finish here, OK?’
‘OK.’
The toilets over here were unlike the crazing art-porcelain originals of the old building. There everything was excessive and mad, in a fantastic Pre-Raphaelite way. Here they were kickproof steel. When I first started the job I was confident that I could take them all on, block by block, and restore their shine; in, say, a couple of months. Now I knew by a sort of intuitive calculus that their rate of moral decay would forever just outstrip my labour; the backsliding fungus and slime had its old ammoniac eye on my workrate. I could never win. Yet I hung on to the delusion that if I worked still that little extra bit more furiously, a spurt might at last put me right with them.
Following Seco’s advice, I checked the store cupboard and found only one and a half industrial standard containers left, which I put by the door of the toilets to compose themselves for their journey downwards. Then, armed with my other chemicals, I entered, prepared to begin.
Appalling! An opera of neglect. I hadn’t seen them for a couple of weeks, having been assigned elsewhere by Mr Prime; and yesterday Seco had volunteered to do them. But I’d left them gleaming last time. My colleagues could have held the fort at least.
They were disgusting.
‘Seco!’ I accosted him.
‘Si.’
‘Have you seen these?’
‘Dio! Terrible!’ He tapped his teeth.
‘But didn’t you do them yesterday?’
‘Sure.’
‘Then how did they get like this?’
‘These folks got no idea how to crap.’
What could I say? All my hopes, all my works, all my days: a personal waste. I set to furiously. I did not speculate then as to why it could be that I was hurling myself, with such intensity, into such a humiliating task, in so ruined and appalling a world.
A Chymical Toilet
It was the pits of the world – Cloaca Mundi, a kind of hell – inhabited by those for whom there was no hope of release. In the toilets you found the evidence. Some biological devil was at work. He made it his business to dehydrate the colons of these innocents so that they were mostly costive, and you might mop cruel khaki rocks about the floor, their sharp edges sometimes bloodied from a final passage.
On odd occasions a witty anomaly would appear in one of the corners: a starfish, or a dead wren. Always on the stand-easies grew encrustations which it took hours to remove with even the most powerful chemicals – a testimony to years of skiving cleaners. I speculated on the human interiors whose fluids had marked the deposited limescale. They’d given it such drama and so flamboyant a coloration. Satan had here his stony monument, and the story of his penetration into this world found here its only inscription. Well, no, not its only inscription. Some of them daubed: formless, wordless, lonely brown fingermarks on the walls of cubicles. I recognised the father and mother of all expression: without language; without design, representation, code; without signification of any sort; without hope of being heard – perhaps the damnedest and most tragic artistic cry.
I thought of Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel. We write our own story on the walls of our world; we project ourselves on to our account of the past – and the future. I did not think of Isaac Newton stitching his own version of things with meticulous and mathematical care into the very fabric of the universe so that scarcely a mouse could wriggle out from under those skirts.
Occasionally a naked madman lay unconscious on the stone floor. When I saw my first I’d thought he was dead. I went over, pulling off my rubber gloves, and knelt by his head. The memory of a star reflected in a pool of blood had flitted in, and out, of my mind. From where? From what? Then I’d noticed the fitful rising of his back. I took the details to one of the bored male nurses.
‘It’s alright,’ he said. ‘He’s OK. It’s the heat.’
‘But he’s lying on the stone.’
‘Just leave him. He’s OK.’
Unable in my condition to recognise negligence, I’d gone back and mopped around the terrible exhibit.
I began on the walls. Working my powders into a biting lather, I sought out the villainy of the place. I restored a fallen glory square foot by square foot, dodging the bouncing corrosive splashes that leapt off the tiles and paintwork towards my eyes. Inhaling God only knew what combination of active vapours, I mopped; I bucketed, seized with a grim enthusiasm. And the treasures of the floor and walls went raw into the jakeses from my brush and dustpan: sludges, geodes, hair, dead insects and arachnidae, a rubber glove and tainted paper waste, a mouse’s skull and tail, a set of used plasters, dust and tomato, the ghost of a prophylactic and several other unnameable matters. I didn’t flush.
Time rubbed on in my frenzy. I hardly noticed. Until suddenly I was assaulted through the high-stationed open windows by an infernal roaring and clanking. Then the frosted screen of the sky was blotted out. I identified the rattle of a huge diesel; presumably it was an apartment-sized delivery juggernaut parking close up next to the glass. So I found myself dark within one cubicle, scrubbing and deafened. It was a mechanical and stinking dark, and gave rise to non-visual sensory streaks: a trace of recaptured taste, and, with my hyperventilation, a recalled other smell mingling in my nostrils with the present fume. My lips pulled back from my teeth in a frightening grimace. I stilled them automatically.
Even as I tried for calm the cubicle floor grew unsteady. The seals and grouts sweated. Something hurt violently in my head, and something else was illuminating the wall in front of me. I swung round to look up and back for the source of the rays, but there was only noisy, noisome dark, and the shouts of men outside. But when I regained my balance and turned back, forms were cast on to the surface in front of me. I tried to erase them from the wall of the cubicle with my scrubbing: bright transfers which began to declare themselves as lewd cartoons. They animated their moments, unrolling themselves beyond my brushstrokes. Still in my ears was the unstoppable roaring of the engine.
They held an initial fascination, these workings. They glowed and ran and re-expressed themselves. They scudded across the wall of the one cubicle and led me beyond, hiding themselves in the pipe-work where my brush couldn’t reach. I panicked again with that wretched desperate feeling in my stomach. They were mine. They took me fast and crazy round the whole place, dabbing and scouring. The more I tried to dash them out the brighter they became, some too obscene, others too gorgeous – episodes from the history of my world. They defied cleaning powder and led across roughnesses of plaster, the dull drum of coated metal, the ridged slide of tiling, back to my original cubicle. She was there, that woman the doctors were talking about. Her long locks gleamed over water. I stared across a lake whose surface was immense. It was as though I stood upon a cliff. The moon’s reflection – the moon itself – whirled in incredible rings and gears. It winked. It was loose in its chapel with water and tides.
I moved into action once my stomach had finished heaving. Putting off the need to drink, I groped to empty my whole container of powder into that bowl, and then, as my eyes normalised to the persisting but ordinary gloom, went on to all the others areek with their abominable soups. Next I made them ready for their final flush by stirring and diving with my brush, lest the huge energy of the event I’d just witnessed should eructate again out of the U-bend.
The
