In the small hours, Greg likes to put the machines on. When there’s no one using whichever of the Scrub Club branches he happens to be visiting, he sticks all the washers on for a spin, all the driers on a fast tumble. Their downtime health check, he calls it. You can tell a lot from the vibration of a machine running without a load. Sort a balance issue before it gets out of hand. Predict when a bearing is on the way out. Mostly, though, he likes to listen to them. Their grinding grumble. The white noise of hot air and draining water. It’s familiar. Companionable.
It can get too quiet in these places late at night.
On this wet October Wednesday, Greg’s in the Scrub Club on Cannon Row, white-tacking up the new Laundry Tips posters. Most of them—like this nine-point clip-art extravaganza on separating your colours—are insultingly basic, but Anthony Timperly wants Team Scrub Club to be seen to be adding value at every opportunity.
Anthony Timperly is a wanker. You’d have to be to come up with the idea of operating a launderette chain like a subscription gym. Offer the customers a monthly fee that sounds reasonable until you tot it up and see that it’s double what your average singleton actually spends on laundry. In Greg’s view, only the stupid or the lazy would consider taking out one of Anthony’s subscriptions but apparently enough people are. The business isn’t just proving viable, it’s shutting the traditional shops down. It’s the convenience. All you need is to remember your pin code for the door and the place is yours to use. If you forget your detergent there’s a vending machine but that’s the only additional expense.
No skin off his nose if folks have money to burn. It keeps him in a job.
The shops are open twenty four hours, allowing members to come and go at all times, but only staffed up to nine pm. After that, there’s Greg, who tours all eight premises during his shift and carries the on-call mobile in his pocket in case of emergencies. Part night manager, part maintenance man, his role doesn’t really have a proper description, but Greg grafts at it and Anthony Timperly appreciates his dedication. You’re a proper night owl, Timperly told him once in that faux fatherly manner of his. Not everyone is. We’re lucky to have you.
The shops’ customers come in waves. Mostly students during the day, office types in the evening, and then it’s a free-for-all of shift workers, insomniacs and others who for whatever reason find themselves living in the margins. Greg doesn’t ask. Their business is their own. No-one’s in right now, however, so Greg is free to enjoy the machines’ rumble and roll while he breaks out the posters and the white tack, and goes around the walls, replacing old with new. The ceiling spotlights gloss the laminated sheets with an unpleasant liquid sheen. Daylight White they’re supposed to be, but who the fuck might want ‘daylight’ this harsh in their homes was a mystery to Greg until he’d asked Janice to order in replacement stock. No one would. That’s why the migraine-inducing bastards are, like everything else in the Scrub Club world, so bloody cheap.
Greg closes his eyes for a moment’s respite. He can’t relax tonight and it’s not just the lights. There’s something off in one of the washers. A distinctive tap and rattle. He sighs. It isn’t unusual for a forgotten coin to escape from a pocket or a button to unravel from its stitching, but foreign objects can do proper damage if they find their way into the workings, and it isn’t like these machines are leased with a maintenance contract. They were end-of-life when Timperly picked them up and Greg, with his whole six months experience as a domestic service engineer for an online retailer, is the only one keeping them going now.
Greg works his way along the row, peering through the portholes, trying to work out which machine it’s in. He can’t tell. The sound, which has neither the aggressiveness of metal nor the flimsiness of plastic, seems to emanate from first one machine then the next, passing from drum to drum like a conjuror’s trick. Frustrated, he turns them off one by one until the noise stops and he is able at last to identify the culprit. Reaching inside, Greg slowly spins the hot drum but feels nothing that shouldn’t be there. He fumbles for the penlight on his keyring and is just about to stick his head inside for a visual inspection when he hears the beep of the laundrette’s entrance.
