The next toilet I found was much better. It was in the gender neutral section with the orange doors.
A woman came out and gave me a funny look, like I shouldn’t be there, but the markings on the doors showed the symbol of a man and next to the symbol it was marked ‘Malo’.
I double checked. Then I went in.
Read moreThe stall had a large glass window which opened out onto the gallery’s exhibit rooms but it didn’t bother me because of the stall’s cleanliness. The seat had paper that would flush away automatically once you used it. There was some paper on the floor but it was better than the previous toilet where I had to use a whole roll to wipe away the spilled water that was everywhere. I’d given up on that toilet which was why I found myself here.
I was conscious of not having seen any of the exhibition of drawings but I sat down instead and squeezed my buttocks. Only nothing came out. I couldn’t go. I stood up to wash my hands and saw that the soaps were gummies shaped like toilet seats, and included the base of the seat as well as the lid. The gummies were covered with what looked like sugar. They looked good enough to eat .
I washed the sugar off one of the gummies and felt tempted to bite into it.
I walked out of the toilet with one of the gummies so that I could show Siobhan and her friends. Once I caught up with them they told me that they were about to leave.
‘I’ll go on first and you catch up later,’ I told Siobhan.
I hadn’t seen any of the artwork we came for.
In the forecourt, Mokbul (we called him Mok for short), Edward and I bundled into a taxi.
‘The nearest bar,’ we cried out. ‘We need something to eat.’
But we were probably too early. And maybe things were not open on a Sunday.
The taxi wound through the Parisian streets in an area that seemed high up . There was a fabulous view, to our right, of grey rooftops the city.
The taxi stopped at some steps that could have been in Montmartre.
‘Are you not going to drive us down the steps,’ I joked to the driver, as we all—driver included—piled out of the taxi. Instead, the driver took us round the corner and along a wide boulevard with old Parisian blocks. The blocks were deserted and had shut up shopfronts. We continued walking until finally, we came across one empty bar with a lone door that he unlocked.
‘Go in here and we’ll open soon. Mok, Edward, and I walked into a bar which was empty of people but had the homely feel of an olde English pub or an old-timey Western bar.
A soft brown light came in from the thick glass windows that faced the street. The pub had a pool table in the center and the bar had a mirror that spanned the length of the counter. The counter was of a dark gray wood and it had four pumps for ale.
We wandered around looking for a place to sit.
From behind me, I saw a black man in the glasss entrance—or was it a woman—playing with the key lock. Maybe they were opening up?
From behind the bar, Mok found a iron pickaxe with hooks on both ends in case someone would come after us.
‘Don’t carry that around,’ I told him, as he walked cautiously up the rotating stairs to the second floor. ‘You’ll only get us murdered.’
Then he handed me the axe.
Edward and I found a white wooden table replete with four white wooden armchairs on the raised portion of the room. The table seated four and just as we were going to sit, a slight woman with short blonde hair came up to the table next to us.
‘Why don’t you join us?’ I asked her, although she had clearly come with friends.
Then she sat on one of the chairs at our table.
‘Where are you from?’ I asked her.
The woman looked Norwegian, I thought. She reminded me of Alice. She mentioned a town but I only caught her say the word ‘Norway.’
I swiveled a chair from the other table so that I could sit next to her at the head of our table. But I noticed that the base of the seat was wider than the other chairs and that it was too low for the table. If I sat in the chair, I realized that my head would only come up to the height of the table. It would be like I was sitting on a toilet again!
Quickly I swapped the chair for another from the other table and I swiveled that into place instead.
‘Yes I flew to Bergen once to see a girl there,’ I replied. ‘Her name was Alice. And she broke my heart.’
Drawing of back streets in Montmartre by Henriette Kosmann-Sichel via Picryl.