legends · 4 min read ·
Load Seven
A launderette attendant watches a stranger wash whites down to nothing and carry out what is left.
The Suds & Spin on Corporation Street opens twenty-four hours, and I do nights. The pay is bad. The hours suit me. I mop, I restock the vending machine, I make change for the people who can't afford the dryer, and I mind the place against the drunks.
There are twelve machines on the left wall, twelve on the right. Dryers up above. A bench. A noticeboard for people selling sofas. A big clock over the door that loses four minutes a day and that I wind myself.
The woman in the grey coat came on a Tuesday, at ten to three. She wasn't a regular. She brought a black bin bag and a pound coin and a very fixed expression. She went to machine seven, which is the big industrial one, and she put in a heap of washing and shut the door and put the coin in.
I watched, because I watch. It's the job. She sat on the bench with her hands folded, staring at the glass, and the machine began to turn.
The first thing I noticed was that the water was clear. It was clear for a long time, which isn't right. A wash goes grey, and then it goes foam. This stayed clean, and in the drum, behind the glass, the clothes tumbled in the light, slow, and white.
White, I thought. She'd put in white things. Shirts. A sheet.
The second thing I noticed was that the clothes were never the same shape twice. I'd catch a sleeve and then it would turn into a skirt, and the skirt would turn into a pair of dungarees, in the way things do when they're tumbling. That wasn't strange. What was strange was that the garments kept getting smaller. I watched a man's shirt go round, and then a smaller shirt, and then a smaller one, and then a jacket for a thing no bigger than a hand. The drum was full of clothes, all of them white, all of them getting smaller, in the same slow turn.
I said, "Are you all right, love?"
She did not turn her head. "I'm just doing the whites," she said.
"They look like they're shrinking."
"They are. It's the only way to get them out." She smiled, very faintly, a smile I would like not to remember. "You have to take them down to nothing. Then they come out clean."
I should have asked her to leave. I thought about it. But she had paid, and I'm not paid to argue. I swept the floor near the door. I wiped the vending machine. I listened to the drum.
The cycle finished at twenty to four. The drum slowed. The door light went out. The woman rose and went to the machine, and opened it, and reached in with both arms, and took out nothing.
I mean that. Her hands were empty. She stood there with them held out in front of her, cupped, as though carrying water, with a look of immense relief on her face.
"They're all clean," she said.
"I didn't see anything come out."
"No," she said. "You wouldn't. You have to hold them the right way." And she turned to me, and for a moment her face was wet, though she wasn't crying. It was the face of a person who has come to the end of something they thought would never end. "Thank you for keeping the place open," she said.
She went out into the street, holding her cupped hands, walking carefully so as not to spill.
I closed machine seven, and I looked in the drum. It was dry, and warm, and there was on the inside of the glass a faint smell of lavender and starch, of a wash day long ago. On the steel at the bottom, very small, there was a single button. A white button, from a shirt cuff, with four holes.
I put it in my pocket. I keep it on the mantelpiece at home. I'm told that things that have been washed that clean are lucky. I've never felt less lucky. I look at it most nights, and I wonder what she did with the rest, and whether the thing she was carrying was heavy, and whether she has found anywhere yet to set it down.