Back inside, Louis makes a wooden screen. Soon the toilet is a small discrete compartment of its own. Next, Louis Faranelli needs a kitchen. He makes a table on three legs, a triangle table, and this will do.
In time, Louis grows potatoes. He also manages to discretely grow carrots and onions on the land outside that looks like a demolition site. He grows parsley on the window sill. He makes nutritious soups on a camping stove. For breakfast, he enjoys a bowl of weetabix.
And this is how things go for Louis Faranelli in the bathroom on the motorway.
And when the winter nights begin to draw in, Louis Faranelli loves nothing more than to lie in a hot bath, the wind and rain thrashing against the window pane. He loves that he can stay in this bath for as long as he likes for he has no flatmates who might need into the bathroom. The water is warm and comforting as a long hug. He likes to make it frothy and aromatic, by means of a grapefruit and basil scented concentrate. This fills the whole space with a delicious aroma.
Louis Faranelli never intended to live in a bathroom, but he had to live somewhere. He had remained a student until the age of 36, and when you do something like that, there are terrible consequences. Louis could not afford to rent more than one room. This room just happened to be a bathroom (and truthfully this bathroom was not even in Nod-Nol at all, but just past the exit to the next city.)
Louis Faranelli had never expected to live in a bathroom on the edge of a motorway. Louis Faranelli had never expected to die in a bathroom either at the age of around 39. But even though it is very sad, that is precisely what happened.
Death comes at a very bad time for Louis Faranelli who has been considering two new projects:
(i) the purchase of a hen or goat (for the company and the dairy products.)
(ii) the hosting of a visitor (he is unsure who.)
But everything changes on the day he sees a person in a fluorescent jacket lurking in the forest near his home. The person wears a red helmet and writes things on a clipboard. The person moves closer but does not see Louis Faranelli who has scampered off in fright.
In fact, after this terrible sighting of another person, Louis Faranelli locks the door and stays silently in his bathroom for the next four days. Whilst here, Louis feels unsettled. For example, he doesn't eat his weetabix. Furthermore, he decides against his new schemes (purchasing a goat and inviting a guest.) He thinks things like: 'where would the guest sleep? He or she might not be comfortable. He would take the bath of course and give them his bed. But then, what about during the day. How could he entertain the guest? There was only the bathroom, the uninhabitable rooms, and outside the demolition site and the motorway with the din that nobody liked. It wouldn't be fun for the guest. As for the goat, what if it was kidnapped? Or what if it grew violent or suddenly ran on to the motorway?
The second night of his exile, in the middle of his evening bath, he has a sudden thought. That person in the fluorescent jacket was there for a reason. But what?
What?
Louis Faranelli doesn't know.
He doesn't like people in general, so he doesn't investigate. Instead he has taken refuge in the safety of his bathroom with the sectioned off toilet, the multi-functional triangular table, and the more-than-adequate storage space, for four days now, all this time, keeping the bathroom door firmly locked. He looks around his cosy home. He has been happy here. He has been undisturbed by flatmates. He has enjoyed doing secret mathematical equations on the window with a thin-nibbed marker pen. He has enjoyed taking hot baths in bad weather. He has enjoyed reading long, difficult books and making simple, nutritional meals.
Outside the abandoned house, over the dark, opaque forest, a large full stop moon is rising. In the distance, the motorway is a dreadful din that nobody likes, cars zooming past like enemy bullets. And as the demolition man counts backwards from 10 and prepares his plunger, Louis Faranelli is having a nice bath. And before the man reaches zero, Louis Faranelli has slipped under the comforting hot water, under the grapefruit and basil scented bubbles, as his simple world melts permenantly away.
YOU ARE READING
Tales of Disturbance
科幻A young teenage girl, haunted by the memories of her father's execution, attempts to escape a cruel regime by night. A solitary woman, abandoned by her husband, inadvertently plays into the cruel hands of 'the state'. In another totalitarian regime...
