I miss crying in public toilets

I’m at the stage of lockdown where I have started mythologising every single bar toilet I’ve ever been in.

I tell myself I will never complain in the queue for the loos in Filthy McNasty’s again. I won’t care that there are, inexplicably, only two toilets in the ladies’, one cubicle reliably out of order while the other is occupied by two sloppy-drunk girls jointly, loudly, drafting a text to an on-off love interest. Whereas in the before-times I probably would have exchanged a grimace of solidarity with the people needing the loo in the queue beside me, I picture myself post-lockdown with Julie-Andrews-level effervescence, beaming ridiculously at everyone, just happy to be around people again.

I remember what an expedition it was to make a bathroom trip during nights at the Jailhouse on Joy’s Entry. This is the place where Henry Joy McCracken was supposedly held before he was brought to be hanged at Cornmarket in 1798, and honestly, Henry had a shorter walk to the gallows than your average Jailhouse customer does from the bar to the toilets. If the Crystal Maze had a Fenian Zone, it would look like the winding route of corridors and stairs that brings you up to the loos (by accidental way of the roof terrace because you can’t read the signposting through your rosé-tinted glasses). It’s ludicrous. I miss it.

I look back with irrational fondness on the blots of darkness spent in portaloos at Belsonic and the Spice Girls concert last year, romanticising the memory of those grim cells even though the last time I was in one was at Pride when my phone dropped into its murky depths, when I lifted the toilet seat and pulled it out with the kind of mindless adrenaline that mothers apparently get when their children are in immediate danger. (The phone died peacefully at home in the small hours of the morning.) In much the same way as Doctor Who’s distinctive blue police box is a beacon of hope and meaning across the universe, the chemical toilet has become for me an idyllic signifier of Good Times (although in contrast to the TARDIS, most portaloos somehow manage to be even smaller on the inside).

I think about the bathroom in the National, which I’m pretty sure has the most terrifyingly-well-lit mirror in Belfast. It is a bad idea to touch up your makeup in its reflection unless you are prepared to see every line in your face like a plain of Death Valley mud cracks. Every pore is harrowingly illuminated like a Snapchat filter for showing you what you’d look like as a pointillist painting. I like to imagine the lightbulbs round that mirror have stayed glowing throughout the pub blackout of lockdown. I look forward to seeing my own eyeliner-smudged face in it again like a badger caught in headlights.

I miss the bathroom camaraderie of drunk women. I miss being told I look good by someone retouching their lipstick in the mirror next to me. I miss becoming emotionally invested in strangers’ relationship dramas and swapping sage life advice with girls I’ve just met. I miss the support coven that rallies round when someone’s crying, offering wads of prickly loo roll to blot their inky mascara tears. I miss toilet-door etchings, daft platitudes like I believe in you, keep going! scored into the wood, ancient carvings from drunk women gone by.

I hear a lot of people saying that lockdown has given them new appreciation for the little things in their old routines. For me, peeing next to an overflowing sanitary bin with someone’s abandoned vodka tonic on the cistern behind me has emerged as one of life’s unsung pleasures. I look forward to the cold kiss of an automatic toilet flush against my hole in safer, happier times.

Cover photo by Marten Bjork on Unsplash