I'm Not A Girl, Not Yet a Lady
In contrast to any character that appears on Little Britain, I am not a lady. A woman? By definition. A moron? Definitely. But the word ‘lady’ has never been in my job description. Why, just yesterday I stood nude from the waist down, staring dead-eyed at a pair of my own tiny, frilly underpants, wondering if they would better serve as a broach because they hold no practical use what-so-ever. But frilly underpants do not a lady make. What I am referring to more specifically is my manner. My sailor’s mouth and, yes, I’m going to say it: my propensity for breaking wind. This is tricky territory – to explain tastefully and to live with.
I was born twenty-eight years ago, with many blessings: a tiny head teamed against gigantic features; early childhood whooping cough that now accentuates my very sensual backribs; and the greatest blessing of all – Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Fellas, if you’re still wondering; yes, I am single. The side-effects of Irritable Bowel Syndrome – or IBS, as they call it on MTV – have made for such trusty companionship that I often forget the frequency and quantity with which I talk about it.
List of Regular (no pun intended) Daily Expressions
• I just ripened a banana with that fart.
• What did that have to sneak past to get out?
• I’m crowning or I’m turtling.
[Please insert also, me miming to my disgusted flatmate a turtle’s head straining its neck out of its shell.]
(It really does go on and, hey, if you stick around to the end, maybe I’ll throw in a few more from my list of greatest hits.) My point is, this has haunted me from the acceptable toddler years of soiling myself with pride until now. There’s only so many times you can say, ‘I’ve got to go back to the loo, I think I left my phone in there,’ before people think you’re bulimic or, more charmingly, a meth addict. My broomstick-with-boobs physique gracefully allows strangers to assume the possibility of both. Don’t be jealous, it’s ugly.
At the age of thirteen, I joined a teenage church group called Squids. It was designed to keep local kids interested in God, and uninterested in the low-socio-economic behaviour that we had a proclivity for as we came from a community that actually held weekly barbecues in the bottle shop car park. And Squids were young, cool innovators! One such example included them taking Naughty by Nature’s ‘OPP’, and replacing the lyrics with their own brand of Jesus Hip-Hop:
They’d call: Y’all wid G-O-D?
We’d respond: Yeah, you know me!
Needless to say, there were only five or six of us at any one time. So, it was a rocking Friday night that we piled into the Wagon of God (the church minibus) to go off to the cinemas. Unusually, we went to see Indecent Proposal with Demi Moore and Robert Redford. That seems inappropriate for thirteen-year-old lovers of God but when you look at the 1993 alternatives, it is fairly clear why it was chosen. Mrs Doubtfire was as good as condoning transsexuality; Jurassic Park would validate the existence of dinosaurs, negating the logic of their entire belief system; and not even Christians were cruel enough to put us through Keanu Reeves in Much Ado About Nothing. So, good old-fashioned prostitution it was – hey, that’s what being a Creationist is all about, right! Now, I can’t remember what I had eaten that night but it was sitting in my stomach like a milk curry in the sun. We were about halfway there when I thought, ‘I am going to have to concentrate on peeling out something very sneaky here, otherwise I might just tear my pants’. Clandestinely, I raised a cheek – windowbound, of course – and, with all the caution of releasing the lid off a well-shaken soft drink, I let drift something to the silent tune of IBS.
There is a lot of brain power required in managing a syndrome as sexy as one related to the colon. It’s not just the act of explosive diarrhoea or the perpetual cramping wind that keeps me on my toes, it’s the strategic questions that sit either side of the act –
Are people having enough fun that if someone did fart, they would blame the fat kid and we could all join in?
If I leave the toilet and realise I’m experiencing something arousing known as ‘an incomplete evacuation’, is there a spare cubicle, so that the woman washing her hands thinks I’m coming in for the first time?
And my personal favourite –
Is this solid?
Back on the bus, ten seconds post-air raid, no one seemed to have noticed. I was scanning for a furrowed brow, for suspicious sniffing, for a curious look that said, ‘Are the insides of my nostrils receiving an acid peel?,’ but nothing. I smiled. A little victory. I was home free and then-
‘Oh my Lord, it’s horrendous. Felicity, was that you?’
Like a gassy deer in the headlights of a large intestine, I panicked. Do I own it? Do I deny it? Do I jump out of the minibus window, yelling, ‘I regret nothing!’? I decided that full disclosure was the best option. I was no Judas, although my fart had clearly betrayed me.
‘[Feigning confidence and joviality] Yeah. Pretty gross, huh?’
I hate to sound more uncouth than I am, but I’ve always managed to create something not just ‘whiffy’ but absolutely putrid. I have left shadows where people once stood against brick walls in the path of my air bagels. I have made toilet bowls cry. If I were a mine, the canary would long be dead in its cage. And I have very little control over it.
I looked over at my church leader, whose giggling was developing into a self-conscious swallowing action. She turned a pallid shade of white and started breathing slowly, forcefully. I came to the sobering realisation that she was fighting a dry-retch. She demanded the driver pull over at the nearest service station, where she ripped open the sliding door and promptly vomited on the concrete. There is no other way to say it: my fart had actually made someone throw up.
I wish I could say that was the end of the saga, but no. On the minibus home, trying to hide my shame, like the boys were trying to hide their tenacious, post-Demi Moore erections, I felt another twinge in my tum tum, but this time Sergeant Rectum (Damn near killed ’em) was ordering in a Code Red. I needed to get out, there and then. Tearing from the minibus, I wondered if I could even make it down the road 200 metres to my house. I hobbled. I doubled over. Pending flames of curdling doom seemed to knock on every orifice door. And here is the genuine conundrum of the IBS sufferer: is it more embarrassing to waddle home with a full loaf in your pants or is it slightly less degrading to be shitting behind a bus shelter?
Turns out for that thirteen year old, option B was the more graceful exit. When I relayed this story to a friend, her optimistic reaction was:
Well, at least there was no cleaning up afterwards.
My cynical understanding of the syndrome led me to this retort:
No, but I did have to lose a few pages of my diary.
Felicity Ward is a Melbourne-based writer and comedian, who appeared on ‘The Ronnie Johns Half Hour’ and in the most recent series of ‘Thank God You're Here’.
Back
