Patience and Prudence: A Visit to Amy

I was in a huge hotel complex. In every direction I could see long corridors stretching away; there were bars, restaurants, foyers, lobbies. I could see everything but the one thing I needed – a Ladies’ room. And did I need it badly! I was aching with desperation. Surely there must be dozens of toilets in a building like this. I tried asking people as they bustled past me, obviously on their way to urgent appointments. But nobody seemed to speak English. I was getting frantic. But there was no sign of a toilet anywhere. What could I do? At last I caught sight of a sign, at the far end of a long corridor. But as I made my way as quickly as I could, already anticipating blissful relief, alarm bells began to ring. Everyone was saying it was necessary to evacuate the building immediately. Was it a fire or a bomb? I was frightened, but even more frightened of going outside, of being cut off from any chance of getting to a toilet. What should I do???
Suddenly I was awake. The bell was the alarm clock, which I quickly switched off. But one thing remained – the fierce, burning need to get to a toilet, and quickly. I jumped out of bed and padded down to the bathroom, only to find that my twin sister Prue had got there before me. (We had digital alarm clocks, which had gone off at exactly the same time.) I could hear her having her morning pee, splashing and gurgling into the bowl. I went back to my room, but I couldn’t sit down, I had to keep pacing round the bedroom, and then bend almost double to prevent myself wetting my pyjamas.
I’m usually pretty desperate when I wake up in the morning because (unlike Prue) I don’t usually use the toilet before going to bed. But this was something special, excruciatingly special. I remembered the previous evening. Prue and I had gone out for a few drinks with some of our friends. Nothing wild, but I’d had a few pints in the course of the evening. I couldn’t remember how many times I’d been to the toilet. When we left the pub to get the bus home, Prue naturally paid a final precautionary visit to the Ladies’. I didn’t. So by the time we’d waited for a bus, and made the half–hour journey home, I was ready. Not desperately, but quite uncomfortable. But when we got in, Prue went straight into the bathroom to get ready for bed, as we had an early start the next morning. I changed into my pyjamas, ready to slip to the toilet as soon as Prue had finished getting ready. But I was very tired and a bit tipsy, so I lay down on the bed – it was a warm summer night. And within a minute, despite my discomfort, I was fast asleep. I hadn’t woken all night; no wonder I was desperate now.
I couldn’t stand it any longer. I ran to the bathroom, and banged on the door. “Prue, let me in, or I’ll have an accident.” Prue had just gotten out of the shower, and she let me in. I almost leapt onto the toilet and immediately the pent up urine began to flood out. For a moment Prue just stared at me in wonder. “How do you manage to hold so much?” she enquired, as my stream flowed on and on with no sign of stopping. “Practice,” I said, “the kind of practice you’ll never get if you always take precautions.”
A few minutes later I joined Prue downstairs for breakfast. The reason we were up so early on a Sunday morning was that we had arranged to go and visit Prue’s friend Amy, who lived in the Midlands. I didn’t like Amy much; I thought she had a nasty, sneering manner. I’d first met her about eighteen months earlier on a coach trip to the seaside. It had been an eventful day for her, because she had wet herself on the coach when the driver refused to stop. [See Patience and Prudence: A Day at the Seaside.] But as it turned out, that had actually been a bit of luck for her. Amy had done her best to cover up her accident so nobody would notice, but one of those who had spotted what had happened was a young man called Brian, and it had really awakened his interest in her. Or at least that was what office gossip said, perhaps on the basis of a drunken confession by one or the other of them. In any case they had quickly become an item and decided to move in together. Because of the appalling price of houses in London, they had moved to the Midlands, a small town near Leicester. Brian was away for a couple of weeks, and Amy had invited us over for the day.
I wasn’t keen on visiting Amy, but I’d nothing else on that day, and Prue wanted someone for company during the journey and to share the driving. But she had made me swear a solemn oath not to mention Amy’s wetting accident, however provoked I might feel. I agreed quite happily, because raising the subject would also be very embarrassing for Prue, who had had her own wetting accident on a car journey a couple of years earlier. [See Patience and Prudence: An Introduction.]
Prue just had one cup of coffee with her breakfast, but I needed to wake myself after the previous night’s drinking, so I had three. When we were ready to set off, Prue disappeared upstairs for another trip to the toilet. When she came down, she said to me: “Aren’t you going? We don’t want to have to keep stopping.” I just grinned and shook my head.
