Occupied
AKA
The Toilet Maze
Originally sold to Labyrinth Inhabitant Magazine under a non-exclusive license.
Chris Hayes-Kossmann - Jan 2009
- - -
The message was written on a long piece of loo paper, folded twice and wedged behind the last cistern of the Civic Road Public WC, Gentlemen/Disabled. John knew he only had a few moments before Father grew impatient and stormed in so he read quickly. It was in tiny block letters, like someone had tried to copy the way AUTOMATIC was stamped on the hand driers. It read: “England again! I’m getting to like the word ‘lav’. Always reminds me of pubs. Please write back. Hide this in a different ‘lav’ somewhere. Maybe I’ll find it. Cheers!”
To not reply to a message that said please would be rude. So John tucked it in his school blazer and washed his hands. Father was waiting outside the door, chewing a cigarette, tweed jacket buttoned tight. “What took you?”
“Reading a letter.”
“Don’t go reading anything in the toilets. It’s rude. All by crazies and leftists. You hear?”
He nodded.
“Good. Polish your shoes when we get home.”
- -
John folded his school pants and hung his blazer on a proper wooden hanger and polished his shoes until they shone. Then he spread the letter on his desk and composed his reply in snatches between sums. He checked it for spelling, signed at the bottom and crept down the hallway past his parent’s bedroom. The toilet had come loose from the wall and the message slipped easily into place.
He crossed out a day on his calendar that read 1988, Year of the Dragon! Be Passionate in Life, changed into his pyjamas and pulled up the covers.
- -
When John went to brush his teeth in the morning there was a stranger scrabbling through the medicine cabinet.
John shrieked and slammed the door shut. His Father shouted from downstairs, “Watch it, you’ll knock the house down!” He clapped his hands over his mouth to keep the scream inside. The bathroom door stayed closed.
After a while he crept to the door and pressed his ear against the cold wood. There was a creaking of drawers, pills clinking in bottles. Finally, an excited squeal and the crackle of cheap toilet paper unfolding.
“Ah! England again!” The man coughed. “I shall begin. Hello. I found your letter. Only old people call it a lav. Why do you hide your letters in toilets? I am eight years old. Who do you think will win the football? Signed, John.” The man coughed again. His voice trembled, as if he was terribly tired. “God, football. Sorry John, don’t follow it. Not many tellies in bathrooms these days. You coming in?”
John didn’t move. The door was slick against his palms. “Guess not, eh?” He sounded unsurprised. “Well, I’ll just write my little answer here…” There was a scratching of pen on paper. “And I’ll tuck it in here, and that’s that. Maybe next time!”
The door swung open and John was suddenly staring at dirty hairy knees poking through holes in denim. The man loomed, arms swinging low, skinny like butcher’s bones wrapped in greasepaper. Little tufts of brown hair sprouted from his chin like he didn’t know how to shave. His eyes were dark and sunken. He had a workman’s boot on one foot and a sandal on the other, and at first it seemed like he was wearing a shirt of many colours, but John realised he was wearing many shirts, one over the other, with holes so large he could see the layers beneath.
He looked terribly sad.
Then the man stepped through the doorway and John fell back against the banister. He wanted to scream but there was no air in his lungs. The man had vanished.
Downstairs his father was clinking a spoon against his teacup. “Get down here and eat the breakfast your mother made before it gets cold!”
“Just a minute!” He crept into the bathroom. It was empty. He checked behind the door and in the tub. He was about to give up when he saw the paper peeking from underneath the soap. A note, folded twice. He pulled it free with trembling fingers.
- -
At recess John hid behind the swings, took the letter from his pocket, unfolded it and reread the message.
“Hello John. Sorry I had to run, I didn’t mean to scare you. If you want to meet again, just write me a little reply and leave it in a different bathroom. Is it true that only old people say lav nowadays? It’d be nice if you brought snacks. Cheers! Sincerely, Charlie.”
