Superloo
Edgar Million
Superloo
Copyright 2014 Edgar Million
“The piano has been drinking
Not me, not me, not me...”
- Tom Waits
It was a trick of sorts.
Magic, but only in the modern sense of the word.
That is, it was an illusion, a conjurer's flourish of the hand, yet it startled and confused us in a way no hidden coin or false bottomed hat could ever have done. Impressive enough to have been performed only by a top conjuror, it seemed to me, yet ridiculously mundane because of the audience for whom it was performed and because the odd subject of the ruse.
Yet Martin, the trickster behind it, my friend of many years, claims it wasn't even a trick at all.
The magic was real he reckons.
Not real in the conjuring sense, with hidden compartments and misdirection, with levers and mirrors, but real as in the sort of nonsense Harry Potter could have done. Or, even, real in some scientific sense which has grown out of watching too much Star Trek and Doctor Who, something about wormholes and subspace; a dive down the rabbit hole.
“Look,” he told us, still tells us, “space is nothing right? Atoms filled with nothing? Well I accidentally found a way through the gaps. I didn't try to, it just happened.”
Why he thinks we would listen to anything said by a library assistant with an overactive imagination and an underactive thyroid is beyond me; or it isn't really, because although I know it’s another facet of the scam, a diversion from letting us see how he performed the trick, but the how of it bothers me immensely.
One day, when we're a bunch of old farts scrunched into the backroom of The Bell in Romford for the fortieth year running, maybe he will let us know how he did it. Let us know that he did it. Admit it was a trick. I for one need him to admit it was an illusion.
Maybe when one of us finally kicks the bucket, he’ll reveal all to the others down the pub, but for the moment, when we go back to that night, when we plead and cajole for him to pull back the curtain and show us where he hid the mirrors, he just says, “it was real. I’m not that good.”
A good conjuror sticks to his story; makes you question the fabric of the world and realise the fragility, and malleability, of vision.
Don't believe your eyes.
A dog’s eyes see two colours, a mix of blue and yellow, beamed from the two colour receptors in their brains; humans have three receptors which blend to produce all the colours of the rainbow; the mantis shrimp has twelve. You have to wonder how much there is in the world which can't be seen by us.
For now Martin sticks to his story though, and is so convincing that Alan has started defending him, saying that it must be true, quoting that thing from Sherlock Holmes about eliminating the impossible to be left only with the improbable.
“So, it must be true,” says Alan who, in my opinion, is not the brightest member of our group.
What do I remember of the trick?
I recall a drunken Friday night.
Boys Night. Missus home with the kids. Saturday was family night, or sometimes it was get-rid-of-the-kids and night-club or restaurant night. We all settle into a routine eventually, or most of us do, and Friday: Boys Night was part of mine. The highlight of my week. Even now.
Three hours in The Bell, talking nonsense about the week and the footie.
It was ninety-seven and the Hammers were having a dismal year, which dominated much of our conversation, and Alan was mouthing off about some bird in his office who he was certain fancied him, before we all moved onto the Curry Kingdom for Chicken Tikkas, Lamb Baltis and Bombay Potatoes followed by an unsteady wobble on the last mile home.
Simple pleasures for simple men.
Sometimes on these nights Martin would tell us about one of the customers in the library who he reckoned had a crush on him, but we always laughed him down.
Hardly a beacon of sexuality your average librarian, but he insisted that there were some out there who went for the weedy intellectual type; looking for love between the book shelves, and after walking for an age, batting insults back and forth, we’d reach Chadwell Heath and the High Street, ready to divert off onto the final segments of our journeys alone.
Usually at some point en-route we'd feel the press of Carlsberg against insides of our bladders and would take the opportunity to relieve ourselves down alleyways, or against fences, keeping back from the street, hiding in the limited privacy of the shadows.
Yes, I know it’s disgusting, but we’re men and we all did it.
We still do, our aging bladders even less resilient these days.
