Soap

Friday Fragment #27

Things – a hairbrush, a dustpan, a bar of soap – each have their place. There is necessity in trusting that something will be where you expect it to be, whether that might be the kettle, a reading lamp or a favourite chair. Each day we geographically reacquaint ourselves with such articles via a thousand repeated small gestures: returning a bottle of milk to the shelf of the fridge door or a key to its hook. Even when we co-habit – especially so – we must organise by place: there must be a consensus about where things belong, from a toilet roll, to a wall clock, to a box of paracetamol. Our sense of home is not the space that we live in, nor the things that we put into them, but the relationship between the two. People also have their place, spaces which hold and contain them – in many ways are them – irrelevant of their presence, regardless of their absence. There is a book, the last book, that still sits on the bedside table of my dear mother-in-law a year after we lost her. In my home, her daughter – my wife – has always slept on the right-hand side of the bed that we share. On nights when I retire later than her, I will tiptoe through the dark of the room, steer around where I know the corner of the bed and the footstool of her dressing table to be, noiselessly place a glass of water onto the coaster at the back of the nightstand and ease myself into bed beside her; all in the manner of a cheating husband. It’s an unfaithfulness that seems real because I too have a place where I belong, a place where I am expected to be. Trust between two people is overwhelmingly centred around place. Even for those we can’t see, knowing where someone should be can help us to feel less blind. Our experience of the world is a lifelong navigation around space, even if most of our lives could be graphed across merely half a dozen or so specific sites. We long for experience, for people, but we desire a space in which to enjoy each, a space to feel secure. Our bodies are also maps of distinct spaces, ones which we traverse regularly and might also permit others to explore.¹ The back of a knee finds rest over the top of its pair, the flesh of one calf splayed by the capped bone of its neighbour. Two arms find simultaneous comfort when they cross and tuck into and on top of the inner depression of the opposite elbow joint. A finger will repose in the suprasternal notch of a lover²; and will travel to and rest against numerous other places of pendulous flesh. We map our bodies with metal hoops, bands, chains and ink. Tissue scars, and the skin creases and corrugates in inimitably cartographical and biographical ways. It was two days ago, as I lay in the bath, that I noticed with sudden sadness that the soap that had sat on the corner of the tub for the last few weeks was gone. So too the dusky pink flannel on which it had rested. On the wall behind, a ghost rectangle had been etched – the spit and spray of calcified water against where that green block of fat, oil and acid had once sat. An hour later, as I towelled myself dry, I noticed both bar and flannel on the metal shelf above where my head had been resting while submersed. It was a strange temporary loss to have felt so keenly, except that it heralded one that was still to come, next week, when my daughter will begin to map out the next part of her life in a new space. It will be a place where things must be located anew, must necessarily fit into and around each other, provide comfort and security, create a certainty of belonging.

‘Friday Fragment’ is an additional weekly instalment to my A Thousand Fragments monthly newsletter.

1. An idea wound richly into metaphor in the song, ‘Arcadia’.

2. Many owe a debt of anatomical knowledge to Michael Ondaatje’s mesmerising The English Patient (and Anthony Minghella’s wonderful adaptation for the screen).