Turning, he sees a student wrestling a large gym bag through the inner door. His first thought is that the lass is in need of a decent meal, but really it wouldn’t be inaccurate to describe her as haggard. All bones, his mother would have said. Her eyes are coffee-ring shadows above pronounced cheekbones, her bleached hair messily gathered under a red knitted hat. She’s wearing a jumble of clothes—a khaki jacket over a lamb-white Arran sweater and pale blue pyjama bottoms patterned with penguins—hinting possibly that her ensemble has been chosen by dint of these being the last clean things she owns.
When she sees Greg, she hesitates for a second before coming fully into the shop and depositing her bag at the far end of the bench. Greg understands the hesitation. At this time of night, any lass would be wary of being alone with an older bloke, even one wearing the laundrette’s branded blue polo shirt. These aren’t big units and regardless of the surveillance cameras—there for everyone’s safety—he’s never comfortable when such situations arise either. He offers her a friendly smile and taps the washer with his penlight.
“This one’s out of order, mate,” he says. “I’m only just getting started on it and but it’s looking like it’ll need a part, so I’ll have to pop over to one of the other shops. You’ll be glad to be left in peace to get your washing done, eh?” The lass doesn’t say anything and he wonders if perhaps she’s foreign. More and more of them are these days. “So, yeah, I’ll be away for an hour maybe,” he adds, shrugging on his jacket. He takes her silence for a sign that she’s got the gist at least. He feels her eyes on him as he taps out.
The street is empty. It’s deep into autumn now and a greasy drizzle makes the pavements and parked cars slug-trail shiny. Greg glances through the laundrette window and watches the lass tossing clothes into one of the washers. Everything at once: leggings, tee shirts, bras and pants, cottons and woollens, whites and colours. No pocket check or nothing. A laundry disaster in the making. He considers popping back in to point out the posters but knows that’ll just come across as creepy. He’s done the decent thing with his white lie about the spare part. Best to let her get on with it now.
The question is what’s he going to do for the next hour? He really doesn’t want to head along early to his next port of call. It’d be a pain to have to come all the way back later. He could sit in the Scrub Club van but it’s properly freezing tonight. He looks along the curving Georgian avenue of Cannon Row. Unseen at the end, the larger thoroughfare of Aston Road will be hosting what scant nightlife is still to be found in this part of the city. Over the far off rumble of taxis and buses, Greg can make out loutish shouting from the direction of the late-licence places down by the crossroads, transformed across the distance into echoing hoots and barks. There’s an all-night McDonald’s up there too. It’ll be full of dickheads but it’s somewhere to pass the time.
He wakes his phone while he walks. It buzzes petulantly and vomits up notifications. Among the social media spatter, there’s a missed call from Sandy at gone midnight, an email from her too, and a rare Facebook message from her chippy sister, Claire. Greg’s heart lurches as he automatically pictures the late night Zoom witchery that must have taken place to result in this. The wine and wheedling. The same old, recurring subject. But then he checks himself for jumping to conclusions. Sandy never calls him on shift unless it’s an emergency. Could be their mum’s had a fall again. Could be proper serious. Nervously, he taps up the voicemail and puts the phone to his ear. Her voice is faint and fuzzy. Clarity comes and goes in waves.
Sorry for calling you at work, babe, but we never have the chance to talk lately. We’ve let ourselves get out of synch, haven’t we? It’s just I’ve been thinking again . . . It’ll be fifteen years next month. I’m not saying we should be over it. God knows I’ll never get over it, and I do know how badly shook you still are, deep down . . . But, babe, we have to move on eventually. And at our age we’re running out of time. Claire says . . .
I’ve put it all in an email. I thought, maybe . . . Maybe . . . ?
Dazed at having his initial assumption proved after all, Greg still has the phone pressed to his ear when he reaches Aston Road. His fingers are numbing from the cold. Fumbling, he presses 3 to delete the voicemail. Does the same with the email and his sister-in-law’s message. He’s tempted to unfriend her completely. They’ve never got on, have they? Three taxis speed along the road, a gleaming black convoy. Snapshot glimpses of faces, tired, happy, drunk, hurrying home to their families.
