‘…at the laundrette’
‘…at the laundrette’
‘…at the laundrette’
The start of the sentences on the sign hanging next to the door had worn out, the only distinguishable parts left simply read –
‘…at the laundrette’
Whatever guidance the faded old sign provided had been lost to time. The yellowing baby-blue sheet had melted into the brickwork behind it, smearing the message out of understanding against the rough, red surface. The font that remained was severe and blocky. Tim felt safe to assume it was a list of demands.
A sudden grave image of Tutankhamun’s tomb flashed before his eyes. Tim wondered if the accursed fellows that cracked its doors had found a similar, indecipherable warning scrawled in the sand-worn hieroglyphs. Rain clattered across the concrete all around Tim, hissing in his ears. He had been trudging around this bleak, dreary and wet little town with his increasingly water-laden suitcase, praying to any good God above or merciful one below that this boring slice of the world even had such a place. Now that he stood before it, weary and sodden, Tim had to remind himself that God works in mysterious ways, the devil doesn’t care, and next time he should pray to a better travel insurance company.
Grit caked the outside surface of the windows while steam clung to the inside, hiding its secrets from Tim’s prying eyes in a grey haze. Tim’s shoulder ached. His shirt squelched. His hand grasped the stiff metal handle of the door and pushed it open.
Tim struggled to accept what he was seeing at first and momentarily convinced himself that he was dead. That he had drowned out there, before ever coming in, or that he had been hit by a stray delivery truck while cleaning his glasses on the street. He felt as if he had just walked through a door into another dimension. The small, sad and musty looking storefront couldn’t possibly have led him here. He had expected to find himself in a dimly lit and mothballed relic of a forlorn time, but what he had waddled into was…pleasant.
The lights were bright but not starkly fluorescent, they sat just high enough to provide ample ambient lighting without straining the eye, the subtle floral scent wafting from places unseen was both natural and unobtrusive, there were no chemical flairs to its airs. The machinery gleamed, blinking, reflective chrome and steel in line formations on polished display, poised for purpose and duty.
Tim had found himself so distracted by the unearthly cleanliness of the the crisp white tiles on the floor to notice an older, silver-haired gentleman in a smoking jacket waving at him from the counter a few dozen feet away.
“Good morning!” The man called, his voice floating casually through the space.
Tim shook himself and hurriedly returned the wave with an awkward smile. His clothes had taken on so much water he felt weighed down, the mortifyingly slow wet stomp across the wide room to the counter felt like an eternity.
“New in town?” the man asked.
“Yes, quite new” Tim mumbled nervously.
The clerk gripped the countertop and craned his neck over the counter to look at the puddle hastily gathering underneath Tim’s suitcase, casting a quick sideways glance at Tim.
“From across the pond, huh?” He asked.
The silver-haired clerk with the warm, baritone voice had turned Tim’s luck around, offering to take care of his whole wardrobe in the commercial machines in the back, for a very reasonable fee. He had even given him a change of clothes from the lost and found before telling him to get comfortable,
“You’ll be bone dry by four”
Tim had picked a corner at the back of the room to roost in. The tight pink t-shirt and baggy denim shorts felt incredible.
As time ticked by, other patrons begun filing through the doors, choosing their weapons and situating at the tables surrounding. Tim wondered what it was the sign had been trying to tell him.
A huge, muscled, behemoth of a man in a skin-tight white vest had chosen a machine near where Tim waited, he was doing bicep curls with chunky steel dumbbells and playing heavy metal from a boombox.
A short, stout man with a large bushel of frizzy ginger hair in the next row was throwing hunks of raw chicken in the air, where they were met by the hungry mouth of his pet iguana.
The silver-haired clerk poured shots of tequila for two splendidly outfitted luchadores at the counter.
Thick plumes of blue-grey smoke were snaking and swirling around the light fixtures from the table of men playing poker, cigars in lip.
At the far end of the room, a shaolin monk, orange robes jostling gently, sat cross-legged, meditating, on top of a rumbling tumble-dryer, next to him a confused looking man with an arrow through his head stood with his hands on his hips, looking back and forth in befuddlement.
Every few minutes, someone would swing open the bathroom door and techno music flooded the laundrette for a few fleeting seconds before it ziffed shut.
Now and then, a trapdoor in the ceiling behind the counter would pop open, upon which a large scaly tentacle would insidiously slither from spaces above to rifle around in the cash register. No one cared.
Tim was engrossed in a flash-theatre production of Les Misérables, put on by a cast of pirates at the back of the room, when the bell above the entrance loudly clanged.
Silence fell over the room with a records skip. There was a loud wet slap as a hunk of chicken chunked into the ground, the iguana, surprised, staring, mouth agape.
A loud resonating thwack rung out as the muscled behemoth dropped his weights and rose to his giant feet to angrily switch off his boombox.
Poker chips fell like rain to the tiles as the table of cigar aficionados wrestled their guts out from beneath its rim.
Techno flooded the room for a final time, before the only thing left floating in the awkward silence was the anticipated cracking of luchador necks and knuckles.
The silver-haired clerk in the smoking jacket was nowhere to be seen.
Tim examined the two men who had soured the air.
The first was a decidedly average and respectable looking man in a black uniform, with a shiny badge on his lapel. The other, was a meagre and frail little man in a black suit and tie, with a thick black ledger clutched tightly under his arm.
The shaolin monk flew, in a forward-flip launched from the tumble-dryer, soaring into the air like an eagle, in an arc, to land gracefully on his feet.
He raised his fist to the men, rage shaking his frame.
“Can’t you read the fucking sign!?”
Life, and Other Stuff 
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