No Smoking (Part Two)

No Smoking (Part Two)

by Paul Seaton

I pushed the door as the sign on the inside told me to, but it wouldn't budge. I half-laughed, turning around to the men at the sinks. Neither looked up at me, but one of the cubicles opened, and a middle-aged lady exited the booth with no shame whatsoever. She was dressed in a faded floral print dress, and her hair looked like a birds nest that had lost any supporting twigs it ever housed. She watched me as I pressed the door again, this time using my foot against it. The doorman had definitely opened it outwards when he'd offered to open the door.

Insisted on opening the door. 

‘Why won't this door open?’ I asked. It was when she went to the sinks that I saw it. 

The woman who had left the cubicle was bent over a little at the middle sink and it was only from this new angle that I could see the three-inch wound in her side. There was an eight-inch wide patch of blood among the faded blue lilacs that formed the pattern. She looked like she should be in agony, but instead, she looked up at me and asked me why I was here.

I went to her side and could hardly speak. The wound was wide open. It was so deep that I could see muscle tissue. The area around the wound was visible due to her dress being ripped open crudely. I took my jacket off and went to wrap it around her. She smiled benignly at me, tears forming in her eyes.

'Oh, young man.’ She said to me, glancing down at my stomach. I followed her gaze and when I saw my stomach, I was nearly sick. Blood pooled around a sickening slash across my belly that had cut deep into my body. My legs buckled and I sank to my knees, my suit jacket flopping to the toilet floor as I shook it off. 

The lady took my hands and held me as she crouched down to my stricken body. I felt the gash, blood seeping between my fingers. The blood felt smooth against the tips of my fingers as what had happened to me came into horrible focus. Despite the wound, which was obviously serious, I hauled myself up and was shaken further to discover that I wasn't in any pain. Was it the shock? I went to wash my hands at the sink and the two men looked at me for the first time.

‘What year is this?’ Asked the one to my left, whose hands brushed over one and other with a papery whisper. It was only then that I noticed they weren't using any water, just repeating the physical motion of washing their hands. I twisted the tap, but no water came out. I yelled in anguish at the madness of it all but dragged myself to my feet. 

My palms were shaking, my legs wobbly and my throat a furnace. I marched to the door and went to kick it open one more time but was surprised to hear it open just as I prepared to boot it. It opened, and a middle-aged man with a yellowing moustache edged past me and I let him do so.

I went to hold the door, but it was immediately pulled shut by the doorman, whose eyes flared with a blood-red colour that I can still see whenever I close my eyes. I think now that it wasn't red at all. It was a colour full of fire, the sight of lightning breaking free from a thundercloud. I am scared of that colour so terribly at night. 

When I turned back to the toilet, I noticed that all the cubicles except one had emptied and seven or eight more people had made their way from the cubicles into the main room. There were around a dozen of us, male and female, gathered in the restroom. They spoke to me as my own eyes, wild and manic, took in the scene.

‘We don't want to see his eyes.’ Said one, a huge bear of a man whose beard came down past the knot of his tie. 

The man with the yellow moustache had no idea what was going on and was about to experience the horrific rush of realisation I had so recently experienced. He was one scare behind me, but we were both riding a Ghost Train we couldn't get off. 

At least it saved me asking all the questions. He turned to me and read the look on my face with the appropriate level of incredulous contempt it warranted to him. Then he looked down at his stomach, noticing that he had been butchered like the rest of us. He started shaking uncontrollably. Somehow the way he fell apart in front of my eyes helped me deal with the shock of it and I rationed that there must be a way out of the room if there was a way in.

I ran to the window and tried the handle, but before I could do so, at least three pairs of arms were onto me. Three of the biggest men in the room were pulling me back towards the centre of the room.

‘Don't open the window.’ The largest boomed, while the other two moaned. They sounded like monks. I threw them off me with all my strength and flicked open the glass window. 

The heat that came in the window was unbearable. It was like opening an oven door, but the musky smell was the worst part of what hit me. I couldn't breathe and even the calmest of my new acquaintances were beside themselves with fear. I looked out of the window despite it feeling like staring into a furnace. 

‘Shut the window!’ Shrieked one of the women from the toilet cubicles. She was joined by the others in a chorus of abuse, but I looked out all the same. I saw fires burning atop what could have been lava. My eyes were streaming because of the acrid black smoke that blurred my vision as it rose up to the window. The ground where just minutes before I'd seen people queueing to get a plate of chicken chow mein at Mister Wu's was like cracked pavement, with a boiling soup of flames undulating beneath it, the surface shifting like a snake's skin when it eats a large animal, rising and falling. 

Breathing.

The men did not stand on ceremony like the women in the room. They rushed back at me and pulled me away. The first man I’d met at the sink pulled the window shut.