Greg is shivering by the time he gets to McDonalds and spends the first ten minutes after he gets his coffee with his hands cupped around it. He’s just taking his first sip when the doors admit a knot of drunken clubbers, a squall of bare flesh, glitter and aggression. The old game of hunters and willing, gaudy prey. He shrinks into his hard plastic corner and tries to block out their noise.
He drinks his coffee. It’s got a pleasant, mellow flavour. He prefers it weak, with the odd taint that comes from adding UHT milk. Shit coffee, Sandy always calls his brew, but Greg’d lived off that stuff when he was a haulier haunting the country’s late night truck stops, and he still finds its insipidness oddly comforting. This, by his lights, is the fancy stuff, and he never feels he deserves it.
After his hour is up, he heads back. The temperature has dropped and the pavement is sparkling with ice. Greg hopes the student down at Cannon Row won’t have far to go to get home. He’d offer her a lift in the van, but . . . nah, you can’t these days, can you? When he gets back to the laundrette, she’s already gone anyway.
At least he has the place to himself again. The doors of the machines are all neatly shut and it takes a second to remember which one he heard the noise from earlier. His penlight flares off the chrome trim as he crouches, opens it and looks inside. He can see nothing. He rolls the drum. It’s silent. He probes further, digging his fingers into the pliant gasket. Feeling around . . . until he finds it.
A tooth. Creamy and long. Squared-off edge tapering to intact root. Clean, like something you’d see in a museum. Like something that has been well preserved. Greg rolls the tooth in his palm, wondering what the hell he’s supposed to do with it. There’s a lost property locker up at the Chapel Square branch, but that’s for phones and bank cards and odd socks that no one ever bothers to claim. But a tooth? He can’t just throw it away. It doesn’t seem right. Greg gets a wad of white tack from the back, balls it and gently presses the tooth into it. It feels like something a conservator might do. Or a mortician. A fucking tooth though? He’s only glad that wee lass didn’t find it. The last thing Scrub Club needs is customers finding body parts.
And the last thing Greg needs is to lose this job.
They were going to be late home. He’d promised they’d be back by five and it was already gone half past. Dinner would be spoiled. San would be quietly angry, and her parents quietly judgemental. Greg glanced over at Layla, trying again to work out what had made her kick off. She’d caused a fuss when the end of their pool time was called, wanting to stay in the water even though she knew the rules. When the time was up, everyone with the blue wristbands had to get out together. The girls, the boys, the parents. She usually obeyed without complaint, so what made today different? Parenting, he’d found, was full of doubts and questions of this sort. A constant state of anxiety. And then, once he’d finally managed to cajole her into the changing rooms, she’d refused to let him dry her hair. Full on tears and tantrums. Now she hunkered in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead through the letterbox he’d scraped in the frosty windscreen. She was still too small for the adult seatbelt. He ought to have made her sit in her car seat, but he hadn’t had the energy for another round of dramas. Bars of sodium orange rolled across her pinched features and Greg felt a surge of love and despair so sharp it lanced his heart like lightning.
Greg finds four more teeth over the next few nights. Two molars, a pre-molar, another incisor. All of them perfectly preserved. Three of them in the same washer as the first, one in the machine next to it. Each of them he deftly presses into the ball of white tack, which is a noticeable presence in his coat pocket now. A weight, like a secret.
Instinctively, he doesn’t tell anyone about the teeth. Not Anthony Timperly, nor Janice in the office. Not even Sandy. Once, she’d have been intrigued, delighting in the weirdness of these finds, maybe even claiming the teeth to make grisly Halloween decorations—once a goth, right?—but now isn’t the time. Now is one of the brief plateaus in the slow rebuilding of their lives where she feels like things are going to be all right, and fucking Claire—with her huge house and her Insta dedicated to showing off her three perfect cherubs—has wasted no time in getting in there. Greg overheard them talking while he cooked dinner a few nights ago. It’s your right, San, Claire’d said in a furious non-whisper. Sandy had stood her ground. It’s got to be right for both of us, though, she’d replied, but Greg could tell she’d been caving.
