The Secret Life of a Toilet Dweller

Blood On The Leaves

The Secret Life of a Toilet Dweller

My mother questioned me how my first week of college went and as usual she got the same reply.

I had to vary my replies every so often. If I said it was fine for two weeks in a row my mother would complain that I didn't talk to her about school enough. So every so often I would throw in an extra adjective or something. Just to spice things up.

I sat my heavy bag down on the sofa, the sat on a kitchen stool and rested my hands on the island. Today I had had a stressful day. My college, in the first week, was going through renovations. With my luck, it just happened to be a part of the building right next to my home. The toilet cubicle that had been so silent for 4 days straight suddenly turned into a mess of drills and clangs. Every so often the builders would have weird banter and throughout my lunch time that was all I heard. I wanted and missed my usual solitude.

It was impossible to get a silence in my house. If I spent more than a couple of hours in my room alone I would put through suicide watch. I was part of a very traditional family unit. When I say part, I was a part of it. I didn’t exactly fit into it perfectly but I was still someone part of it. I had my father, who the head matriarch of the family. His words were law although we were encouraged to challenge him. Then we had my mother, she was a perfect embodiment of a wife. She cooked, cleaned and worked whilst kept all her three kids in heck. I had two older brothers although they might as well have been younger. Nicholas and Alexander. They were both in university; Alexander was in his last year whilst Nicholas had just started last year. On top of this white picket fence family we had an overzealous dollop of religion. Religion wasn’t an issue for me; it was the way it was conducted in this house. I gave up on religion a while ago. I had informed my parents that I no longer desired to go to church; however my mum completely ignored me. I repeated it twice thinking that she hadn’t heard me, but she did. She just chose to ignore it.

So I was forced to attend church with my parents. I went to the youth club however. And by the youth club I meant turning up at the beginning, going to the toilets until the very end where I pop up again.

I played with my fingers whilst I watched my mother cook dinner for the night.

Cooking was one of my mother’s favourite pass times; it was something that she was good at and no one could challenge her when it came to the kitchen.

She was in her element and no one interrupted her.

She would usually play music, on Monday it was classical music, she said it calmed her. This carried on throughout the week until we reached Friday, today. This would be the day she let her inner youth come out. She would listen to the radio station teenagers my age were meant to listen to and cook to the rhythm. Chopping onions to bass of European electronic dance music. This continued until Sunday, on Sundays she would listen to gospel music. Then the cycle would start again.

But today she didn't, which usually meant that she was deep in thought, that, or one of older brothers had done something to annoy her and her God.

My mother had repeatedly tried to make me develop her love of cooking myself but it was never my taste. When I did try to cook it always came out disastrous. My lasagne would taste like fish pie; my fish pie would taste like what comes out of the reader end of fish.

What I wanted to cook and what it taste like never seemed to coincide. This didn't stop my mother though, at least once a week I would hear a lengthy lecture about how my distaste for cooking wouldn't do me any favours when it came to finding husbands.

She repeatedly informed me that cooking was the way she found someone like my dad.

I don't think she understood that I didn't want someone like my dad.