D is for Dettol, and Dad

In DRC, we kept a full 200-litre open-top barrel of water in the bathroom as backup for when the water was shut off or the plumbing not working. The barrel water was stagnant and thus highly attractive to mosquito larvae. To prevent and kill any lurking larvae, I would pour one or two capfuls of Dettol into the barrel. Brown in the bottle, Dettol turns white when diluted. I enjoyed watching it swirl around in the barrel, like fresh milk in orange pekoe tea or cloudy streaks in a mouth-blown glass paperweight.

Having Dettol to hand made me feel less alone in the middle of the jungle and safer, too. Growing up, it had a reputation in my family as being the world’s strongest antiseptic. Dettol takes a long time to dilute completely in 200 litres of water, and observing the swirls descending the barrel’s depths provided me with a few minutes of contemplation, nostalgia and homesickness.

The odour of Dettol transports me back to the bathroom countertop of my childhood home in Ontario. This was where grazed knees and cut elbows were inspected, washed and disinfected with Dettol. “Better put some Dettol on it. Don’t want it to get infected,” my dad used to say, no matter how minor the injury. Down came the glass bottle of Dettol, and a cotton ball soaked in the stuff was placed directly on our cuts. It hurt like hell, and I always tried to shove away the cotton ball.

My dad was obsessed with avoiding infection. He was always going on about how our cuts would become infected if not cleaned and disinfected with Dettol, and then gangrene would set in, the infection would travel up our limbs and settle into our joints, and eventually it would get so bad we would need to have a limb amputated. “Better put some Dettol on it. You don’t want gangrene setting in. Then you’ll have to amputate.” Every scrape, every sliver, every scratch could very well lead to one of his three daughters ending up an amputee.

Let’s be clear: my dad is not an amputee. My dad served in no wars, so he was never, I believe, an eyewitness to what infection and rot could really do to a person’s limbs in the absence of a good disinfectant. He is not a once-upon-a-time victim of a poorly cleansed wound, succumbing to a fever-inducing gangrenous infection and very near becoming an amputee himself. No one in his family, to my knowledge, has ever had a gangrene-induced amputation of any limb. I don’t think anyone in the family has ever even had gangrene. Yet he is very, very conscientious about disinfecting wounds.

My dad told me once that if I was ever out hiking, and I fell and hurt myself, I should pour beer on any wounds. “Beer’s got alcohol in it,” my dad said. “And alcohol’s a disinfectant.” I nodded heartily, the way all children do when a parent imparts wisdom, envisioning myself dutifully pulling a stubby of beer out of my knapsack and pouring it over a bloody gash on my leg in the middle of the woods. I was nine or ten at the time, so I’m not sure where I was supposed to get beer, or why I should be hiking with a bottle of beer and not a bottle of Dettol, or why I would be hiking alone in the bush at that age to begin with. I guess my dad had experience of hiking with beer in his knapsack or maybe he just forgot that he was telling a minor to carry beer around, or maybe he meant it to be the perennial “when you’re older” kind of advice. Either way, that was my dad’s view: at home, use Dettol; in the bush, use beer.

Dettol is a major family-care product in some countries. When I lived in Oman from 2006 to 2007, I discovered a whole Dettol section in the toiletries and cleansers aisle of my local supermarket. There was bar soap, liquid hand soap and shower gel, in moisturizing and fresh scent varieties. There was the classic bottle of brown Dettol liquid antiseptic, cream, spray surface cleaner, hand wipes, kitchen and bathroom cleaning wipes. It was a Dettol cornucopia. I had never seen so many Dettol products. I did not know so many existed. I did not know people wanted so many Dettol products to exist.