Yeah. It’s definitely been coming, hasn’t it? He’s been pretending not to see it, but the signs were there broad as daylight. He’s always been bad for distancing himself from uncomfortable truths. The night of that first tooth, Sandy had set her alarm for him coming off shift. She’s had a lot of stress at work lately, staying late more often than not, and the few hours of overlap in the evenings before Greg goes out to his own job are often curdled by exhaustion. He’s taken to sleeping in the spare room, slipping in quietly when he gets home and kipping down before she stirs. He tells her he doesn’t mind, that he just wants her to get all the rest she can. But that morning she was waiting in the kitchen, dressed and made up, even though she wasn’t due to leave for another two hours. Greg, she’d said. I really think it’s time. And there was no getting out of it. He’d sat and held her smooth, warm hand and nodded and smiled and said, If you’re sure. If you’re really sure.
They’d agreed to discuss things more fully that evening. Plan for it, how it would fit into their lives, what adjustments they’d have to make. But that night she’d worked late again and the next he’d had to answer an emergency call. And so it would go on as it always did. The reasons piling up. Evidence, he’ll gently suggest in perhaps a week or two from now, that maybe now isn’t quite the right moment after all. They’re still in their thirties for God’s sake. There’s plenty of time.
Greg happens to be in the Cannon Row shop when the student returns. This time it’s well after two in the morning and so cold that the front window is decorated with frost flowers. He’s got the condenser unit of one of the driers out on the bench and is patiently cleaning the vents.
“Alright, mate?” he says, trying to keep it light. “I’m in the middle of a job here but if you want to use the machines down the other end, I’ll keep out of your way.”
The lass blinks owlishly. Though she still looks haggard—rather than all bones, he is struck now with the thought that there’s not enough bone to her, that maybe she has a habit that’s eating her away from the inside—she manages a tired, tight-lipped smile. But as she unzips her bag and fills the machine with her bits and bobs, Greg can’t shake the knowledge that she must be uncomfortable in his presence. He’s always hated his gender for that. How they’ve made it such a shit world for lasses to grow up in. Silence pools between them like gelid water. He goes back to the condenser, inserting the thin brush between the vanes to hoik out the worst of the compacted grey fluff.
“My wife’s decided it’s time to start a family,” he blurts. Fuck, that’s the last thing he wants to talk about but maybe it’ll set the student’s mind at rest to know he’s married and talking about having kids. Reduce the perceived threat level, although he’s well aware that those things mean nothing of the sort. “I mean,” he continues, “I want to, you know. I’m just a bit wary.” He forces a laugh, as if he’s being stupid. Out of the corner of his eye he sees her select the quick wash cycle then glance over and nod and, under the rush of the infill, he thinks he hears a quiet, non-committal mm-hmm, which he takes to be a sign that she’s okay with conversation.
As a rule he doesn’t talk to the customers but, once he’s started, he finds it easy to continue. Jesus, therapeutic even. He expands on what Sandy said the other day, and goes on to add that it’s probably just the suddenness of it that’s taken him off guard. He’d known the day would come eventually. Why the hell else were they both doing these shitty jobs, working all the hours while they have the hours to work and barely ever seeing each other, if not for saving up for the expense of it all?
Even to Greg’s ears the story he spins is full of holes, but the lass is watching the suds slosh around in her washer and just letting him talk. Companionable. Undemanding. He feels compelled to go on.
