The inconsistency of your rectal emissions is something that never fails to piss you off. You’ve been eating a lot of beetroot recently (god knows why), so the colour’s changed. You consume large amounts of alcohol, coffee, cigarettes (though you’re not a smoker) and various narcotics – all of which have undeniably negative effects on your digestive tract. You understand why you’re in turn diarrhetic, constipated, gassy, solid, lumpy, mushy. You know what it is in your behaviour that’s stopping using the toilet from being a pleasurable experience, but you have no plans for a lifestyle change and, as it’s been this way for about three years, you’ve grown used to it.

Shitting should, apparently, feel like pushing an apple out of a sock. Right now, it’s about as far away from that as things can get. You’re sat on a toilet in Bloomsbury, taking time out from a reasonably tame (i.e. everyone’s plastered but nobody’s on drugs) party. Given your reputation, people may presume you’ve locked yourself in the bathroom for a line of something. You haven’t. God knows you would if you had anything on you, but this is a party of your girlfriend’s most-repressed friends and neither of the two of you brought anything along. Unless she’s hoarding.

This is the first time you’ve been an official “boyfriend” since you moved out so you could both “see other people”. It may have only been five, six weeks, but it feels like an age. Or no time at all, particularly as you have still failed to so much as kiss another woman. Rumours (and going through her text messages) tell you that your girlfriend has been much more proactive. She’s settled into the situation, is comfortable with it, and is able to bring you to weekday parties again.

And, as per your effervescent best, you’re sat, legs spread, Diesel jeans round your ankles and Aldo shoes braced against the floor, trying to squeeze what feels like a fucking tree out of your red raw anus. You’ve had less cocaine than you’d become used to since you moved out (something, reluctantly, you’re missing more than you miss her) and you’ve heavily felt the benefit (or not) on your back passage: poos have steadily become more solid and less frequent. Verging towards the constipated. Thankfully, tomorrow is a Friday and you’re seeing Jake. He should help with loosening the load (because he’s going to give you drugs, not fist you) as you’ve finally agreed to let him take you “out on the pull” in Dalston.

Pushing it out, you feel the bulk of the faeces force open your asshole, your anus spread wide, held in place by the exiting log. You’re a man who enjoys a bit of stimulation that way during sex, but you’ve never had more than a finger up there. You often inappropriately compare the feeling of shitting out a massive load with how you imagine a retracting penis would feel. You like to think it’d be fun. Since a fluttering nervousness induced by a male-given head massage in a hair salon recently, you’ve been trying to decide if you are now attracted to men. Your browsing history would imply you definitely are.

You pump your anal muscles further, pushing, rolling the shit out using the flesh inside you. The turd, umbilically attached, approaches the water at the bottom of the bowl, then starts to decrease in girth, taper to a point and fall with a slither down the ceramic wall to rest, part submerged. You sigh with relief, your poor fourth eye (third is cockhole) stinging with the effort. At least a cock would have the decency to lube itself up first, right? You lean back; that took a lot out of you. A ten, twenty second pause, then you push and strain to force anything else out. A couple of farts and the singular splash of a small chunk hitting the water. Nothing else.

You formally concede that the easy part is over. Now, for the cleansing of the wound. You try to stand. Unsteadily, as (understandably, it is half nine) you’re a bit pissed. Your trousers lock your legs in place like one of the soldiers in Toy Story, and once you’ve leant with one hand against the bathroom wall, steadied yourself, collected your thoughts and mentally prepared for what could be a wiping frenzy (you know your own bowels), you pull three squares of toilet paper off the roll and fold them into a six-ply sheet. You hold this in your right hand, lean forward slightly, place the paper in your arse crack just above your hole (moist), and bring it down, quickly, quicker than is sensible, over the really messy area you’re about to dedicate five minutes to cleaning. You run it back and forth a couple of times, pointlessly glance at it (FILTHY) and throw it into the bowl, next to the large turd markedly bigger than your erect penis.

