Confidence is everything in this game. It all depends on confidence and when the confidence goes, everything goes. And my confidence was slipping away, slowly but surely, with every minute that passed. The knowledge of this fatal slippage unnerved me totally and as a result I was – not to put too fine a point on it – blabbering like a madman. I was raving. I was talking the purest shyte, and everyone knew it – including me. Most of all me…

Knowing that I was blabbering like a complete fool and talking unrelieved shyte made me more desperate than ever – far from causing me to shut up (which is of course what I should have done if I had had any sense at all left to me) I launched into it all the more. Flecks of foam appeared on my lips. I started spitting on my audience, showering the front row with froth. An edge that was not pleasant to listen to had crept into my voice – an edge that spoke eloquently of barely suppressed insanity.

Something peculiar, something unexpected had happened to my audience. Instead of getting bored or fed up or irritated with the bullshit that I was subjecting them to, they were embarrassed for me. They were embarrassed on my behalf and – more than this – they were transfixed, they were paralyzed, they were pinned to their seats with a kind of horrified fascination, the type of horrified fascination one might have when witnessing a gruesome traffic accident. Although I’m sure the audience would have liked more than anything else to simply get up and walk away, they were no less trapped in the experience than I was.

Becoming aware of this most peculiar and remarkable fact did little to help the situation, in fact it did a lot to push me even closer to the edge. To talk of the barely repressed madness in my voice would have been overstating the matter at this stage – madness was boiling up inside me like milk boiling over in a super-heated saucepan.

My voice grew strange and harsh and then it cracked, like an egg might crack, like a pane of glass might crack, like an unstable personality might crack if pushed too far, if subjected to pressure of a sustained nature. It cracked and it broke and what emerged from the shards was nothing less than pure insanity – the unholy face of pure, unmitigated, no-holds-barred insanity.

I blabbered and I raved, I gibbered like a tortured soul only just released from the darkest depths of hell. I mewled like a sick kitten. I squawked like a chicken running in fear of its life from a fox. I screeched like an owl and I hooted like a howler monkey. I bayed like a dog driven mad by the moon. I croaked like a toad, I brayed like a demented jack-ass.

Something burst out of me then, something I didn’t realize I had in me. Some kind of a mad creature, some kind of an unholy thing. It hopped and it skipped. It capered and cavorted like a perverted imp of Satan. It humiliated itself before the audience, who had gone far beyond horror at this stage to the point of being deeply traumatized. It pissed on itself, defecated upon itself, degraded itself, abused itself, shrieking with hideous insane delight as it did so…

As I say, it’s all about confidence in this game, and I had lost it…