Stephen McQuiggan was the star of such iconic movies as Bullitt, Papillon, The Magnificent Seven and … hold on a second, that was Steve McQueen – so who the hell is this Stephen McQuiggan guy? Hang on, I’ll Google him – turns out he’s the author of the novels A Pig’s View of Heaven and Trip a Dwarf. Trust me; I’m as disappointed as the rest of you.

BORE’S BRIDLE.

John O’Mara was a decent sort, everyone said so – goodhearted, honest and hardworking – it was just he was, well, a tad tedious, dull as ditchwater, a pain in the hole; everyone said so. Yawn O’Mara they called him behind his back. They called him worse things to his face if stuck in his company for any length of time. Still, God loves a tryer and John was always trying.

He was also fond of repetition. If he did accidently manage to hit on an interesting topic he would lock onto it like a rat and shake all the interest out of it. He appeared to take the idea of boring quite literally, burrowing his inanities deep into his victim’s sub-conscious, but once he had exposed his mundane marrow to all and sundry he would find himself inevitably isolated, shunned. Even chat-rooms emptied in his presence.

John would then be forced to drag his cloud to yet another new town where, fooled by his unthreatening, jovial appearance, he could lure, for a time, unsuspecting people into the negative force field of his personality. People like Jill, seated now before him, every aspect of her screaming her mistake before she was even halfway down her skinny latte.

‘So, you like coffee?’ John knew it was a dreary thing to ask, the smallest of smalltalk, but he had nothing else.

Jill was cradling her flat white, her eyes already seeking out the exit. He knew he had to engage – asking a dreary question might just buy him enough time to think of something clever.

‘I said, so you like …’

A tremor coursed through him, a spasm that jerked the coffee from his hand and sent it splashing over his dancing lap, his body fizzing like an electric eel; it was over as quickly as it began. Jill stared at him, shocked but intrigued. At least he had something to talk about now.

But even that first strange incident could not be milked for long. He soon realised there was a thin line between a jumper and a dumper. Jill’s eyes, once shiny as glace cherries, grew dull and soon returned to the exit in search of someone, or something, more interesting.

‘Some weather we’ve been having,’ he ventured.

‘What?’ She didn’t lend her reply enough air to make it audible, conveying it more by the arch of her eyebrows and the glare beneath.

Desperately, John tried to repeat the observation but what came out was a long, low hum, a burst of irritating static that was still continuing even as Jill grabbed her clutch from the table and stormed out shaking her immaculate mane. Some weather, indeed. He didn’t bother calling her that night. He didn’t know what to say.

He was a haunted by a persistent stench of sulphur, a hateful aroma that recalled the last funeral he had attended (he liked funerals; everyone was dull at funerals) a few weeks before and the old man he’d met there – a man so old John was tempted to ask him if he had turned up as part of a dress rehearsal.

The old man, just like John, was unrelated to the deceased, barely knew her in fact. From what John could make out from his desultory chat the old man only went to funerals for a ‘bit of fun’ and therein lay the problem; John cast a shadow over even that morbid masquerade.

‘Comes to us all,’ had been John’s opening gambit, followed quickly by those old perennial chestnuts, ‘Good innings, ripe old age, we’ll be lucky to see it.’ He’d been sweating profusely, feeling it essential he slip the phrase ‘sine qua non’ into the conversation.

The old man turned all the way round to face him causing John to shuffle back against a prayerbook. ‘I’ve been coming to these things for years,’ the wrinkled codger frowned; his breath smelt like a burnt match. ‘And never, in all that time of delicious despair and moreish misery, have I ever encountered a buzz kill like you. You, my grey friend, are a veritable human drain; a binge talker. You could empty Hell itself. I tell you that most sincerely.’

‘I was only saying, y’know, funerals make you think … You never know what’s round the corner.’

‘Back in the day they used to bind the mouths of nagging women – scold’s bridle they called it. They should have come up with one for crashing bores; I’ll have to look into it.’