“It won’t be our first, see?” Greg says. “We had a wee girl. Layla. But she died.” The student looks over. Those big eyes sunk like wells into that almost cadaverous face, interested but uncritical. “We were too young really. Seventeen the both of us, just out of school. Planning on college like you, mate, or travelling, maybe. On a life together. Or not. Who knows when you’re that age, right? Anyway, then all those possibilities were taken away from us because we were suddenly going to be parents. Sandy’s dad wangled me an office job in the company he worked for. Her mum organised everything else. Took over, truth be told. We were just ignorant, skint teenagers and we just went along with it all. And then Layla was born, and she was perfect and beautiful. I remember thinking, maybe the only perfect and beautiful thing in this whole shitty world because every day back then there was some story or other, wasn’t there? Assaults, rapes. Some lass’s picture on the news . . . ” Greg makes himself stop. Appalled at what’s threatening to froth out from inside him. “Fuck,” he says softly. “Sorry, sorry.”
The washing machine grinds into an uncertain, stop-start oscillation but the lass just shrugs her thin shoulders and, when it becomes clear that Greg’s done, she gets her phone out. As she scrolls, the blue-white glow accentuates those unnaturally thin cheeks and the pronounced pucker of her lips. This poor girl obviously has more than enough worries without having to listen to all of Greg’s crap too.
“I’m so sorry,” he says.
The road between the town and the village was an eleven mile snake, high hedged on both sides. Not great for sight lines at the best of times let alone in freezing fog, but Greg knew the road by heart. Every turn, every straight. He should probably be taking it a bit slower, but they were so late already. He just wanted to get home.
Once the lights of town were left behind, it was like another world out there. Silent, cut off. They could almost be nowhere at all. He liked that notion.
“There was a boy.”
Her voice was small but the words were hard and brittle. He looked over, just for a second, just long enough to establish that she had actually said those words. But it was more than long enough. He was exactly a second too late to react to the oncoming lights dazzling in the fog. As the other car blared past, he twitched the wheel too hard, felt the back end of his own car slide out and in a panic overcorrected.
The next thing he knew was the tree.
It’s another two weeks before Greg sees the lass again, and by then he’s found nine more teeth. They come in clusters, rattling like pennies in a can and every one is flawless, lacking in fillings, chips, even the slightest discoloration, almost like they’ve never even been used. He knows now that these strange artefacts are not lost or accidentally left behind. They appear out of nowhere. The machines are empty and then, suddenly . . . rat-a-tata-tat-tat. No-one else has reported finding anything in the Scrub Club machines either. It’s just him.
Greg doesn’t know what it means. It’s gone beyond a quaint mystery now. He feels seen and hates that feeling, but still he keeps collecting the teeth although it feels like a burdensome duty now. An unasked for custodianship. The increasingly crowded ball of white tack stays permanently in his coat pocket, his fingers running over the enamel nuggets until they find a free spot. The more teeth he adds the more, in his mind he has begun to picture the ball as a small skull, and that is not something he wants to look at.
Sandy’s stood up to her boss and more often than not gets home for dinner now. Giving them time to relax together in their shabby living room. To chat about the normal things people chat about, to share a smile over something stupid on Instagram. To reconnect. Get back in synch, as she puts it. She’s lighter now. She laughs. Three days ago she took the afternoon off and they made love. It was awkward, and they both cried after. Later, when Greg was making his rounds, all he’d been able to think of was how warm she had been. Her skin, like there was a furnace beneath it. How much of a relief it had been to get out into the quiet cold again.
Sandy sent him another email. Just some thoughts, some dates. If they start trying now they’ll have time to renovate not just the spare room but pretty much all of their neglected little house to make everything ready for baby. And it’d be a new start for them too . . . But, yeah, just ideas. No pressure.
Sounds good to me, he’d written back, and added three x’s at the bottom. They’d reminded him of snowflakes.
Tonight there’s another Scrub Club member in the Cannon Row shop sitting near the student. Youngish guy in a donkey jacket and skinny black jeans, and with one of those haircuts that sweeps down over his eyes. They’re not together, though. They sit apart, each absorbed in their phones. Neither looks up when Greg enters. He hovers for a second then, deciding that no intercession is required, goes up the back to check the log for anything that’s been reported in the last twenty four hours. There’s not much. Someone’s mentioned a funny squeak in one of the driers but neglected to say which one. He sighs, rummages for the WD40 and sets it aside. He’s really nervous tonight, fidgety. As if sensing his mood, the Daylight White bulbs are buzzing and shivering. He tries to settle himself by reading the football results in a discarded Metro but takes none of it in.
