Once I stopped in a subway and I hate all the sudden choices you gotta make so I usually just focus on some sort of meal deal on the menu and stick to it, which is how I ended up with some sort of sandwich drenched in sweet chilli sauce. There are alot of things which my shitty genetics has decided to punish me for eating but that sugar filled syrup is my mortal nemesis, this sandwich is my world killer. I still eat it though, because every aftermath from consuming it is so bad that I basically turn into a feral animal, slipping only back into consciousness when the macrobiome regains control of the micro, plus I just got peer-pressured into paying five quid for this sandwich Im gonna eat it.
I dont even get halfway through my foot long chicken filled hyper-laxative before my gastric system attempts to depart my torso, at this point the IBS blinders slip on and I am suddenly completely removed of all social anxiety, I am prepared to shit in a bucket in front of the whole store and god if it will allow me to return to the pretence that I am in control of my own bodily functions (and finish the rest of the sandwich). In this tiny subway there is only one door, right in front of the extremely long queue of people waiting to pay too much for not-bread and horrifically square meat. It has bathroom signs on it, but there is no way this door that a couple of teenagers are currently leaning against is the bathroom surely? They may as well have put windows in so the unwilling spectators could get a good look at the horrors they are hearing.
I do not care, I am a meat machine born to shit, I rush the teenagers leaning against the door, scattering them in my wake as I slam the door shut and turn to discover there is no lock.
There is no lock
For a moment I fall back on my instinctual irish catholic childhood and begin to categorically list all the transgressions against the Pope that could have led me into this tiny section of hell. Is it friday? Is this because I ate meat on a friday? Why dont I know what day it is? Jesus Sam you need to get your life together. Then Gut-Brain resumes control and my world narrows to the disabled friendly toilet that is dangerously far from this unlocked door. If it swings open, I will be at the mercy of the non-shitters beyond that door. Forever haunted by the smug denial and hatred as they turn their disgust for their own base needs outward on to me, they will put me down like the animal I am and I will welcome it.
In this moment I am the most in tune with my own body as I will ever be. My muscles sing with power as I perform the shameful act. My eyes see clearly now, I do not just see a door rattling in the breeze, I see the ancient wooden soul trapped within, and it sees me. I am in its mercy, in this moment it would be so easy for it to yield to the wind that buffets it everytime another queue obsessed Anglo enters this slophouse and expose me to the world entire. I am part of the cancer that killed its kind and it would only be just in taking its revenge on me, even as I silently plead for the opposite I know this is true.
The door begins to shake violently, more than just mere wind, someone is trying to get in. I yell and scream and plead and beg with the stranger on the other side of the door not to enter, but they are deaf to my cries. Perhaps they are not a man at all, but another walking vessel for the hunger that drove me down this dark path, seeking their own escape. My only saving grace is the broken nature of the door, the very thing that caused this whole mess in this first place. Unseen forces batter that door and jiggle the handle, they even succeed at one point, the seal cracks and the world burns, but only for a moment. I slam the door shut and abandon that moment to the void, I excise that reality and form a new one where the door remained closed and I can still pretend to be human.
The ordeal has passed, I carefully rebuild my facade of decency as I wash my hands and destroy the evidence. Now that the forebrain has regained control, the oceanic fear of the judgement of strangers comes rushing back in. Surely they heard my pleas, surely they know.
But as I open the bathroom door, braced to be beaten by a mob of retched sallow cheeked Liverpudlians for my crimes, I see nothing but the barely held but tamped down rage of the average English Queue Enjoyer. All is bliss in the court of Subway, I stumble out into the cold air and rejoin my friends. Are they my friends anymore? I have aged a lifetime in that bathroom, I am a different man from when I entered, a broken man. When I enquire about the door, they look at me in puzzlement.
“No one was at the door, and we didnt hear anything”
Did I imagine the whole thing? Was it some vision of a darker world, a message to change my ways before it was too late?
I begin to eat my sandwich.
Any UK/France/Ireland school goers will have had 1066 drilled into their skulls for about a year.