John had forgotten all about the old man until the smell returned. Besides, he had more things to worry about now – epilepsy, brain bleeds, and a hundred other worrying internet searches.

He swapped his keyboard for a waiting room. He sat twiddling his thumbs in frustration, eager to be called yet terrified of what the doctor might diagnose. A woman across from him with a small child on her lap eyed him accusingly from time to time, as though she suspected him of harbouring an STD and placing her boy in both moral and physical danger.

He coughed a few times to dispel her of the idea but that only seemed to make her more wary. Growing exponentially more embarrassed with every dragging second, John resorted to his usual tried and tested method of alleviating the tension with a lame joke. He knew it bored people but he also knew it put them at their ease.

‘I’m sick,’ he was about to confide, ‘Sick of waiting,’ but he got no further than the first syllable before he was hurled to the floor, his body convulsing in a manic horizontal tarantella. He was only dimly aware of the woman’s horrified screams before he passed out.

He awoke in a hospital bed with tubes in his arms and a soothing numbness in his brain. John was subjected to a barrage (was that the right word? he mused; blitzkrieg would have been more apt) of tests but nothing showed up. He answered all pertinent questions truthfully, never once straying into the defence area of dad jokes and deflective dullness. He was too damn scared to be boring.

‘I’m sorry to say,’ the consultant confided to him on the day of his release, ‘that we’ve sank the well and pulled up a bucket of blank. We can find absolutely nothing wrong with you. Of course, if you should relapse please feel free to contact us immediately.’

John was so relieved he attempted a little light badinage with the nurse who wheeled him down to his taxi. ‘I can’t wait to get home to bed,’ he told her, ‘all that lying about has taken it out of –’

He was vaguely aware of being momentarily airborne, as though the wheelchair had a secret ejector-seat fitted, and of a startled gasp from the nurse. His body contorted mid-air and he cracked his skull on the hand sanitizer dispenser on the way down. When he awoke he found himself back on the ward.

More tests; a series of tests, a box-set of tests to binge on. ‘You seem perfectly normal, Mr O’Mara. I’m afraid you are proving to be something of an anomaly.’

John merely nodded – he spoke little now (understandable, his doctors reasoned, poor man doesn’t know up from down) because in the long sleepless nights under the cold glow of the ward lights a strange conviction had taken root inside him.

It started life as a laughable seed, an idea so ridiculous that he played with it a while as a form of escapism to deflect from his fear that something untreatable was nesting in his brain. Yet the more he thought of it, the more he experimented with it, and the more he ended up squirming like an electric eel, the more he was forced to give it credence until it became an article of faith.

‘What’s your favourite colour?’ he would inquire of the night-porter – cue a galvanic tango. ‘Let me tell you about the dream I had,’ he would stall the nurse on her rounds, then breakdance over her medicine trolley. His experiments proved so fruitful they strapped him to the bed.

In the face of all the evidence, John came to the only available conclusion – he was pathologically allergic to smalltalk.

 Thirty years of mind-numbing tedium had sickened even himself. His body now rejected the boredom John had been immersed in since he had first learnt to speak. A few bad jokes, a smattering of grey opinions culled from shallow end of the media, an idle comment on the inclemency of the weather might be enough to actually kill him; his body seemed intent on a quick death rather than a long drawn out sigh of a life.

The knowledge plunged John into an abyss – a lonely mute existence stretched out before him with no salvation in sight – but as he gradually moved into acceptance hope unexpectedly tagged along.

His brain was filled with interesting thoughts, witty asides, exciting anecdotes and telling facts (that had never been an issue), the only problem had been how to release them. Truth be told, John had been a lonely boy who grew to be a lonely man. When faced with company, with the possibility of relationship, he retreated, believing himself unworthy and so found himself left with mere scraps from the verbal feast.