We had a good journey up the motorway. It was just after we turned off the motorway that the coffee kicked in, and I realised I was bursting. Of course I’d missed my chance of a service station, and the possibility of finding a public toilet out there in the wilds was minimal. So I was resigned to having to hold it until we got to Amy’s house. That would be no problem, I thought, for someone as experienced as I was in the arts of self–control. Except that Prue was driving and I was supposed to be navigating. The need to pee was wrecking my concentration, and I told her take the wrong turning. We had been going nearly twenty minutes in the wrong direction before we realised, and had to turn round. Things were getting so bad by now that I nearly asked Prue to stop so I could squat behind a hedge, but we weren’t really in the deep country and there were too many people around. By now I was sitting on my foot and clutching myself between the legs. Prue could see easily what was wrong and of course she had to rub it in: “I told you to go before we set out,” she smirked. True enough, but it wasn’t much good to me now.
At last we found the estate Amy lived on, but we still had to stop and ask directions twice before we finally located the house. I was rocking to and fro in absolute agony. Prue parked the car and we walked to Amy’s door – or rather Prue walked and I hobbled. Prue knocked, but there was no answer. For a moment I thought there had been a misunderstanding and we had come on the wrong day when there was nobody at home. I was hopping from foot to foot, glancing round Prue’s garden trying to see a bush big enough to squat behind.
At last Amy came to the door and welcomed us. I just pushed in front of Prue and said as though it was all one word: “Hello–Amy–nice–to–see–you–where’s–your–toilet?” Luckily there was a downstairs cloakroom so I didn’t have the torture of running upstairs. I just dived in, locked the door and plonked myself on the seat. As the miniature Niagara erupted between my thighs I felt an indescribably sensation of bliss flooding through my body. It had been worth all the discomfort and pain to finally reach this moment of sensual pleasure.
But despite this state of orgasmic nirvana, I was aware of something else. Prue and Amy were standing just outside the cloakroom door, and I could hear Prue saying something, followed by a cackle of laughter from Amy. I soon picked up what was going on; Prue was telling Amy how desperate I had been because I had refused to take a precaution before setting out. Amy thought that was hysterically funny. And, Prue added, “She’s always like that. She never goes before a journey.” Amy laughed some more.
I was furious. My moment of bliss evaporated even before all the urine was out of my body. It was one thing for Prue and I to have a private family joke about our different toilet habits. It was quite a different matter for me to be made a laughing stock by my own sister. I was tempted, very severely tempted, to break my oath and mention Amy’s own bad experience. I didn’t, but my mind was on revenge.
It was the beginning of what was, for me at least, a very boring afternoon. Prue and Amy chattered on and on about people from the office they had both worked at, most of whom I knew nothing about. There was nothing to do but drink the endless cups of tea that Amy kept making, and listen to the radio, which Amy left permanently switched on. Apart from some music, which I didn’t much like, there was nothing but weather reports and traffic news. Pretty tedious stuff, or so I thought, until I heard something that started me thinking…
Shortly before six o’clock Prue said we had better be going, since we both had to be up early for work in the morning. I was glad it was over, and thanked Amy for her hospitality in the most formal manner. Prue, of course, had to make her farewell visit to the toilet, even though she had been only about twenty minutes earlier. When she emerged, she looked at me and said: “Better go, Paish, we want a quick journey home – no stops.” I knew there was still a fair amount of tea sloshing around inside me, and I hesitated for a second, but then Amy put her oar in: “Yes, that’s a good idea. You don’t want to be uncomfortable while you’re driving.” And she started to giggle. Prue giggled too. That finally made my mind up and I determined to implement the plan I had been hatching during the long spells of boredom during the afternoon. I strode for the door, saying to Prue: “Come on, you’re the one who wants to get back quickly.”
It was my turn to drive. I found the way to the motorway without incident, and we drove southwards. When we got to the second last service station before London, I pulled off the motorway. “What are stopping here for?” squealed Prue, “I want to get home and have some sleep.” “Sorry,” I said, “I need the toilet.” “What a waste of time!” she moaned. “If you’d gone at Amy’s we could have got home non–stop. It’s so unnecessary. Why can’t you plan ahead?”
I didn’t respond, just unbuckled my seat belt, and opened the door. “Coming?” I inquired as I prepared to get out. Prue hesitated; it was not in her nature to miss an opportunity to take a precautionary pee. But she had complained so vociferously about my needing to stop that she could hardly follow my example. So she stayed in the car.
I ran over to the lavatory block and dived into a cubicle. As I sat down on the seat, I felt slightly guilty. I did feel a mild need to go, after all that tea of Amy’s, but under normal circumstances I would never have dreamt of stopping here – I was quite capable of hanging on till I got home. So in a sense I was taking a precaution, especially in view of what I knew and Prue didn’t. But it was all part of my plan, and Prue was going to get a well–deserved shock.
I took my time washing my hands, then strolled back to the car, further irritating Prue who wanted to get moving as quickly as possible. She didn’t know what lay ahead.
Soon we were back on the road, making good progress – but not for long. After a few miles we came to a massive traffic jam. The cars ahead of us seemed to be totally immobile. And as more cars accumulated behind us, we were totally trapped.
