Little Tours of Hell

by Josephine Saxton

Genres: Science Fiction; Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

Josephine Saxton is able to unravel the disturbing implications behind the most innocent and everyday activities with an acute and very witty eye for detail and brilliant prose. These stories are specifically concerned with the more macabre or stultifying aspects of eating and holidaying.

Release date: July 25, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 146

Sample

Mary had dreamed up and instigated a family camping tour, so here they all were in Marrakesh: one Daddy, one Mummy, two boys under ten and a little girl aged five, with a very old tent and a very old but thus-far reliable car. It was a grand tour, much envied by their less adventurous friends, most of whom thought that ‘roughing it’ with children was too much. They had proved to be right, and Mary, holding the trembling hand of little Alice, thought: ‘Well, I asked for this.’ They surveyed the frightful scene before them for only a few moments before they fled, Mary praying that the child would not remember, had not understood. In mistake for a Ladies, they had wandered into an open yard full of Arab men crouching amongst great piles and streams of steaming, stinking shit. Dozens of dark and hostile eyes had turned towards them; faces had split in evil grins full of black spaces; shouts, curses, laughter followed their hasty exit. Outside, Alice danced from one foot to the other crying ‘I want to wee I want to wee!’ so Mary hid the child behind her own skirt, and the dust just outside the ancient and glamorous city of Marrakesh was slaked with little girl’s pee. And for herself and the dysentery? Nowhere. The rest of the family came wandering over from their parked car which was being climbed upon by ragged little Arabs, who everywhere followed them. John saw Mary’s silent tears and the look he tried to conceal was one of despair and boredom; he had had enough of Mary’s bowels; her constant need for facilities was haunting the journey. Nobody else in the family ever seemed to get ill, it was a mystery. A vision haunted Mary too, a naked bum from which was emerging … and once again she tried to send away bad images, all the time. She had seen and heard and smelled things which she had thought would be all part of the adventure, but which had already undermined her completely. She wished she was back home.

How ironic. She, the least xenophobic of people, now heard someone in her head cry ‘Dirty Arabs!’ Where had her willingness to understand other cultures, to explore, gone … where was her usual stamina? Down a series of nightmarish drains.

It wasn’t just the Arabs; France, Portugal, Spain, she hadn’t realised how primitive the plumbing would be. Twenty years ago she had heard Americans being horrified at English plumbing and habits. Was she now over-civilised, a slave to sanitation? Travel was narrowing her mind to a deep longing for a clean bathroom, completely private, an untouched roll of paper to use, a sparkling bidet, proper seats and infinite flushings. Ecologically unsound, infinite flushings. But what a delight. Long showers, deep baths. Clean. Clean.

She limped back to the car and stayed silent until they reached their spot on the huge campsite, unfortunately far from the showers from one point of view, because Mary was limping with a foot swollen and turning black because of a mosquito bite which had become infected. She hadn’t dared consult an Arab doctor in case he cut a lump out of her ankle and charged her a fortune, without anaesthetic or recourse. She took huge doses of Vitamin C and hoped it would heal by itself. But it was rather painful and the darkness of it was creeping up her leg. John had said, bathe it in alternate hot and cold water, but this was of course impossible – everything in the way of water was never far from tepid, doubtless accounting for the dysentery. Those sterilising tablets must have gone off or something.

At the toilets there was a long queue. She hoped John would at least begin to prepare their meal or the children would become impatient and whine. Someone came staggering out, handkerchief over mouth, eyes rolling. Everyone had a pail of water, and she filled hers from the tank – greenish, horrible water. No flushes. It was as bad as a concentration camp, she thought bitterly, we could all be doomed, and I’m supposed to be on my holidays!

She got her turn for a cabin eventually without fainting in the smelly heat, and quelled her dread at the sight of the concrete feet, slippery, either side of the bottomless pit designed to swallow valuable jewellery, car keys and indeed anything except that which it should. It was impossible to squat over these with pants around ankles – they had to be removed, and to do this, shoes which had trodden in the mire needed to be removed. A sort of game of Pirates ensued, in which the penalty for touching the ground with a bare foot was some vile disease. Her sandal on the swollen foot was held on with string for it would no longer fasten across the swelling, and the string had become knotted. She managed to break it but the sandal flew off into the horrible shithole, not quite disappearing, just breaking the surface as if testing the water before a dive.

‘Oh Jesus God, I wish I was bloody well dead!’ she yelled in miserable fury, tears and snot dripping down the front of her dress, the hem of which now also trailed the slimy floor. Sweat ran in streams from her; she thought she might throw up; her insides dealt with their contents as if mortally offended and she clutched her toilet paper as if it had been a prayerbook, help help me please.

‘Are you all right?’ came an elderly disapproving voice from outside. Knocking rattled the door.

