Seats For All: An Anthology in support of World Toilet Day
Today is World Toilet Day
Toilets are a privilege that nearly half the world lacks. At least 2.6 billion people around the planet have no access to a toilet — and that doesn’t just mean that they don’t have a nice, heated indoor bathroom. It means they have nothing — not a public toilet, not an outhouse, not even a bucket… and the disease toll due to unsanitized human waste is staggering…each of the 2.6 billion people who live without sanitation may ingest up to 10 grams of fecal matter a day. The consequence is often diarrhea, which is a mere irritation in the West, but in the developing world a lethal condition that kills 2.2 million people a year — more than AIDS, tuberculosis or malaria. (from Toilet Tales by Bryan Walsh in Time Magazine)
They had no electricity, no sewage, no piped water. There were 21 public water taps which had to serve over 1,000 homes. The toilet buckets were emptied once a week by the Council. (From History&Housing, Vrygrond Community Website)
Now for a quick, novel tour of hygiene facilities and the luxury of a space (for cleaning body and soul) called bathroom:
A toilet in Mexico
He snapped on the light. Hot water. Shirt over the toilet. He looked at their things: tooth paste, mentholated shaving cream, tortoise shell combs, cold cream, a tube of aspirin tablets, antacid wafers, tampons, lavender water, blue razor blades, brilliantine, rouge, pills to be used for stomach-spasm, yellow mouthwash, condoms, Milk of Magnesia, band-aids, iodine, shampoo, tweezers, manicure scissors, lipstick, eye drops, eucalyptus oil inhalator, cough syrup, deodorant. He picked up his razor. It was clogged with heavy brown hairs between the blade and the guard. He paused. He lifted the razor to his lips, and involuntarily closed his eyes.
From The Death of Artemio Cruz, by Carlos Fuentes
A lavatory in Ireland
Once he had washed his hands in the lavatory of the Wicklow Hotel and his father pulled the stopper up by the chain after and the dirty water went down through the hole in the basin. And when it had all gone down slowly the hole in the basin had made a sound like that: suck. Only louder.
To remember that and the white look of the lavatory made him feel cold and then hot. There were two cocks that you turned and water came out: cold and hot. He felt cold and then a little hot: and he could see the names printed on the cocks. That was a very queer thing.
And the air in the corridor chilled him too. It was queer and wettish. But soon the gas would be lit and in burning it made a light noise like a little song. Always the same: and when the fellows stopped talking in the playroom you could hear it.
From A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce
A (bestselling) bathroom in New York
I reach back in time three years earlier to the moment when this entire story began—a moment which also found me in this exact same posture: on my knees, on a floor, praying. Everything else about the three-years-ago scene was different though. That time, I was not in Rome but in the upstairs bathroom of a the big house in the suburbs of new York which I’d recently purchased with my husband. It was a cold Novermber, around three o’clock in the morning. My husband was sleeping in our bed. I was hiding in the bathroom for something like the forty-seventh consecutive night, and—just as during all those nights before—I was sobbing. Sobbing so hard, in fact, that a great lake of tears and snot was spreading before me on the bathroom tiles, a veritable Lake Inferior (if you will) of all my shame and fear and confusion and grief.
From Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert
A toilet in Great Britain
“Oh yes, I am fit,” said Margaret, uncovering her face. “Only most frightfully worried. I cannot feel that Helen is really alive. Her letters and telegrams seem to have come from some one else. Her voice isn’t in them. I don’t believe your driver really saw her at the station. I wish I’d never mentioned it. I know that Charles is vexed. Yes, he is–” She seized Dolly’s hand and kissed it. “There, Dolly will forgive me. There. Now we’ll be off.”
Henry had been looking at her closely. He did not like this breakdown.
“Don’t you want to tidy yourself?” he asked.
“Have I time?”
“Yes, plenty.”
She went to the lavatory by the front door, and as soon as the bolt slipped, Mr. Wilcox said quietly:
“Dolly, I’m going without her.”
Dolly’s eyes lit up with vulgar excitement. She followed him on tiptoe out to the car.
From Howards End, E. M. Forster
A coed bathroom in the US
She decided to take a shower, get in bed, read for a bit, and then go to sleep.
Her hear sank My God..take a shower? In a coed bathroom? The thought was mortifying, yet she had not choice. She changed into her pajamas, her slippers and her towel, screwed up her courage, and headed down the corridor. Things were quiet, thank God. On the way she nodded tentatively at a gril and then a boy, each alone and looking as lonesome as she felt. She entered the bathroom slowly and softly, as if stealth was of the essence. It was a large, windowless, feebly lit room with rows of weary old yellowing white basins and urinals, gray sheet-metal toilet cubicles, narrow shower stalls with old mauve-gone-russet curtains for privacy…One of the showers was running…Other than that, the place seemed to be miraculously empty. Perhaps if she hurried—into a toilet cubicle. She had been sitting down for no more than fifteen second when she thought she heard a faint grunting sound. Then—a prodigious pig-bladdery splattering spincter-spasmed bowel explosion, followed by, in rapid succession, plop plop plop and a deep male voice—‘Oh fuck! Splashed right up my fucking asshole!’ Filthy! The crudeness, the grossness, the vulgarity—above all the face that there was a boy or a man in here…no more than three or four cubicles down the row from her.
