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.