A luminous yellow poster outside a little Methodist chapel called out to him, exhorting him to let Jesus into his life. Loofah felt bad about drinking the cola, cutting short its brilliant career in the public sector, but it had certainly refreshed him and there was now a definite spring in his step as he strode purposefully along the pavement, passing first a fish and chip shop, and then a row of low red brick alms-houses with mullioned windows and ornate chimneys.
On reflection, though, 'purposefully' was not exactly the right word—being as he didn't really have a purpose, that is. A flicker of a frown skitted across his forehead. Nor, for that matter, did he know where he was going or indeed where he presently was. A small but chilly cloud of uncertainty settled on his brow; his feet lost momentum and for a few moments he stared down anxiously at the undulating grey slabs of pavement as a strange coldness began to trickle through his veins.
But only for a few moments—for the warmth of the sun and the prettiness of the village were too strong for the coldness. He looked up and let the friendly light flood over his face, banishing the cloud and wrapping him once again in cosy niceness. Loofah smiled. So what if he didn't know where he was or where he was going?—something would turn up, it always did. He relaxed and slipped gently into the moment, feeling his feet once again carry him forward.
He was now out of the centre of the village, among terraced cottages with trim front gardens where gnomes frolicked, and detached houses that sheltered smugly behind privet hedges and crumbling red-brick walls. A slight tension registered in the base of his belly; the cola, having slaked his thirst, had moved on.
The village thinned, the terraced cottages giving way to modern executive homes, with vast picture windows revealing their empty hollow hearts. The pavement had run out and he was now stumbling over the roughly mown tussocks of the grass verge.
He passed what appeared to be the last house—a sales manager's palace in glass and brick, with no less than three German cars gleaming arrogant malevolence on its herringbone paviered driveway—then a small scrubby field with two ponies and few schoolgirl jumps of planks and straw bales. After the field, though, it was woodland.
The path Loofah chose was wide and heavily walked, but after the relative exposure of the village street, being in the gentle press of trunks and leaves and undergrowth was like returning to the bosom of his family. His relaxation, though, was not complete. For at the very centre of everything was the growing tightness in his bladder, which now filled his abdomen like an overripe watermelon. And with the pain came anxiety—the problem would not go away, he knew he would have to do something, and soon.
A particularly massive trunk loomed towards him, a central pillar in the cathedral of the woods, a single column of titanic strength from which the whole arching canopy spanned out. And, as the path skirted around the splayed fist of roots that clutched into the solid earth like the gnarled fingers of some ancient giant, something hove into view that was nether tree nor undergrowth—there, standing incongruously in a clearing among the lesser trunks, was a building.
Squat and shabby, it was brick built and flat roofed, with rusting metal grilles against its poky windows. But, ugly and squalid though it was, to Loofah it was a veritable palace of unsurpassed beauty; for, beside the doorless entrance, was a little painted silhouette of a male figure and the magic word: 'Gentlemen'. And, as if to emphasise the point, as Loofah stared at the building open mouthed with surprise, a grey-haired man in a blue anorak strode purposefully across the clearing and went inside. Suppressing a whoop of delight, Loofah followed.
The inside was dank and badly lit, pervaded the clinging perfumes of stale urine and blocked drain. The broken tiled floor was wet with puddles of some nameless liquid, undecipherable obscenities were scrawled in felt pen across the peeling yellow paint of the walls, and the grime-caked windows were festooned with cobwebs, heavy with dirt and long abandoned by any self-respecting spider. The urinal itself was a waist-height wall of cracked white porcelain, its gutter half-filled with stagnant dark fluid in which floated blackened cigarette stubs and disintegrating pieces of brown tissue paper.
Been in worse, thought Loofah cheerfully, stepping up to the urinal and unzipping his jeans. There was no sign of the other man, though the graffiti-decorated door of one of the two cubicles was closed.
His tension jetted out onto the porcelain in a hot stream and a warm wave of relief flooded up his belly. He felt strangely comforted in that damp malodorous place, staring uncomprehendingly at the felt pen scrawl on the wall above the urinal, absently aiming his warm hose at the cold porcelain. Clouds of steam rose around him, sauna-like, and the spreading relief lulled him like a drug. He began to slide slowly into a dreamy nowhere world of spreading well-being, where the pungent vapours curled and wrapped around him like affectionate wraiths, where the graffiti swam in the half-light, forming and reforming words and phrases in languages never to be spoken, and where—at the lower edge of his vision—the porcelain reached out to him, extending friendly hands of greeting.
Porcelain? Reached out?
A small circuit in his dormant awareness clicked into life and Loofah looked down. For a tiny splinter of time he just stared, his brain failing to process the image projected onto his retinas—an image of ceramic hands and fingers, bathed in his hot jet, extending from the stained surface of the urinals and reaching towards the open front of his jeans.