From I Am Charlotte Simmons, by Tom Wolfe
A train lavatory
The sleeping carriages on the Great Northern line were divided into three compartments – one at each end for travellers, and one in the centre fitted with the conveniences of a lavatory. A door running in grooves separated each of the others from the lavatory; but as there were neither bolts nor locks, the whole suite was practically common ground. …
From New Arabian Nights by Robert Louis Stevenson
A toilet in Wuhan China
Rooms two and three were spacious and empty and dark. In the cupboard of room three was a collection of broken heaters. I couldn’t imagine ever wanting a heater in Wuhan, it must have been forty degrees outside.
After a morning of flying and several cups of tea, I needed to go to the toilet, so I moved on to the bathroom and there I had to really work at keeping my spirits up. The shower over the toilet was adjacent to the sewerage pipes that delivered nine-storeys of waste from above me to the pit beneath the building. The pipes painted silver, were wet and oozing and there were … what were those creatures, maggots? I don’t know exactly what nature of creature they were but they were alive, clinging en masse to the pipes and I was sharing a bathroom with them. I needed to wee, so maggots or not I opened the lid of the Western-style toilet. It was a dark place down there, but all things can be cleaned, and so I did what I had to do and flushed. The water from the toilet seeped out across the floor wetting my socks and the trouser bottoms of the cat-suit. I cringed. Then I noticed how, staining the walls of the bathroom near the floor, there was a rim of shit; obviously the toilet had been leaking for some time. The contract had said a fully functional Western toilet. The squalor of it was a deal-breaker. I was appalled enough to want to leave the country. If that were remotely possible, I probably would have.
The phone in my new home was ringing.
‘Hello, Alex,’ Su Ting said sweetly on the other side.
I pulled off my horribly wet socks and tossed them towards a corner.
‘Your telephone is working now,’ Su Ting said. ‘The gate works on the phone too. Just press 1 to let somebody in.’
‘That’s great, thank you very much.’ In an incarnation before this sweating, cat-suited teacher in China, and before the social editor master’s student life, I’d been a design director of a textile company. The experience there was an education. For one thing I developed a deep appreciation for fine textiles and patterns. More useful, though (and not as taxing on my wallet), as a result of dealing with mills, printers and angry customers, I learnt that at all times and in all situations, if one needs something done or resolved, it is best to stay calm, persist relentlessly and to be pleasant. ‘Um … I’m afraid I have a small problem … with the toilet. It’s leaking.’
Su Ting was sorry to hear that. She promised to send a plumber to fix it. ‘And also I have asked for water to be delivered to you,’ she said.
‘Wonderful, thank you very much.’
Only the kitchen remained to be discovered. It had a nice new washing machine, an aged fridge, and a dire-looking gas hob in a tiled window box that shimmered with drippings of splattered oil and fatty grease. My contract had said there would be a microwave and a fully equipped kitchen. There were two mismatched plates, a bent spoon and some dishcloths dried into grey crumples. And there was a pair of crutches. There wasn’t a kettle in sight and I really needed a cup of tea.
All in all, by Western standards, the apartment was bad, the bathroom especially. But I was in the middle of China with no money, no map and no immediate means of escape. Besides all those negatives, on the positive side, the dragon had given me a home, a three-bedroom home and a beautiful white washing machine with a mint-coloured on-light all to myself. What a gift! The place simply required some determined cleaning and I knew where the supermarket was. I needed to get out of the cat-suit, still wet at my ankles, but the phone rang. A man spoke in quick Chinese.
‘I don’t understand. Do you speak English?’
He spoke in Chinese.
‘I’m sorry I don’t understand.’
He spoke in Chinese, sounding urgent.
‘I don’t understand.’
He spoke in Chinese and then the line went dead.
‘I’ve got to change!’ I ranted at the wall, but before I could open my case, Su Ting phoned again. ‘Alex. The plumber is at your gate, will you let him in please.’
I have never seen such teeth as the teeth of that plumber. He was not neat with pale skin like the office staff in the English department; he was a worker, his skin was tanned, his clothes were rough and his teeth were yellow and the front teeth stuck out almost perpendicular to his other teeth.
He nodded, took off his shoes and left a path of barefoot prints in the dust. In the bathroom, I demonstrated the problem with the toilet.
The plumber spoke only Chinese.
I indicated with my hands: ‘I don’t understand.’
Cleverly, he produced a mobile phone and phoned Su Ting, spoke to her and then handed me the phone.
‘Alex, the plumber will have to work on the toilet and it will take a few hours. Is that okay?’
‘Yes, absolutely, fine. So it will be fixed today?’
The barefoot plumber with pointy yellow teeth crashed around in the bathroom for two hours, first chopping up the floor tiles and then spreading cement everywhere.
To allow for the plumbing works, the front door and mesh door were open, mosquitoes began finding their way in and just when I thought I could close myself into my bedroom and change, so did Don Kane.From Drinking From the Dragon’s Well, Alex Smith
