A Thousand Days of Wonder by Charles Fernyhough

Author:Charles Fernyhough
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US

We get a lift to the station and buy a Daytripper ticket for me. Athena enjoys the pleasures of public transport—inserting the ticket into the electronic reader, pressing the bell button on the bus—for free. On the train she wants to stand on her seat, her hands and nose pressed against the window, and sing a song about a teddy bear. She has sticky tips of Vegemite in her hair from the sandwiches she has already helped herself to. She is wearing a butter-stained red T-shirt and a pink dress ruched around the middle. Today is forecast to reach eighty-six degrees, but a peach gingham hat will see off the summer sun.

Our first stop is Town Hall, and the walkway under the QVB that leads to the Little Girls’ Toilet. Others navigate Sydney by the tourist-brochure landmarks; our compass is marked by the poles of excretion and food . Never mind the opera house and the MCG: Australia should be famous for its public toilets. On the second floor of Grace Brothers in Central Plaza, there is a parents’ room with a toddler-sized loo that is never less than spotlessly clean. One place we stopped at, in Port Douglas in the north of Queensland, even had a grown-up-sized loo placed alongside the smaller one, so that parent and child could strain together in blissful company. Those who complain that parents are potty-fixated should, of course, try looking after a toddler who is toilet training. My claims on such an obsession are weaker than most, because this is one thing that Athena is taking in her stride. She left England in diapers and landed in Sydney in underwear. The parenting industry goes to some lengths to glamorize the mucky end of the alimentary process, with its Disney-branded training pants and days-of-the-week underwear. It needn’t bother. Pooing is a pleasure that cannot be enhanced by advertising. When toddlers get down to it, they really get down. We have had some of our best conversations with Athena on the throne, her flow of discourse only interrupted by moist-browed, flush-cheeked pauses. “I do two wees and two poos,” she announces, sitting down to another bout of stinky bliss. She celebrates it, sings its praises, frequently for an entire public convenience to hear. More embarrassing is her insistence on commenting on her fellow occupants’ activities. She thinks she’s alone with me in those cramped white stalls, but of course the man next door, upon whose grunting she is commentating loudly, knows otherwise. Once again, she is tripped up by the question of how people come to know things, how perception shapes the contents of minds. She seems not to understand that, if she can hear a person, that person can hear her. Social life is a hall of mirrors. At any moment, you can be caught out by how another mind reflects your self to you.

After easing her bladder, it’s down to the lower ground floor for lunch at the food court. If we’re there by eleven forty-five, we can beat the crowds of office workers.

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