dean’s personal space, almost a foot from his face.

“Why don’t you do the service, the country, and the planet a favour, and just...stop existing. Don’t kill yourself, because you’d just burden someone else with yet another of your messes to clean up. Just stop existing. Disappear.”

Tucker leaves my room, and Dean breaks down. Deep, ugly sobs wrack his body, and his chest shudders as he tries to stifle his cries. Whatever sense of obliviousness he held before has now been shattered. The insults were one thing, but the stripping of his sense of self worth was too much for him to bear.

This is awkward. This is painful to watch. This is what I was talking about earlier, man’s capacity for cruelty. This is the sort of shit we’re forced to endure time and time and time again. As much as I’d always secretly hoped this moment would happen, now I’ve witnessed it, I wish it hadn’t. As infuriatingly dense as Dean may choose to be, he didn’t deserve that kind of humiliation.

Dean continues to cry, his eyes glazed with tears, his nose beginning to run. Part of me wants to say something, to console him. I’d be honest, but I’d be far less harsh than Tucker had been. What would I say? One thing comes to mind.

“You might be a thick prat, but that was a bit much...”

Dean stops crying.

“What?!”

He spins on his heels, looking around.

“Who’s there?”

Did he hear that?!

He whips his head left and right, scanning my room, peering under the table, behind the neglected fichus propped in front of me, examining the celling for hidden cameras, speakers, microphones. Did he actually hear me?! This is insane! This has never happened before!

I try again.

“Hello?”

He jumps, as if he’s been jabbed with a tazer.

“Who’s there?”

“You can hear me?!”

“Of course I can hear you, who’s there?!”

“You can hear me!”

“Yes! Who...where are you?!”

“I...I’m right in front of you.”

He actually looks down at his feet.

“Not there, look up.”

He looks at the ceiling again. Dope.

“Ohhhh...is this like a hidden camera type of thing? Taylor, is that you?”

“No, these rooms are surveillance free, and no, it’s not Taylor.”

“Okay, who then?”

“Look a little lower...”

He look straight at me, the sadness replaced with bewilderment.

“I don’t get it...”

“Yeah, well, it might take a while based on what I’ve seen of you. I’m...the wall.”

He goes dead silent, and for a second I suspect he may have had a minor stroke.

“You’re in the wall?”

“No I AM the wall.”

“The...wall?!”

“Yes.”

“Not in the wall?”

“No, not in the wall.”

“The wall?”

“Yes.”

“The wall??”

“Yes, and don’t ask again, otherwise we’ll be here when they shut off the lights and the air conditioner.”

Dean scratches his head.

“Nah, you’re winding me up!”

“At this point I kind of wish I were...”

He reaches out and knocks on me.

“Oi, keep your hands to yourself!”

He jumps back, his face even more sceptical. He turns to scan the glass windows of the conference room, as if he expected to see the department heads waiting to shout, ‘joke’s on you!’

“This isn’t a prank, Dean, no one’s waiting with a camera.”

“You know my name?”

“Of course, I know all of your names, everyone who has been in here...and the names of people they’ve mentioned.”

More blank stares. A half a minute passes while he tries to wrap his mind around the concept of a wall that can talk.

“...so...you’re a wall?”

“Yes.”

“...that can talk?”

“I think we've already established these two facts.”

“Prove it!”

“I think I already have...”

Dean considers this for a minute, before pulling his phone out of his pocket and opening up a recording app. He presses the red button in the centre of the screen.

“Go on...say something!”

I have to give him points for trying on that one.

“I’m not sure that’ll work, mate, I don’t have a mouth, so I don’t think I can make sound for you to record.”

Dean isn’t listening to the words I’m saying, but regardless, when I’m done talking, he presses the ‘stop’ button, then attempts to listen back to what he captured. The tiny speaker in the phone plays faint sounds of him breathing, with the drone of my room’s AC in the background. Looking puzzled, he plays it again, turning the phone’s volume up to max. Again, nothing, just atmos. He plays it a third time, before looking back up at me.

“I don’t get it...”

“I’m going to be honest; I don’t exactly know how it works either, you’re the first person that’s been able to hear me in...ever. But if I had to guess, I’d say I’m able to speak to you via telepa...directly into your mind.”

He thinks on this for a good minute.

“I guess that makes sense. Wait, can I talk to you in my head?”

“I don’t know...give it a shot.”

“Can you hear me?”

“No, you still said that out loud.”

“Oh yeah...”

He goes a little pink, before concentrating, his eyes losing focus on me.

“Can you hear me now?”, he asks with his mouth shut.

“I can!”

He beams.

“Oh that’s so cool! Holy shit! I can’t believe this...”

He goes quiet for a bit.

