55: Velux

Donnie Prickles was in the lounge again watching a terribly noisy adult cartoon. I sat in the kitchen staring out of the window or, rather, the garden was there, staring at me. “I can't stand the sight of it when it’s playing up like this,” I thought, “The trees are naked again. They’re just being really stupid. It’s their leaves they’ve run amok again, sort of throwing themselves on the ground and being irritating, going up against the shed and teaming up with the blasted rain to make themselves mushy. What are you doing, you idiots!” “Those bloody trees are at it again!” I called out, hoping Donnie would join me in the pot of coffee I’d just made. But it was the weekend, when he’s either gaming with his friends in Quebec, Japan, and Dubai or watching some 16 season box set, while atrophying on the phone. These high flyers know how to spend their down time. There was nothing for it, so I went up to the loft to consult the bladder. In my youth, at my boarding school, didn’t the bladder grant us all stories it spluttered at intervals from a lavatory? Weren’t these missives initially found, the stories first, then the bladder, when the odd job man was installing a new saloon style door on one of the communal toilets to stop the pupils being able to hide in there? Didn’t he rush out with an agonised but somehow joyful yodel, clasping reams of pure wonder for us all to indulge in? Didn’t it create our curriculum, the culture of that institution? Didn’t every action from that moment swirl and swill from that inflatable centre? Didn’t a cotton embroidered bladder appear on our blazer breast pocket we’d puff out with pride? Wasn’t it at least a huge leap from the prehensile toe learning by wrought prescribed before that moment? Didn’t we begin to sing? The bladder is big The bladder is strong The bladder will hold piss all day long The bladder’s so kind The bladder’s a song The bladder looks purple and will never be wrong. But over the winter term something along the way changed as its excrescences were poured over, recited, analysed, interpreted … doubted by the flustered teachers. The tone around it, the contents, the handfuls of a putrid substance the janitor held up claiming it was now secreting, offering only trouble to those around, taking it to the doors masters that closed in haste, from fear. To them, the bladder has gone from counting, measuring, documenting, illuminating the experiences within this increasingly caged and colonised planet to pushing on the material form of it’s supposed reality … soon we were told to chant a new refrain … The bladder is wicked The bladder is grey The bladder explodes at the end of each day “It’s a shame this isn’t an experience we can all share anymore.” Tina had said to me wringing hot urine from her hair while Funky Timo pulled the yellowed cotton wool from within his ear canal, putting it in the basin, “Ta da - A mini garden of ear!” he announced. But within that space of frivolity, currents were swelling, visibility vanishing in murky subterfuge; amidst the humour we still all had with the bladder, those in authority were preparing to stamp it out. From simple story telling, to an education facilitator, it has become the tumour that exploded daily 30 gallons of piss, according to the head master, an event that occurred after lights out and witnessed exclusively by members of staff, an explosion supposedly covering the whole third floor toilet seeping down into Form G, and soaking horizontally next door to the matrons flat. This toilet last refitted in the early 1980s was suddenly earmarked for an update into luxury, slides showed something akin to a Turkish baths - this shift in play by the school was met with some … anxiety by us. The final night before the holidays I held it in my hands, the bladder. I managed to say, “Oh, lamina propria, somewhere in there I seek you as own…” before I noticed the rest of the dorm had followed me in and without a thought I passed it along the line in a ceremonial farewell. In a public school when a bladder no longer appears to teach about the great mysteries of why we should be fettered but removes the fetters, the deception that there are necessary chains and is accused, after all its efforts, of exploding and spraying everyone with its fabric and the contents of that fabric, if it can’t be harnessed, tethered or fast tracked into becoming prime minister or some lower ministerial role, even a lobbying position, if it isn’t going to be eliminated then a pupil must be found amongst the pupils and by the pupils to take it home, to safe guard it, to raise it or rather be raised by it and become its conduit, its interpreter. “What would Blads like tonight?” I asked standing in front of the vitrine in my loft, looking at the damn garden through the velux window. “Kidneys, always kidneys and an ammonia soak please.”