Chapter 21
Lesson 21: Pay attention to small signs. They may be important.
Reading List: The Adventure of the Second Stain by Arthur Conan Doyle (not read)
Bridget Jones Tally:
unsolved mysteries—1
It was a day that would live in infamy—its horrors forever emblazoned on my memory like an acid burn. The sights and the smells
of that morning will haunt me for the rest of my days and perhaps beyond, raking up fresh terror every time I am reminded
of it. When some gruesome sight flashes before my eyes, or heinous odor curls menacingly up my nostrils, or even without any
elicitation at all, the remembrance will hunt me down, it will find me, and it will traumatize me anew.
Who is to blame? I may never know. And in its eternal mystery, the memory grows stronger. Always there. Always clawing at
me. Always triggering my gag reflex.
My alarm radio woke me at 4:45 a.m. with “Sweet Caroline”—I thought I had been shot through the heart. I rolled out of bed, put on a comfy traveling dress and leggings, and hobbled down to the new, modern tour bus. I threw Robbie’s canvas duffel bag inside the luggage hold underneath, rather than stacking it behind the bus for Robbie to Tetris into the back as he would have done with old Rosie.
It was still pitch-black out, and there was a chilly nip in the air, but we were trying to make up for the time we had lost
between the bus breakdown and the hospital visit. We had to make it to London and get fed and sorted for a 7 a.m. tour of
the British Library’s special books collections, which Robbie had arranged for us unofficially with a friend who worked there.
We had a fully packed day, then a night in London, and sightseeing all the following day before setting off for Oxford.
The bus was dark and the heaters were blasting away, adding a whoosh to the soft sound of Vivaldi on the radio. Ahhh. Sweet, sweet bus shut-eye , I thought for a passing moment before I fell asleep under my coat, leaning back in my high-tech reclining seat with my cardigan
for a pillow. I could never have fathomed then, in those moments of ignorant innocence, that I would soon be uncommonly grateful
for my makeshift bedding.
For one heavenly hour, I slept like a narcoleptic baby sung to sleep by Julie Andrews. But then I woke, cajoled awake by some
unseen unpleasantness. I didn’t think it scientifically possible that a smell could wake a soundly sleeping person. Alas,
this was no ordinary smell. This was an unearthly stink so fierce and so foul as to burn my nose hairs clean off. Soon it
had filled every corner of the bus. It spread like an epidemic, waking sleepers and turning dreams to nightmares.
A few of us looked around, bleary-eyed, but no one seemed forthcomingly apologetic. I wrapped my scarf around my nose and
mouth and eventually willed myself back to sleep, most likely to dream of rotting carcasses and sewage spills.
When we arrived, the sun was shining, I felt amazing, and we were in London. The London, England, of the movies. The Lon don, England, of Dickens and Sherlock Holmes, of Shakespeare and Tennyson and T. S. Eliot. The London, England, of my dreams. I couldn’t wait to get going.
The schedule was tight. We were to drop our things off at the inn, change clothes, grab a free crumpet, inhale a cup of fortifying
tea, and then hurry to the library looking somewhat smart and less sleep-creased, if at all possible. We had forty minutes
to get there, and the tube would take at least twenty. It was nearly impossible, but we were up to the task.
I went to retrieve my bag. While Robbie was assisting the ladies with their luggage, I spotted mine and grabbed it. As I pulled
it out, I noticed it was a bit wet. That’s strange—did it rain? I looked around at the dry road and the dry bus and decided that it didn’t look like it had. But the canvas duffel Robbie
had loaned me was certainly wet, and I opened it to find that the damp had soaked through the fabric. Crap. That’s a shame. Maybe I can take a couple of extra minutes to hang some of my clothes in my room to dry out.
I zipped it back up. Then something hit me.
Something heinous. And yet intimately familiar.
That smell.
What was it? I dropped the bag, unbelieving, and looked back under the bus for answers. There above the spot where my bag
had been was a tube. And on the tube was a little sign. A sign that said toilet dump valve . My brain hemorrhaged.
What? Toilet dump valve? I very calmly moved in closer to read it again in case I was hallucinating, or in case it actually said tropical drinks vault or torchlit duck vulva and I was just overreacting. But no. Not only had I read it correctly the first time, now I was close enough to see that
the pipe was open and uncovered, its filthy, gaping maw still slowly dripping with sewage.
With great control, I carefully pulled my torso back into the fresh air, inhaled slowly, and turned my head with the grave look of a newscaster delivering the message that Earth would soon be destroyed by a flaming meteor.
“Robert.”
He made a strange face. No one called him Robert, but “Robbie” seemed too light and jolly a nickname for such a situation.
“I need you to come here now, please.”
He saw the look on my face and hurried over, concerned. All I could do when he arrived was point at the valve.
“What’s the matter?” It took him a moment. “Whoa—this thing is open! Good thing you caught it! That could have ended very
badly.” He laughed. “Can you imagine?”
“I didn’t catch it,” I responded flatly.
“Huh?”
I pointed at my bag. Now that I knew what had happened, I could see that within the wetness, there were small bits of wet
toilet paper clinging on to the canvas. And... Oh God. Oh God, no. A smear. Several SMEARS!
But there was no God. I knew that for certain now.
Robbie gasped.
“Burn it.” I choked. “We’ll have to burn it.”
He stood there with his mouth open for a moment. Then he stood up straighter, squaring his shoulders in resolve.