Eager to please, to quell the yearning deep within, John pressed on in conversation regardless like a soldier entering battle armed only with a spoon, knowing with every dreary word he was pushing people away but, in his desperate need for connection, unable to stop himself. His victims found themselves pummelled by autobiography. He earned the nickname Pothole because everyone tried to avoid him.

Was this new development then not a good thing? If dogs could learn not to bark with the aid of a shock collar, could his own internal one not force him to shine in social situations? Instead of planting suicidal thoughts in pretty girls’ eyes maybe he could spark some genuine love there.

This could be the making of him, and if he were quiet sometimes whilst he learned it would only make him appear enigmatic; he might even appear to be listening. His goal was to possess a wit so sharp it required an ivory handle.

On his release he only smiled and said, ‘Thank you.’ Some of the nurses were actually sorry to see him leave.

He spent a few weeks convalescing, watching endless YouTube videos on how to forge a dynamic personality and – apart from a few mishaps where he had spoken aloud to stave off the isolation – he had kept his seizures down to a bare minimum.

On his very first foray back into civilisation he stood quietly at the bus stop, eavesdropping on a couple of students who were discussing the current situation in the Middle East (ironically, in a manner that would have had John dancing under the number 47 had he attempted it). Plucking up courage he butted in, offering up a few perceptive observations backed up by some salient facts. Emboldened by this immediate success he planned to speak to a pretty girl (ever his perpetual bane) at the first opportunity.

He stayed on the bus after his stop, disembarking at the next town over; a clean slate, a place he had never sullied with his ponderous personality. He nursed a beer in the corner of a fashionable bar, biding his time until he spotted his prey.

She was dark, attractive, and dressed to the nines – but she was on her own. It wasn’t her questionable chin jewellery, it was her disposable sexiness. She was one of those girls pretty enough to be intimidating to the average male like himself, but yet not pretty enough to hold the alpha males’ attention for long. She roamed a dating wilderness, a lovelorn limbo, which John now possessed the coordinates for. He finished his beer, took a deep breath, and approached quietly.

‘Twenty stone penguin,’ he said.

‘What?’ She bore the familiar look of one contemplating fight or flight.

‘Just something to break the ice.’ He felt a sudden jolt, a match being struck up his spine, but then she laughed and everything was fine. ‘Say, you couldn’t do me a favour, could you?’ He remembered to maintain constant eye contact.

‘If I can.’

‘Could you keep me company until your date arrives? I’m new in town and feeling kind of lonely.’ Another slight jolt.

‘How do you know I’ve a date?’ She closed her eyes as she spoke; a great sign, he’d read.

‘I just assumed a woman as gorgeous as you …’

He spent the next hour listening – it was as easy as that. A few nods here, a few well-placed empathetic comments there, and all the while he was studying her body language and totting up the results on his mental scoreboard. Her name was Jenny, the first of many – a wealth of women that led to a paucity of perspective.

Yet he always maintained a fondness for her because she was the first, a symbol of the upturn in his fortunes. He even moved in with her, though he saw it more as a base for his operations than any kind of acknowledgement of commitment.

John ‘worked late’ on a regular basis and didn’t come home at all most weekends. He knew he could always keep Jenny sweet with a few well-timed compliments or, if she were feeling emotional, a few tears and claims of depression. He found that girls bought into the old Troubled Man routine without much effort.

The field was open and he was playing it. At work the guys would gather round on their lunch break to hear his latest sexploits and the glory of it was he had barely to embellish; almost all of his stories were true.

Soon however he found his audiences dwindling – were once they hung on every word now they barely hung around, preferring to grab a bite at their desk instead.

‘So, I got this little redhead, had her pinned up against the back of the bus shelter, and I slipped my –’

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ butted in Benny (one of the more enthusiastic regulars to his daily tales); ‘Did anyone catch the match last night? That was never a penalty in a million years.’

