Baths by Jessie Bray-Sharpin

Berlin, 2014

Sitting in a tub in a pale green bathroom in our airbnb in Berlin. I chose this apartment because of the bath. I have an intensely vivid memory of seeing steam rise into the air above this particular bath. I remember facing a window and seeing leaves on a tree in the courtyard outside. The season is turning. I think it is the warmer side of autumn.

Flights were so cheap from London. 42 pounds each or something. I booked the flights as a surprise for my boyfriend that backfired. It turned out the days I booked for our trip coincided with the release of an album for the band he was doing PR work for. I took my guilt out as resentment. Worse, someone had checked into our apartment instead of their own, up another flight of stairs. The two apartments were nearly identical except for one thing: the bath. Our apartment’s twin didn’t have one. In the end it was sorted for us and we moved into our correct apartment on the second night, getting two days in a row of clean towels and a freshly made bed, but it had tainted an already strained trip. 

Carlo was on the phone a lot for work. I remember waiting for him in an enormous doorway, thinking every dimple in the stone walls was a bullet hole from the Second World War. I sat on a red tartan ottoman in a bookshop while he looked at the record store on the floor below. We saw the bust of Nefertiti, had to enter the room individually to view the queen in her case alone, watched over by a security guard holding a gun. We saw the bright blue Babylonian gates and a shining, golden astronomical clown hat. We took a photo of ourselves in a graffitied mirror stuck to the Berlin Wall. 

But mostly, I remember sitting in the hot bath in that cool green autumnal bathroom, watching steam slowly rise above my submerged body, feeling the warmth of the water and the lump in my chest somewhere of things not sitting right. Of yelling at him in the bedroom earlier in the evening. I got the bath I wanted but the trip remained a disappointment. 

Nelson, 1990 - present

I have had uncountable baths in my parents’ old claw-foot tub in the house I grew up in. Until I left home, I thought all baths were that large. They are not. I grew my love for baths in that enormous, body-length swimming pool. I used to love rolling over onto my stomach like a lazy seal, pretending I was swimming, snorkelling. Staying in until the pads of my fingers looked dead and wrinkled. My mum would wash my hair with a dark green plastic bowl. She would fill it from beside me and pour it over my head, my short brown bob sticking flat to my skull like a helmet, and she would say each time, “a-waterfall, a-waterfall”.

I remember my dad pulling me and my brother out of the bath with our towels, something we called The Helicopter. My towels were always the white ones. My brother’s were navy blue and one of my sister’s were a pale butter yellow. We each had one with our name stitched in cotton block-letters of a contrasting colour, Christmas presents from our aunt. 

A very early memory in that bath was having a bath with my mum. I was lying sleepily on her front. I was probably sucking my thumb. I remember the wet warmth of her skin under my cheek, and her voice, the sing-song saying of many baths: “Don’t go to sleep, now”. 

The bathroom has changed and grown up as the house and my family has, but the bath is the same. I remember when the walls were a dark yellow, when the shower was over the bath, along a different wall, and we gave our kittens flea shampoos in there. My mum and older sister’s fabric strips for waxing their legs hung drying on a metal rail above the tub. At some point the colours changed and were blue and orange. Now, it is white and light and a covered shower stands in one corner with hot water heated by gas.

Baths have followed me through life. Through moods. I imagine all the different versions of me that that bath has had sitting in it, lying in it. Imagine seeing a stack of all the books I’ve read in it. When I was 13 or 14, I overflowed the bath while I was on the phone to a boy. The receptionist from my highschool, on the PTA with my mum, was at our house at the time and I remember her going into emergency mode, helping us stop the water with endless rolled up towels before it flowed out into the carpeted hallway. I don’t know if it was the same phone call, but I remember getting stung by a bee on the phone to the same boy. I was so distracted by our conversation that I tried to help a bee out the window by picking it up. Of course, it stung me, right on the tip of my forefinger. It was a while before boys stopped making me behave like an idiot. 

The view from the bathroom in Brixton, London 2014.

London, 2014

I often think about the baths I had in my flat in Brixton. It was a falling down place above a closed off-license, one block down from a pub called the Hootananny. There was a crack in the lounge wall so large that I used to joke to visiting New Zealand friends that if there’s an earthquake, know that I am dead. My Sicilian flatmates smoked indoors. There were mice. The pipe from the kitchen sink leaked into a container hidden in the cupboard under the sink that we had to empty pretty much daily. Things grew in it. But, rent was cheap for London. And I lived with someone I loved. 

The bathroom was not nice, but I’ve seen worse. It had no outside window, but it did have a bath. My boyfriend at the time seemed overly concerned with cleaning it for me before I used it; I didn’t ask why. I’d witnessed obnoxious film students waiting for the toilet at one of our parties suggest pissing in the bath.  