“No, I’m sure we can just...” He stepped closer, but as he leaned down to unzip the bag, he stopped in midair, just hovering
there for a moment, hands outstretched. Then he came to his senses, straightened, and returned to stand a little further off,
rubbing his unsullied hands together as if to clean off imaginary germs.
Percy jogged right on over, took a sniff, and tried to flop down and roll in it before Robbie, with a speed like I’ve never
seen, grabbed the handle on Percy’s harness and lifted his entire body up off the ground in one swift movement before carrying
him off to be leashed.
“Okay. I’m going to go inside and get some gloves and some disinfectant spray, and then we’ll wash what we can salvage with superhot water... and maybe some bleach?”
“Hot water? We don’t need hot water. We need an exorcism.”
We both looked down at the bag, the silence gathering between us.
“I touched it,” I whispered, a pained confession I didn’t want to be true. “I touched it with the skin of my hands.” I held
them out in front of me to show him, wishing that I could have them both cut off at the wrists in one clean chop. He pulled
away from the threat of contact. I had just touched a bit of the wetness on the outside of my bag, but to me it felt like
I may as well have been making a vase out of turds on a pottery wheel.
I blinked many times, looking from my hands to my bag and then back to Robbie.
“Okay, Alice. Let’s deal with this thing one bit at a time. This is horrible. I can’t believe this happened to you. I’m so
sorry. That’s the first thing.” He waited a beat. “The next thing is that, I’m really sorry to say it, but we have to leave
here very shortly, and we don’t have time to wait. Would you prefer to stay here and wash and gather yourself and come meet
us in town later?”
I didn’t want to be left behind and miss out on the London itinerary just so I could stay at the hotel alone to wallow in
an air thick with poo and self-pity.
“No.”
“Okay. Then go wash your hands, and come down and grab some breakfast. We’ll deal with this when we get back later. It can
hardly get any worse, can it? I’ll talk to the hotel and figure out what to do with your bag in the meantime.”
“I can’t, uhh... I can’t touch anything with my hands.”
“Right. I’ll help you.” He led me inside, got the key, and let me in the room. In the bathroom, he turned the faucet on for me and adjusted the temperature to near scalding, but not quite burn-your-skin-off. He pushed the soap dispenser several times and then left me to the undignified business of washing another person’s feces off my hands.
I wanted to wash myself in boiling bleach and then put clean clothes on, but I didn’t have any clean clothes. Basically everything
I brought with me was soiled—quite literally.
That smell. What if that smell clings to me like a parasite on a host body?
I scrubbed ten times with three different types of soap, then dug the sanitizing gel out of my purse and rubbed on the entire
bottle, from fingernail to elbow like a surgeon. I would have lit my hands on fire like I’d seen doctors do in historical
dramas, but I couldn’t find an open flame in time before it dried. Then I looked in the mirror, took a few breaths, tried
not to think of all my favorite tops and bras and jeans and dresses I would have to say goodbye to forever, gagged a little
bit one more time, and then went downstairs to join the group in stoic silence.
I did not eat crumpets.
“Here’s what I’m thinking. We get some disposable gloves, put your bag on a plastic tarp, and go through it, separating what
can be spared and washed, and what will need to be thrown in the bin.” When I came down to breakfast, Robbie had been working
on a game plan.
I looked at him—baffled, incredulous. “I can’t keep anything in there,” I explained as if he were a little slow. “That is
not the kind of toilet water I like to wear.”
He was going to argue, and then his shoulders dropped and he let out a breath. “I don’t blame you.”
“But, Robbie. We’ve got another two weeks of this tour, and I won’t have anything to wear but the hideous thing I’ve got on right now. I’m going to have to get a new wardrobe, and since we don’t often have a chance to do laundry, I’ll have to buy enough to last until the end of the tour. Please tell me that you have insurance that can cover things like this.”
His pained expression said it all. “The insurance covers theft and personal injury, but it wouldn’t cover damaged luggage.
No. I’m sorry. That’s why the website said it was mandatory to purchase your own travel insurance. Did you do that before
you left?”
Oh no.
“Well. I thought everything was covered.”
His face fell. “Oh, Alice. How could you leave without travel insurance?” At the look on my face, he stopped. “Okay. I’m sorry.
I will call the auto insurance company today, explain the situation, and see if there’s any way they can cover some of your
expenses. But Alice, even if they agree, which is a slim chance, it may take months for the money to come through.” His face
scrunched up again.
“What am I going to do, Robbie?”
“Well,” he said, his face brightening a little. “I think we’ll just have to have to shop creatively. Could be fun.”
I scowled. “Don’t you dare try to find a silver lining, you monster. Once someone poops in your bag, there is no silver lining.
Okay. When can I buy something else to wear? Today?”
“Today is totally packed. If you don’t have any particular interest in the British Library or Baker Street and you want to
skip it and meet up with us later, that would be fine. Otherwise, you’d have to wait at least a few days until we have some
free time in Oxford, or maybe Bath.”
“I definitely don’t want to miss anything.”
“Okay. I’ll finagle the schedule. I still think it’s a good idea to go through your bag when we get back today.”
I slumped. “Fine.”
“Good girl!” he said, and I glared at him, but it was toothless, and a little bit of humor creeped in against my will.
“That smell was outrageous,” he said, sounding shaken. “It made my eyes water.”
“If only it could have been harnessed for good instead of evil. It could have powered Tokyo for a week.”