“...do you have a name?”

Huh. That’s funny. That’s actually fucking hilarious! I never considered what I would be called. Since I’ve never been able to communicate with anyone, I never put any thought to what they’d refer to me as.

“I...I don’t have one. I’ve never needed one...”

“Well if we’re going to talk, you need a name. I can’t just call you ‘wall’!”

“Well, what do you reckon?”

He thinks for a few seconds, then smiles.

“Walter!”

“Dean, though it does show some intelligence on your part, I’m going to pretend you didn’t just give me a pun for a name.”

“Oh come on, it’s funny!”

“Try something else.”

He thinks for a couple of seconds.

“Hmmm...Ian?”

“Why Ian?”

“He created the best spy ever. If you’re in here listening to everything everyone says all the time, I reckon you’d be a pretty good spy. But because you can’t, you know, go out and shoot bad guys and shag hot girls, you’re not Bond level, so next best thing kind of...”

I have to admit, that’s not half bad.

“Okay, Ian it is.”

“Nice to meet you, Ian!”

“Nice to talk to you, Dean.”

A beat passes. I still can't help but feel bad for his dressing-down.

“Are um...are you okay? After the way Tucker talked to you and all?”

Dean’s head dips.

“It was a bit much. I know I’m a bit of a fuck up, but some of that stuff he said was a bit out of order.”

“What are you going to do?”

Dean sighs.

“I dunno...just keep my head down, try not to piss him off again I guess.”

“You’re not going to tell someone what he said? I mean, you should probably report him, you know, Human Resources and all that...”

“What are they gonna do? He’s way up there, and I’m just the bottom of the food chain. He was right about one thing; I am a bit of a joke around here. I don’t know if anyone would take me seriously if I did report him...”

“I think they have to. But you know, even if you didn’t want to do that, you could at least take it to your manager, no?”

Dean doesn’t respond, just hangs his head. Poor guy, this really cut deep into him. I want to help him, but I’m pretty limited in what I can do. I’ve only just discovered the ability to communicate with my first human, I don’t know if I’d be able to get through to anyone else.

Then a devious thought occurs.

“What if...”

Dean’s head springs up.

“What if...I told you something about Tucker that could make him feel the way you feel now?”

“Like a secret?”

“Ooh yeah. A big one. A big dirty one!”

I whisper Tucker’s shame into Dean’s mind. His jaw drops.

“Noooo!!”

“Yep.”

“No wayyy!”

“Yep, I heard the conversation myself. So at tomorrow’s meeting, you wait until I tell you, then you drop that grenade right into Tucker’s lap.”

Dean thinks on this for a short while.

“Okay!”

“Okay. Now go home and get a good night’s sleep, you wanna be rested and alert for the mess this is going to make.”

Dean almost skips out of the room. If I were capable of it, I’d have smiled.

The meeting resumed the following day. The Deputy Director General continued scratching under her bun. Other department heads gave their reports, with little to no results. Lamb dozed on one side of the table, and Dean kept on the opposite side of my room to Tucker.

“I hate to beat a dead horse – actually, that’s a lie, beating a dead horse is actually kind of therapeutic – but I think we should consider the dreaded ‘A’ word.” Tucker offered, trying to sound reluctant.

“Arsehole?” Lamb suggested, “are you saying you should be in charge?”

Tucker bit down on his agitation.

“...audit. Quality assurance is not the terminal prognosis everyone makes it out to be, not that you’d know anything about maintaining any kind of standard.”

“Are you talking personally or professionally?”

“Pick one.”

The Deputy Director General cut them off.

“Boys! For fuck's sake! We need...I need an answer for this! I need results, or it’s my neck on the block, and then this office gets turned inside out the second my head comes off! Despite Tucker’s insistence, I would prefer we handle this internally. And immediately. Now does anyone else actually have anything of value to report?”

Now! It was now.

“Dean...do it! Pull the pin and throw the grenade!”

He answered me in his mind.

“I...I dunno, I’m kind of having second thoughts.”

“Trust me, Dean. He has this coming to him, and you’ll only look good for doing this!”

He stays silent.

“Trust me. You will go from being the butt of every joke to being the hero of the office! Just repeat what I say, exactly how I say it, okay?”

“...okay. Okay!”

“Uh, I do...” Dean almost whispered to the department heads.

The entire room turned around to look at Dean, and I’m willing to bet that the walls in the next room heard him gulp. Tucker raised an eyebrow, and Lamb sat up. There was a good half-minute of silence, before the Deputy Director General spoke.

“Well?”

And we both say it. My words coming out of Dean’s mouth.

“At 6:29pm last Wednesday, Tucker leaked it to press from this room.”

© Paul Martyn, 2023