The Laundry Basket
Page 1
The Laundry Basket
The Monkey's Fist Collection
G. M. C. Lewis
Copyright © 2014 G.M.C. Lewis
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study,
or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in
any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the
publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with
the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries
concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
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Contents
Cover
Part 1
Sock
Cycling Shorts
Suspenders
Snood
Shirt
Slanket
Strip
Sable
Scarf
Sombrero
Part 2
Shell Suit
Suits
Skirt
Shalwar
Sweater
String Vest
Sarong
Slippers
Silk Sheets
Shift
Part 3
Sneakers
Strides
Stab Jacket
Slacks
Sauna Suit
Smutter
Smoking Jacket
Scrubs
Swimming Trunks
Stetson
Acknowledgements
Part 1
Sock
Tem reaches over and switches off the alarm, remembering he’d set two to ensure he doesn’t miss his flight. Her eyes are open and unsmiling, so he checks his argument log to try and recall the specifics: the roll of the waves under the clean hull, diving into the sharp spring sea, rowing to the beach to meet old friends, learning about lunar cycles, tides, sea floor topography, winds, currents and all the other elements that influence the ebb and flow. Then the developing argument; it starts about nothing, well the laundry to be precise, and escalates quickly through frustration and miscommunication, as it always does. They have been in love for a year and the elements of hell it has brought to them have defined their relationship and interaction, much more than the heaven.
The laundry. Who gives a fuck about the laundry! How he wishes he could pull back the dirty sheets and argue with the real monsters that lurk underneath, but the ancient email to an ex-lover that can never be unwritten, and its spawned child of impotence, will always sporadically limp and crawl between them. Her impenetrable eyes that will not see him through the intervening mist; eyes from a different time, nurtured by different experience, seeing very different perspectives on the world. His terrible silence that speaks a language to her that he doesn’t understand. His demands that she make sacrifices for him as he has done for her – sacrifices that she never asked him to make in the first place. These creatures are insoluble. Best left under the sheets. Stick to the matter at hand. And so they grapple over the inane, until they are bored and full of hate. Then when one of them has walked away (her this time) they try to reconcile, because they love each other and can’t bear to be apart and hurting the one that they love. But they’ve never been good at this; the resentment that they can ferment in each other is a truly powerful brew and every proffered touch and kiss is received coldly, each jest and injection of lightness is twisted into seriousness, and even if a continuation of the argument is averted, no healing occurs, just a mere stemming of blood. And so with the last. They break for a spell as they travel back to London on a train and a motorbike and reconvene in the stifling history of her room, where they manage to avoid hostilities, but also any affection, before dropping into sleep, exhausted, hurting and curled away from each other.
“You want us to be friends.”
“I’ve been thinking about it more and more.”
“Then let’s be friends.”
Silence, then:
“Fine.”
He rises and drags on his clothes, hurriedly grabbing his possessions, considering brushing his teeth only momentarily, opting to get out as fast as possible before one of their resolves break and they collapse back in on themselves like an autumnal puffball. Dressed, he picks up his crash helmet, rucksack, laptop bag and jacket before leaning in to give her a kiss, almost toppling back into the bed as his load swings forward.
“Bye.”
“I washed your t-shirt and socks – the t-shirt is on the upstairs landing with one of the socks and the other sock is on the rail downstairs.”
He looks at her one last time, seemingly uncertain of what to make of this information.
“OK. Thanks. Bye.”
He pulls the door to and moves quickly up the stairs, easily locating the plain beige t-shirt with blue trim and one grey sock with purple trim as she had explained. The sock had been bought in a pack of ten grey socks all with a differently coloured trim, to aid pairing. He moves back down the stairs, aware that she will be able to hear him moving through the quiet house on the other side of her door. He cannot see the missing sock among her clothes, on the long radiator in the corridor as he descends to the ground floor of the house. Into the kitchen: nothing but the stale smell of smoke, old fat and an abundance of crumbs. He spies a clothes horse through in the sitting room at the back of the house and, with a hint of unease (ten people live in the house and despite their relaxed attitude, he still dislikes the thought of being found unaccompanied this far off the path that leads out the front door), moves further into the house. He still can’t see the sock, but looking through the back window into the rear garden, he sees clothes hanging on the washing line – did she say ‘downstairs hanging in the garden’? He knew that he had begun to listen to her less attentively and a confirmatory click of this is unhelpfully triggered as he struggles to recall what has been said to him only three minutes ago.
