The Two-O'Clock Launderette · short story
3Fenn Street, 2 a.m.
Here is the thing nobody warns you about being given something.
You have to keep it.
The hour went at two, the way it goes — the hum under the hum letting go, the fluorescent tube resuming its faint electrical complaint, the shop settling back into being a shop. And the weight came back into my hands. Not all of it. I want to be honest, because I’ve been dishonest for a year and eight months and I’d like to try the other thing. Not all of it, and not the worst of it — but the piece of paper in my right hand stopped being a feather and started being a piece of paper again, with my father’s telephone number on it, and the particular gravity that a piece of paper gets when there is something you are supposed to do with it.
So it hadn’t fixed me. It had just shown me, for about ninety seconds, what it would be like not to be carrying the thing — the way you might lift a bag off somebody’s shoulder at a bus stop, hold it for a moment, and hand it back, so they know exactly how much it weighs. Which is a kindness, and I resented it enormously.
I stood there in my empty launderette with the mop in the corner and my coat spread out on the folding table like a patient, and I thought: right. Well. Fine.
And then I cleaned.
I want you to understand that I cleaned beautifully. I cleaned the way people clean when they are avoiding a telephone. I did the seals on all nine machines, including the two nobody uses, going round the rubber with a cloth and getting out the grey grit and the hair and one 20p and half a sock. I descaled the kettle. I did the change machine, which does not need doing and has not needed doing since the spring. I emptied every lint trap on the row of dryers and made a little grey haystack of everybody’s clothes on the counter, which is the single most disgusting and satisfying job in the trade, and if you have never done it I’m sorry to say you’ve missed out.
At half two I looked at the clock, and then at the number, and I thought about ringing him.
At half two in the morning.
I got as far as taking my phone out of my bag, and then I heard myself, the way you sometimes get to hear yourself from a foot behind your own head: Nadia. It’s half two in the morning. You cannot ring a seventy-one-year-old man at half two in the morning. There is exactly one thing a phone call at half two in the morning means, and it isn’t hello.
It’s the phone call we got about Mum. It rang at ten past three and my aunt answered it and I stood in the doorway of the front room in a dressing gown and I knew, before a word, from the ringing.
So no. Not that. Whatever I did, I wasn’t going to do it to him like that.
I put the phone back in the bag. And I felt the relief go through me like a hot drink — oh good, I can’t, it’s not allowed, it’s out of my hands — and I stood very still at the counter with a lint haystack in front of me and I recognised that relief. Intimately. I have been living on it. It is the exact feeling I have had a hundred times with that number in my hand, dressed up in a hundred different coats: not now, not tonight, I’m working, he’ll be asleep, it’s been too long, it would only upset him, I’ll do it at the weekend when I’ve got the time and the words.
I’ve had one year and eight months of weekends.
So I made a deal with myself, out loud, in an empty launderette, because that’s who I am now, apparently, a woman who talks to machines:
“Six o’clock, then. When I lock up. And you don’t get out of it by cleaning.”
Then I cleaned for three and a half hours anyway, because I’d only promised not to get out of it. I never said anything about the mopping.
I locked up at ten past six.
Fenn Street at ten past six in the middle of February is the colour of a dead television, and cold in the way that gets in under a coat, except my coat was clean and dry and warm as a scone and it was, I’m told, the only one in London that morning that had been laundered by whatever the Wishy-Washy is when nobody’s looking. I pulled the shutter down. I did the padlock. I stood on my own step with the keys still in my hand.
There was a milk float. There is always a milk float; I refuse to explain it.
And I got the phone out and I put in the number off my aunt’s receipt, digit by digit, checking each one twice like an idiot, like a woman defusing something, and my thumb went over the green button and stopped.
Here’s what I want to say about that pause, because it’s the only heroic thing in this entire account and I’d hate for you to miss it in the general laundry.
