A few years ago I was staying at a raw food, deluxe wellness retreat in the Philippines when I met two Sydney guys – Nat and Justin. Over breakfast of teeny, tiny salads we discussed our itineraries.
“Are you going to do it?” they asked, suddenly leaning in, voices dropping to a whisper.
“It? What’s it??”
It was what the place was famous for … colonics. I was here, wasn’t I? I had to do it, they said.
There were two options: a gentle hosing and a more vigorous, deeper clean using a special machine (and also a hose) that really got in there. I was horrified. I had heard of such things, of course, but never been at close range.
It was over there (they pointed to a hut down past the spa), the colonic centre, where it happened. I swear, as soon as I saw it I detected a new odour in the air, the faint earthy smell of excrement.
In the distance by the hut, people in white uniforms were collecting piles of fresh white towels from a golf cart, presumably used to mop up any overflow. It must be carnage in there, I thought with a shudder.
Nat and Justin were debating whether to go for the “hard” or the soft option. They looked at me.
No! No! I could not. That night I had booked in for a massage under the stars. You lie under a palm tree. They play Bach. You get to choose an essential oil based on your astrology chart. But this other thing? No! I liked to pretend I had no internal organs – that I was just skin and some features. If asked, I could not tell you where my kidneys are. If asked, I’d tell you a colon was a useful grammatical device.
I could not even think about being hosed down like a slaughterhouse floor, unblocked like a clogged sink. In the words of Meatloaf, “I would do anything for a travel story, but I won’t do that.”
*
I thought of the colonic place this week as I contemplated a blocked kitchen sink in my flat. Would I have to give the sink a colonic? Or would the blockage just … fix itself?
I decided it would just fix itself, it was just a little constipated and once I poured something down there it would loosen up, relax and things would start flowing once more.
But instead of draining like a normal sink, it took things down in small sips, slowly. It seemed pained – and once or twice in a horrible, human-like gurgle, it seemed to spew up the liquid it had just drained. Glug, glug, it would say, before regurgitating bits of rice and liquid. “You’re disgusting,’’ I replied.
I began to avoid using the sink. Dishes piled up around me.
I bought some Drano but didn’t use it. And although it promised to dissolve whatever was clogging the sink, the chemical cure seemed too harsh.
On YouTube I watched people dismantling their own bathroom pipes and removing the blockage with their bare hands. It was gross but I couldn’t look away. One man removed what could only be described as a hairberg. Strands of mangy hair provide a structure for dirt, oil, blobs of toothpaste? ... and some other stuff to coalesce around.
What would I find in my pipes? I both did and didn’t want to know.
Rather than bother my landlord, I decided to fix the drain myself and consulted the hive mind of Twitter. People responded with an almost horny enthusiasm. They were hooked on filth. They loved the drama of a blocked drain.
The hive mind rejected Drano as being too harsh for the environment and most people suggested the use of a plunger, warm water and bicarb soda. Only a few brave souls suggested I dismantle the sink myself. I was many things, but not a guerilla plumber.
Yesterday I was lying on the floor, wearing a white linen top, talking to my editor Steph about some tricky changes in a feature. We were debating back and forth and I was absently fiddling with the pipes to see if they’d unscrew.
My editor was making a case for a minor rewrite, when suddenly it came out.
I started screaming. It was gushing all over me in a dirty brown flow. “Argh! Arghhhh!” Where was a bowl? Or a bag? I need to capture it.
I kept screaming. It was so disgusting. Steph, not knowing where I was or what was going on, was alarmed. Were the screams in response to the edit?
“Brigid, Brig? Are you OK?”
“Arrghh, arghhhhh!!!”
“Talk to me Brig. Where are in you? Do you need help?”
I screamed a bit more, then whispered: “The Horror. The Horror.”
Call terminated, bowl located, I captured the flow. It smelt, but not of rotten meat but something else, something old and dank and cranky. Out of instinct I poured it down the sink before remembering just as it gushed again into the cupboards and on to the floor that I had detached the pipes.
I thought again of the colonic centre, all those white towels, the hot mess of stuff that moves around our insides, the things (meats?) that get stuck along the colon wall and putrefy. The horror of the internal. The fascination with the internal. (Would this explain Twitter’s interest in a clogged sink, I wondered? A sort of Freudian thing?)
I removed another piece of piping. It was heavy. This was where the blockage was. I steeled myself, changed my clothes, mopped the floor. I was about to meet my Colonel Kurtz, confront my id, eyeball my own filth.
I set to work. It was a fatberg of sorts, my fatberg. And just like a colonic (which I ended up having, by the way, in the Philippines), it would contain information, disgusting information, that would tell me what my worst habits were, the things of me that had been hidden.
It was coffee grounds. I had been putting them down the sink. As a result, the pipes looked like a French press. The grounds were packed in there – blended and reconstituted with tiny bits of food and large white blobs of fat. It was horrible.
I was horrible. I should have been putting them in the bin. The bad smell was all over me and probably would be for the rest of my life.
Cleaning the pipes was a penance of sorts, as was not being able to reattach the pipes and now being in much the same situation as I was at the start – that is, not being able to use the kitchen sink.
But just like the colonic in the Philippines, there was also something satisfying about having cleaned something horrific. After the procedure and its penance-like aspects, there is the promise of renewal.
