Are You There, God? It's Me, Ellen by Ellen Coyne

Author:Ellen Coyne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gill Books

Chapter 10

One of the simpler pleasures in my life is a trip to the women’s bathroom. As everyone knows well, the deepest, briefest friendships are formed by two heretofore unknown soul sisters who happen to be at the sink putting on their lipstick at the same time. But I also believe the beauty of the cubicles has gone unsung for too long.

The backs of the bathroom doors are tiny archives of women’s lives. You go for a wee, you stay for the gossip. I like to sit in the cubicle and read about all the fleeting romances documented in permanent marker. The best ones have addendums. A declaration that ASH LOVES MARK is sabotaged by a claim that maybe Mark or Ash or even both of them are sluts. (Who are these people whose lives are so intertwined that they all go for a wee in the same place?)

I like the ones written in lipstick because it suggests an unknown urgency. My favourites are the debates. On the cubicle wall in a pub near my house, someone has earnestly pleaded with women in neat black pen to ‘BE THE GOOD AT DIY HUSBAND YOUR MAM ADVISED YOU TO MARRY IN THE WORLD’. In one response, someone declares ‘I already am!’ while another rejects the original author as a ‘GOBSHITE’. The most recent response, at the time of my visit, said ‘no need to be mean’.

I think bathroom graffiti also puts the ‘pee’ into politics. Before the 2020 general election, my anthropological bathroom visits also noted some pastel-coloured stickers saying ‘FUCK FINE GAEL’ or ‘FUCK FIANNA FÁIL’ that had started to emerge. (If any psephologists would like to borrow my polling method, please feel free.) A lot of bathroom doors in Dublin are now relics of a different time – like the ones with ‘REPEAL’ scratched into the wood. I’ve seen a few cubicle doors host abortion debates. Back before abortion was legal, these private spaces in public were where women shared illicit information as well. There used to be big white stickers with a cerise pink dot in the middle that said ‘SAFE ABORTION WITH PILLS’. They were advertising a website called Women on Web, which is an international organisation that finds ways to send abortion pills to women in countries where the procedure is banned. For a long time, hundreds of women in Ireland would order these drugs on the internet so they could illegally induce a termination in an early pregnancy at home by themselves. Some, who can’t access a legal abortion for whatever reason, probably still do. Before the original pub was closed down, one of the women’s bathrooms in the Bernard Shaw had a list written on the wall. It said, ‘DO NOT CONTACT: Womenhurt.ie – antis; Abortionadvice.ie – antis; Cura – Religious.’ It was a list of anti-abortion crisis pregnancy agencies. I keep a picture of it on my phone. It reminds me of a woman I met a few years ago who told me her own story about a bathroom door, and I still think about it all the time.

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