condolence, and continued on to the station. He felt a genuine pleasure as he sat down on his folding seat. Julie was burning his fingers.
‘Saturday is always the busiest day of the week, along with Wednesday, but when Saturday is also the last day of the sales, then you can tell a mile off that it’s going to be a horrendous day, the kind of day when even the shopping centre’s 100,000 square metres seem to be hard put to hold so many people. It was packed from the minute the doors opened. Hordes of visitors poured into my cave all day long to deposit their stream of urine, excrement, blood and even vomit. Sometimes I see them reduced purely to sphincters, stomachs, intestines and bladders on legs and no longer as entire human beings. I don’t particularly like these peak shopping days which turn the shopping centre into a giant ant hill. I find all this frantic activity disturbing, even though it often heralds excellent takings. You have to be on your toes the whole time so as to keep up. Restock the cubicles with toilet paper; don’t forget to wipe the seats as soon as you get a chance; chuck bleach blocks into the urinals regularly, not forgetting to sit by the saucer as often as possible. Thank you, goodbye. Thank you, have a nice day. Hello, thank you, goodbye. The thing is that a lot of them don’t give anything if there’s no witness to appreciate their generosity. Auntologism number 4: Beggar absent, begging bowl empty. I think the entire human race has come by here today. That’s what I said to myself as I locked the gates, exhausted, my back broken, my nostrils saturated with the smell of bleach and ammonia.
I far prefer the midweek early-morning calm with its slow trickle of customers to these fraught periods. When it’s like this, I sometimes put aside my writing or my magazines to listen to them. Holding my breath, my eyes closed, I ignore the constant rumble of the shopping centre and concentrate all my attention on the noises coming from the toilets. My hearing has become more refined over time and now I’m able to identify each of the sounds that reach me through the closed doors, no matter how muffled, without hesitation. My aunt, armed with her characteristic bleach-infused omniscience, classified these noises into three main categories. First of all there are the ones she prettily calls “noble sounds”. The discreet click of a belt being unbuckled, the gentle whoosh of a zip being pulled down, the snap of a press stud, as well as all those rustlings of fabrics – silks, nylon, cottons and other materials that sing against the skin with a rippling, crinkling, swishing, and other murmurings. Then come what she calls the “cover-up sounds”. Embarrassed coughing, deceptively cheerful whistling, activating the flush – all those sounds designed to drown out the third category, that of “active sounds”: flatulence, gargling, tinkling, the song of the enamel, the plopping of high dives, the toilet roll unspooling, the paper tearing. And I would add a final category, rarer but O so interesting – sounds of relief, all those grunts and groans and sighs of contentment that sometimes rise up to the ceiling when the floodgates open and that liberating stream held in for too long cascades onto the enamel, or the sonorous avalanche of over-full bowels. Sometimes I love people when they fetch up here, so vulnerable in their need to relieve their bladder or empty their stomach. And during the brief time that they are hidden from view behind the cubicle doors, whatever their condition or social status, I know they are returning to the dawn of time, mammals satisfying the call of nature, their buttocks glued to the seat, their trousers corkscrewed around their calves, their forehead dripping with sweat as they labour to open their sphincter, alone with themselves, far from the world above. But the people here do not only leave me the contents of their bowels or their bladder. It’s not unusual for
‘Saturday is always the busiest day of the week, along with Wednesday, but when Saturday is also the last day of the sales, then you can tell a mile off that it’s going to be a horrendous day, the kind of day when even the shopping centre’s 100,000 square metres seem to be hard put to hold so many people. It was packed from the minute the doors opened. Hordes of visitors poured into my cave all day long to deposit their stream of urine, excrement, blood and even vomit. Sometimes I see them reduced purely to sphincters, stomachs, intestines and bladders on legs and no longer as entire human beings. I don’t particularly like these peak shopping days which turn the shopping centre into a giant ant hill. I find all this frantic activity disturbing, even though it often heralds excellent takings. You have to be on your toes the whole time so as to keep up. Restock the cubicles with toilet paper; don’t forget to wipe the seats as soon as you get a chance; chuck bleach blocks into the urinals regularly, not forgetting to sit by the saucer as often as possible. Thank you, goodbye. Thank you, have a nice day. Hello, thank you, goodbye. The thing is that a lot of them don’t give anything if there’s no witness to appreciate their generosity. Auntologism number 4: Beggar absent, begging bowl empty. I think the entire human race has come by here today. That’s what I said to myself as I locked the gates, exhausted, my back broken, my nostrils saturated with the smell of bleach and ammonia.
I far prefer the midweek early-morning calm with its slow trickle of customers to these fraught periods. When it’s like this, I sometimes put aside my writing or my magazines to listen to them. Holding my breath, my eyes closed, I ignore the constant rumble of the shopping centre and concentrate all my attention on the noises coming from the toilets. My hearing has become more refined over time and now I’m able to identify each of the sounds that reach me through the closed doors, no matter how muffled, without hesitation. My aunt, armed with her characteristic bleach-infused omniscience, classified these noises into three main categories. First of all there are the ones she prettily calls “noble sounds”. The discreet click of a belt being unbuckled, the gentle whoosh of a zip being pulled down, the snap of a press stud, as well as all those rustlings of fabrics – silks, nylon, cottons and other materials that sing against the skin with a rippling, crinkling, swishing, and other murmurings. Then come what she calls the “cover-up sounds”. Embarrassed coughing, deceptively cheerful whistling, activating the flush – all those sounds designed to drown out the third category, that of “active sounds”: flatulence, gargling, tinkling, the song of the enamel, the plopping of high dives, the toilet roll unspooling, the paper tearing. And I would add a final category, rarer but O so interesting – sounds of relief, all those grunts and groans and sighs of contentment that sometimes rise up to the ceiling when the floodgates open and that liberating stream held in for too long cascades onto the enamel, or the sonorous avalanche of over-full bowels. Sometimes I love people when they fetch up here, so vulnerable in their need to relieve their bladder or empty their stomach. And during the brief time that they are hidden from view behind the cubicle doors, whatever their condition or social status, I know they are returning to the dawn of time, mammals satisfying the call of nature, their buttocks glued to the seat, their trousers corkscrewed around their calves, their forehead dripping with sweat as they labour to open their sphincter, alone with themselves, far from the world above. But the people here do not only leave me the contents of their bowels or their bladder. It’s not unusual for
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