INGRID DOULTON | Lady Writer | Contact

A Betoota Heights man with a life that’s largely void of zest has finally learned to just lean forward and piss through the toilet seat, using his knee to wipe and drips off it when he’s done.

That’s better than forgetting to put it down, says Mark Pinkle.

Because when he doesn’t, he gets spoken to like he’s a child.

A child that doesn’t have a job that sucks the soul from him. One that doesn’t force his mind to jump the fence and become absent. Absent enough to forget to put the seat down after he lets out a room-clearing, kidney-stone-baking piss after sitting on the D45 bus home from the city.

Short of gluing it down, his partner said there was little she could do to make sure the toilet is set up and ready for her to use.

“Mark hasn’t left to toilet seat up for weeks now, I think I’ve finally got through his thick skull,” she laughed.

Mark’s looked away out the window, hoping for a bit of space junk to suddenly reenter the atmosphere and kill everybody in his rapidly-depreciating display home.

“Have you, Mark? You haven’t left the seat up for ages, have you? Good boys!”

He though about the hundreds of millilitres of piss he’s mopped up with his knees over the weeks.

All the times he’s just held on until the shower, when he could piss on himself and marvel at how cold it feels on his body compared to the shower water.

His bliss was interupted by a sharp elbow.

“Have you Mark? You haven’t left the seat up? Answer Ingrid!”

Mark nodded and smiled.

“No,” he said.

“Most of the time I just piss in the garden, or if I’m upstairs, I piss in a cup and throw it out the window onto the neighbour’s wall. Or I piss in the shower, or sometimes I piss on the carpet in the living room and blame the dog. I piss pretty much anywhere I want these days.”

Our reporter sensed that this was probably the time to leave.

More to come.