Then a klaxon sounded in some deep recess of consciousness and, just as the closest hand darted forward and grabbed for him, he jerked back, sending an arc of golden jewels across the urinal. The hard white fist snapped closed on empty space where, a nanosecond before, his manhood had been.
A dozen porcelain arms now burst from the surface of the urinal and grabbed for him, their ceramic fingers brushing his jacket as he stumbled out of reach, spraying hot liquid over the floor, his shoes, his jeans. But at that instant he felt a sudden hard grip at each hip—escaping from the urinal, he had backed into the cracked washbasin opposite, and hard white hands emerging from the curved outer surface of the bowl now held him firm against the rim of the sink. He twisted hard to the left, then to the right, wrenching at the ceramic wrists at his hips—but its grip was like granite: cold, hard, and completely ungiving. He was trapped, held fast by the washbasin, while a tentacle-nest of porcelain arms seethed in front of him, the snapping fists closing inches from his exposed and dangling member.
The sink held him tighter and tighter, crushing his buttocks into its rim, as if trying to snap his pelvis like a bone china dish. Panic flared and, crying out in fury and fear, he thrashed wildly against the stone-handed trap—but to no avail. Then, as he teetered on the edge of despair, he noticed a metal soap dispenser screwed to the wall beside his left shoulder, and saw hope glimmering in the pitted surface of its tarnished chrome.
He twisted round and seized the dispenser in a two-handed grip and wrenched. It didn't shift; although it hadn't usefully dispensed soap for many a year, the dispenser had no intention of giving up its honorary position on the wall above the sink so easily. Stubborn pride, however, was no match for naked desperation. Again Loofah wrenched, goading every muscle fibre in his tortured arms, and this time there was a grating of screws and a small trickle of plaster dust from its mountings. At the next wrench it jerked off the wall with an outraged cry, scattering mortar and ancient rawplugs.
Loofah raised the dispenser above his head and then swung it down, a battering ram against the ceramic hand that held his left hip. The porcelain shattered with an agonized crack, the severed hand fell away and, warding off the grasping urinal arms with the dispenser, Loofah twisted away from the washbasin and threw himself clear.
Dropping the dispenser, he charged towards the exit, but then remembered himself in time and paused by the doorway to make himself decent. Like angry polyps, the urinal-arms waved furiously, still reaching out for him, and the shattered sink-hand crawled unsteadily towards him across the wet floor, a crippled white spider. Even the walls themselves seethed with carnivorous menace, as if the building itself was trying to devour him.
He hauled up his zip, but as he turned to go, he heard a noise—an anguished cry—from behind the locked cubicle door. The man in the blue anorak: he had forgotten that he was not alone. There was another cry—his fellow toilet-user was clearly in some considerable distress. And given Loofah's own experience with this particular convenience, something as benign as an intractable case of constipation or last night's vindaloo seemed unlikely to be the cause.
Loofah looked nervously at the lethal urinal and the ominously pressing walls, and then to the graffiti scrawled cubicle door—every fibre of his being was screaming to get out of this hideous building. A third desperate cry echoed through the cubicle door. For a moment Loofah hesitated, with fear and conscience locked in mortal combat for his soul. Then an animal roar was torn from his throat as fear was hurled onto to the mat (down but not out) and he charged forward, hammering his foot into the cubicle door.
The feeble lock gave way and the door crashed open, revealing the grey-haired man's plight in all its horror: for the toilet was swallowing him, as a seabird might swallow a fish. He was going down feet first, head and shoulders out of the bowl, arms thrashing weakly against the ungiving porcelain. Like a pair huge white lips, the rim of the bowl was crushing his chest, working him down its throat. Festoons of white toilet paper were draped around the cubicle like festive streamers, wrapped around the victim's flailing arms and around the base of the toilet.
'Help me—for God's sake help me!'
'It's OK,' said Loofah, taking hold of each of the other's hands, 'I've got you.'
He pulled back towards the open door, but nothing shifted. The victim screamed, and Loofah pulled again, straining against the firm grip of the porcelain mouth, but still without success, the trapped body moving not an inch.
Suddenly, the man's face froze. Then, as his eyes bulged in mute horror, the whole bowl convulsed and gulped, and, as if Loofah's entire strength were as nothing, the paper-draped human prey slipped deeper into the gaping throat.
With the hard white lips mouthing his shoulders and neck, and only his head above the rim, the man now began to scream incoherently, clutching wildly at Loofah's jacket. Grasping the padded nylon of his shoulders and bracing himself against the porcelain base, Loofah hauled hopelessly against the relentless bowl, his face inches from the struggling victim's mask of panic.
