Tin Whistles At Bath Time

I’m not being funny but when he was blowing that tin whistle in my face I knew I had to go.

I mean I had to just go, it wasn’t that he didn’t play the tin whistle beautifully, it was the glinting cleaver he carried into the bathroom. It was his mad brown eyes when he was saying Bath Time! It was the mental image of mixing my blood with hot scented bath water. I head flooded with visions of my blood on the white bathroom tiles. I remember thinking I love me with my blood inside my skin, inside me and I don’t wish to see it outside, congealing on bathroom tiles. It was a knife, a cleaver, I am sure of it, in my mad drunk mind I saw him take the weapon into the bathroom and then say cheerily to me Bath-Time!

How I wound up in his Chelsea-someplace pad I really don’t remember. There I was though, my friends had gone and left me there. Together we drank brandy, Camus brandy, whilst listening to some African music. He didn’t know the work of Nobel Prize winning author Albert Camus. I explained the story-line for The Outsider, I was thinking of the book Steppenwolf, I was all muddled of course the book I was trying to describe was The Fall.

I remember sitting on his kitchen floor in the glare of the fridge light eating raw broccoli, I was like a giant eating small trees. I remember lying on his bed waiting for something to pass, it did. What was I doing in his bedroom? I sobered up suddenly and wondered out loud where on earth I was and where my friends had gone. It was very beige there, you know those apartments that have those ivory carpets that stain like hotel walls get punched. Cushions were scattered like trying to remember where they would be most comfortable. But it was then, it was exactly then when he said Bath Time I knew I had to just leave.

I ran out and down the street, I had no idea where I was and it was raining lightly. I walked and walked for what seemed hours. I felt sorry for myself. I had thoughts that seemed weighty and final and then as I passed a park I burst into tears, my back to the passing traffic, facing tree bark.

I cried like I was lost and because it was not funny anymore. I wept and felt the pathetic and pitiful vulnerability of being a girl. Then I cried because the rain seemed so sad and wet. I cried because I was a million miles away from home and I was sure he had a knife. Why on earth did he take a cleaver into the bathroom?

Above me there was nothing but a wet indigo sky. I felt I was going to fall into it and there was nothing to hold onto. No railings, no comfort and nothing to be sure of. I looked through my tears at the rain. I touched some leaves and the texture of waxy green leaf and individual raindrops made me cry even harder and I apologised, I felt like I had forgotten something, something very precious and important.

The pavement mirrored a silver shimmering shadow of an old oak tree moving in the water.

A car pulled up and I said to the driver I am escaping a knife-wielding-tin-whistle-blowing-bath-fanatic, please save me. The kind stranger nodded and drove. I finally recognised Harrods and leapt out. I started laughing in the rain, as I realised how far from insanity I was and how close to ordinary I wanted to be. I took a bus that was heading to Trafalgar Square, I wanted to sit on a lion and count pigeons while I figured out what I was going to do with the rest of my life.

On the bus there was a woman eating a chunk of bread with tomato ketchup on it. She licked the tomato sauce like it was delicious. She poured more onto the bread and licked the bottle lid too. It was revolting and compelling to watch, it looked like blood.

Trafalgar square was full of tourists, even then at three or was it five in the morning. Drunks stumbled at the bus stops eating hot dogs and kebabs.

What was I doing alone and walking the streets of London? I cannot answer that. There must be something we are all always looking for, sometimes we seek something that comes only from the sounds made by the mouths of strangers. I have walked the city streets like this many times before, London slows down to slow motion for me and I can feel it all. I was miserable but now safe and suddenly I could see things quite brightly. With some newfound clarity I walked towards Tottenham Court Road and I could see the blood racing under the skin of Saturday night.


* Salena Godden's stories and poetry appear in publications such as Dazed & Confused, Salzburg Review and Le Gun, and have been published in anthologies including Penguin’s IC3, Canongate’s Fire People, Serpents Tail’s Croatian Nights and Hodder & Stoughton’s Oral. Salena regularly reads and performs on both BBC Radio 4’s Spoken Word and BBC Radio 3’s The Verb, and is renowned for ‘taking poetry into clubs’.