My office on campus is next to the ladies. It's a curious toilet, more a halogen-lit vestibule with a toilet behind an elaborate, heavy door suspended from a complicated-looking hinge bolted into the ceiling. It's quite nice, actually. The toilet-using ladies of my floor have come to an unspoken agreement that if you go into that toilet and find the door shut and locked, you leave and go elsewhere. It's jarring to run into someone else there, and when you do there's a lot of startled apologising and shuffling for space.

It makes sense, really. In your standard public toilet, with its rows of cubicles and wash basins, there's an anonymity in the crowd. You can go about the evacuation of bladder and bowels secure in the knowledge that there won't be someone waiting outside, or if there is there'll be enough space for you to pretend as though they aren't there. With this toilet there's no buffer zone, no bathroom cordon sanitaire. If you don't leave the vestibule as soon as you see that the toilet is occupied you'll be forced to come face to face with the previous occupant, and it's uncomfortable.

So today I was surprised to find someone did exactly that. I was there, enjoying my private time, when I heard the door to the vestibule swing open and close. I waited to hear it open again and heard nothing. I heard a handbag snap open and snap close. I heard an impatient sigh. I waited for her to leave, counting down from ten, but still she stayed.

When I summoned the courage to leave my fortress of solitude the woman stared at me blankly, an expression my girl's school-school damaged brain parsed as 'bitchface.' She had one of those Chloe padlock bags in the crook of her arm, the other hand on her hip. As she went into the toilet she checked me, ever so slightly, into the counter with her shoulder. And I stood there for a moment, flushed with rage. Then I washed my hands and used the drier just long enough to make her feel slightly uncomfortable and left, letting the door slam behind me.

Calm, in control, and quit

'You don't need cigarettes.'

'I like cigarettes.'

'Well, you shouldn't.'

'...'

'I didn't want to tell you this, but cigarettes have been talking behind your back.'

'I don't believe you.'

'Yeah, they have. The other day I was out and I heard those skinny white bitches talking about you. They were all like, "that foreign man is so annoying. He, like, just talks and talks and talks, and I'm all like shut up, nobody cares."'

'Who were they talking with?'

'Pot. And then pot was all, like, "yeah, and foreign man has totally put on weight."'

'Pot would never say anything like that!'

'That bitch did.'

'I don't believe you. I'ma go have a cigarette. You're a stinking liar.'