Living for Disco

You step into the sucking warmth of the tiny pine room; it smells eye-wateringly of vicks vaporub. Someone’s been spiking the water bucket with eucalyptus oil again. Anti-social bastards.

Two very large ladies with impressive bosoms are rubbing moisturiser into their cellulite and talking about their work with AIDS orphans.

You lie down across from them, and half listen to their conversation, in case any interesting leads should arise, but after a while you drift into the heat-sluggish arena of your wandering mind.

You wonder if there is anyone in this town who doesn’t talk about AIDS as a matter of course, every single day of the week. In the sauna the other day, you got talking to someone who asked you if it was the same in the UK. She was shocked when you said that people at home rarely talk about AIDS in a local context, and you don’t explain that it’s generally seen as something affecting Africans, immigrants, drug addicts and gay men. For white, heterosexual Britain, AIDS is someone else’s problem.

You shift your towel and burn yourself painfully on your locker key. Why do locker keys get hot enough to burn in here, but not belly-button rings? You remember the day you went to get your belly pierced, eight years ago. The woman offered you an oscar for your outstanding portrayal of a woman in pain. You always knew you were meant for the stage.

You meant to go back there and get them to do your second tattoo, but never got around to it. Now you wonder if you’re too old to get a tattoo, although if you’d had it at the age of twenty-five, you’d still have it now, so that kind of thinking is rather redundant. Anyway, you’re only as old as the man you feel, ha ha, which means that at the moment you’re as yet unborn, empty, your life a blank slate on which everything is yet to be written. The thought of growing up, of being thirteen, fourteen, fifteen again, oh the horror, makes you glad to be thirty-two, single and sweating sleepily in a heated box.

You feel your face growing red and hot, and remember reading somewhere that (unless you have hypothermia) stimulating circulation of the blood near the surface of the skin is healthy. You feel your face throbbing, and imagine the blood in there, tackling your blackheads from the inside.

“Blimey,” you hear it saying. “Has it been this long since we had a good spring clean up here?” You giggle to yourself, and wonder if the two women, quiet now, think you’re unhinged. You glance over, but they are both sitting, heads back, eyes closed, mouths wide open, enjoying the heat.

You think perhaps if you’re starting to giggle to yourself in public, you should leave the sauna, as you’ve clearly been in here too long.

You pick up your towel, and fight the headrush as you sit up. On the way out, you burn yourself painfully with the scalding hot locker key.

You wonder if you’ll ever learn.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 12th, 2006 at 3:35 pm and is filed under Miscellanea. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.