This is a short story. It is fiction.
You start the shutdown at half eleven, because the machines take twenty minutes to finish whatever they are pretending to still be doing and because you have learned not to start it at quarter to.
The order is fixed. Driers first, back to front, so the warm air goes out of the room while you still have work to do in it and you are not standing in the cold at the end. Then the soap dispenser, which needs the key you keep separately because you lost the other one in your first month and never admitted it. Then the float, counted twice. Then the mop.
You like this part. You would not say so out loud, because it is a launderette on the Hanley Road and there is nothing to be romantic about, but the hour between half eleven and half twelve is the only hour of the day that belongs to you, and it is quiet, and everything in it can be finished.
Tonight there is one drier still going.
Number nine, the one that runs hot. Inside it a single shirt is turning over and over, blue, going up the drum and falling back, on its own, like a fish that has given up.
The man is in the plastic chair by the window with his coat still on and his hands in his pockets. He has been there since about ten. You had assumed a full load.
You keep mopping, because it is not your business, and because you have worked here long enough to know that people come in here at eleven at night for reasons that have very little to do with laundry, and the correct thing is to let them.
At ten to twelve the drier stops. He does not move.
You wring the mop out and put it in the corner and you say, without looking up, that you close at midnight but there is no hurry.
He says thank you. Then he says, in the voice of a man producing a fact rather than a complaint, that it is a job interview in the morning and that the shirt is the only one, and that he could not get it dry in the flat because the flat is damp, and that he had not wanted to turn up to the interview in a shirt that smelled of the flat.
You look at the shirt through the round glass door. It is a perfectly ordinary blue shirt.
You go into the back and you get the iron, which is not for customers and which the owner would have something to say about, and you set up the board by the folding table and you plug it in.
He starts to say something and you tell him it needs five minutes to heat up, which is not really an answer, and he stops.
You do the collar first, then the yoke, then the sleeves, because that is the order and you are not going to do it badly. He stands slightly to one side and watches, and neither of you says anything, and the only sound is the iron and the rain on the window and a bus going past with nobody on it.
It comes up well. It is a cheap shirt and it comes up well anyway, which is a thing about cheap shirts that people do not expect.
You put it on a hanger from the box under the counter and you give it to him, and he takes it with both hands, and says thank you again, in the same flat voice, which you understand.
At the door he turns round and asks what time you open.
Seven, you say.
He nods as though this is important information and goes out into the rain holding the hanger up above his shoulder to keep the shirt off his coat.
You unplug the iron. You put the board back. You count the float again because you have lost your place, and it comes out the same as the first time, and you turn off the lights in the order you always turn them off, back to front, and you pull the shutter down.
It is twelve minutes past midnight, which is late, and you do not mind.
Nobody in this story says anything about kindness, which is the only way the scene survives being written down.
For another story set in the last hour of a shift, The lamp room. For one about a route taken deliberately slowly, The long way round.
Join the discussion