‘I won’t be long,’ snivelled Mary guiltily, hating as ever being waited for, unable to function if anyone could hear. All pride gone though, she managed wretchedly to wash her sandal in the pail of water, get herself together and hurl the water down the vile hole which retaliated by backing up so that she had to get out of there quickly, bad foot or not. The whole queue stared with hostility at the woman who dared to wish she was dead. Mary felt like the bad girl of the Guide troupe, the one who grumbled at the mozzies and having beans every night, the one who spat out the lumps in the cocoa, the girl with no grit or pluck. They all looked away as she, the disgrace of the camp, put her pail back on the stack and slithered off in her unfastened sandals. Nobody here grumbled or complained. Perhaps it was what they were used to at home!

Next day they were watching the buskers in the main square, a famous troupe of dancing drummers. A crazy-looking man in a Fez whirled his tassel; the safi drums were exciting; the dancers were probably stoned on kif. Mary and John were not – they didn’t have the knowledge or courage to find the stuff here. Mary loved to dance, and was stamping her feet to the rhythm; her foot was numb and she thought: ‘I am getting high on blood poisoning and weakness. Kierkegaard was right, the losers are the winners.’ But behind that lurked floating visions of various toilets like torture chambers – she could not elide them. She was haunted by things more powerful than the positive thoughts she tried to summon: the beautiful mountains of central Portugal with the cork oaks like giant cigarettes, the stars over the Atlas Mountains numerous and brighter than any others she had ever seen, fish in clean water in Spain – all perished. Baskets full of used paper in the corners of foreign lavatories, encrusted bowls never washed, buzzing flies, huge threatening spiders even bigger than the ones she had feared in childhood in her Aunt’s outside country dunny. Vile bidets designed to pass on VD which nobody would believe had not come from some exotic encounter with a romantic Arab. Slimy floors swimming with unknown germs with hind legs like kangaroos all ready to leap up into her crotch. Floors wet by men who could not aim straight, the stench of garlic twisted into the putrid rivulets, rising to stay in her nose through mealtimes. Wooden seats soaked in historic crud, or no seats, and these she tried to cover with reams of paper which always slid aside, and never, never, never a clean toilet roll or proper soap and water to wash, oh heavens, she was probably going mad, this was surely the stuff of paranoia?

Perhaps, however, she had become ill after accidentally swallowing some water from a swimming pool, which in well over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit had been deep green by evening and as warm as soup? At that campsite all the toilets had been completely blocked until some Germans complained loud enough to make a cursing Arab come with a rod and a hosepipe. There was something to be said for Germans after all.

To the rhythm of the safi drums she threw coins into the insistent Fez, hypnotised by the eyes of its owner, and recalled a campsite by the sea where everything smelled faintly bad, an unhealthy miasma polluting the water, her clothes, the food, the air, her soul. Perhaps it had been the herb which made rice stink of sewage, perhaps it was asafoetida, she did not know but it reeked powerfully and she felt she would never forget it.

‘I feel high,’ she said to John, who seemed not to hear. She was shivering in the heat. Was that malaria? Was her extreme fatigue bilharzia? Was the series of sharp pains in her liver the wriggling of twenty-foot worms emerging from the cysts which she had watched a butcher excising from lamb’s liver, instantly bringing on an attack of vomiting? She would finish up being an exhibit at the London Institute of Tropical Diseases. She didn’t care any more.

That night, after pouring Jeyes’ Fluid into a plastic pail and hiding it under the tent flap, because if she had a night-time emergency she could not and would not limp across a dark expanse of tripping tent-pegs over unseen scorpions, she wrote some cards to send home to the various friends.

‘You may think that being abroad is lazing in the sun with a bottle of wine, it isn’t. It is crouching in a shit-hole wishing you had a bottle of Domestos. Wish you were here.’

They packed up to move on next morning, the children bouncing and squealing with anticipation, healthy and full of energy as usual. John backed the car and then moved forwards and Mary checked their site to make sure they had left nothing. The car wheel had squashed a scorpion which had lurked where their tent had been pitched. It wriggled over its own squashed body trying to sting its enemy.

‘You’re lucky!’ she shouted at it, and then began to laugh as she got in the car. She began to laugh so much she could not explain to them why she was laughing. She cackled and hooted, the laugh of a wicked demon, thoroughly at home in Hell at last.

Leamington Spa, 1985

Alice was eighteen and would have liked to have been even more sophisticated. Her models included Lauren Bacall and Barbara Goalen, and she owned very high heels, a long furled umbrella in black silk, with a tassel, and long black gloves to wear with sleeveless dresses. She was far too fat to be really elegant, but struggled with the problem intermittently. It was very solid weight – nobody could call her flabby. A wasp-waist corset was a help if a torture.

While her parents were away and she too was on holiday but remaining at home (the seaside was such a bore, especially with parents) she decided to invite friends to dinner. She had never been to nor held a dinner party: people in Halifax had dinner at lunchtime and high tea or supper, but in London, elegant people had dinner parties. She had the kind of friends who would appreciate such an event, for she painted scenery for the amateur theatrical society. Many of its members were very sophisticated. Joan Harwell had given her father a cocktail shaker for Christmas, Nigel Dixon had been to Paris, and Percy Smith owned a Rover car with a cigarette lighter in the dashboard. Also, Mar. . .