He tries the door to the garden. Locked. He unlocks it and steps out. He has never been here before. He used to live ten doors down the street and the dimensions of the garden are not dissimilar, but the small differences of detail and appearance feel alien, like seeing a familiar face reflected in a mirror. The garden is the other end of the block to his, so the perspective he is used to has been reversed. Where is the decking he built? When did the vegetation take over? The garden feels darker, more solemn, enclosed, oppressive; each item of junk, every tool and piece of rubbish, feels like an impostor. For some reason when he walked into this garden he expected familiarity and the lack of it has created a strange inversion in his head. He looks down and sees that, along with his beige t-shirt, rucksack, laptop bag, crash helmet and jacket, he is still holding the grey sock with purple trim.
He can smell tulips.
He thinks of the plane leaving as he stands in this strangely familiar garden.
Cycling Shorts
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The clock says 10.46am. The timer flips to 1 hour 00 minutes and a hint of panic becomes audible within the room. Barbara is out getting a coffee at the moment, but if she gets back and sees that the clock has cleared the hour, she will rage, no ifs, buts or maybes – there will be immediate, extravagant, wobbling rage and nobody wants that. Tanya looks across the office at Donnie. He’s currently pulling his quiff so hard that his cheeks are shaking and his face appears to be on the verge of bisecting between the eyeballs and brows, which indicates that he’s probably got snagged on a SPRAT or a ‘Small Print Reader Anus Tight’. A SPRAT is one of those rare breeds of customer that is capable of absorbing and understanding the indecipherable jargon that is crammed into the bottom of practically every action that can be perceived as having contractual obligation between two parties, and using that information as a way of saving tiny amounts of money (compare with a SPRAY, or ‘Small Print Reader Anus Yawning’ who absorbs the same information, but uses it to shit all over you). This at least means that there’s no immediate threat of a ‘Donnie Vertical Suplex’ and they have a small chance of clearing the backlog before things kick off.
Barbara is the office assistant manager and she is a monster. (Tanya has never seen the actual office manager, but she assumes that he/she is Lucifer, or someone of equivalent demonic standing.) Barbara is a huge, irrational, quick-tempered, firecracker of a woman, with a greasy flop of red curls atop her primitive-looking head. Dr Stone – swoon – would have described the head as brachycephalic and exhibiting enhanced prognathism, but then the only reason she could think of for her unbelievably handsome and foppish old physical anthropology lecturer to be anywhere near the offices of ISIS would be to conduct a study on the regression and retardation of the human mind in the contemporary work environment. The thought that her involvement in such a study would be as part of the subject group, not as part of the observers, fills her with no small amount of shame.
Still nothing from the workshop, so she flicks back over to the ever patient Mrs Andrews:
“I’m so sorry to keep you waiting Mrs Andrews.”
“That’s OK, my dear.”
“They’re very busy in the workshop today, but I know they’re doing their best to have a look at your computer this morning and they promised to let me know the situation as soon as possible.”
“Don’t you worry my love, I can wait.”
“If you like I can give you a call straight back as soon as they’ve given me an answer, to save you waiting.”
“Oh no dear, that’s what the gentleman said yesterday. I made sure to stay near the phone all day – my hearing isn’t what it used to be, you see – but he didn’t call back and when I tried to call back later, I kept getting cut off. I’m happy to hold if that’s OK.”
“Of course, that’s absolutely fine Mrs Andrews and I’m very sorry again about your problems yesterday – we’ve been having a few technical issues with the phone lines, but hopefully they’ve all been sorted today. I’ll put you back on hold then.”
“OK, bye then.”
It made her blood boil to think of Mrs Andrews waiting next to the phone all day, probably not even daring to go to the loo, in case she missed the call back from that spineless, lying git, Donnie, which obviously never came. Donnie is one of Barbara’s minions. She has six of these sub-demons that make up her permanent staff; most of them have become so desensitised to their surroundings that they no longer exhibit any signs of human emotion and have a sort of glazed appearance, like giant monotonal toffee apples. But wrestling-mad, Elvis aficionado Donnie actually seems to get some sort of perverse pleasure from working in this hellish call centre. The rest of the office is composed of what appears to be a constant flow of shell-shocked temps that desperately try to deal with the combination of mind-numbing boredom and roaring mental abuse that typify Barbara’s regime. They cling to their jobs like shipwrecked mariners on an upturned hull, floating in a sea that knows only doldrums and tsunamis.