He thought for a very long time about whether to write back. He was sure that his mother would not like him replying to this particular letter. She’d tear it into pieces while Father yelled and turn as red as his carrot moustache.
But the letter was very polite, and his teachers said that good people were polite. After all, the man hadn’t been mean. Just messy.
He wrote his reply on the back of the same sheet, folded it three times and slipped into the toilet blocks by the oval. He tucked the letter behind a pipe where nobody would see. Then he jittered all the way through mathematics class, the numbers on the board a blur. The bell sounded and he ran for the toilets.
One cubicle door was closed, the little red OCCUPIED knob showing. John was about to leave when he heard the voice. “That you, John?”
John’s tried to say yes but it only came out as a squeak. “Okay,” said the man. “I’m coming out. Don’t be scared.”
There was a little click as the lock turned. The man stepped out. He looked just as he had in John’s bathroom, all raggedy and fallen apart. “So, here I am,” he said. “Pleased to meet you.” He bent low and held out his hand.
John shook hands and pulled away. The man’s skin was slippery. “Are you a leftist?” he asked.
“No,” said the man. “I don’t even know what that is.”
“Is your name Charlie?”
“Yes,” said Charlie. “That’s me.”
“I brought sandwiches,” said John. Charlie smiled a great big smile.
- -
John wrote in his diary that night, his handwriting precise. Dear diary, he began. The man in the bathroom is Charlie. He sucked on the end of his pencil. If mother caught him she’d smack the back of his hand, because pencils were for writing, not eating. He did it anyway. His accent was funny, like something off TV. He consulted the dictionary for ‘accent.” I told him about football.
A click as mother turned off the hallway lights. “Bedtime, sweet.” He waited until her footsteps had faded. Charlie is writing letters to me like pen pals. It’s a game how we have to hide the letters but I’m not sure why. The page was used up so he hid the diary behind some books and curled up in bed with his socks on. It was very hard to keep his eyes open.
There was one thing he didn’t write about in the diary, but he dreamed of it that night. He and Charlie had spent a long time talking and laughing and folding paper airplanes from squares of toilet tissue, nibbling sandwiches until all of John’s lunch was gone, but nobody had walked in. And when it came time to go, John shook Charlie’s hand and opened the door, and the noise of ball games and skip-rope and kids squalling over skinned knees washed over him like he’d stepped from under the eaves into a thunderstorm, battering on his shoulders, ice down his spine.
When he looked at his watch, no time had passed at all.
- -
Charlie had scribbled Hello John! in what little space was left on the sheet; it wasn’t the length of the message, he explained, but how you meant it. John tried leaving his reply in the school toilet block a second time, but when he returned at lunch Charlie wasn’t there. He sulked for the rest of the day until he remembered: leave it in a different bathroom. So he hid it away until the weekend, when his mother took him to buy groceries.
The local supermarket had a loo out the back, and as soon as they stepped from the car he made his excuses, rolling the letter up tight and slipping it inside a lavatory roll. Then he returned and helped his mother collect beans, spaghetti, potatoes, and a long string of sausages.
He escaped while mother was at the checkout. “What, again?” He ducked into the lavatory, his breakfast doing a little dance inside his stomach.
“Hello,” said Charlie. “Nice to see you.”
John pointed to the letter Charlie had crumpled in his hands. “I asked you a question.”
“So you did.” Charlie squinted at the page. “In reply, no, I can’t do magic.”
“So how do you do it?”
“I don’t do anything. The letter takes me around.”
“It’s a magic letter?”
“I don’t know much,” Charlie said. “But I do know I’m hungry.”
They ate sticky buns in the supermarket toilet, and when they were done Charlie’s eyes seemed a little more alert, more alive. “Very nice. Thankyou.”
John smiled, terribly pleased with himself. “I’d bring you home for tea but Mother would go berk.”
“That’s okay. I wouldn’t be dressed for it, anyway.”
“Oh.” Then John asked, “Are you my friend?”
“Well,” said Charlie. A silly grin broke out on his face. “Yes. Guess I am.”
