Sunday, June 03, 2018

Gone



Gone.

On the bathroom windowsill,
pre-redecoration, we had twin
white containers of conditioner and
shampoo (or as Egyptians
delightfully pronounce it, shamboo); the
clear glass denture cup; the
man’s small travelling
shamboo called, in best masculine
fashion, Dominate; the baby
shampoo and the baby oil – though
we’ve been babyless in this
house for some years - and the
Alpha Keri, intended once for
my dry skin, but proving to be
allergenic round the nose and
sinus areas; (a smear of one percent of
Hydrocortisone in Aqueous Cream
combined with half a percent of Menthol
cleared the skin instead).

Gone.   All gone.

The windowsill, post-redecoration, is
clear: no white containers of
shamboo or conditioner, no glass
denture cup, nothing to Dominate, no
baby oils, shampoos, no Alpha Keri to
increase my eczema, and where
before the bottles and containers
formed themselves into
military arrays (as seen from my
prone position in the bath, with the sun
shining through the bevelled glass), or
formed themselves into oligarchies or
hierarchies, with the larger containers
dominating the smaller, or the smaller in
rebellion against the larger, or into
various dramatic tableaus that came from
some long-forgotten nineteenth-century
play in which the cast were required to
stand still for minutes at a time
allowing the audience to reflect on the
passions of the characters – or
lack of them - or on the
drama inherent in being able to
observe a group of people formed into
patterns amongst which you’d
discern the hierarches based entirely on
whether the actor was upstage or
downstage or seated or standing or
higher than all the others on some steps or
rostrums that in previous incarnations had
been the focus of a different play entirely.
These days they’d call them
Happenings, or installations.

Gone.  All gone.

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