Night Bathing

By
John Walke

I sat in the darkness on the edge of my bed, searching for the thread. This had happened on a number of nights in succession. I couldn't sleep. Through the open window the festive gamblers at the greyhound racetrack beckoned me. Their passionate nightly roar rose and fell in waves across the darkened deserted football fields and cricket pitches of Lewisham Park. It was punctuated at intervals by the rhythmic clashing of steel on the elevated tracks that transported the gamblers back and forth. The train's lights flashed on and off between the trees crossing the steep embankment, and the near yet distant vibrant energy of the gamblers struck a melancholy chord of loss in me.

It was a loss I couldn't place, though I sensed that nothing could ever be lost. Like wine, the liquid at the start is not that drunk years later; so with each day - the bottling is only the beginning. I leaned forward and brushed my elbow by my waist. A chill shot across the small of my back, up the length of my spine and over my shoulder blades. It was a slight chill like none but one of too many years past when for the first time I had bathed at night and I was lost and disoriented. 'Where am I? Have I returned to where I first bathed at night?'

I was searching for the thread. I felt a clue was at hand. What had happened had not been my idea, very few things then were. I had just traveled thousands of miles from Karachi to benefit from the Nevilles' schooling so Mrs. Neville, the bursar's wife, insisted I bathe. A short heavy woman with long gray disheveled hair worn in a bun, she peered through her spectacles and leaned forward as she scrubbed me down in a few inches of lukewarm water. Her short thick hands maintained a vigorous motion. She looked me over as if she were about to comment on my thin matchstick legs, my elephant sized ears or my cherub dark curls, terms Mother had applied to me. Instead she said, looking cautiously at where my legs parted. "Derek, You are a big lad, aren't you!" something Mother would never have said. I was eleven.

The thread? The chill? The bath at night? I can't be certain. The vigorous rubbing down with towel and slipping in pajamas? Suddenly I discovered, as cotton caressed curled toes and elastic snapped at goose pimples, that this was not the first time I had worn pajamas, felt such warmth or bathed at night. No, it was not the first such time, but I could not recall, until just then, my first brief visit to England on another night of disorientation when my whole world had been turned upside down.

...Lights upside down far below. The hypnotic hum of the Super Constellation. Flattened faces against fogged up windows. Cupped palms blocked out shimmering night-lights. Through the steady drizzle wet runways reflected lights deep within a distant hangar illuminating its blue high-angled entrance. Frosted breath rose from flushed cheeks buried in woolen scarves and collar turned up overcoats. Clutching gloves, brushing sleeves and leaning torsos rushed past waist high guardrails. Crying coughs and sniffles. Rapid high-pitched conversation, twisting country lanes, amber cats' eyes down the center of the road, invented by a blind man I'd been told. And through the haze amber globes, zebra crossings, red pillar boxes, blue Bobbies and men singing,

"Christmas is coming, the geese are getting fat
Please put a penny in the old man's hat..."

The gleaming hot cast-iron stove quickly encircled at Aunt Rachel's home, the matching tiled pantry deserted and cold. Cocoa, biscuits and exhaustion. Everything twirled around - upside down, inside out, mirror image backwards. Worlds first encountered at night remained at odds with the morning.

Porcelain bathtubs and the chill of night bathing suddenly became disconcerting. I had been raised on bucket baths every morning back at home in Karachi - water carried across the compound by bearers, then poured upon backs glistening beneath the jaundiced naked light bulb that hung low from a high ceiling, its copper wire exposed through the damp rotted paper covering.

But in England the damp gathered at hill bottom, at the dip in the road where Aunt Rachel lived. It triggered her arthritic fingers with which she spent hours shinning brass doorknobs and switches. You could see yourself in them, grinning upside down. But "Don't touch!" unless you were told! Approaching her house on foot, drawn down by the steep road, I was always thrust forward trotting, then running, gravity drawing me there. Though whenever I departed it was only through some super-human effort as I strained uphill while being drawn back as if pleaded with, "Stay! Never leave! Don't go!"

She said that when she first arrived in England from India in '46 after the War she would sit curled up in the front room where fires were rarely lit and watch men thrust ladders up at dusk, lighting the gas street lamps -hiss, ...pooooooofh! ...An hypnotic glow...

The gas lamps and lamplighters are gone now...pooofh! Vanished. But night bathing and that sudden chill past my waist at that long day's end, begun too many thousands of miles away, confirmed that I was now at last back in England, though not for a brief visit like the first time, but for years of the Neville's education.

I had been told to expect my Aunt Rachel at the airport. I anticipated her welcoming embrace. But I only encountered Mr. Neville, a tall man with a glistening bald head. His ruddy complexion, round face and welcoming grin behind wire rimmed spectacles shriveled to a frown when I hesitated to accept his handshake. He was no substitute for my absent Aunt Rachel. No one could substitute for her. But gradually the realization that I was embarking on a journey all of my own crushed in on me.

I was travelling to a world that had long been desired for me, one I'd briefly visited years earlier, where people were expecting me, a place that had always been the center of my world while I had navigated its horizons. A centripetal force drew me in. I belonged there; a place had been prepared for me. I could not hold back. It was useless waiting for Aunt Rachel. I might as well accompany that frowning man. And by the time I fell asleep that night Mrs. Neville had already said, "Derek, you are a big lad now, aren't you! This will have to be the first and last time I bathe you!"

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