The bathroom was quiet ... she who found it her daily activity to clean it had left en route for the kitchen floor, for she had plenty of girders of the bridge to paint and, before her sentence reaches its end, she will die from sheer exhaustion.

The man had been sleeping off the morning, so that by the time he emerged, yawning, from the bedroom door, the raw edges of the day had been papered over by his own wisecracks ... and by the evening mood that even now seeped into the early afternoon.

He entered the bathroom and decided to trim his stubble beard into the wash basin. The scissors needed to be found, first, and she who was by now sopping out the muckenders and utilities was called to account. Orange scissors, bottle opener, sellotape, hammer, string, fuses ... were all kept in a cupboard nobody ever knew existed; nobody that is except the woman who was by now another job away, shovelling away the night soil from under his bed or teasing out the tapeworm from the middle child’s bottom drawers or blowing on the TV screen to brighten up its dim, flickering image…

The scissors? Yes, can’t you look properly, they’re behind the built-in wardrobe. It only needs a demolition expert to find them!

Sarcasm wont get you anywhere, so he’s resorting to pulling out his bristles one by one with blunt, rusty garden shears...

Don’t make a mess in there, I’ve just cleaned it out. I don’t want hairs all over the place - the water sinks slowly out through the plugging already as it is, and I bet it’s a whole load of your hairs.

The man shrugged and jokingly offered to ask the hairy little bugger to shift itself, either up or down, it didn’t matter, as long as it cleared itself away and make it snappy!

He’d had a day off from work to do his hair, what with the several applications and consequent rinsings, the fixing up of the drier, the magazines he’d had to buy to read under the hot air, the plug-work with the sink, the baking towels, the blow-waves, the scalp friction, the split ends to mend, the convalescence and after- care, the setting out of the combs, the brushes of varying torques and grades, the oils, pomanders and talcum puffs, and finally the endless staring into the mirror, evidently mulling over the balding process that surely had been in full spate for many a year...

He watched the last lot of water slowly spiral out through the plug-hole, perforated to prevent the exit of lumps larger than a processed pea and to bar the entrance of anything that cared to come back. Today, the water, even on this last lap of rinsing, was dark, curdled and steeped in breaking suds. Deep down somewhere in the bowels of the plumbing system, whatever blockaded the passageways and outflows was forcing the fluids back up in great gurgling spouts. Even the very first wash had backed up sufficiently far to force itself through the perforations with the consistency of a thick soup riddled with wriggling nets of hair. It came up at him like a beard in search of a face...

At this time, the woman was scraping the walls away from all the wallpaper in the house, as if in some desperate attempt to purge herself of boredom...

But then, she heard the man bundling about in the bathroom like a creature at war with a giant soggy towel. A substance remarkably like a tide of mushed peas slewed across the landing and began to droop over each step of the stairs...

knd she heard flapping things that must have had massive wings settle on.the upper ridges of the house; they had flocked in, attracted by the smell, for a mighty feed.

The house hunched up on itself and lurched into the forest to be violently sick somewhere on its own.

***

He stared wildly into his own eyes. He’d had a strange dream before getting up, but all he could do now was scream! For half the morning would be spent looking for the damn scissors; their official keeper, the woman, was away house hunting.


Published 'Auguries' (1988)