Martin didn’t do it.
Martin had what he described as a shy bladder.
Alan regularly asked if that was code for 'small cock' and we always laughed because after a night in the pub even the stupidest joke is genius, but Martin insisted he just couldn't wee in front or alongside other men, and so his habit was to use the Superloo outside 'Birdshit Park', which I’m sure has a real name I’ve never taken the time to learn.
We all used the Superloo sometimes, mainly if you needed a number two, escaping the orange streetlamp glow to do your business enclosed by dappled, bleach cleaned aluminium walls, hoping the door wouldn't malfunction and swing open whilst you were sat there.
Once, Fat Kev fell asleep in there and after fifteen minutes or so was awoken by us lot laughing at him as the door slid open, but I think it was the only time it happened, and it couldn’t honestly be called a malfunction, more of a failsafe.
Mostly, when someone’s in the Superloo we all wait for them, sitting or leaning about, the oldest gang in Romford, to wait for them to finish; on mild nights anyway, a short break on the long walk home.
I liked to sit across the road on the bench facing the bog, and if you're waiting for Martin he's generally prompt in his doings, so there's no great hardship, and the company is pleasant and literate on the remainder of the journey.
For anyone reading this who is unclear on the whole Superloo concept, and they do seem to be less common these days, and I should probably describe the contraption.
They look like an escape pod from some hoary old sci-fi programme, but instead of offering space adventure, they provide a relatively clean facility for anyone not wanting to dodge desperate homosexuals in the public bog once you get back into town.
All this for only twenty pence, which you dropped into the angled slot to make the curved door slide open like something out of Star Trek. When you step inside one of these capsules you'll discover the resemblance to a space-pod remains undiminished.
All gleaming metal and strip lights, the door slides closed behind you with a hiss to leave you to your needs. Then, at the end of your visit to Captain Kirk’s bathroom you click the handle down and the door eases back open.
To reveal: us.
Sitting, standing, staring, at you.
Some nights, shifting from foot to foot, urgently awaiting our turn.
From our perspective, viewing this scene, then as now, you can't see the back of the facility, as it is squashed tightly into a solid brick alcove, against the semi-derelict remains of an old insurance firm behind.
The perfect locked room set-up.
No possible escape. Sure a person could detach panels and climbs through the mechanism, but how he could then re-tighten the screws and disguise his exit I have no idea. Plus we’d have seen him. The wall behind the Superloo stood and stands tall and solid. Both sides of the facility were clearly visible, so even if he had found a way out through the panels and the wires and the mechanisms before covering his traces, we would have seen him sneaking out.
We'd sat looking at the toilet the whole time, for a good twenty minutes at least, before the s
afety release automatically triggered the door to reveal the interior.
“Oy oy!” Alan shouted as the door eased open, “someones's fallen asleep.”
Alan had been closest to it, and had hammered on the door at least three times for Martin to both wake and hurry, and had been giggling about the state of Martin to have fallen asleep like this.
“Teach him to bloody laugh at me,” Fat Kev mumbled as he half dozed on the bench, “show us ya cock, Martin!”
As the door swung open we ambled over to see if he needed help, and to cheer him awake, but as we discovered, he was no longer there.
Only the vacancy awaited us.
We took crowded in and took turns in banging at the walls and calling him, and all agreed it was some sort of a trick, bafflingly clever, especially when measured against his usual standards, usually things with coins or cards, but nothing like this.
He had completely disappeared and despite our pleas would not re-appear that night.
It was back before mobiles, or back before everyone had them, and we didn’t want to worry his missus, so we left it for the night and walked off down the long road home.
My doorbell tinkled at about five the next day, just after watching Arsenal snatch the league and I invited him in with a guffaw and a hug, before demanding to know where he'd been and how he'd done it. Devious bastard.
“Definitely beats card tricks or strings of handkerchiefs,” I laughed, “Come on, you git, I mean, sod the magic circle, you have to