This was no surprise to me. I had heard the radio reports of an overturned lorry and of the massive jam that would take several hours to clear. I also knew I could have turned off at the previous junction and taken an alternative route which would have got us back to London quite quickly. But Prue had made fun of me to the obnoxious Amy and I was determined to have my revenge.
Prue was furious at the traffic jam, and moaned for quite a long time, though happily she did not suspect that I had set the situation up, or I think we should probably have come to blows. After a while she accepted the inevitable and calmed down. We talked of one thing and another to pass the time, and played CDs. From time to time it would seem as if the traffic was moving again; we would go forward for a few yards, and then find ourselves totally immobile once again.
After we had been there for about an hour, I could see Prue beginning to fidget a bit. I asked if she was all right, knowing full well what the problem would be. “No,” she replied, “I do wish I’d gone to the toilet when we stopped at the service station.” Feeling some satisfaction that the tables were turned for once, I said in a rather smug tone: “Well, I did ask if you wanted to, but you didn’t take your opportunity.” She looked rather cross, but since she could see that I was just saying to her what she said so often to me, there was nothing she could do.
Another half hour passed. Obviously we weren’t the only people on the road to have a problem. A couple of men got out of their cars and stood with their backs to the traffic, pissing copiously on the grass verge. Prue shuddered and said: “I hate men. They can go anywhere they want to. It’s not fair.” Obviously she was getting desperate.
We edged forward ever so slowly, but there was nothing by the roadside that offered any cover, no wall, or hedge or bushes. Even I would have been hard pushed to find somewhere to squat and piss, and I had pissed in some pretty strange places in my time.
A young mother got out of the car in front with her two young children so that they could wee on the grass verge. As the little ones did their fountains, I caught a glimpse of the look on her face. Never have I seen jealousy expressed so blatantly and obviously on a human face. Clearly she was consumed with a desire to do what her kids were doing. When the youngsters had finished, she stood there for a minute, tapping her foot on the ground, as though making a decision. In the end respectability prevailed and she reluctantly got back into her car, but she had clearly given very serious consideration to the possibility of squatting on the grass verge.
Another half hour passed. We moved forward a little, but only a couple of hundred yards. By now Prue was sitting on her foot, rocking to and fro, and biting her lip. I was beginning to feel sorry for her. I felt that I had had my revenge and that I’d be quite happy to let her go now. But where? We were still trapped; this was taking a lot longer than I had expected.
Eventually Prue look at me and said: “Paish, what am I going to do. I can’t wait much longer. I’m scared I’ll wet myself again. And I couldn’t stand that.” And she started to cry. “Well,” I said, “the only alternative seems to be to go on the grass verge.” “But I can’t,” she sobbed, “Everyone would be able to see me.” Although quite a lot of men and kids had relieved themselves on the verge, no grown woman had done so thus far. Although the sun was about to set, it was still quite light. “How long till it goes dark?” she asked in a whisper, as though afraid of the answer. I reckoned it would be about three quarters of an hour before it would be so dark that she could squat unobserved. There was another wave of sobs as she said: “I can’t hold it that long. Damn Amy and all that tea.”
By now I was beginning to feel really sorry for what I had done. If it had been Amy in the seat next to me about to piss herself, I should have laughed and paid the cleaning bill willingly. But this was my twin sister Prue, and despite our mutual teasing I loved her dearly, and certainly didn’t want to see her humiliated. But what could be done?
Then I saw it, the miracle solution. We had moved forward another couple of hundred yards and we were alongside some sort of building site. Lying on the verge a few yards away was a huge piece of piping, several feet in diameter. It was clearly part of a sewer for some new construction that was taking place. A sewer. What could be more appropriate?
I pointed it out to Prue. “You could squat inside that,” I said. She looked dubious: “Everyone would be able to see what I was doing.” “Yes”, I said, “but at least they wouldn’t be able to see you doing it.” When she still hesitated, I said in my firmest voice: “Go on, will you. We don’t want the car soaking.”
She was obviously at the very limit of her capacity, for she climbed out of the car and ran to the pipe. She disappeared inside. The pipe was tilted slightly, and a moment later a stream of water issued from the other end, catching the light of the setting sun and flashing gold. It went on for a very long time. At last she emerged and ran back to the car. When she got inside she hugged me and gave me a kiss, saying I had saved her from disaster.
It wasn’t just Prue’s problem I had solved. Within moments a number of women, who had obviously been watching what was going on, got out of their cars and ran to the pipe. They formed an orderly queue, just as though it were a regular public convenience. I was pleased to see the young mum from the car in front, who stood there tapping her foot frantically as she waited her turn.
Prue and I put on another CD and prepared to wait for the gridlock to clear.
By: Jay–Gee