‘What have you done with the money? WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH IT?’
in dominant; there may be further subjects), often repeated and giving way to 2. DEVELOPMENT (here the material from the Exposition. .
‘. . gambling or drinking? How low can you sink? Did you think about the boys when you did it? Did you? I try so hard to raise. .’
This time with effort coiled up into a balclass="underline" 3. RECAPITULATION (in which the essential feature is the return of the second subject but now in the home key or the tonic, and the repetition of Exposition material, though often with modification). The Recapitulation has a coda, which helps provide a proper feeling of finality. Some composers, including Beethoven, extend this coda into what, to all intents and purposes, is a second Development section. The principle behind sonata form is key relationships.
Everything fell away. He was left just with a rustling page and the accumulative music of repeated words.
The space between the shit-brown door and the hinge offers him a strip of view, just a thin, long line of fluorescent-lit space. He has to keep one eye shut, though, and one side of his face pressed to the cold metal of the door. If he shifts between the right eye and the left, the view from the crack changes in a parallactic dance. Right left, right left, right left. They don’t add up to a seamless whole, there is either an overlap or a gap, he can’t understand which.
Luckily, he doesn’t have to stand in this position all the time, neck twisted, eyes strained. Because the toilets are underground, he can hear heavy footsteps descending; only then does he get up from the toilet seat and move to his spyline swiftly to catch the man entering the toilets while he passes through that narrow ribbon of vision for a fleeting second. He’s cautious and doesn’t want to lose the man during that split second so he rushes to the door as soon as he hears footsteps running down.
There are two staircases leading down to the two wide pissoirs, all brushed aluminium and falling jets of water, separated by a long length of mirrors with four washbasins and an open space off which four cubicles open on either side. The cubicle Ritwik occupies, his favourite one, is an anomaly that disturbs this elegant symmetry; it is placed diagonally behind the two small cubicles which open out from one side of the short wide corridor leading to the mirrors and sinks. There is no corresponding cubicle on the other side. If he draws a straight line through the middle of the sinks and corridor, each half of the St. Giles public toilets almost becomes a mirror image of the other. Almost, because his cubicle, the biggest one, breaks this symmetry: it is like a stray, careless note in a perfect fugue.
But he likes it best because it offers him a view of who’s coming in, who’s going out, without having to get out of the toilet and do all the ridiculous things to signal he was really using the loo — flush, wait two seconds, open the door noisily, get out, head straight for the sinks, wash hands for a long time, shake hands, go to the dryers and spend another five minutes there, pressing the ‘on’ button each time it stops, once, twice, three times, as if he is really drying his hands.
The hot air dispensers are a stale joke, a cliché: everyone in the trade knows that if the button is pressed more than two times the last thing that is happening is hand-drying. Yet it is allowed, almost lovingly indulged, its loud, whirry drone providing a reassuring matrix of meaning to the game. It is so transparent a guise that it is not a guise any more but a tattered, old, understood code. Ritwik loves it; the sound sends a little surge of camaraderie coursing through him: he knows he is in the company of familiar strangers.
The other reasons he prefers this particular cubicle to the others is because it is so roomy. There is space enough for someone to sleep in there comfortably in a sleeping bag. Three people could fit inside without finding it a squish. This aspect is readily exploited as and when the opportunities and inclinations arise.
There is graffiti on the walls, the door, even some on the ceiling. Most of it seems to be written with marker pens, some with pencil or biro, and some etched and scratched on to the paint of the metal door and the one metal wall with sharp objects. There are the usual ones: ‘For cock action call 865974’, ‘Any horny 18–21y old around looking for 9” cock here every Friday and Saturday evening. Show hard at the urinals’, ‘8 in cock, cut, for sucking fucking Sunday afternoon. Genuine. Leave message below with date and time.’
There is one that can only be described as super-efficient: ‘I love to suck young juicy cocks and swallow your creamy spunk. Make date’. And then, below, five columns: name, age, size, date, time. The writer has even taken the trouble of drawing vertical and horizontal lines, so the whole thing looks like a statistical table. There are two entries as well in the columns. The age is always under twenty-one, the size never below seven inches. ‘Genuine’ seems to be a desirable quality: more than half the messages have that word as its final note. Occasionally, they get cleaned or painted away but some are too stubbornly written with invincible ink, they just fade a bit. Soon others appear and before long it is thick with these urgent, hot words again.
Every night he takes some time to read them: they ease him into the swing of things and even get him aroused. His favourite one is:
Batter my arse, three persons at the door
Who but knock, breathe, rub, and seeke to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow mee, and bend
On knees, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.
The changes to the sonnet are minimal and not especially clever but seeing it in that context reconfigures it for Ritwik in such a way that there is no other way to look at it any longer but as a feverish request for a trinitarian gang-bang. The metaphors, the desire behind the writing, all seem to fall into place with such ease it is as if he has at last unlocked a room to which he has been denied complete access for a long time. He laughs silently for some time at the aptness of the whole thing. He wonders if in his essay on the metaphysicals he could get away with saying that the seventeenthcentury religious poet loiters with intent in his prayer closet, cruising god. The final three lines — ‘Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I / Except you enthrall mee, never shall be free, / Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee’ — when they come, are exact and inevitable. Some marginalia have been added to the sonnet: ‘Doesn’t scan any more you poof wanker’ and ‘Posh turd burglar fuck off to your AIDS.’
This is a true laboratory of the senses: all of them are stretched to their experiential limits — the eye at the door hinge; the ears pricked to catch footsteps entering or exiting, the flush of the cistern, the hissing drum of a jet of urine hitting the metal pissoir, running water and gurgling sink, the slightest movement and shift of feet; the nose acclimatized to the acrid bite of ammonia, disinfectant and sometimes the wafting stench of shit.
The way everything is registered on impeccably tuned keys of sight, sound and smell here, he could easily be a hunter in the wild; either that or a beast of prey, sensing out danger even in the slightest change of wind direction.