“That’s good,” said John. “That’s nice.” He doodled little circles on the tiles with his index finger. “I have a football game tomorrow.”
“Mm.” Charlie fumbled about for his pen. “Gonna score a goal?”
“Maybe. Father wants me to play rugby.”
“Not your game?”
“I’m not very big.”
“Oh well. Score one for me, eh?” Charlie scribbled on the letter and handed it back. “You should get going. I don’t know if it’s okay for you to stay here too long. Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Maybe at Church?”
“Maybe.” Charlie grinned. “Now, go.”
John opened the lavatory door and looked out. The sun was low and dim behind the morning fog of Manchester. A young man walking his dog stood perfectly still, spotted pup caught mid-leap, leash strained tight around its neck, like waxworks from Madame Tussauds.
“Are they okay?”
Charlie rested a hand on his shoulder. “They’re fine. Step out and see.”
“Will you come?”
“No,” he said, and gave John a push. “I’ll be fine.” John had just enough time to wave goodbye before the door swung closed, and then the air rushed around him and the chirrup of birds and the strangled gasp of the spotted pup appeared from nowhere, like someone turning on a television.
He folded the letter and put it in his pocket. Then turned back to the toilet block and opened up the door very slowly. It was dark and empty. “Hello?” His voice echoed back.
When his mother asked him why he was crying, he couldn’t explain.
- -
He wrote his reply and signed it John (your friend). Then he folded the paper neat by squeezing it between textbooks. Mother ushered him into bed and turned off the lights, and he tucked his head beneath the cover to keep out phantoms.
Only when he stepped from the car the next morning and saw the needle-spire of the chapel did he remember the letter. “We need to go home!” Father cuffed him about the head and dragged him through the doors with tears in his eyes.
The sermon seemed to go for many hours. By the end he was terribly hungry, so hungry that his stomach gnawed and growled so that all the ladies in the pews could hear. His father smacked him again on the way out. “What were you thinking, making noises like that?”
Mother was in his room when he got home, dusting and rearranging the books on his shelf. “Honey,” she said, without looking around. “You sound all snivelly. Are you feeling sick?”
“No. I forgot something.”
“That’s a shame.” She straightened up the last things on his desk. “I did some cleaning. Try and keep your room tidier.”
When Mother had left he peeled his history books apart, expecting to see the letter still folded, waiting. It wasn’t there. He felt a squirming in his stomach. Maybe it was the maths texts? No, not there either. The English?
Only when he’d thrown all his books to the floor and scattered papers across the room like dying birds did he realise.
- -
He wrote a new letter on a new sheet of paper but when he folded it and held it to his chest it felt wrong, like a shirt one size too small. He hid it behind the hand-towel dispenser in the girl’s toilets and waited with his heart beating in his ears. But as he worked his way through mathematics class, the whole idea began to seem very silly. Charlie was a very strange man to be leaving his letters in toilets. Did that make John even stranger for replying?
Maybe it was he that lost the message, not his mother. And Father would have called Charlie “not all together.” He might even have called the police. Perhaps it was for the best.
At lunch he decided that Charlie was a fantasy. A daydream that grew too large and escaped.
By the final bell, John had forgotten Charlie entirely.
- -
And the time just flew.
- -
The boss tapped John on the shoulder. “It’s calming down. Take a break.”
John peeled off his elbow-high yellow rubber gloves. Out the back door he smoked a slow cigarette. There was a menu trampled into the alley gravel; he’d read through it only once. The cheapest meal cost more than he earned in a night.
He ducked into the toilets and did his business and wiped his hands on his greasy apron. The boss was yelling outside, probably with his hands balled into pudgy fists, carroty moustache ready to leap off his upper lip. So much like Dad. Could have been brothers.
He saw it.
A sharp corner of paper sticking out from behind the cistern. He tugged it free, a sudden light-headedness sweeping up from his feet. He checked over his shoulder, making sure he was alone, and unfolded the sheet. It crackled like ancient papyrus. There was a message written with blue ink in tiny block script. His hands shook.
