Parfum

Last Monday, I stopped being able to pee without literature. I'm not talking volumes of Proust - what serial killer keeps them in the bog? - so much as more accessible toilet text. Instructions, warnings, ingredients I will never know the colour of. I can say for certain that I have read the entire back catalogue of L'oreal, depending on which variants my flatmates gravitate towards in the chemist each week. I am the most thoroughly qualified person I know to administer a hairwash.

Of course, the flipside to being master shaman of all shampoos is that I am bound to them for urinary release. How did this happen? One moment I was merrily pissing a rainbow in any public lav I entered, the next I found myself knotted, frustrated and fiercely examining a bottle of Peach and Passionflower Conditioning Serum.

I think I can trace it back to this time two weeks ago, at the Ass and Angel. Having supped three pints of a beer which zoomed my memory back to being sixteen in a
home town dive, I headed to the "Slags room and sat down. As I was about to let go, two pairs of kitten heels clicked into the room and came to rest at the sinks opposite my cubicle. The owners began talking loudly about a documentary they'd seen on premature burial. Boom! Suddenly it was like piss-kryptonite had been flung at me. I ruffled the toilet paper loudly and prayed they would bugger off or at least be merciful and turn on the hand dryer. Pushing like a woman giving birth to a cactus, I tried to get rid of the bladderful, all the time muttering "fuck off! I refuse to carry this back out of these toilets just so you people won't see that I can't piss. Which, of course, is what I ended up doing.

Just a matter of being alone at first, or so I thought. I would grab my phone whenever I heard footsteps and text, beeping to hide my grunts. I realised, however, that even after any girls had gone, I couldn't simply put down the phone and let it all stream out of me. My urethra had apparently gone into hiding like a traumatised tortoise and was not coming out any time soon. Non-negotiable. As soon as I stepped back outside each time, however, there the weight would be, like a water balloon pinballing round my lower belly.

There would be days in which I wouldn't urinate once, all because I'd heard what sounded like approaching hooves, but which would later turn out to be a rattling extractor fan or someone passing by outside. Then I lost the ability to go altogether.

It was while I was sat there, two days after the blockage settled for good, that I picked up a bottle of Lemongrass Lagoon Crème for Normal Hair out of sheer boredom and began to make my way through sulfates, acids, alcohol, aqua and some things I had to take a stab at pronouncing in my head, just for the sport of it. In all my concentration, I suddenly felt my agonised pipes uncurl and a friendly splashing begin, as warmth trickled then sloshed from between my thighs into the bowl. I made a friend that day with old Lemongrass, but I have been fickle since.

Sometimes there were no cosmetics available. No, not even a bottle of disinfectant, and so I began to improvise texts to relieve myself. For example, tiles. Have you ever noticed the grains within the grouting? Counting them, or tracing with my eye the path of each smooth square outline, became functional literature within itself. Within the flecks in a polka-dot shower curtain, or the grime spots on a stall door I found keys to unlocking my urinary stream. The more pointless the counting, spotting or unveiling, the more my will forgot to reinforce the dam. The stem of a wallpaper tulip, followed slowly to its bloom and back again; flecks on taps, first hot, then cold; the tally of bottles; the blemishes on soap; the miles and miles of mildew along the wall and about my head like halo seconds. Everything was an option.