ISIS (IT Security and Insurance Solutions) is a computer insurance and claims company. If a customer has an insured computer that happens to be damaged, ISIS arrange collection of the injured unit, assess it, and then repair or, if necessary, replace with a new computer, on a ‘like-for-like’ basis. This ‘like-for-like’ phrase in the small print is crucial – ISIS buy cheap desktops, laptops and handhelds in bulk and their interpretation of ‘like-for-like’ is identical in terms of specification, but not necessarily build quality. So customers claiming for damage to their top-of-the-range Mac would, often as not, have their unit replaced with a top-of-the-range cheap Chinese import. The worst part of it is that ISIS are making such a considerable amount of money by selling second-hand, very expensive repaired computers, through their sister company 2PC, that the workshop pretty much writes off any nice-looking piece of hardware that comes their way, regardless of the issue. Combine this with the marathon periods customers tend to spend on hold (listening to a never-ending loop of Pachelbel, broken up by a deeply sincere, sexy female voice telling them how important their call is to ISIS) and you can pretty much guarantee that spending a day working at ISIS will lead to exposure to emotions such as simmering rage, hysterical laughter, abject despair and utter apathy. It is bathed in the light of this particular emotional spectrum that Donnie seems to shine.
The clock says 10.51am. This is the slowest that time has ever been. This is like watching paint dry, through the heightened mental acuity of a car accident. She has been temping at ISIS for almost two weeks and cannot afford to walk out of another job. The rain grows in intensity for a moment against the windowpanes that look out over the damp streets leading towards Monument, the swollen Thames and the newly completed Shard. Beyond that, the puddled, potholed streets, their gasping drains struggling to swallow London’s rapid runoff, lead past Southwark Park and finally to home and sanity, where the majority of her housemates are doubtless still curled up asleep in their warm pits. She looks at her Lycra cycling shorts, still dripping on the radiator behind her workstation. They are black with an indigo stripe and have a padded cushion sewn into the lining of the crotch for extra comfort. Her desire to tear off her hideous uniform – an orange shirt with a little Egyptian-style ‘ISIS’ logo and a brown skirt – pull on her clammy damp cycling gear and leave is almost irresistible.
She checks her phone; still no text from Tem. Did he say he had meetings this morning? His job seems to be becoming increasingly demanding and the work trips overseas that are looming on the horizon are casting an even bigger shadow on their already troubled relationship.
The timer flips to 1 hour and 03 minutes. This is bad. The timer on the big screens monitors the average waiting time that customers who have phoned up ISIS have been kept on hold. When it reaches the 1 hour mark, one of two bad things is likely to happen: if Barbara notices, she will go apoplectic, unleashing the full force of her fury on the already beleaguered temps; if Donnie notices, he will employ his ‘Vertical Suplex’ move, whereby he answers and hangs up on the longest waiting clients so quickly that his fingers almost blur, until the average waiting time gets down to about twenty minutes, sowing the seeds of wrath in a block of their clients, who were doubtless already seething. Either way, when that timer hits the hour mark, people start sweating.
*
The clock says 10.55am. It hadn’t been a particularly bad argument last night, by their standards, but there was something about Tem’s reaction to her accusations that was more worrying than his anger. He just seemed to go limp, like there was no fight left in him. She’d never seen him look so tired and sad. Maybe she should text him.
“WHAT?”
“Oh hi, I’ve got Mrs Andrews on the line, ref: 230001476, who was hoping for an update on her damaged desktop, which –”
“MAKE?”
“It’s a Dell.”
“MODEL?”
“She’s not sure. Her cat knocked a glass of water –”
“IT’S FUCKED.”
&n
bsp; “OK, shall I tell her that we’ll be replacing –”
“NOT MY DEPARTMENT.”
The line goes dead. As a temp, she’s not authorised to issue replacements so, according to the company rules, she now has to wait until one of the permanent staff is free and pass the customer over to them. At that very moment she sees Donnie finish his call, check the board, check Barbara’s empty desk and, without a moment’s hesitation, answer and hang up on 32 callers in less than 30 seconds. He stands up and, sweeping his hair back, he cries:
“This ain’t no garden party, brother; this is wrestling, where only the strongest survive. Woooooo.”
She takes off her headset and nips over to his desk, putting on her best dizzy blond attitude.
“Donnie, you are so crazy!”
“That’s how we roll, sweet cheeks.”
“Great. Um, Donnie, I’ve got a massive favour to ask.”
“Ask away.”
“I’ve got this nice old lady on the line whose unit’s a write off and she just needs a replacement issuing. Shouldn’t take a second and I’m not authorised to do it, so I was wondering…”