I knew of only one person who could appreciate the Dettol mother lode. I bought one of everything, and gave it to my dad as a Christmas hamper that year. It was meant to be a joke, but gangrene and amputations are no joke to my dad. He loved it! He acted as if it was the best present he’d received from me in years (childhood gifts being a rock I painted and a ceramic plaque of him where the glaze ran and he looked like he had a black eye, so really, it’s understandable). There were snickers all around the Christmas tree that year, but my dad showed off his Dettol products as if I’d discovered penicillin myself.

When we were older and reminiscing about our Dettol-soaked childhood, my sister Jennifer screamed out an accusation that shocked us all. To say it shook me to my core would be an understatement. The accusation, and its implication, was life-altering.

“You know what? You know what? I read the label of that stuff in the pharmacy awhile ago, and do you know what it says?” Jennifer at the time was the mom of two young boys, so disinfectants were part of her shopping tours.

“No,” I said, curious. “What did it say?” I expected her to say that it was actually a corrosive, that Dettol was not recommended for children, or humans, or any mammal, for that matter, and that in fact our father had been negligent in his duties as a parent.

“It says DILUTE IT! DILUTE IT! It says dilute it with like, one CAPFUL of Dettol to, like, 20 LITRES of water! He used to put that stuff on us STRAIGHT! STRAIGHT FROM THE BOTTLE!”

“What?! Dilute it? Are you serious?” I gasped.

“YES!” shouted Jennifer. “I’m serious!”

It was true! He had been negligent in his duties as a parent! All those times we screamed and winced, my father shouting “You don’t wanna get gangrene, get your arm cut off, do ya?” as he held a cotton ball soaked in full-force, undiluted brown Dettol to our cuts and scrapes. We always knew, just knew, that Dettol was nothing if not toxically bad for us. I never read the label as a child because I couldn’t read the label as a child. This crucial piece of information had been withheld from us, and now that we knew the truth, our betrayal was all the more bitter. We had been right. One was not meant to put straight Dettol on wounds. We were vindicated.

As part of my job in the Congo, I participated in and supervised deployments to rural, remote areas that had no running water or electricity. All team members, including myself, were entitled to a ration of personal hygiene items such as soap and bug spray—and a bottle of Dettol. The Dettol was for adding to an individual’s shower bucket. Some areas we worked in had cholera present in the water and occasional yellow fever outbreaks. Without the Dettol in the water, there was a real risk of contracting a life-threatening infection, and I admonished all staff to use it daily. To be sure no one would become sick, I would augment the disinfecting by adding a few capfuls to the 200-litre barrels of well water from which the shower and toilet water were drawn.

Whenever I spoke to my Dad on Skype, he made the usual inquiries after my health, admonishing me not to contract any diseases and to take precautions against malaria. I think he felt reassured whenever I told him “Don’t worry, Dad. We’ve got Dettol here.”

“You do? Oh, great!” he enthused.

“Yeah, I’m bathing in it!”

tactile dysfunction

I was on safari in Botswana this summer, and the same thing that always happens, happened: I fantasized about jumping on top of the animals. It's bordering on delusional, I know, to think you can dive out of your open-air safari vehicle and land on the back of a lioness, wrap your arms and legs around her, caress her golden coat, nuzzle into the scruff of her neck, dream she'll just let you snuggle in and have a long cuddle that ends in an afternoon snooze bathed in the gilt of the setting African savannah sun....

I'm prone to this kind of fantastical daydreaming while on holiday, and the themes are always tactile: jumping on wild animals that will surely kill me, and swaddling myself in reams of fabric. I had the same restrained pouncing impulse when I walked into Vlisco in Kinshasa, DRC. Vlisco produces haute couture pagnes--batik-printed lengths of fabric with which African women wrap themselves up. Their designs stopped my heart when I saw them. There were two billboards I saw whenever I arrived back in Kinshasa from my base in the interior of the country. The first was on the road coming from the airport; the second at an intersection of the road leading to the Grand Hotel and the tony ambassadors' residences district, and they beckoned to me. When I finally got to the store on one of my stopovers before going off on holiday, the range of designs produced in dozens of colour combinations and the haute couture dresses created from them sparked the desire to pull every pagne off the shelf and roll around on the floor, wrapping myself up in them. But the threat of a beating from the security guard and the unbelievable embarrassment once I resurfaced kept me restrained. Instead I bought a pagne in my favourite design and the colour combination that best suited me, and took a brochure home for pornographic viewing later.

