bathitudes

I was so tired. I rang my mum. We rarely speak. I said, it’s me, I just wondered, are you out tonight? Only I’m feeling so worn through, and I want to have a bath, I thought maybe I could use yours but I’m feeling antisocial, I just want to be in the water.

Mum said, We are home, your auntie’s here, but I can explain to her you don’t feel like socialising, come round and just hop in if you like.

I rolled up a towel and piled into the car. It was one of those stately nights in the sub-tropics where the clashing leaves have stilled and the screechbirds are all sleeping, only the runnels of little fresh breezes disturb the grasses as they roll across the ground. At my parents’ house the lights were on upstairs. I let myself in and turned on the taps. Ran up to say hello and give my aunt a kiss: this is the same Christian auntie who once told me when I disagreed with my mother that I was possessed by the devil. “You look so beautiful,” I told her. My mum gave me a plate and some candles in little tin bowls. She gave me a box of matches. My father was watching tv and didn’t turn, though he said goodbye to me as I left, an hour later.

The feeling of sinking into a vessel of hot water. Of being only “a vessel sunk in a much larger vessel.” The feeling of peace: at the same time blood’s horses drum like a nearing army through the passageways of my heart. The heart leads its merry crew all over my body. It leads away and it lures them back. I lean back and close my eyes, candles flare on the outside of my lids, the all but too hot water rises on my chin. The tap drips. It drip-drips. It drip-drip-drip-drips. I am the only one alive in this valley of slow heat, I am guarding the entrance to my heart, hearing the horses.

When the water got too hot I climbed out, trembling, and stood on the mat to wrap myself. Letting myself out the side door I came onto a dark cave formed by the verandah’s overhang, shelved between two rows of bushes, the house next door almost non-existent in the greenery. I lay back in an old cane chair and let the heat steam off me into the cool dark night. I thought about a song I had written long ago. Back in the bath I began to sing it to myself. One feels like a child, singing privately in the bathtub.

“Sailing by/with colours high/and feathers to the knee,” went the song. After a long time I got out and dried myself, gathered my pen and the densely-scribbled Vietnamese restaurant receipt off the closed toilet lid, blew the candles out all at once. I put my clothes back on. Hot, hot. Calling up the stairs, “Bye! Thank you! Good night!” I escaped the house. Escaped all houses. My little truck was a vessel for mountainous voyaging, a bark that fears no storm. We drove home. We crossed the bridge, where my grandfather died. On my windscreen I carried all the lights, each one by one briefly flared and weightless, and then gone. The cliffs above the city were sentinels still, peopled by large rigid flowers of the porcupine bushes that shoot up into the cloud, by a late-night climber carrying his pack, by people desultorily talking. The pool of night left no tone untuned and no thought furrow fallow, no mere impossibility implausible. Back at home at my own house I parked out front under the long palms. I was weak with the water and with the depth of the night. Now I can sleep for a thousand years, now.