Charlotte Cline -  Lost and Found

 

We didn't have a lock on our bathroom growing up, [chuckles] which meant that there were often three or four of us in there at once. Two in the bath, one on the toilet and my dad soaping his bristles at the sink. They say that the kitchen is the heart of the family home. But in my house, it was the bathroom. 

 

As we got older, my sister, Robyn, taught me how to wedge the dirty laundry basket behind the door. It took the two of us in fits of giggles to shift it, but it was no match for my family when they wanted in. Like, the time when I was reading in the bath, my mum crept in with a sketchbook tucked under her arm and begged to use me as practice for her life drawing class. [audience laughter] Outraged, I said, “No.” But she said that she was only going to draw my face. She promised faithfully she was only going to draw my face. 

 

When I glanced up from my book a chapter later, she was sketching with joyful abandon across the full double page spread. [chuckles] And I realized I'd become an unwilling centerfold. Over the time when my first boyfriend, Griff, a flame haired Welsh metalhead, came to stay for the first time, I tried to warn him of the dangers and I told him to make splashing noises in the bath to signal that it was occupied. [audience laughter] But despite his best splashing efforts, my dad appeared at the door, Winnie-the-Pooh style, a shirt on his top half and completely naked [audience laughter] from the waist down. And nonchalantly went for a sleepy wee while Griff lay utterly horrified in the bath [audience laughter] and tried to act like he was cool with it. 

 

The rest of the house was always fairly lawless and alive, so I don't know why we expected the bathroom to be sacred. I always thought that I wanted more privacy and more boundaries when there was a time when those things unexpectedly and uninvitedly crept in. When in the summer before I turned 13, the house went quiet and we lost my sister, Robyn, in a car accident. Afraid to upset one another further, we gave each other privacy. We built those boundaries and we locked invisible locks. And it didn't feel like home. I missed the madness that had once driven me crazy. [chuckles] 

 

We were all looking for our own ways to cope. My mum had started swimming to try and find her happy place again. She came home and she went for a wee and I wandered uninvited into the bathroom, something which I hadn't done for a while. As she looked down, she found, tangled in her pubic hair, a purpley-pink mysterious blob that looked like. It should have been attached to an intimate part of her body and now wasn't. She held it up in shock. And a look of recognition passed between us, mother to daughter, daughter to mother. And she said in the most British way possible, when you think you have spontaneously lost your clitoris at the local swimming pool, [audience laughter] “Oh, Charlotte, I think something terribly important has fallen off.” [audience laughter] 

 

So, she squeezed it, and it squished and she held it up for a closer look. It smelt of strawberries. [audience laughter] The pink mystery blob was in fact a piece of strawberry, Hubba Bubba bubblegum, [audience laughter] that had been chewed completely accidentally into anatomical perfection by its careless previous owner and found itself stuck to her as she sat on the bench at the swimming pool changing room. [audience laughter] Sorry, I'm going to ruin that gum forever for anyone. We dissolved into fits of giggles reserved only for times of absolute relief, not only for the lost and now found clitoris, [audience laughter] but also the sounds of joy and silliness starting to return to our house again. It felt good to laugh. 

 

My teenage self behind me, I can see what we lacked in privacy we found in this beautiful naked closeness of what it means to be a family forever bound by blood and bath water and bubblegum. I have a house and a family of my own now, funnily enough, with that first flame-haired, Welsh boyfriend, Griff, who didn't run for the hills as he ought to have done. A few years ago, as I went to close our bathroom door, the lock mechanism, which had been wobbly for a while, came off in my hand. As I held it in my fingers, I realized something terribly important had fallen off [audience laughter] and decided to keep it that way. Thank you.