The line outside the Left Luggage office at Victoria Coach Station catches Eva's eye as soon as she gets there. She is now faced with a dilemma. Should she wait there to offload her bag for a couple of hours until she catches her train? Or should she subtract another ten years from the life of her aching joints by carrying it all the way down those steps to the Ladies, where she frankly needs to go pretty badly and pretty quickly? Ruefully, Eva supposes that stations are designed by people who never need to use them, or at least who never need to use the public conveniences. She concludes that architects must be exempt from weak bladders.
Wherever you go, at every subway, underground or metro station, apart from those near rail and bus terminuses, there are always escalators leading up to ground level. Whether at King's Cross or Victoria in London, or at Florenc bus station in Prague, the technology seems to run out just when you need it most. Having arrived with a substantial proportion of your worldly belongings wrenching your limbs apart, your palm sliced in half by your bag strap, your wrist dropping off and your bladder about to rupture, you are then faced with the equivalent of a Labour of Hercules before you can restore yourself to continence. As if in anticipation of our baggage, the architects of stations and airports seem to outdo one another in ingenious ways of turning conveniences into inconveniences. They are down long, winding narrow staircases, they are up staircases, they are in the departures building, and you are in arrivals.
At Victoria Station in London, for example, you wander in despair along an interminable labyrinth of corridors at the Underground, only to find yourself at the bottom of a steep staircase leading up to the street. You then lug your cases up this, to find yourself still a good five minutes' walk away from the Coach station, if your onward journey is by bus. Having forged your way through the crowds, crippling several passers by with your luggage on the way, you then have to negotiate various obstacles before you stagger down another staircase to the public conveniences. Retracing your steps two or three times along the confusing row of arrows leading there, your troubles are still not over, for you will then likely as not find your way barred by a tortuous looking turnstile demanding an obscene fee in just the combination of coin that you happen to be lacking. This is a popular trend at international train and bus terminals, where people have just arrived from far flung destinations and have only managed to procure the local currency, if at all, in notes only. There follows a strained and desperate set of negotiations with an attendant who is unlikely to be able to speak any language you know. The necessary loose change somehow procured, often from some passer by who has taken pity on you, you drop it into the slot of the turnstile. On the optimistic assumption that the turnstile responds to your coin, you then face a combined obstacle course and intelligence test as you attempt to fathom, with your sphincter muscles by now at the utmost limits of human endurance, how to get yourself and your suitcase through the turnstile in one piece. There follows a hasty impromptu drama involving the lifting and shunting of bags and cases, often under the watchful, suspicious, disparaging, but not necessarily helpful eye of the attendant.
Admitted at long last to the fragrant inner sanctum, you will consider yourself fortunate beyond words if a pissoir or cubicle is actually vacant. All women, and those men who are in need of cubicles, are now faced with a new quandary: how to manoeuvre themselves and their luggage into the cubicle without coming into contact with anything unsanitary. At this point the experienced traveler will fling all hopes of privacy to the winds, reverse themselves into the open door of the cubicle, which is guaranteed to be half the size of a lavatory cubicle anywhere else, and place their case in the open doorway where they can keep an eye on it.
There then follows a perfunctory inspection of the toilet seat, to determine whether physical contact with it is likely to prove life threatening. Actual contact with the target zone may prove tricky from this reversed and hampered position. The wary traveler first takes a generous length of toilet paper and carefully places it horizontally across the front part of the seat. If eye contact is difficult on account of copious outdoor wear or shoulder baggage, the canny traveler will carefully lower themselves forwards and downwards until their head is parallel with the seat, peering upwards and backwards through the parted legs for as long as the sudden downward surge of blood allows before vision is impaired or balance is lost. Any scarf or particularly precious pashmina you may be wearing will at this stage usually come into contact with the floor and absorb anything up to half a dozen urine samples as it trails on the ground. This is often also the point at which your mobile phone works its way out of your side pocket or handbag and lands in one or more of the said samples. The resulting impact will turn out to be one of the best tests for the robustness of mobile phone housing ever devised, although it may temporarily cut you off from the outside world in the process. Your vocabulary of four letter words will expand exponentially.
Depending on the state of the floors, your cell phone may turn out to be a virtuoso at aquaplaning across considerable distances, such as into one of the other cubicles, usually one that is occupied. You, however, have other pressing matters to attend to just now: you can always retrieve your sim card and the back cover of your mobile phone later. First, you must remember to lower yourself very gingerly on to the seat, to avoid any sudden back drafts that might inadvertently blow away your protective layer of toilet paper. Alternatively, your level of desperation has by now reached a pitch where all such considerations are irrelevant.
If you are traveling with small children, the above account will seem a ridiculous exaggeration of a perfectly straightforward situation. Either way, you will now, at long last, have reached that point at which the bliss of restored continence seems worth any price. For the truly masochistic, the exquisite agony of this scenario can be enhanced beyond imagination by attempting to use the on board toilet of a bus in motion (no pun intended). In this case all the hazards associated with the stationary sanitary facility are heightened by finding oneself hurled at speed around an enclosed space while the lower half of one's body is completely exposed to the elements. One may even find oneself subjected to the additional humiliation, at a moment's notice, of an audience, since the doors of these contraptions rarely seem to remain locked for very long, which isn't surprising when a fully grown adult human body is being flung against them at anything up to 100 miles an hour.
Perhaps this was why Eva had an impulse that day, and decided to travel First Class, for once in her life. Admittedly this was only one of her short journeys, she had just been up to London the evening before for an evening dose of Death, so to speak (a lecture on Nietzsche that had been recommended for her Master's in Death Studies). She armed herself with a large gourmet coffee, a bottle of French designer mineral water and a beef Jerky baguette, and for good measure bought herself a book of Sudoku puzzles from the station bookshop. It felt good, getting into that First Class carriage. As if she were a different person, or perhaps just herself in another life. Fiddling thoughtfully with the Moldavite ring on her finger as she looked out of the window, a little light seemed to go on in her mind as something surfaced for the first time in her consciousness. She wondered where and how she had managed to acquire her rather pernicious habit of living in unnecessary discomfort, as if she had programmed herself for some unnamed atonement. She knew in the instant of naming this habit of hers that its spell was being broken, and yet still felt the residue of mystery it left behind, incongruous, like stardust on a newspaper stand.
