‘Get up,’ my friend Roland ordered as he stretched across my prone body. The stars were bright and there was a distinct ringing in my ears.
‘Fourteen whiskies in a row, it must be some kind of record,’ he said, but the fuzz in my head refused to let me understand.
Roland is hard to follow sometimes. I’m still trying to figure out, ‘Beauty is truth; truth beauty,’ which he threw at me at the beginning of the evening. Now, as he splashed cold water on his face from the basin in the corner, he declared, ‘We’re going to the mattresses.’
I was already on his mattress, what on earth was the fellow talking about?
I think Roland is like a sponge. Not that he is a sponger – but now I think about it, he never paid for any of those whiskies – rather his mind soaks up all sorts.
There’s a breakfast cereal at Waitrose and in each packet you get five cards – like playing cards only they each have a quotation from a book. Roland has the compete set tucked away in his head and he drops one into a conversation at any time. I was impressed: all I’ve read is the back of a sauce bottle.
‘Beauty is a world of its own,’ Roland declaimed. There he was going on about beauty again. ‘Beauty is truth.’ To tell the truth I’d had quite enough of Roland. After all, as Roland told me only last night, ‘All is vanity.’
Click here for more stories involving Roland
Words: Richard Rooney
Illustration: A.I.
Flash Fiction 250
Flash Fiction 250 