GLOOMY SUNDAY.

You push your penny in the slot; close it against the crowd outside the door. Why there is always a queue in the ladies lavatory, you have often mused, as you do now, as you disrobe, sit, and stare at the grimy door and metal hook for coat or bag. Someone has written on the off-white paint in pencil; the platitude ages it by a year or so. You turn your gaze to the lemon walls; read the messages writ large and small, as if some had lodged in purgatory here; thought of final condemning words. Marcel sat the whole time in Green Park; said not a word. His eyes on the blue sky; not on you, Stella or Guy. Stella laughed at the jokes, but Marcel brooded. Stella finds things funny; she has the spirit of joy in her soul, you muse, brushing a strand of your brown hair from your eyes. The voices outside the door are like those of the doomed; their moans fill the air. The smell lingers of perfume and dead flesh. Guy eyed you; made those smirky grins that so anger Marcel. Had Marcel noticed this time? you muse, sniffing the air, closing your eyes. Your mother had never entered the public lavatories; she said they were for common people with their poxed ends. She’d rather pee herself than enter these places, you remember, seeing her face dimly behind your closed lids; recalling her scent; her dark eyes that pierced you; wounded you as a child. Someone in the next cubicle mutters to herself; obscenities filter the wall; give way to weeping sounds. Marcel will brood now until evening and bed. He’ll not take of food or drink. Your father would limp around your mother rather than ask her to move to let him pass. His leg gone from a German sniper’s bullet on a beach some place you’ve forgotten. Sounds of straining echo on the air; some one red-faced no doubt, you muse in your darkness; remembering your childhood; the dread of cod-liver oil from mother’s spoon. Marcel’s moods linger for days like dark storms, you remind yourself, opening your eyes, reading a dull script by the toilet-paper holder that quotes something in Latin. Guy calls you, Daphne, in that posh voice of his; blows you kisses from his pinkie palm; wanting you in his spoiled bed, for better not worse, ditching Stella with her horsy laugh; her large blue eyes like gobstoppers, you recall, sighing, rising from the seat, listening for sounds from purgatory; the moans of the dead and dying. All tendered to and clothed, you unlock the door. The faces of those undone by death’s fair choice stare at you as you pass; their whispering voices follow you as you climb the damp urinal stairs to the London air of a gloomy Sunday.