By James Clammer.
I was walking in a shopping mall. Thousands of objects swam behind plate glass windows that shimmered, in their turn, with the shoal-like reflections of mirrors and screens. It was a heavenly place, impervious to seasons, filled with novelty, warmth, odourlessness. Around me the shoppers thronged and I took my part in their thronging. Suddenly, however, I was seized by an irresistible urge to empty my bowels; I could feel the faeces, conscientiously processed and miraculously compacted, moving already into my sigmoid colon. I needed to find a lavatory as fast as possible — but among all the interiors of white and gold and black there were none to be found. Then I had an idea. I would search out the nearest Mothercare. Their facilities, for young mothers, are always clean and spacious. This I knew from experience.
I found it immediately. The lavatory was in the basement, and the stairs that had to be descended in order to reach it were covered in cracked and curling linoleum. The single cubicle being occupied, I decided to press on, for the notion had come to me that there would be other suitable places in this lowly corridor at the rear of the shop. Our young mothers deserve the best, and one solitary stall, even if roomy, was certainly not that. By now almost all the muscles below my transverse axis were locked tight. It felt as if my rectal tract were dealing with a cruise ship; yet I was also subtly aware of delaying myself, knowing that this would make the final release more intensely pleasurable. No doubt I have a well-developed streak of masochism, like all Englishmen.
Soon the corridor turned into the London Underground! The tiled, yellowing, circular tunnels were unmistakable. Since exploring the illicit and forgotten parts of the London Underground — the back passages if you like — had always been a desire of mine I now became greatly excited; so excited, in fact, that for a short time I forgot the gravitational inevitability of the enormous turd swelling within.
I rounded a corner and came upon a member of staff, neatly dressed and bland-faced, sitting inside an old-fashioned wooden kiosk. He was a throwback to the days when the tickets that one needed to buy in order to ride the London Undergound were perforated cardboard strips. He showed no surprise at my appearance; instead, as if reading my mind, he merely nodded over his shoulder. ‘Be careful in there,’ he said.
I saw, then, behind him, a door emblazoned with the universal stick man and I lunged for it. The exquisite moment was almost upon me. Yet fate (it was certainly not, by that time, any vestige of the renowned masochism) intervened once more. By some trick of the eye, such as one often experiences on the London Underground, a sort of half-hidden, grimy area was revealed to me. It may once have been a storage depot, now it was laid with strips of parched turf. Three gorillas (I emphasise their maturity) lay there in various states of distress. The nearest was clearly dying: stretched out on its side, ribs deeply contoured, it stared at me through a mask of flies. The other two could not be far behind, although they moved around a little as they perceived me observing them. All had the look of creatures whose relationship with the world has been utterly broken. I wanted to go closer and brush the parasitical flies away, if nothing else, but nature, as they say, was calling and I hurried on.
The door of the universal stick man was locked. I banged on it but to no avail. I banged again, almost beside myself, and this time heard a noise. The person inside was finishing up. The door opened and out came… something. He (the personal pronoun is appropriate since he had, after all, elected to visit the Gentlemen’s) seemed to be half-man and half-gorilla. Past me he shuffled, bent low with a face the colour of midnight and a throat pleated like a turkey’s. He wore a plum-coloured jacket and kept his eyes, which I did not have the opportunity to see, firmly on the ground.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ve left rather a mess.’
I pushed past him. I didn’t care about that man, if man he was. Instead I went inside and slammed the door. It was far from ideal in there. The porcelain bowl was heaped with soaking toilet paper almost to the rim, the floor was awash with dark yellow urine, and everywhere, everywhere, on ceiling and walls, there was shit. I sat down on the bowl, the soft skin of my backside gently brushing and pressing into the swamp of toilet roll, and gasped. Already my bowels were going through the voluptuous contortions.
It would have been madness, afterwards, to have flushed.
Outside, I hurried past the dying gorillas. Perhaps they were not all dying. The man in the wooden kiosk nodded approvingly when he saw the excrement lodged in the half-moons of my fingernails. Given the conditions, that had been unavoidable. He told me the gorillas had been there for many years. Nobody came to work for London Underground because they wanted to help the public, he said. Still less did they do it for the money. It was because they had found out about the gorillas. Some wanted to help and some merely to gawp. It was the best kept secret in London. And now that I, too, had stumbled upon it, was there any way I might assist? The authorities were clamping down on food and medicine: could I get any of these things? I told him yes, I would consider it; yes, I would try; but secretly my only thought was a profound happiness at being in on London’s biggest deception.
I wiped my hands on the yellowing tiles until the foul streaks of brown were gone. The creature in the plum-coloured jacket had vanished, presumably down other corridors. I retraced my steps, climbed from the basement of Mothercare beside a heavily pregnant lady, and found myself among the bright lights of the shopping mall. The crowds thronged about me, and once again I took my part in their thronging.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James Clammer was born in Bristol and grew up in East Anglia. His first novel, Why I Went Back — a work of YA fiction — was nominated for a Carnegie Medal and longlisted for the Branford Boase Award. His first novel for adults, Insignificance, was published by Galley Beggar in 2021.
