The Bathing Ritual (July 20, 2009. Issue 7.)

I think the ritual started after the first time he and I slept together. I tugged at his hand, and gently teasing, asked him: ‘I’m going to take a bath. Want to watch?’

The bathroom here is tiny, only large enough for a toilet, a basin, a miniaturised bathtub. The whole flat isn’t unlike an oversized matchbox. A perfectly fitted cocoon for just me, but throw a grown man into the equation and it begins to seem absurd.

He would have smiled, dragged along behind me. Perched himself down on the edge of the toilet seat, chuckling as I manoeuvred the taps with my toes. Months later, after he has returned home, he will remember to me how my bathwater has only the one setting: ‘hot.’ It is a mis-memory, conjured by my fondness for steaming myself in the bathtub like a crab chasing its death.

Even rendered dreamlike by a thick fog of steam, it is not an elegant bathroom. It is sickly seventies pastel green, the colour of unfortunate hospital wards. Balding paint flakes from above the tiny window where a shadow of mould once lingered.

His presence renders the small space intimate. As he watches me cook, swirling wooden spoons in pans on the stove, as he watches me lain against him, face smushed into his chest, contentedly murmuring, so he watches me bathe.

Lazily he scribbles notes. Later he will allow me to read them.

I immerse my hair and body under the water, wriggle my feet out and poke at him with my big toe. I drag his hand down to my naked body, more warm and familiar than sexual.

We are in there for hours.