2What Comes Out

The door wouldn’t open. Of course it wouldn’t. Machine 7 locks itself on the spin, like every machine in the shop, like every machine anywhere, because otherwise people would open them mid-cycle and flood Fenn Street with hot suds and their own bad judgment. I knew that. I have known that for two years. I stood there with my hand on the warm glass and pulled at a door I have told approximately four hundred strangers not to pull at, and it did not open, and the drum went round, and my coat went round in it, sleeves out, like something waving.

There was a minute left. Maybe less.

Here’s what I did with it, and I’d like it noted that I’m not proud: I looked at the little pile of lint by the door, and the soap I’d refilled, and the empty chairs, and I worked out — genuinely, with the serious part of my brain, the part that does the takings — whether I could put the whole thing back. Whether if I bagged the coat wet and hung it on its hook and went home and said nothing to nobody, the hour would take the hint and stop bothering.

Because I hadn’t asked. That’s the thing. Nobody had asked me if I wanted washing.

The drum slowed. You know the sound — that long descending whine as the spin lets go, and then the click, and then the whole machine sitting there afterwards looking innocent, like a cat. The light above the door went from red to nothing. The clock over the change machine said 1:59.

And the air did the thing it does. The held breath. The hum under the hum. Except this time it wasn’t happening near me, the way it does when it’s the boy or the baby or a stranger’s shirt — I wasn’t standing at the edge of it watching it work. It was happening to me, and it turns out that from the inside it feels like standing in a doorway in a warm house on a cold night, with the door open behind you, and someone in the other room saying, without any fuss, come on then, it’s ready, it’s been ready.

I opened the machine and took out my coat.

It was warm. It was clean — properly clean, cleaner than it has been since I bought it off the rail in the Cancer Research shop for nine pounds, the mud off the hem, the tidemark gone from the cuff where I lean on the wet counter. And it was dry, which no coat in the history of the Wishy-Washy has ever been coming out of a washer, and I want to be clear that I noticed that, and that I chose, right then, to have the smallest possible reaction to it, because if you start screaming at the little things you’ll have nothing left for the big ones.

I carried it to the folding table. I don’t know why. It’s what I do — it’s the table, you fold on the table — and I spread it out flat like it was somebody’s, like it belonged to a customer coming back in the morning, and I went through the pockets, which is also what I do, because people leave their whole lives in their pockets and it’s my job to hand it back.

Left outside: three pound coins and a fifty pence, which is Bernadette’s biscuit money and the change I keep for the machine for people who come in with a note. Two safety pins. A hair elastic, not mine, found on the floor months ago and pocketed in case its owner came back for it, which nobody ever does, because nobody comes back for a hair elastic and I keep it anyway.

Right outside: a Rich Tea wrapper. A folded flyer for a takeaway I don’t eat from, kept because the back of it is blank and blank paper is useful. A biro that doesn’t work. I have carried a biro that doesn’t work for so long that I’ve stopped testing it and started simply believing in it.

And I laid all of it out on the folding table in a little row, the way you do, and I stood back and looked at what came out of my own coat, and it was all — every single item — for somebody else.

That’s a joke, isn’t it. That’s the sort of thing you’d laugh at, if you were somebody else, if you were looking at it from the other side of the counter. Coins for strangers. Pins for strangers. Somebody’s elastic. A pen for anyone who needs to write, that doesn’t write.

I did not laugh.

The inside pocket I left till last.

I want to explain about the inside pocket without making a meal of it, because Mum would have hated a meal being made. It’s an order of service. Grey card, gone soft as cloth at the fold. Her name on the front and the two dates, and inside the hymn we picked because it was the only one anybody would know, and on the back, in the corner, in blue biro — a working one — the number of the crematorium office, which I wrote down myself on the day and have never once needed since. It has been in that pocket for one year and eight months. It has been through rain. It has been sat on. It has been in that pocket every night of every shift I have worked since, four feet from Bernadette, six feet from the twins, right there against my ribs while I told a boy in a bin bag that it gets different.

Paper does not survive a wash. Everybody knows that. You get pulp, you get grey confetti stuck in the seal of the door, you get a lecture from me about checking your pockets.

It came out perfect. Dry. Flat. Cleaner than it went in — the softness gone out of the fold, the biro on the back sharp again, her name across the front of it as crisp as the day the funeral place handed me forty of them and I took forty because I couldn’t say the word fewer.

And it did not weigh anything.

That’s the only way I can put it. It was the same card. It was exactly the same card, I checked, I turned it over twice, it had the little crease where I’d caught it on a machine door — and holding it was like holding a card. Just a card. Just my mother’s name on a bit of paper, which is what it has always been and has never once been, not for one second, not for one year and eight months, because every time my hand has gone anywhere near that pocket my whole chest has gone tight as a bad valve, and I have taken my hand away and thought about something else, and I have got very, very good at thinking about something else.

The Wishy-Washy had rinsed the weight out of it. Not her. Not the day. Not one single thing about what happened — the card was all still there, every letter — but the thing I’ve been carrying under it, the hard grey knot that isn’t grief, that’s the not looking at grief, that’s a year and eight months of walking past a door in my own house without turning the handle. That went down the drain with the grey water, on Fenn Street, at one o’clock in the morning, while I was bouncing somebody else’s baby.

And underneath it, in the same pocket, where it has sat since March, was the piece of paper with my dad’s number on it.

Not his old number. He moved. My aunt wrote the new one down for me on the back of a receipt at the wake and said he’d want to hear from you, Nadia, he’s not going to be the one to ring, and I put it in my pocket and said I would, and I meant it, and it has been in that coat through a spring and a summer and an autumn and most of a winter, and I have taken it out perhaps a hundred times, and I have put it back perhaps a hundred times, and each of those times took about four seconds, and I have never once dialled it.

It came out clean too. Dry. His name in my aunt’s round hand. Dad — new no.

I stood at the folding table with the two of them, one in each hand, at two o’clock in the morning in an empty launderette, and I felt light in a way that frightened me so much I nearly put my fist through the glass of machine 7.

Because you don’t get to be light. Not me. Light is what the boy in the bin bag gets to be, and the dad with the baby, and the man with his one Thursday shirt, and Bernadette going out into the cold with a biscuit in her cardigan pocket and somebody having said her name. That’s the arrangement. They come in heavy and they go out lighter and I am the quiet reason, and the quiet reason does not get washed. The quiet reason keeps the coins and the pins and the pen that doesn’t work.

And I looked down at the little row of everybody else’s things laid out on the folding table, and I did what I always do.

I started putting them back.

The coins first — sorted, back in the left pocket, three pounds fifty for the change and the biscuits. Then the pins, because somebody always needs a pin. Then the elastic, for the girl who is not coming back. Then the wrapper, and the flyer with the useful blank back, and the biro I believe in. Item by item, my hands doing it without me, the whole familiar weight going back where it lives, and it was the easiest thing I have ever done, and I was most of the way through it before I understood what I was doing, which is the truest sentence in this entire story.

I picked up the order of service. I looked at it, and I could look at it, and I put it in the inside pocket, gently, and that was all right. That was all right. She should be where I can reach her.

And I picked up the last thing on the table.

Dad — new no.

And the clock over the change machine went round to two, and the hum under the hum stopped, the way it does, like a held breath let go, and the launderette became an ordinary launderette on Fenn Street with a mop in the corner and a bad fluorescent tube.

And I was still standing there. With my coat on the table, and my hand out, and my father’s telephone number lying in it, not weighing anything at all.