EPT
It occurred to me about three days ago that if I were to leave work just as I finish, at 1500, then I can make it outside to the 1508 bus and be home before about 1545, which shaves about an hour and a half off my average work day. It’s not life changing, but I’m very pleased with the arrangement. This new timetable has given me a great opportunity to stop at the shopping centre on the way home from work and have a poke around to see if there’s anything there on which I might spend my hard-earned job-money. I am a man of few enough vices that pretty much all of my income is disposable… it’s a pleasant way to be.
Anyway, I had skipped lunch so that I might read my book and was deciding that, on reflection, it may have been a poor sort of strategy for the day. I decided that, it being only twenty past three, I might reasonably pick up lunch on the way home, and still be back by 1700 and sitting pretty.
I picked up a fantastic roll from the deli and, it being a bright and sunny midday, wandered down to eat it beside the shallow fountain. I read a book as I ate, enjoying the sunshine, water and general atmosphere, before realising that the entire time I’d been dripping various dressings all down my shirt-front. This is how I eat; I’ll make no apologies for it. I did some quick and flexible mental arithmetic (with an abundance of rounding up and down) and figured I’d be able to excuse picking up a new t-shirt, running to the bathroom and putting it on.
While I was in HMV, buying a truly lovely Mr. Men t-shirt, I happened upon a pair of unmistakably mispriced Sony headphones and, my doddering earbuds long since overdue an upgrade, picked those up too. I got a bemused look from the girl scanning my headphones, clearly having noticed the same thing I had, followed shortly by an understanding smile at the t-shirt that clearly took in my spattered shirt. I wandered down a floor, barely catching the lift as a man who looked to be in his fifties hammered the “close doors” button. You know the one: it looks vaguely like this “>|<”.
On the way down, I swapped out my headphones, appreciating the new depth of sound, the bass lower than before without the distortion I was clearly used to but had never noticed. I was pleased.
I exited the lift swiftly, still feeling his disapproving bespectacled glare on the mess soaking slowly into my t-shirt, walking directly to the bathroom. There’s a corridor leading off the body of the main room – banks of urinals gleaming too-white in the perpetual post-daylight of fluorescent lights designed to make you feel bad if you make a mess – and lining this corridor are three stalls. The door of the first had swung half open, and I could see that it was unoccupied, so I stepped in.
I swung the door shut behind me and turned on the heel of my right foot, coming face to face with one of the most putrid stools I’ve ever seen. There aren’t words yet designed to describe it, but I’ll do my best to do so a little tastefully and still communicate the shuddering sickness I felt on looking at it. It’s important to know that all of this happened to the tune of the Autokratz remix of La Roux’s Quicksand, the bass drum a kind of ultimate too-fast heartbeat pressing at the inside of my head. When you’re listening to something like that you think to the beat. Single words spring to mind more than descriptive terms – a kind of musically perforated stream of consciousness from the event:
Yellow (yellow was first, and perhaps most worrying)
Bass-drum
Splash
Bass-drum
Grainy (I was tempted to write dusty, but it doesn’t carry the right viscous connotations)
Bass-drum
Tortured
Bass-drum
I’m not sure I’ve ever been so struck in my life by something so mundane; I turned immediately and walked back outside to the corridor. I would wait for another stall, that couldn’t be hard and it couldn’t possibly be any worse than the first attempt. Never.
The next stall down was occupied. I wish I could say there was some reason not to have waited to enter that one – a scream, muffled gagging, anything. There was no reason not to wait except that I’m impatient. I walked past instead, wandering on to the next stall, door hanging limply, not quite on its hinges, not quite off enough to qualify for any kind of maintenance. It turned with an ominous creak.
This toilet was similarly occupied – not by some clawing monstrosity, barely inanimate like the last – by a tiny sample. I considered myself lucky, stepped up to the plate and depressed the ‘flush’ button for a few seconds. It always takes a few seconds. I can never explain why I did what I did next, but I did it… maybe out of a sense of morbid curiosity, maybe out of a sense of gratitude that it wasn’t as inhuman as the last stall’s occupant. I looked down.
It was streaked with blood… and not even in a manner that might be mistakable. It was lined crimson, like the glow of magma through the convergence lines of tectonic plates on an early earth. I was taken aback, mostly because somehow this was still better than the alternative. Everyone has blood, what’s there to be afraid of?
Then, of course, the flush hit it and it immediately shattered, revealing innards that could only have been predominantly blood. Panic stricken, I shambled through a change of t-shirt as quickly as possible, unlocked the door with the least grateful twist possible and wrenched at the door, an unforgiving creak issuing from its clearly abused hinges. As I walked past the door of the middle stall I wondered why I hadn’t just waited to use that one; it’s door was hanging open now too and it would have been easier for all concerned.
As I walked past it, I suddenly felt that feeling that you get when you’re forced to interact with something you’ve never interacted with before. I’ve tried to explain it a few times before – the feeling of your brain trying suddenly to deal with an entirely new sensory input. Sometimes it’s something that makes you feel insignificant (the pre-romantic notion of the poetic ‘sublime’ springs to mind) and sometimes it’s just that your brain has so much new to process that it just has to shift back a bit and deal with it all while you’re on auto-pilot.
This time, I felt that same feeling, but the reasons were entirely different. My father once described the feeling of being tricked into smelling the outlet from drum of ammonia as “like being punched in the chest.” This was a bit different, but similar. You know when you get hit on the head with something hard, there’s a feeling so strong it’s like a sound?
This was like smelling being punched in the face.
If you’ve not been punched in the face recently, there’s always a split second where you respond without being aware of it (if it’s hard enough, your legs sometimes manage to move themselves around so that you don’t fall over, for example). You just suddenly are aware that some small amount of time has passed and you’re in a slightly different position than you were a second ago, and then your face hurts. This was the smell equivalent of that.
I felt my brain try to divorce itself briefly from my senses, and then I was leaning up against the wall with spots in front of my eyes wondering what was happening, sliding my way gradually towards the sinks on weakened legs… then I was aware of what is probably the single worst non-chemical smell I have ever encountered. It was literally the kind of smell you might find in a nightmare – it had no texture, no material to associate it with, it was inarticulately bad, as though someone had leaned on a part of my brain marked, “smells awful”.
It was terrifying. I think a little bit of me died inside. I’m not really sure how to end this, but I thought I should share it with you all anyway, just so you’d know how awful it was…
The day was okay after that, but I think there’s a fragment of my soul I’ll never see again.
.