‘We don't open the window. You need to calm down.’ 

‘It's the cigarettes.’ One of the women said. The others nodded in agreement. They asked me if I had any on me, but when I reached to my pocket, my fingers trembling, I couldn't find them. 

‘He took them.’ Said a lady. 

‘The doorman?’ I asked. The man who had entered the room after me looked like he was in shock, shaking like a leaf in the wind. The old men ran to the new man's side. 

‘The doorman brought you here?’ he said, his voice quivering.

‘Yes, in fact, he must have been the one who...’ 

He trailed away, feeling his terrible wound with a hesitant touch.

‘Don't talk about him. Never speak of him.’ Said another woman. She joined the other one in a cubicle and locked the door. I could hear them mumbling in there, not conspiratorially, but like a mantra. I could only make out words, but they were happy words; Battenburg, Arthur, Sunday, radio, tea. Over and over they chanted.

The other old man from the taps stood in front of me and Yellow Moustache. He made the same motion with his hands that he did when he had been hunched over the sink. It made no difference to him that there were no taps under his hands or water in the pipes. It was just his nervous tic, and everyone seemed to have one.

‘There's no escape. Out there...’ he pointed the window without looking, ‘... is not an option. And the door you entered from only moves one way. Then, of course, there’s him.’ 

‘The doorman.’ I replied. The old man gave a nod that I noted with a detached regret seemed as if he'd given the look a hundred times. 

‘What year is it?’ Asked a slightly younger man at one of the urinals. The way the others stood at the enamel fixtures scared me; as though the fittings of the room had developed magnetism through familiarity. 

‘2021.’ 

‘40 years? Has it really been that long?’ He asked. 

Tom Jones, Spandau Ballet. They weren't retro acts. They were headliners. They were sell-out smash hits long before I'd arrived. 

It was then that everything clicked into place for me. How long they'd all been here, in the Hell's Waiting Room that was this ancient restroom. The green and gold sign was from years ago. It matched the doorman’s jacket. The path through the old building led somewhere I didn't know existed and had never believed in, to my cost.

‘But why?’ 

‘He never told you about his mother?’ Said the old man in the middle. Most of the others had scattered now, drawn to a fixture, a door, a tap, or just a corner of the room. They'd heard it all many times before. 

‘He told me.’ Said Yellow Moustache, finally able to speak. His fingers stayed on his wound, and softly rubbed the bent flesh and open muscle tissue. I couldn't keep my eyes from it. 

‘He said smoking killed her. It took her when she was still a fairly young woman and he never got over it. He said no-one ever gets over it. Now I think I know what he meant. He's evil. He's....’

But Yellow Moustache couldn't say it.

I thought of Charlotte and the play. How she'd wonder what had happened to me, worry, panic, call the police. I'd be front-page news in my local paper, then page seven, then a month later a mere recap, another missing person in a world of seven billion citizens. Barely even a footnote, then just a name.

She would eventually meet someone else to settle down with. She'd keep a copy of the paper printed a year after my disappearance in the hope I'd return. She'd start to remember me just once a year, a pocket of grief to dip into then zip shut.

Eventually, she'd forget me.

The thought made my stomach feel empty before a temporary feeling of happiness skipped across my consciousness like a flint across a calm patch of sea between waves. I wanted her to move on, even to forget me, if it meant her being happy. 

I caught myself in the bittersweet reverie. If it had been so long, then there were might have been over a hundred people in the toilet, not merely a dozen or so. Two of us had been admitted in one night. The windows hadn't been broken and were far too small to permit anyone climbing through them. There simply weren't enough people in the room. 

The old man seemed to read my gaze, his eyes then glancing at the last cubicle, before dropping to his feet, which he continued to stare at as he shuffled awkwardly. I went to the cubicle and tried to open it, finding that it wasn't locked. But the door wouldn't budge more than a centimetre. 

‘Don't look.’ The old man said, and I tried not to, I really did. I paused, the sad gaze of the old man calling a useless restraint to me. I had always been stubborn; it was one of the reasons I’d maintained my dirty and inescapable habit of smoking in the first place.

I entered the adjacent cubicle and climbed onto the toilet pan. I'm tall, and it was easy to lean onto the cubicle wall and see what I knew would be there. The bodies were piled up in every position, crammed into every recess of space, from the floor to just underneath the top of the cubicle. I couldn't even begin to count them, but they were in various decomposed states.

Why were they at peace and those inside the room weren’t? Maybe they’d learned a lesson I hadn’t yet, but I would have time. I would have all the time it took.

I couldn't speak. I felt numb with the shock of it, the hopelessness of my fate. 

As I sat down on the toilet seat and began to cry, I looked up through the open cubicle door and saw the old men returning to the taps.