The squeeze of fortnight-halved, fridge-atrophied lime I just mangled into this cheap rum and flat coke has made it taste like the smell of a citrus air freshener vainly fending off a soiled nappy in a warm car. I knew I should've taken the rum on its own, but we haven't got any ice and I was embarrassed at the idea of myself sitting alone in the lamplight, tapping away at the keyboard while sipping a neat tumbler of acrid hatewater, not-in-any-way-thinking-I-must-look-at-least-a-
tiny-bit-Ginsberg but basically sort of trying and failing to ignore the fact that yes, I probably definitely do.
When I was a kid, maybe five or so, I used to dotingly prepare my I-guess-two-year-old sister a heady and pointedly toxic brew of bathwater, shampoo, shaving foam, cocoa butter, anus cream, jojoba - basically any partially liquefied substance within lunging distance as we squatted like goosefleshed gargoyles at our antipodean poles of the tub (her end the tap end, because y'know, a bro gotta kick back up in this shizz) - and serve it to her, topped with an enticing
crema of Radox suds (we always wanted
Matey, but were never allowed things with faces) in an upturned pink miniature frisbee that for some unfathomable reason constituted one of our two bath toys*.
It was quite the labour of love, this cleansing tincture, and when it was done I fully expected her to drink at least a polite amount of it as a due sign of basic fucking gratitude for my all-round brotherly mixologist radness. I was no pushy host, though: whenever some mercurial, presumably-lunar-related lapse of etiquette on her part did occasionally threaten to sour my little naked sororal cocktail soirées, I'd merely insist that she took just one proper gulp and then I'd quite reasonably leave it at that.
In retrospect, of course, I'm hugely relieved I never managed to poison the impressionable little soap-chugger (although I suppose I would've quite liked to see her puke back a rich pine-scented lather, just once, and modestly y'know so mum didn't hear). Besides, she got her sickening revenge one ostensibly innocuous Autumnal evening by laying the most unutterably sinister pipe RIGHT THERE IN THE SHALLOWS and then not even telling me about it like at
all, and the first I know is when it's bumping up like some macabre capsized sailboat against the glistening jetty of my hairless and vulnerable thigh. By which point it had already been in the water for a good few minutes and had begun to fragment, lurking just beneath the suds and camouflaged in a churning cloud of its own detritus, precisely the way I'd seen crocodiles sneak up on David Attenborough's drinking gazelles, but if the crocodiles were made from rapidly unclenching fists of little girl shit. And I didn't know precisely what it was, but I knew it was evil and it shouldn't be there, and oh god I
did know what it was, and I screamed...I screamed a high-pitched, OMGWTFSAVEME, totally non-bathpimp loser scream, and tried to leap to safety and slipped and ended up sprawled and whimpering on the cork mat, which is how mum found me around 11 seconds later. And my sister will always have that shattering victory over me, and now I can't even make her
drink chemicals any more because she's 27 and doing a PhD and anyway ironically that's become kinda 'my thing' so I'm more or less boned over here. But you should've seen this poo, seriously. The way it surfaced, all silent crumbling and bloated with malice? You'd have screamed too, probably louder. It was hateful...venomous.
Cold.
[Snap to PRESENT DAY: a dimly-lit room, and a tumbler of off-brown liquid that resolutely refuses to sparkle.]
The crumpled lime slice just bobbed to the top of my rum, resembling the methane-buoyed corpse of some wretched mollusc that slipped on the lip of my glass 20 minutes ago and has already achieved an impressively advanced state of anaerobic decomposition. I think I'll go make myself a fresh one. Well, a fresher one.
*The other was a brutalist, faintly Kafkaesque (ROFL 'A' LEVELS) plastic tower construct named after its chief protagonist Diver Dan, which suckered lasciviously onto the side of the tub and involved pouring water into a little hatch until a spring popped somewhere inside it and a tubby Speedo-clad figurine belly-flopped off the high board, usually landing with a decent payload right in 'genital cove'. It taught me absolutely sod-all about volumes and pressure transfers and the like, but groping blindly about to retrieve him from the turbid grey swamps below my navel was always strangely magical. Creepy high five, my five-year-old self! Yeah but no not with that hand, thx.