I can't wander past locally-produced fabric without stroking it and feeling its texture, imagining what form it will take, and then purchasing reams of it. My favourite thing to do on my travels is to locate the textiles markets and wander around. I buy fabric like sculptors buy blocks of wood or stone: I wait for my creation to reveal itself from within the body of the material. And so, since I wouldn't survive to tell the tale if I decided to just go for it and jump on wild animals, I buy stacks of fabric in remote villages and await inspiration. It's not as good as rolling around wrapped in all of them, but at least I get to keep the material, and my dignity.

I patriotically have my animal-molestation fantasies about polar bears too. God, how I love polar bears. I love them so much. I love their white fluffy wintry coats, their cute-as-a-button button noses, their adorably plaintive save-our-icecaps stare, their long talon claws that could rip you open in a flash like that creepy scene with Giancarlo Gianni in Hannibal. When visiting the Toronto Zoo in my teens, all I could think when I viewed the largest land carnivore was how much I'd love to dive in that pool, jump on its back, and ride around having chicken fights like you do when you're drunk at a pool party and think it's not dangerous. Only the heartbreaking realization that I'll be eaten alive keeps me from doing it. I saw that new Nissan commercial for the LEAF electric car on Canadian TV while back on holiday, and I became weepy with despair.

The problem with these tactile obsessions is that they do cause a certain level of anxiety. (Am I really brave enough to jump out of this safari truck? Do I have the luggage allowance for all these fabrics?) I had to be talked down once while in the fabrics market in Seoul, South Korea. I walked into several floors of several hundred stalls of several thousand types of fabrics, and I started hyperventilating in reaction to the overwhelming choices available to me, and I practically needed to huff into a paper bag to get over it. I bought a mere half-dozen few-metre lengths of various fabrics as tranquillizer, and then stared at the neat stack of them, waiting for the ideas to bubble.

While discussing the idea for this essay with writer-ly friends, they both said the same thing about the jumping on wild animals part: "You need to explore that a little more. You need to go deeper into that. That means something." In other words: What are you really talking about?

I had a boyfriend who used to describe getting out of bed as an extrication--from me. I clung to him like a limpet, he said, and he had to climb out from under my arms and legs against my whimpering protestations and slip away quietly just to go pee. But I loved him, and I loved clinging to him as I fell asleep. He was so much more comfortable than so many other boyfriends I'd had, and he was warm and the nights were cool, and I loved being that close to him. It just felt good. I always eventually moved away to my own space anyway as the night wore on. It was just the first few moments of sleep that made it so necessary to be near him. I loved being wrapped up by him, just as I adore being wrapped up in pagnes, and the idea of wrapping myself around a fluffy animal. I love the feeling of feeling, and this way I could indulge myself without fear of being maimed or arrested. Sure we can talk about my heart getting ripped out and the pain I felt when the inevitable breakup occurred, but just like my animal fantasies, I ignore that part too.

This is all to say, I suppose, that keeping your passions at bay can, in some cases, save your life. You shouldn't jump on a wild animal. It will kill you. You shouldn't grab a bunch of fabrics and drag them to the floor and roll around wrapped up in them. You will be manhandled by security guards. But to resist wrapping yourself up in someone you love, someone whose body you adore and want to enjoy intimately as much as you can--controlling that passion, controlling that desire, to me, it seems, would lessen the experience. Self-preservation doesn’t apply when you're in love. You're either all in or you're not. You'll wrap yourself up in someone and it could break your heart, but at least you won't get eaten by a lioness or arrested at your favourite boutique.