There was a girl you once dated who would frequently discuss a sexual practice she’d “read about” that involved people shitting into Tupperware, freezing the results and then using the rock hard – but ice cold – objects as dildos. You and her never attempted this (together, god knows what she did alone), but if you were ever to do so, this shit would be perfect. It’s huge. And it’s left a very long streak up the ceramic. You risk one more wipe (the resulting toilet paper a cornucopia of light and dark browns), pull the flush and watch the water spin and sink (you heart along with it) as only the paper is consumed. There’s nothing for it – you’ll have to break it up now, while you still have a filthy anus, in order to prevent the toilet getting blocked. Lots of toilet roll is doomed to be sent through this u-bend over the next few minutes. It needs an easy passage.

To the right of the bowl, lodged between the pastel wall and the base of the cistern, is a yellow bottle of Toilet Duck and a white brush, the Sainsbury’s Basics label still attached. You pick the brush up with some paper between its handle and your skin, sticking your arse in the air and holding your shirttails by your side in order to avoid the very real danger of getting shit on your clothes. Thankfully, the log comes apart. Not instantly – you don’t stick the brush in and it disintegrates, but you press into its middle, just below the water line, push and push and push and as wave after wave of rectal scent washes over you, the bristles finally slide through and two medium-sized turds are left in the bowl – one underwater, the other with a flattened lower half and stuck, completely stuck, to the side of the bowl. You nudge it down, steadily, not wanting to make a splash. It’s beginning to crumble now, and the water is a brown, peaceful, mess, like a stagnant pond in a forest. You flush the chain a second time, the bowl emptying surprisingly well. There’s still a streak on the side, which will necessitate a second bash with the brush, but you decide to postpone that until you can put your trousers back on.

Slowly, wipe by wipe, things start to clear. It reaches a point where nothing seems to be improving, until you realise that a chunk of excrement has gotten lodged into some of your crack hairs (must remember to trim them before tomorrow evening – just in case someone (you) gets lucky). You wrap a piece of toilet roll around the lump and pull, ripping out three hairs in a rather sick semi-waxing. You’re impressed by the stickiness of your own poo. A few more wipes and things are looking rosy. The not high-quality paper is starting to rub a little and you’re starting to wonder if the very small line of reddish brown you’re getting now is more blood than shit. You have an odd personal rule that allows you to leave skid-marks made of blood on your boxers, but never those of faeces. You’re not certain where this originated, but it’s one of the few principles (possibly, nowadays, the only one) that you actively make an effort to stick to.

Satisfied that your anus is clean (two more wipes to be certain, plus an extra one making sure that there isn’t any poo at a wider point of your arsecrack fired there by gas – you’ve been stung that way before), you pull up your pants and trousers and buckle yourself in. Easy.

You reach for the handle at the side of the cistern and notice, as the water flows, something on the parquet floor you’d earlier missed.

It could have been flung from your person at any time thanks to your over-zealous wiping, but there, shining on the floor, is a pistachio-sized lump of your thick, sticky, arse poo. Your immediate feeling is regret – due to your most recent action you’re now going to have to wait a full minute before you can empty the bowl again and get rid of it, so as you pick it up (using even more toilet paper – you’ve gone through about half the roll) and drop it into the still-swirling waters, you attempt to kill two birds with one stone and take the brush to the stained ceramic.

You end up getting the bristles covered in the sheet of paper, tearing through it, making a real mess, splashing about ridiculously trying to shake it off, slowly spinning it like a rotisserie chicken once you can get a fresh burst of water to come out, pumping at the plumbing like you’re dragging the water up from an underground lake.

At last, eventually, it is gone. You and the toilet are empty. You squirt some of the Toilet Duck around the rim, scrub your hands (true to form, you’ve got a bit of something brown under several of your fingernails), dry them, unlock the door and squeeze out into the one-room flat the party is being held in. The smell follows you, as does the realisation of how much noise you were making. Your girlfriend’s initial look of disgust reaches you before the smell reaches her. You maintain a hopeful eye contact as sounds of disgust spread around the room and then she too begins to retch.

Looks like you won’t be kissing anyone today either…

Scott Manley Hadley is not fine and blogs at TriumphoftheNow.com 

Image: Iain Heath