One Big Damn Puzzler

by John Harding

  He also tried to get a good cross section of the most common OCD types. There were a couple of checkers, people whose lives were being seriously inconvenienced by their having to keep checking that they had done things. One of them, Steve, wrote movingly of his daily difficulty in getting out of the house. After he had gotten himself ready to leave for work (he was an accountant, at the office he spent his whole day – what was left of it once he got there – checking other people’s figures), he was unable to exit his apartment until he had made a number of safety checks. First he went round and made sure all the windows were securely locked. They nearly always were, for the simple reason that he almost never opened them. Never mind that his apartment reeked of sweaty socks and stale underpants and that he had had to install air conditioning against the hot summers, the bottom line was that there couldn’t be a window open. Except, of course, that sometimes Steve would open one just so he could go through the process of closing it and locking it so he’d know for sure it was locked. Then he could never be certain that he had actually locked it so would have to check each and every window each and every time he left the apartment. Besides checking the security, he also had to make sure he had switched off every single electrical appliance in the place (except for the burglar alarm, of course, which he had to make sure he’d switched on). Sometimes he couldn’t be sure he’d switched something off, so he’d have to switch it on, see it light up and then switch it off so he would have the memory of the light going out that would let him know he had turned it off. But then, of course, he was never quite sure that the memory was a real one; it might instead be an anticipated memory, something he’d foreseen happening but which had not really occurred because he had not actually carried out the necessary procedure, or it might be a real memory, but from the day before, or from a previous aborted round of checking that same day. Steve’s checking routine took so long he was regularly late for work and had consequently acquired a reputation as a high-liver, someone who was out at clubs every night and probably doing all kinds of drink and drugs so that he was too tired to get up on time in the mornings. The opposite was true, of course. Steve was actually getting up earlier and earlier so as to have time to fit in his ever more elaborate checking procedure before leaving for work. The idea of staying out late in the evenings or of drinking alcohol or taking drugs was ludicrous to him. He’d never have been in a fit state to do all his checking if he’d had a hangover. But he did nothing to challenge this impression of himself. He’d rather people thought him a dissolute reprobate, which somehow seemed kind of cool, than let them know he had a mental disorder, which did not.

  The other checker was also a man, Sam. His dysfunction was not yet as serious as Steve’s, being mainly limited to his car. Sam had to perform a series of checks before getting into his automobile. He had to measure the tread on his tyres and make sure all the rear lights – direction flashers, reversing lights and brake lights – were working before he could drive off. When he parked the car someplace he had to return to it several times to confirm it was locked, that the alarm was engaged and that the emergency brake was on.

  William was able to sympathize with both these men because he was something of a checker himself. He wasn’t as extreme as either Sam or Steve, but he would never have left his apartment without checking everything two or three times and he never got beyond the edge of a car park before having to return to his car to check the doors and the emergency brake at least once.

  Two of the three women on the weekend were obsessive cleaners. They had remarkably similar OCD profiles which was hardly surprising as ritual cleaning is one of the most common ways in which the disorder manifests itself.

  Both Sheena and Rhoda spent most of their free time cleaning their homes. Sheena, who was in her mid-twenties, lived alone in an apartment. Rhoda, who was forty-something, had two teenage children whom she drove crazy by her excessive tidiness. It had also years ago driven her husband to leave her.

  Sheena had been unable to hold down a job because her need to clean her apartment often made her late for work and she was always getting fired. Then one day she saw an advertisement on a card in a shop window for a cleaning woman. She rang up right away and got the job. She reasoned that as she spent most of her life cleaning anyhow, she might as well get paid for it. At first the family who engaged her to clean for them two mornings a week were delighted by her. Their house had never looked so clean. Both days Sheena worked not only the morning they had asked her to work, but until suppertime. The house sparkled like a new pin. The family happily paid her for the extra hours she’d put in. Seeing how clean the house was now made them realize how dirty it had been before. It had needed those extra hours.

  Sheena was happy too. She put a card in the shop window herself, advertising as ‘SHEENA THE CLEANER’ and within days had lined up a number of clients. The first week she was out all hours because the houses she had signed up to clean were way below her exacting standards of cleanliness. They looked like they hadn’t been treated to a thorough going over for years. And she was still working whole days for the first family who’d employed her. It was round about the fourth week that trouble hit. The first woman to employ her took her aside and gently explained that they would have to let her go.

  ‘Why?’ asked Sheena. ‘Isn’t my cleaning any good?’ Even as she was talking she was looking around for fingermarks on light switches or dust on the glass top of a coffee table.

  The woman shook her head. ‘My dear, if anything, your cleaning is too good. You clean everything so thoroughly that it takes you two whole days a week. We can’t afford to pay you for that, we only wanted two mornings.’

  ‘I’ll speed up,’ Sheena promised her.

  The next time Sheena worked there she was still cleaning at suppertime. As the woman finally ushered her out the door, she said, ‘It’s no good, you see, you work too slowly. We can’t afford you.’