My memories of actually using that bath are really vivid. They’re good memories. Distinctly it was a lying bath, it was a staring-at-the-ceiling-in-clean-heat kind of bath; the water up over my ears and framing my face in waterlogged, peaceful silence. It was a solace for me in that house, in that city. Even though I feel kind of unclean thinking about it. 

The flat I was in before that was on the sweetly named Sugar Loaf Walk in Bethnal Green. I loved Bethnal Green. It was close to the huge expanse of Victoria Park, near Brick Lane where I would get a nutella bagel on my days off and where I missed seeing Jarvis Cocker in the flesh in a vintage clothing shop one day because I was trying on a blue and grey tartan skirt in the changing rooms. The celebrities I tried to spot when I lived in London were always just out of sight. Madonna came to the museum where I worked to see a wedding dress exhibition, but I didn’t see her, I was in solitary confinement in the tapestry gallery. David Attenborough was there one day too, I found out in the locker rooms at the end of the day. We closed the entire place early one night so Jay-Z and Beyonce could come and look at a fashion photography exhibition. I think it was meant to be a secret, but all the gallery assistants knew. Anyway, they didn’t show.

Remembering the bath in that Bethnal Green flat is strange because my memories don’t contain the bath itself. They are of sounds. Any image or physical sensation of the bath and bathroom have fallen away, and I’m left instead with hearing my flatmate Becky have a bath from the tiny hallway outside the closed bathroom door: She’d watch Netflix on her laptop in there, and I’d hear the sound of some crime show accompanied by the odd splash. The only memory of my own baths in that flat are of listening to Lucinda Williams’ album Essence while I bathed. It was a recommendation from my sister, especially for (homesick) baths. 

The writer and her friend Mollie. Photo by Jessica Bryne.

Somerset, 2014

Mollie and I were going to stay at Dogberry House. Dogberry House inherited its name from a previous owner and it fit with the rest of the address: Hornblotton, Shepton Mallet, Somerset. A fictional-sounding English countryside address. Mollie’s family home was a large 18th century cottage with things like a kitchen floor made of huge stone slabs, an attic space filled with art Mollie and her parents and sisters had made over the years and a Meccano model of the Eiffel tower from when her dad worked in a toyshop. We had cups of tea in the cosy kitchen and I helped her parents fill out a quiz about famous books. The back garden opened out onto a wood that we walked through in gumboots after it had rained, everything dripping and smelling of the fresh soil under our feet. Mollie and I wore the same high-waisted jeans in different shades of blue denim and bright knitted jumpers. With our fringes and brown hair, everyone at the museum we worked at thought we were either sisters or the same person. I explored Mollie’s childhood home with the happy curiosity of finding out more about the life of someone you love deeply. 

Mollie drove us down country roads in her parents’ car and we went to visit Wells Cathedral and Glastonbury Tor. At Wells, she showed me the oldest continuously occupied residential street in Europe. Stone houses with matching chimneys, low stone walls and garden paths leading to matching front doors. Inside the cathedral, the thing I remember the most is the medieval clock from 1390; like a cuckoo clock but with jousting knights who appear out of the wall and knock one another over on schedule. Outside, I struggled to get my head around the sheer size of the cathedral. We sat on the grass in front of this enormous structure and I tried to imagine it existing hundreds of years ago, of people travelling to this place, to this massive, beautiful building. 

The bath at Dogberry House was upstairs in a large room with a sloping ceiling. I had a bath there because there was no shower. Instead there was a large, old fashioned tub with a handheld metal fixture at the tap end for using like a shower head and washing your hair. I loved it because it was a life-sized version of the miniature bath set I had for my sylvanians when I was a child: real porcelain, bright white and heavy in my hand, with tiny taps and a shower head made of metal painted a brass colour, and an elasticated gold thread keeping the plug attached. 

The Pink Bath, Dunedin, 2015.

Dunedin 2015   

When my work visa ran out and I moved back from London, I lived for some of the year in a freshly painted and carpeted three bedroom flat on York Place. I told my friend Cade that I didn’t care which room I had, as long as he and our other flatmate Nate didn’t mind if I used the bath. The bathroom was the only room that had not received a modern makeover; the owners must have thought, like me, that the pale pink tub was a masterpiece. The bathroom was small and dim, I don’t remember any windows. When I was in Nelson at my parents’, I had taken some sachets of Japanese bath salts that my mother received from one of her ESOL students. I didn’t know what they said on them, but the packages were different colours that corresponded to their contents. In the pink bath I made the water violet, deep turquoise, and gold. It was strange and magical. But I was very, very depressed. I had so many baths at that time because sometimes it felt like the only thing I could do. It’s interesting because often I associate periods of depression with staying in bed, but when I think of that time I strongly associate my illness with baths. 