Everything in me — everything, all of it, the whole architecture — wanted to put the phone away and go home and get in bed and be extremely tired, and ring him properly at the weekend when I’d got the words. And I stood there on the step of the Wishy-Washy and I did not have the words. I have never had the words. I am not a person who has ever once, in her whole life, had the words. What I had was a coat with a clean pocket, and a number, and the memory of ninety seconds of not being heavy, and the flat certainty — the kind you get at six in the morning at the end of a night shift, when you’re too tired to lie to yourself properly — that if I went home now I would put the number back in the pocket, and it would go back to weighing what it weighs, and I would still be standing on this step in another year and eight months.
It gets different, I have told frightened people, for two years, at one in the morning, with total confidence.
I have never once let it get different for me.
I pressed the green button.
He answered on the fourth ring, and he sounded exactly the same, and that undid me more than anything else that night, more than the coat and the card and the hollow hour and all of it. He sounded like my dad.
“Hello?” And then, immediately, because it was ten past six in the morning and a father is a father: “Nadia? Nadia. Is everything all right?”
And I stood on Fenn Street in the cold with the shutter at my back, and I said:
“No.”
The milk float went round the corner.
“But I thought I’d ring,” I said.
And there was a silence on the line, and it went on a good deal longer than a silence is supposed to, long enough that I looked at the screen to check the call was still there, and it was, and I could hear him breathing, and I understood — standing there, at six in the morning, one year and eight months late — that he was doing exactly what I do. That he’d been sitting on his own side of this with his own bit of paper and his own hundred reasons. That the reason he never rang wasn’t that he didn’t want to.
He’s not going to be the one to ring, my aunt said. She never said why.
“I’ve got the kettle on,” my father said, at last, roughly. “I mean I haven’t. I will have.”
“I’m just finishing work.”
“Right.” A pause. “You’re working nights?”
“Two years.”
“Nadia.” And there was so much in it — twenty things, half of them cross — and he put every one of them down and picked up the only one that mattered, which is a thing I did not know he could do. “Come for your breakfast, then,” he said. “If you’re not too tired. I don’t know what I’ve got in. I’ll find something. I’ll put the heating on.”
“I’ll get the 43,” I said, and my voice did something on the last word that I’m not going to describe, and I don’t think he’d want me to.
“I’ll put the heating on,” he said again.
The 43 comes at twenty-five past, and I had fifteen minutes, and I spent them sitting on my own cold step outside a shut launderette doing the only bit of housekeeping I had left.
I went through my pockets.
The coins I kept, because Bernadette likes a Rich Tea and the twins always need change. The safety pins I kept, because somebody always needs a pin. The hair elastic I kept, and I’m aware of how that looks, and I’d like to say for the record that she might come back.
The flyer for the takeaway I don’t eat from — kept, because the back of it is blank, and I wrote my dad’s number on it in big honest figures, and put it in the pocket with the order of service where I can reach both of them.
And then I took out the biro.
I have carried that biro for years. I have believed in that biro. I have never once tested it, because as long as I didn’t test it, it was a pen I was keeping in case somebody needed to write something down, and that’s a nice thing to be, isn’t it, the woman who’s got a pen.
I scribbled it on the back of my own hand, there on the step, in the blue light, and it didn’t write. Of course it didn’t. It hasn’t written since before my mother died.
I put it in the bin on the corner of Fenn Street.
And then I got on the 43 with a clean coat and a card I can look at and somewhere to be, and I sat by the window on the top deck with the whole cold city going lilac outside it, and I let myself, for the length of a bus journey, be one of the ones who leaves lighter.
Only a bit. Only a bit lighter. Nothing was fixed, and nothing is; the shop opens again tonight and Bernadette will want her biscuit and the man with the one shirt will be in on Thursday, and I’ll be there, because I like being the quiet reason, and there’s nothing wrong with that as long as it isn’t the only thing you are.
But I’d had a wash, and I’d made a phone call, and my dad was putting the heating on.
And at the top of Fenn Street, when the bus pulled away, I looked back at the Wishy-Washy — dark, shuttered, ordinary, nine machines and a bad tube and a mop — and I said thank you to a launderette, out loud, in front of a man eating a sausage roll at half six in the morning.
He didn’t even look up. This city. Honestly.