  Sheena put her hand on the door to prevent the woman closing it on her. ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘Just pay me for the hours you wanted me for. If I go over time I won’t ask for any extra.’

  ‘Oh no, I couldn’t possibly,’ said the woman. ‘It wouldn’t be fair. Your hourly rate would be less than minimum wage. I’m a Democrat.’

  ‘I wouldn’t care,’ Sheena insisted. ‘You see, cleaning’s my passion. It’s what I’d be doing if I was home.’

  Reluctantly the woman agreed. But other clients were less understanding. One by one they dwindled away. Some felt too guilty to adopt a similar arrangement to the one she had with her first client. Others weren’t happy with it because they couldn’t stand Sheena being around the house all hours.

  ‘People want a cleaner to be in and out without them noticing, except in the results,’ she explained to the rest of the group at their Friday evening get-together session. ‘They wanted me to work two or three hours. I couldn’t clean anywhere to my satisfaction in less than ten.’

  So Sheena was virtually unemployed except for her original family who treated her much as one might a pet.

  Both Sheena and Rhoda cleaned not only their homes to excess, but themselves too. They would spend hours every day on their personal hygiene, having to go through elaborate rituals, taking two or three showers or baths. Rhoda had so overcleaned her teeth she had worn grooves in the enamel, exposing the dentine which reacted fiercely to hot and cold drinks and sugary snacks. Both said that if their rituals were interrupted for any reason they would have to begin them all over again, a trait common to many OCD victims.

  William understood their fetishes as he himself had a bit of a personal hygiene problem. He had a morning ritual which he was unable to vary, no matter how much of a hurry he was in. He always began by brushing his teeth, timing himself for exactly three minutes (he couldn’t skimp by even a few seconds, no matter how late he was running), then he’d have a cup of coffee to get his bowels working, take a dump, take a shower, shave and dress in a particular order – shorts, socks, undershirt,
shirt, trousers, it never varied. In addition he had a horror of germs in public lavatories and virtually never took a dump anywhere but at home, except when he stayed in a hotel or rented house which then became, temporarily, a surrogate home. He had installed a bidet in his bathroom so that he could wash after every time he defecated. One of the ideas that horrified him was walking around with an unclean butt. He would later find it incredible that he was shitting on a public beach in full view of dozens of other men and then not wiping his butt at all.

  His concern with faecal matter also helped him empathize with Lorna, the third woman in the group. Her main concern was with dog shit. She was scarcely able to leave her home because of her fear of treading in it.

  At first she had been happy just going out and not stepping in the stuff. But as her condition worsened, she became obsessed with the idea that people who had stepped in dog dirt had then walked on clean areas of pavement, depositing infinitesimal fragments of canine faecal matter on them. And moving on, she worried that other people would walk where they had walked, picking up the dog-shit bacteria and redistributing it elsewhere. She was terrified of anyone bringing the bacteria into her home and insisted on any visitors removing their shoes outside the front door and washing their hands before touching anything.

  To prevent herself inadvertently picking up invisible doggie-doo bacteria she covered the soles of her shoes with tin kitchen foil before venturing out. She removed the foil on her doorstep before re-entry. Although William didn’t go to such lengths, he knew he too had a problem with canine crap. He would never have touched the soles of his shoes either.

  William identified with the final member of the group as well. Frank was a hoarder. He was a middle-aged man who confessed that he had been unable to throw anything other than obvious garbage away for thirty years. The upper floors of his house had had to be reinforced to take the weight of the old newspapers, magazines and books he kept up there. It had never occurred to him to throw them out instead.

  Frank had been married for twenty years when one day his wife said to him, ‘Either all this junk goes or I do.’ Frank had been on his own ever since.

  William too was a hoarder. He still possessed all of his childhood toys and comics and found it difficult to dispose of anything to which he had formed a comfortable attachment, for example an old pair of Levi’s which had worn through in the crotch. He kept them even though they were beyond wearing any more. But compared to Frank, William was a rank amateur.

  One of his secret hopes for the weekend was that Frank might be incited to invite Rhoda and Sheena to his home. William thought that between them they would soon sort Frank out and that having experienced his mess they in turn might realize a certain amount of disorder could be lived with.

  Everyone arrived at the farmhouse on Friday evening. They were all as tired after the journey out from the city where most of them lived as William had expected them to be. They ate an easy meal of pizza which William had ordered in and spent a brief, but relaxed evening introducing themselves to one another and providing brief résumés of their particular problems.

  The only sticky moment came when Rhoda fretted about the cleanliness of the kitchens at the pizza restaurant. This led Lorna to construct a theoretical chain of events in which someone who had been in contact with dog dirt had handled the pizza dough. It took some time to reassure her, but William managed to convince her that all the people at the local pizza parlour wore disposable plastic gloves when preparing the food and that while it was possible the motorcycle delivery boy had ridden over a dog dump in the middle of the road, then had a blow out and had to change his wheel and had touched his tyre and then their pizza, it was extremely unlikely. He argued that it was impossible to open a pizza carry-out box without bending the cardboard tab and that he himself had opened the pizza boxes and all the tabs had been intact. Lorna seemed to accept his argument but not her pizza, at least not without a lot of persuasion, so that by the time she was prepared to eat it, it was already too cold for her to do so.

