On Chasing Brad Through Purgatory by Stephen Benatar

side. We were almost at the door. I had the feeling I could yet be saved. Some woman washing her hands or combing her hair or applying her lipstick? Yes! Somebody both capable and sympathetic who’d smilingly take charge.
    Please.
    The room was empty. There was only one cubicle. A notice hung from its door handle. Out of order. Nearest W.C.s attached to the Mary Llewellyn Jenkins ward. The cubicle itself was locked.
    â€œOh dear Lord!” It erupted from both of us, simultaneously.
    â€œWashbasin!” she said. “Oh help me! Lift me up!” She was already hoicking up her nightdress. “Don’t let me do it on the floor.”
    I took her in my arms and lifted her—she was a greater weight than you’d have thought, I felt the strain in the small of my back—and while I held onto her tightly with one hand tried to keep clear the back of her nightie with the other. Between the two of us we had got her there none too soon. There was a vast bespattering explosion. The pitiful sliver of white soap in its slimy indentation was suddenly shot across with freckles. I felt something dribble down my arm. The smell was powerful to put it mildly. I watched her scrawny mottled legs dangling pathetically over the front of the basin, my arm firmly supporting her so that she didn’t sink back into the depths of it; and I said with what I hoped was a nonchalant kind of smile, “There! Does that feel better?”
    Yet now she was having a piss, an unexpectedly forceful piss, off which I saw the steam rise. Well count your blessings I told myself. At least this’ll help to flush away the gunge.
    Not help enough though. That became evident once I’d got her back on the floor. For a minute she just stood there holding up her nightgown, balance a bit uncertain, while I first turned on both taps (however there’d been more pressure in her piss than came from either of those taps or even from the two of them together) then held onto her again while I looked for ways of cleaning off the porcelain. I couldn’t come up with any—I saw no kind of brush or sponge or cloth—other than through the direct use of my own right hand. Thankfully the main part of what had come out of her had been quite loose so beneath the sluggish flow of those unwilling taps I smeared my palm and fingers back and forth around the china creating a swirling brown pool that increasingly thinned and lost its density of colour. And left an accumulation of smallish lumps which had to be mashed against the plughole, a process that reminded me of kneading Plasticene or more recently bread dough: frustratingly a skill too late developed, for Brad as well as me. Now somewhat tight-lipped in the energetic employ of my fingertips—for the mashing had become a kind of sieving—I even forgot or else had grown oblivious to the evaporating stench. With both the plughole and the sink again made more or less respectable (and the soap; and my own hand—so far as that sliver without nailbrush could accomplish it) I then ran a deepish pool of warm water and hoisted my now more tractable, less talkative, companion back into her previous position, only this time with her knees pointed a little more towards the ceiling, while I soaped as well as I was able her bottom and vagina and the inside of her thighs, especially at the top. In the absence of any paper towels and feeling unequal for both our sakes to holding her up back and front in close enough proximity to the hot-air machine, even if it worked, I took out the white linen handkerchief with which Hermione had provided me (mightn’t there be a good case and not solely on the grounds of economy for the issue of double-strength man-sized tissues; perhaps I ought to mention it?) and dried my new friend off in that rather inadequate fashion. “What’s your name?” I asked while I worked at it.
    She looked at me uncertainly.
    â€œYou’re not James are