“Hello there!” it said. “Sounds like a nice restaurant, shame I can’t pop out for a snack. How about you write me back, and hide it in a different toilet somewhere? I’ll find it, no worries. Ciao!”
He re-read the letter twice. There was a feeling in his stomach like he was falling from a very high place, tumbling over and over with the wind whistling past. The words were familiar but he didn’t know how. He felt like he’d just woken after a bad night out, his eyes gluey and disobedient. “Hide it in a different toilet,” he read out loud. “A different toilet.” Maybe on a billboard, or a dream? No. Something more.
His boss’s voice cut through the haze and he snapped back to attention. There were dishes to be washed before closing, timesheets to be backdated. And yet it seemed suddenly unimportant. The only thing he could see properly was the paper in his hands.
The back door clicked shut behind him. The night air was cold.
- -
There were things he couldn’t remember, and things he could.
Whether it’d been a game he’d played with friends or something from a TV show wasn’t clear. When he tried to visualise his childhood, only two things came to mind: the cold weight of the league cup after winning the under-12’s championship, and the way the trees blurred when Arnie Dickson cracked John with a right hook the day after his father’s funeral. The service had faded but the taunts the next day were crisp, word-for-word. He’d fought back. Then came Arnie’s fists.
The letter itself wasn’t coming back, only that he’d replied to it. Maybe it had been a game. A game played with a friend that smiled.
Eleven at night. It was beginning to snow.
He’d gone through two watery lagers at the Cheswick Arms before he asked the barman for a pen. He folded the message twice and stuck it behind the mirror in the loo with a bit of gum. Then he went back to his third beer and waited.
It was almost midnight. The pub was beginning to empty. He swallowed the dregs and went around back.
The man stood by the washbasins, examining his stubble in the mirror. When John walked in he smiled, the same smile he remembered from so many years before. His legs went wobbly as if he’d had eight beers and not three.
“Hello there,” Charlie said. “Did you ever win a game?”
“Won a lot, actually.” His tongue was numb. “You don’t look any different.” Charlie had traded his boot and sandal for matching sneakers and a woollen overcoat but his eyes were still tired and still dark. “I didn’t think you were real.”
When Charlie smiled black gaps showed along his yellowing gumline. “How could I be?”
“But you are, aren’t you?”
“I am. It’s been a long time for me. Longer than you know. I missed you. God.” His eyes were not just tired but haunted. “It’s hard to tell sometimes. It’s not easy, this.”
Charlie fell, his legs giving out and dumping him in a tangle on the floor. John rushed to pick him up and was amazed at how light he was. Like a bird, hollow-boned. “Sorry.” Charlie’s voice was thin, reedy. “It’s worse, when I have to think about it.” John set him down on the counter and Charlie grabbed at the hand dryer to stay upright. “Talk. Please. Tell me about you.”
John recognised the wobbles in his stomach now. It was the first day of school again. “I… what do you want to know? I’m just… I live on my own, I wash dishes. I have a girlfriend… had. Sorry.”
“Easy to forget.”
“Sometimes. She said I have issues.” He tried not to stare. Charlie’s skin was eggshell white, the veins in the back of his palms thick blue ropes. “Who are you?”
“Just me. Charlie.”
“But you haven’t gotten any older.”
Charlie grinned. “I can’t explain that one.”
“You need to eat something. You-” He stopped, swallowed. “You can’t leave, can you.”
“Oh, I can leave. I can walk straight out that door. Off to somewhere else. Could be Japan, or Australia, or… Kuwait. Or the john in the bar next door. I never know.” He dug in his pockets and came up with the paper between his knuckles. “Unless someone calls me.”
“How…” John twisted his fingers together. “How long?”
“How old were you when we first met?”
“Eight.”
“Ah. Bad of me to forget.” He slapped himself on the wrist. “It was… a while before then. Maybe five?”
“Years?” John shook his head. “God.”
“No,” said Charlie, and his smile was terrible. “Decades.”