We were getting fibre installed at our flat and it kept getting delayed. We went for what felt like weeks without wifi. I would walk to the Octagon and stand in an old phone booth outside the town hall that had become a Spark wireless hotspot and skype my boyfriend back in London. He was due to come and visit me and, torn between two lives, I decided that I didn’t want him to anymore. He had just found out his dad was dying. I didn’t know that until after I tried to break up with him. 

Walking to work at the Otago Museum, I knew I was unwell because I couldn’t walk at a normal speed. My feet dragged along the footpath behind the Meridian Mall, past the entrance to the rooftop car park and ads of All Blacks in their underwear. I remember looking in the mirror in the staff bathroom and thinking I looked terrible. I can’t describe it other than that; I don’t know if I did look as sick as I felt or if I was looking at myself through my depression and thought everything looked awful. Maybe both. I saw on Instagram that my cousin and her friends had gone to swim in the sun at the St Clair saltwater baths. She hadn’t invited me and I felt miserable. I ran the bath. 

The writer and her friend Zoe in Argentina, 2016.

Buenos Aires, 2016

Lying in the bath in our rented apartment in San Telmo, I can hear Zoe watching Bubble Boy on the TV in the lounge. She has found the only English language channel and enjoys watching whatever movie is on offer. Each evening, we have turns taking a bath, drinking sweet, cheap Argentinian wine bought from the shop next door to our apartment building. 

Our two week holiday in Buenos Aires was divided between two different parts of the city and two different apartments, one in San Telmo and one in Palermo. Both with baths. Zoe and I had booked our trip for no real reason other than that Air New Zealand had just started doing direct flights from Auckland to Buenos Aires. During the day we visited book shops and museums and antique markets and at night, in San Telmo at least, we would go to the same corner bar, still furnished and decorated like it was the 1920s or 30s, and drink wine and eat the complimentary peanuts, talking and piling up discarded peanut shells on a napkin on the table. 

 Zoe and I have been friends since we were five. I remember sitting next to her at our primary school swimming pool, in our togs on damp wooden benches, while a teacher told us how to swim. Zoe pointed at the square-shaped freckle I have at the top of my thigh. “Chocolate chip,” she observed. 

We were diving for hard, plastic teddy bears that sunk to the bottom of the pool like pebbles. Blue, green and red shapes sat blurring on bright blue concrete, just out of reach of our small grasping hands. A teacher was above us, we were in one corner of the learners’ pool. The teddy bears came from a large clear bucket that normally sat on a wooden shelf next to the mat in our classroom. I still remember the feeling of happiness those plastic bears gave me, the satisfying feeling of pushing my hand inside the container of them and the sound they made when they knocked together. The joy of one, just one, secured in my hand from that impossible spot on the pool floor.  

I suppose we were learning to hold our breath. 

Wellington, 2020.

Last night Zoe ran me a bath.

We left uni together in the cold while it was still just-light, three kaka flying noisily above us on their way home too. We went to Zoe’s flat and ate pizza on the floor in the lounge while Bunny the cat tried to figure out the new heat pump and watched us skeptically from under her squashed brow. Zoe opened her wine and offered to run me a bath.

This is my first winter for a long time living somewhere without a bath, and I have been yearning for that bone-deep warmth that only really comes from soaking in a hot tub for a good hour. Sometimes it feels like baths are my one real weapon against winter. I resent the short days, the dark mornings, my own lethargy. I tell my friends I want to hibernate. So, Zoe runs me a bath.

Here she has ready for me: A new candle and my wooden bath-tray-thing, tool of the serious bather, that sits across the tub as a place for drinks, snacks, candles, a book or all of the above. I used to live with Zoe, so this bath-version of a TV dinner tray has stayed behind until I have a bath of my own again.

Zoe always moves a lamp into the bathroom for baths so that the lightswitch-activated fan won’t rattle away while she is trying to relax. I never used to bother with the lamp, but this time I do. I turn off the light and fan and confirm there’s enough light from the lamp to read by. With the fan off, it is perfectly silent and the room seems to have changed all over to a dark blue colour. Steam pours up from the tub as I step in and arrange my book and towel on the floor within reach in a well-practised arrangement that ensures my book stays dry when I decide to start reading. 

That first sinking into a bath is unparalleled. When you sit down, and lie back, and the delicious warmth of the water swallows you up. Up, up over your shoulders. Relax. No phone in here. No people. Uninterrupted reading time.

Water.

     Heat.

        Steam. 

My own body, 

Sink / floating.

My tattoos appear like old friends. 

The writer in a bath-lovers dream in Pammukale, Turkey.