238: Piston

The coach jerks to an unexpected halt sending my tapestry and needles under the seat in front. As I’m clambering and reaching around trying to retrieve them I get swept up in the rush of people pouring out the front door, the driver, slamming his head against the steering wheel is barking our marching orders between bursts of brow-beaten horn. I grab what I can: record bag; satchel; knapsack, and fluster out into the heavy morning air.

As people are scrambling to grab their bags from the hold, the coach accelerates backwards, pistons hissing impatiently, spilling a trail of luggage and former passengers onto the narrow dirt road. Those of us that can gather ourselves together, pull ourselves out of ditches and brambles, begin to loosely assemble in a confused disarray on the forecourt of the Roman baths.

Two heavy oak doors open inwards and the crowd starts to cautiously tiptoe into the hallway. A small snake with a crimson body, a bright yellow head and orange tipped nose slinks its way along the floor of the inner hallway— it looks like the kind that would give you a serious bite if you stood on it, so I grant it a wide berth.

As I turn the corner I see a bank of makeshift crafting tables set against the stone wall. Your mum sits at one, not looking up, as your mum’s mum, seated at the adjoining table, bores her eyes into the side of her head.

You are there too, but you’re not immediately recognisable as you’re not wearing glasses but actually you are but they’re ultra frameless but actually they’re not, they’re the thickest-framed I’ve ever seen…so thick they’ve swallowed themselves up, like two black holes in a Christmas cake.

You don’t appear to recognise me and seem over-occupied with providing stationery and pens and pencils and scissors and glue and paper and string and ribbons and glitter and cardboard and stickers and stencils and sheets of Letraset … to your mum and your mum’s mum’s indifference so I follow the other guests into a large hall where we begin to take up chairs that have been haphazardly scattered about as if by a sudden flash flood that came and went before we arrived.

I hear Rubio’s voice over my shoulder before my splenii involuntarily yank my gaze in favour of his gaunt face, marbled with some recent but nameless exertion. You’re not supposed to be seated yet, he gently rasps in his rich melodious baritone. You should have waited in the porch area for the groom’s arrival.

But the rain has disrupted everything. Grib’s limo cannot pass through the ford which has risen to swallow the approach ramps and flooded the neighbouring fields.

One by one, the guests decamp in impatience to the dining hall, stonily spurning Rubio’s flapping remonstrations. And de-filming platters of comestibles laid out in exquisite symmetry, they proceed to undo the order of the arrangements.

As the pervasive dampness of the darkening hills and valleys of this forgotten little county seeps into my synapses and bloats my perception, the secret fentanyl in the raspberry flan kicks in and I slump onto the tablecloth, biting it down to the floor with me.

I wake up on a pillow of caramelised pears under the buffet table, my tongue carpeted with a thin layer of dried baba ganoush and my beard shot through with poppy seeds. The rain has stopped, the sun is out, you can see into the next field, the wedding will commence at noon, says an unfamiliar voice over the tannoy.

As the grounds dry out and roads reopen, finally some stewardship arrives with ushers guiding us up the winding central staircase to the upper floors, flittering ellipses of light darting about on the floor, indicating where each of us should stand.

As we are hushed into crannies and against bannisters, a faint rumble can be heard coming from the eastern wing, getting louder and louder until a procession of people bursts into the hallway, chanting clashingly incoherent slurs and bearing placards and banners, thronging past us and snaking down the stairs.

As the procession thins out at the rear, I see you, and your mum, and your mum’s mum, and your mum’s mum’s mum, and your mum’s mum’s mum’s mum, and your mum’s mum’s mum’s mum’s mum (some of the more ancestral generations appearing in placard form only), shuffling through the debris of streamers and cardboard and cans. The ushers’ lightbeams dart over the stragglers, indicating that we should join them and follow the march back downstairs.

The crowd reassembles in the central courtyard, spiralling around a deep rectangular bathing pit, with a small hatched opening in one wall. This was actually where the Roman occupiers would make early Christians, weighted down by bronze plate armour, fight hammerhead sharks, which, however, were invariably no match for members of the early Church, for whom, deep in their muscle memory, the techniques of Jesus’ underwater fighting skills were still screwed in tight. And they minced those sharks.

Prompted by the stewards, the congregation throws its banners and placards into the pit, where Rubio, crawling through the opening on his elbows and clamouring over the signage delivers a touching soliloquy between laboured breaths. He starts by thanking everyone for submitting their consent forms, as he snorts and nuzzles at the cardboard beneath him. Then he declares that all data is political; that data-driven politics is a ouroboros; that the shrinking reptilian donut in each of us represents the perfect closure of true self-relation; that… just at that point I’m distracted by a homicide of corvids in the sky above – rooks or crows – circling and mobbing a single raptor – a kite or buzzard, and somewhere in the distance beyond the squeals and caws, I can make out a brass band starting up…

A sudden thunder of claps and whoops brings me back to the poolside. Rubio is concluding his speech, voice raised over the applause. Now, ladies and gentlemen, he flutes, please prime your bladders to toast this true wedding of convenience, in that way only too fitting of conveniences. And with that, the crowd unzips flies, bunches up skirts, teeters or crouches at the edge of the pit, and unleashes its blessing onto the cackling nuptial below. Myriad streams of hot urine, gushing with all the pressure of several hours of un-micturated prosecco, begin to flood the pit. The placards soften and smear; Rubio splashes and mews in glee. And then, a staccato bar or two of tooting prompts the crowd to part as a black limo reverses parallel to the poolside and the chauffeur gets out and opens the nearside passenger door. But there’s no passenger inside, just a huge brass tank with “Grib” stamped in a gothic font on the side. The driver fetches a hose from the limo’s boot and fastens it to a valve in the hull of the tank. With a snap of Rubio’s fingers, the chauffeur yanks down the spigot and a thick torrent of urine bursts into the pool, pummelling the placards into a soggy pulp and thrusting the flailing body of the newlywed about in playful figures of eight beneath the foaming amber surface.

No one, not even in their deepest imaginations, had ever seen this much urine.