The toilet gulped again and the victim slipped further down, his head disappearing below the level of the rim. His screams were now muffled and his arms flailed desperately with fading strength. With one more gulp of the bowl the doomed prey slid finally down its swallowing ceramic throat. With a howl of anguish Loofah released the disappearing anorak and went to pull back—but could not. For two white hands, reaching out from the side of the bowl, now gripped the leather of his jacket.
Cursing himself for his stupidity, Loofah gazed with blank dread into the yawning white cavern. Strands of wet and torn toilet paper trailed down its stained and malodorous sides, and in the depths, two hands jutted from a pool of turbid brown saliva, now swollen, blue and motionless.
With the desperate bellow of a doomed animal, Loofah struggled madly, hopelessly. But the iron grip of the ceramic hands held tight, pulling him into the open bowl, whose the hard white lips mouthed rhythmically against his body, working him inexorably inwards—first his left arm and shoulder slipped within the deadly circle of the rim, then his right shoulder. The mouth gaped wide to take his head and when his cheek touched the stained porcelain of the inside of the bowl, he knew he was lost; after one last titanic spasm of panic, a strange calm flowed through him like intravenous morphine, killing the fear. Gradually, he relaxed his struggle and let himself fall gently into the all-embracing arms of death.
His terminal peace, however, was short-lived—for at that instant an explosion hammered through his skull, splintering the calm of death into a thousand tiny shards, followed by another and another, echoing in the bowl like a stick of bombs. Then something seized his jacket, pulling hard against the grip of the rim; for a second it held him, but then with a violent jerk the gaping mouth fell away as he was wrenched backwards, flying out onto the cubicle floor among the broken pottery of the shattered toilet-arms.
Loofah looked up. Two camouflage-clad figures towered over him. One carried a pistol, still smoking, the other a submachine-gun—an abstract sculpture of death in dark metal—under his arm.
'Go! Go! Go!' yelled the man with pistol, and with their free hands the two dragged him across the wet floor, away from the bowl and its impotently waving arm stumps.
Once outside the cubicle he was hauled to his feet. There were three of them, all in combat fatigues with khaki webbing belts hung with grenades, and all wearing mirrored Easy Rider shades and US Army helmets, chin straps dangling loose. As they hurled Loofah towards the door, the soldier with the machine-gun covered their retreat.
'Manges plomb, commie assholes,' he screamed, aiming at the furious mass of arms and hands that was the urinal. A staccato rattle split the air as his weapon spat fire across the dingy toilet and a dozen white limbs exploded in a shower of ceramic shards and severed porcelain fingers. The soldier then snatched a dwarf metal pineapple from his weapon belt and, stepping up to the cubicle door, pulled out its stalk with his teeth.
'Chew on diss, muzzerfugger!' he spat through clenched teeth and tossed the little fruit into the open mouth of the toilet bowl.
Then all three soldiers were round him and Loofah was flown through the doorway into the open air. As they ran forward across dry leaves and moss, the grenade exploded behind them, spewing a cloud of porcelain splinters and mortar dust through the open doorway. A fourth soldier was waiting outside—standing legs akimbo, he was holding a huge construction in green painted metal, on which was mounted an elongated pear with fins and a scarlet snout.
'Let 'em have it!' shouted the soldier with the machine-gun, 'And be hitting the deck!'
The fourth soldier aimed his weapon and as, with a roar of smoke, the pear flew across the clearing towards the toilet doorway, two pairs of hands hammered into Loofah's back, toppling him forwards. Sun-dappled leaves and moss loomed closer and closer, but at the very moment they collided with his face the earth collapsed as the sun exploded behind him, crunching his eggshell skull to nothing, and shattering a crack through time and space itself—into which he tumbled.
Darkness. Soft dampness against his cheek and a smell of wet soil. He was a woodlouse, newborn, coming to life under a log.
Then muscles in his face moved of their own accord and light flooded in bearing images of the huge brown curls of dry leaves, each the size of ship's hull, and rainforests of emerald moss that shimmered with their own lurid light. A few inches away towered a monolith of red brick with cream mortar trimmings.
The earth rumbled and two vast black carapaces planted themselves in front of him, crushing ships and forests to matchwood. Something touched his shoulder—a hand.
'It's OK, my friend,' said a voice, 'you can be getting up now.'
From the caps of the combat boots, Loofah followed the two camouflaged pillars up to the body that leaned over him, the machine gun tucked under one arm. A tiny ashen-faced figure stared down at him from each eye socket of a battle helmet-topped face, a face that, behind the mirrored lenses, was strangely familiar.
'Norbert?' said Loofah, 'Is it you?'