  But against Lorna’s worry about the pizza, there were signs of the group already beginning to work. William was glad to see that, as he had hoped, Sheena and Rhoda had paired up and were already talking eagerly to one another, although he was not so reassured when he realized they were discussing the relative merits of different cleaning products.

  ‘No, no, you must try my cleaner,’ insisted Sheena. ‘It’s guaranteed to kill 98 per cent of household germs.’

  ‘Well, that’s good,’ said Rhoda. ‘But don’t you ever worry about those other two?’

  The only person who didn’t seem to fit in was Frank, who had arrived with a station wagon full of suitcases and cardboard boxes that he spent most of the evening hauling up to his room.

  ‘It’s just stuff,’ he explained to William with an apologetic shrug when they met on the stairs. The word reminded William of Mrs Beach who’d used it in just the same way all those years ago. ‘I wouldn’t feel comfortable not having some of it along with me. I might get homesick.’

  William wasn’t too bothered about the evening, anyhow. It was just a chance for everyone to settle in and get acquainted. It was next morning that they would really begin exploring their condition and, he hoped, helping one another.

  He went to bed happy, already feeling no need to indulge in any alternate blinking, or hand squeezing or molar grinding. He lay on his back listening to the distant sound of the breakers and the quiet but determined noises of windows being opened and closed, doors softly shutting and bolts being driven home as Sam and Steve checked the security before turning in. At what hour they finally came to bed he never knew; he was sound asleep long before the last window catch was screwed down.

  Next day though, things began to go wrong right from the start. William woke with a volcanic feeling in his stomach, a hot bubbling accompanied by a griping pain that made him wonder if Rhoda had been right to question the cleanliness of the pizza place. Surely this was just how an infection of E. coli would begin? But he didn’t have time to lie there and contemplate the situation. He had an urgent need to crap.

  He struggled out of bed and tiptoed across the landing to the nearest of the two bathrooms. He tried the door and was surprised to find it locked. After all, it was only 6 a.m. Staying on tiptoe, to avoid waking the other five guests whom he assumed to be still asleep, he made his way along the long upstairs corridor to the other bathroom at the opposite end. But once again the door was locked.

  It struck him as a piece of bad luck that both bathrooms should be occupied at the precise moment when he needed a dump and such an urgent one at that, but he consoled himself with the fact that their occupants must have heard him trying the door handles and would soon emerge.

  He decided he could hold on a little, in spite of the pain, especially if he were to lie down, reasoning that gravity was making things worse. So he returned to his room, lay on the bed and read through a newsletter from a panic support group that he intended to share with the others at the morning get-together.

  After five minutes, though, his mind was too much occupied with his gut to concentrate. It was getting to the stage where if he didn’t move soon, he wouldn’t be able to get off the bed before he exploded, let alone make it to the bathroom. So he rose and he ventured out again.

  Once more the first bathroom was locked. He padded along the corridor barefoot to avoid any slipper slapping on the polished wood floor and tried the door of the second bathroom. Locked! Immediately he wanted to shit even more than before. He locked his buttocks together to keep from doing it then and there. He couldn’t believe his luck. His first time back at the shore in years and he found himself in a Sandy Beach situation. Only this time he was Sandy Beach! But unlike his former friend he couldn’t bang on the bathroom door. Not on either of them! He didn’t want to wake the whole house.

  After another five minutes he was desperate. His guts were churning and he knew that his morning dump was on its way, even with
out coffee. He considered his options. He could stay where he was and make a mess of himself. He could rattle one of the doors, or he could sneak outside and take a dump in the shrubbery.

  He rattled the door of the first bathroom.

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t keep doing that.’ It was Sheena’s voice, sounding tetchy. ‘That’s the second time this morning. Now I’ll have to start all over again. Again!’

  William realized that Sheena must have gotten up very early in order to complete her washing rituals before anyone else was abroad. Instantly he knew that the other bathroom was occupied by Rhoda and that waiting in the hope that one of them would emerge before he crapped himself was futile.

  As he minced downstairs (mince was the only word he could think of to describe his new tight-assed walk to himself) he consoled himself with the fact that already the weekend was working for him. Here was he, who could never even take a dump in someone else’s lavatory, about to have one alfresco in a rented house’s garden. That was progress!

  He just made it out of the back door and behind a shrub when his bowels finally gave out. He squatted and released what smelled like a toxic flood of bacterially challenged pizza. The relief was so great that he couldn’t help celebrating out loud. ‘Ahhhhh!’ he exclaimed, closing his eyes, as his bowels exploded. ‘Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!’

  ‘Hey, William is that you?’

  He opened his eyes and saw Sam peering at him from the other side of the garden fence. Fortunately Sam was some twenty feet away which probably meant he could only see William’s head. William hastily pulled up his pyjama pants and lowered his dressing gown. His embarrassment at being so surprised was so great that it outweighed his horror at the thought of his besmirched haunches.