There are five urinals, intimidating in their ivory sheen. Rob waits in line with all the men in their football shirts, suddenly horribly conscious of being the only one not wearing team colours, and prays he gets to use number one or number five. At the end of the row, he\u2019ll be able to angle his body away from his neighbour and just about fool himself into believing he\u2019s alone. Then he can go. But if he ends up at two, three or four…<\/p>\n
Please. Please. Please.<\/p>\n
Denim shorts man at number four zippers up and makes for the sink.<\/p>\n
Oh, no.<\/p>\n
Rob stares at his feet and pretends not to have noticed. He hopes someone cuts ahead of him, or that ripped jeans at number one or tan shoes at number five finish in a second and he can nab one of their places instead. But they don\u2019t. Instead there are mutterings from the queue.<\/p>\n
“Pisser\u2019s free,” says Rob\u2019s brother, Luke, from behind him.<\/p>\n
Rob knows what will happen now. Or rather, won\u2019t happen. He won\u2019t be able to go. He can\u2019t in these places. There was that bar a couple of months ago. All the cubicles were out of order. He ended up so desperate then that he just left and caught a cab home. There was the campsite where he\u2019d had to sneak off into the bushes whenever he needed to wee. And there was that time, the first time, he thinks, when he\u2019d gone in as a boy with his Dad, unzipped, looked up at his father, so towering, confident and masculine, and found himself so intimidated that he just couldn\u2019t pee and had to ask to go to the toilet again five minutes later.<\/p>\n
Head bowed, Rob shuffles to urinal number four, to the right of a man in a leather jacket. He unzips, stares at the grubby, cracked tiles, and waits. And waits. He tries to relax. He can\u2019t. If anything, he justs gets more tense. Nothing is happening. How do other men do this so easily, shoulder to shoulder with their bits flapping out? Rob remembers his son, Ashley, who went just before him. He\u2019ll be waiting for him by the sinks now, wondering what\u2019s taking so long. He wishes he\u2019d waited for a cubicle, but he hadn\u2019t because he\u2019d feared Luke would make some crude joke about it.<\/p>\n
Tan shoes leaves and Rob considers moving over to his vacant spot, ignoring the pool of sticky piss on the floor, but the idea of everyone watching this is too embarrassing to contemplate for long and besides, here comes Luke. Rob hears the fzzz<\/em>\u00a0of his zip and, immediately, the shshshshsh<\/em>\u00a0of piss on porcelain. Rob\u2019s bladder is screaming now, but he still can\u2019t go. To his left, leather jacket grunts with relief. To his right, Luke is doing some grunting of his own.<\/p>\n Maybe he should grunt too? Perhaps grunting is some primal genetic catalyst that allows men to pee in public unashamedly?<\/p>\n “Unk.”<\/p>\n It didn\u2019t work.<\/p>\n Now Rob can feel leather jacket and Luke peering at him from the corner of their eyes. All he\u2019s done is attract their attention. They\u2019re onto him. They\u2019re listening for the sound of piddle and they can\u2019t hear it, and that\u2019s making it even more impossible to go. He wishes he could just curl up and die, although maybe this wouldn\u2019t be the best spot for that.<\/p>\n Rob casts his eyes downwards, where a golden stream is resolutely failing to fountain from his member. He feels impotent.<\/p>\n Luke zips up and walks away, but not before shouting: \u2018Come on, Rob, what are you doing? The match is going to start again in a minute. Stop fannying about, can\u2019t you go in public or something?\u2019<\/p>\n Rob cringes and, not for the first time, curses his brother. Luke, who\u2019s outshone him throughout his entire life. Better at sport. Better at attracting girls. And confident enough to piss in public toilets without a second thought. Rob remembers being forced to stand in muddy fields in the driving rain with his Dad, watching Luke score goal after goal for the school soccer team, Dad hollering, “You fucking beauty!” every time the net bulged. But neither Luke nor Dad came to watch that year Rob made the finals of the county-wide chess tournament, although given that he froze under the pressure\u2013a tale that would become oh-so familiar\u2013and ended up in checkmate after just a dozen or so moves, that was probably for the best. Besides, Dad thought that chess was “for sissies.” He\u2019d said the same when Rob had plucked up the courage to ask if he could have violin lessons.<\/p>\n Then Rob recalls that Luke\u2019s latest big-haired blonde girlfriend, Vicky, is waiting for them all outside, and remembers Rob bringing home a different girl each month during his final year, and his Dad grinning and saying, “That\u2019s my boy.” Rob managed one single date during his entire school years. He\u2019d been stood up and come home in tears. Dad had told him to “stop being so bloody soft,” that he should be more like his brother and, when Rob could have really used a hug, embraced Luke instead. Later in life, Rob realized he could count the number of hugs he\u2019d received from their father on the fingers of one hand, and he certainly wouldn\u2019t need all the digits. Luke, meanwhile, was smothered in fatherly affection for his achievements.<\/p>\n “Dad?” says Ashley, from somewhere near the sinks. He must have been waiting for ages.<\/p>\n Luke is with him, rolling his eyes. “Get a move on, you pussy.”<\/p>\n Luke laughs out loud. Rob glances over his shoulder at them and hates his brother, hates the influence he has on his son and hates himself because he knows he\u2019ll never do anything about it. He also hates that he needs to pee so badly he\u2019s seeing black spots in front of his eyes, but it\u2019s not going to happen. He zips himself back up, bladder at boiling point and, trying to pretend nothing\u2019s wrong, strolls breezily towards Ashley and steers him towards the door. I\u2019m so casual, look at me, I\u2019m normal, I\u2019m like everyone else, he thinks, and then he catches someone\u2019s eye and oh god everyone knows, everyone\u2019s staring at the freak with performance anxiety, what a twat, what an utter, utter twat, and he feels his throat closing with stress and wants to just get out of there now.<\/p>\n “Hands, Dad,” says Ashley with a grin, remembering, at the worst moment, what he continually nags him about at home. Rob wants to burst into tears, but instead just nods and washes his hands as fast as he decently can, then ignores the driers in favour of wiping his hands on his slacks.<\/p>\n They step outside into the bustle of the stadium. Ashley runs off towards Vicky, who\u2019s waiting with bags from the stadium shop at her feet. Presents for Ashley\u2019s birthday. This trip to the game is a present too. Ashley loves sports. Sometimes Rob thinks his son was born to the wrong brother.<\/p>\n The young boy and Luke high five, then hug, in the sort of effortless way that Rob and Ashley have never managed between themselves, reminding Rob once again of all the embraces the younger Luke shared with Dad. These thoughts temporarily distract him from his need to go, but it\u2019s not long until the boiling sensation returns.<\/p>\n Ashley untangles himself from his uncle. “Watching the game tomorrow?” Luke asks Rob. Rob says yes, but everyone knows he\u2019s lying. Ashley and Luke catch each other\u2019s eyes and smirk. Luke, almost imperceptibly, shakes his head, then reaches into one of the bags. He produces a soccer ball and hurls it Rob\u2019s direction. “Catch!” he yells.<\/p>\n Rob, caught by surprise, can\u2019t catch the ball. Instead it wallops him in the stomach. He tries desperately to control what is now uncontrollable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When you’ve gotta go, you’ve gotta go… but sometimes you just can’t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15491,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[1988],"class_list":["post-15360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","tag-performance-anxiety-family","writer-david-cook"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15360"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15360\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15493,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15360\/revisions\/15493"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}