The sparse crowd suddenly grew animated, discussing the ins and outs of a game that John had never understood. He waited for a lull in the debate before diving back in.

‘Anyhow, the redhead’s playing all coy, but I wasn’t gonna let the opportunity pass –’

‘Honestly John,’ Benny said, ‘you’re starting to sound like a bit of a dick.’

The others murmured in agreement as they gathered up their sandwich crusts and left the table. John was about to protest when a tremor shot down his spine and his arm jerked out, knocking over his coffee.

‘Wanker’s cramp,’ he heard Benny say as they laughed and left.

Who cares, he fumed, they’re just jealous. He was seeing the little redhead, Kirsten, again tonight – he’d do things to her they’d be begging him to spill the beans about tomorrow.

‘Sorry, love,’ he told Jenny as he ran a bath, ‘but I have to go back into work. They’ve sprung some emergency meeting on me, some new account threatening to go ass over tit. Don’t wait up.’

By the time the bubbles ran down the plughole his own had burst. Jenny was waiting for him in the living room, scrolling through his phone with a vacant look on her face. ‘Who’s Kirsten?’ she asked, sounding neither angry nor curious.

He snatched the phone from her. ‘Just some besotted little girl. I don’t even know how she got my number.’

But Jenny was already on the sofa, remote in hand. ‘You think I didn’t know all this time?’ He could barely hear her over the news headlines.

‘Jen, babes, it’s not what you –’

‘I don’t care. I’ve known all along and I simply don’t care anymore.’ No tears, no rage – he didn’t know how to react to such a blank slate. ‘It’s okay, John, honestly.’

‘Aren’t you mad at me?’  Her casual dismissal made him feel invisible, just like the bad old days.

‘No, just bored. You’re so predictable, so damn boring.’

He collapsed, narrowly missing the coffee table as he did the funky chicken on the carpet that had still three payments pending on it. He awoke in the same bed, on the same ward – Jenny had at least called for an ambulance before she packed. A nurse informed him, her eyes puddling with pity, that he had been here three days and that he hadn’t had a solitary visitor.

John tried to piece together the shattered remnants of his memory but was convinced something must have slipped his mind – he had been his usual exciting, charismatic self, so why the attack? And where were the guys from the office (they loved him), where was his band of female admirers? The pitying nurse began to rankle. He decided to bombard her with a charm offensive that would transform sympathy into seduction.

‘Hey, sweetcheeks, any chance of a bed bath?’

He barely had time to waggle an eyebrow before he jerked onto the floor, the monitors flashing and bleeping in digital mockery. He was more circumspect when he gained consciousness next time round. The notion that he had played his hand too well but too often was starting to take hold.

Jenny’s parting words rang in a constant sombre knell in his head. He decided not to speak again until he was sure. It seemed the safest option. He merely nodded or shrugged whenever he was asked a question, but in truth his opinion was rarely sought and the nurses were only too happy to ignore him.

John spent his time dozing, building up his strength for when he got out – he would have to go online and research a whole new dynamic personality to slip on over the shop-soiled one he’d now worn threadbare. As he dozed his nostrils quivered, assaulted by the sudden acrid stench of burnt cigars. He opened his eyes to find a familiar looking old man perched by his bedside.

The old man smiled revealing a row of glistening sharp teeth. John felt a chill course through him – it was the old man from the funeral except … well, except he looked younger.

‘I see you made the age old mistake of thinking loud and brash and boastful is somehow more interesting than dull and dreary.’

John shook his head and pulled the blanket up over his mouth to trap any reply. The old man laughed.

‘You are a pain in the hole no matter what you do, Johnny Boy. I guess it’s just the way you were made.’ John pulled the blanket up higher. ‘Not talking, eh?’ The old man leant forward, his breath an overflowing ashtray. ‘How boring is that.’

The blanket flew off John’s bucking body, his limbs pounding the mattress in a frenzy until, with a dull gasp, his heart could dance no more.