They were silent for a while. Rubber squeaked on dirty tiles. Charlie spun the toilet roll with one skeletal finger. “I was out with some friends at a place… The Green Room? Maybe. I needed a piss. So I go in, take a leak, walk out, and I’m in a different loo. Lav. Do they still call them that?” His smile was strained. “And another, and another. Thought I was just drunk. For a while. So.”
Charlie coughed again. John heard phlegm rattle in his lungs. “I think there are others.” He pointed to the cubicle wall, graffiti layered in black and blue ink. “See that? Rog was here, ’02? I see a lot of that. The names get familiar after a while. And the handwriting. I leave my own.”
John nodded. “Like the letters.”
“Yeah. I leave them everywhere. You know how many people have replied? Twenty, maybe thirty. That’s all I’ve talked to in sixty years. But I keep waiting, you know. Just in case.” He raised a finger to his nose. “But! I’ve never found one of my own. Never recognised a bathroom, either, unless I’ve been called back by a reply. So maybe that’s it. Just keep walking ‘til I’ve seen every urinal in the world. Maybe that’ll be the end of it.”
John’s throat was dry, his tongue rooted. “And then?”
“Then? I’ll die.” His head dropped low. “Why couldn’t it have been libraries, or… theme parks? Rides and popcorn… It won’t let me starve, you know. I tried to hang myself once but I was too scared. Rather just keep walking. It’s too cruel.” He swallowed, adam’s apple bobbing. “I…”
John held Charlie as he cried, tears warm against his neck, heart fluttering away inside the birdcage of ribs, so faint, so distant. He closed his eyes and imagined Charlie was someone different. A man who went thin in his last days and wheezed through an aspirator but had never let himself be held.
The tears finally stopped.
“I’m okay,” said Charlie, and John stood. “Where are you going?”
“To get you some food. You won’t vanish while I’m gone?”
“I’m here until I leave.” Charlie wiped his eyes. “You’ll be back, won’t you? You won’t be long?”
John nodded. “Five minutes. Don’t worry. Then we’re going to figure you a way out of this.” He held up his hand, spread his fingers. “Five. Be right back.”
The door swung closed and a tingling swept outwards from John’s stomach into his fingers and toes. The blare of the jukebox appeared without warning. The barman stared. “Short trip.”
“Wasn’t in the mood. Can you do me some dinner?”
The barman frowned from beneath thin plucked eyebrows. “Boy, it’s past twelve. We’re closed.”
“What?” But the barman was already moving to lock the toilet door. John swore and grabbed for the handle but the barman slapped his hand away.
“You’re out,” the man said. The bolt slammed home. “Go home.”
“I’m a customer!”
“I don’t need a bouncer to toss you out.” He frowned. “You going to make trouble?”
John glanced around. The few men left standing by the exit looked on with morbid fascination. The barman was small but built solid, white hair curling from cauliflower ears. An even fight. Until the guys by the door joined in.
“Please. Just for a second.”
“No. Out.”
The walk home was long and cold, and the wind bore down with the howling of a widow.
- -
John was waiting outside the door of the pub at eight in the morning, hugging himself tight against the chill of snow. The toilets were empty and the barman kept one hand by the phone, eyes wary. Back at the apartment snow had blown in through an open window and melted into the carpet. The air was sharp and burned in his lungs. He sat on his bed and clasped his hands together, and said nothing for a very long time.
He filled an old diary with all he could remember: the letter, the supermarket toilet block, the hunger. Then he wrapped it lengthways with a red rubber band and left it on his desk where he would see it every day. He drew Charlie’s face as best he could in whiteboard marker on the fridge. He wrote Charlie’s name underneath.
Finally, he put a post-it on the wall of the bathroom. “You’re in John’s house! Wait here until I get back home!” He sat outside the bathroom door for an hour, waiting to hear the clatter of Charlie exploring the medicine cabinet, or playing with the bidet. There was no sound. He opened the door. The bathroom was empty.
His mother called to ask how he was doing. He told her everything was just fine.
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