Eventually the lad’s drier falls silent and he’s quick about scooping his steaming smalls into his chequered laundry bag and buttoning up his coat. As he keys in his pin to get out, Greg sees him glance at the lass. A sharkish flick of dead-eyed appraisal, and then he’s gone.
Greg waits a beat or two before going over. “That lad,” he says. “He didn’t bother you, did he?” The lass looks up startled, but seems to relax when she sees it’s him. She shakes her head and then scoots along the bench a little. He hesitates, and then accepts. She never speaks, he’s noticed. He wishes she’d say something, even if it’s just hello.
“Right,” he says. Suddenly it feels like he’s on a cusp. Sensing the edge of a crevasse under thin ice. “What’s going on?” He’s not sure what he means—the teeth?—or why he would expect her to have an answer. The student just smiles with her sad suture of a mouth, and for the first time he sees that she has abnormally tiny teeth. Like a child’s. Her washing machine goes into a lull and expectation trickles and pools around them.
“I loved her,” Greg whispers. “Layla. I really did.”
He nearly shits himself when a burst of violent hail shakes the frosted shop window. And again when the hail is answered by a sudden cacophony in the empty machines.
Greg crushes his eyes tight shut until it stops.
The snow started on the way to the hospital. A dissociative flurry beyond the windscreen, like static from a broken aerial connection, that patterned Layla’s face with shifting, fractured light. The white skin, the sticky black patch of hair. They’d missed the tree but the seatbelt hadn’t been able to hold her tiny frame in place during the skid. There was a greasy mark on the side window where her head had hit it.
To begin with Greg drove fast and there were a few hairy moments as they navigated towards the hospital. The worsening conditions forced him to cut their speed. Slower and slower. The dull rubberised metronome of the wipers ticked off the passing time, but nothing was louder than Layla’s breathing. Too shallow, too rapid, interspersed with plaintive, wordless murmurs.
All he could think was, what if I lose her? What if she dies and never gets to grow up to have the life she’s supposed to have?
The life any girl would have.
That thought immobilised him in the car park, as the engine cooled and the snow blanketed the windows in thick swaddling, hiding the red Accident & Emergency sign.
Some time later—he has never been able to say exactly how long—he carried her inside.
When it was all over—after he’d called Sandy and, somehow, told her the news—he’d sat in the car again. Alone this time, the x-ray clutched in his shaking fists.
The shop is in darkness. Greg’s brain’s obstinately rational explanation is that those cheap, bastard bulbs must have tripped the circuit breaker for the lighting ring. He clings to that. There is light from the street outside, but it is diffused by the window’s shroud of frost. The student, apparently unfazed by any of this, sits motionless next to him like a manikin.
“I, uh . . . ” But Greg knows that words are worthless now. He knows what he has to do, so he’d better get on with it. Clicking his penlight on, he opens the doors of the machines.
Empty.
Empty, empty, empty.
He doesn’t understand. He heard them. He has to collect the teeth and keep them safe. Keep them hidden. Instinctively, he feels in his coat pocket but the ball—the skull—is also gone. He checks his other pockets, starting to panic now. Then he feels a slender hand on his arm, and turns.
Her face is an inch from his own, and the cheeks are no longer sunken and empty. Instead they bulge and when her lips part he sees that her mouth is now crammed full of teeth. Each jaw has two overlapping rows crowded nightmarishly together. And he is reminded—how could he not be?—of the x-ray he’d been given at the hospital and had shortly afterwards burned in a lay-by bin. Thinking there was no need to horrify Sandy with the fracture and compression of Layla’s perfect little skull. And certainly no need to show her all the teeth. The baby teeth that came through when she was little . . . and the unerupted adult teeth hidden in her gums, ready for the life she would grow into. That would sparkle in moments of joy. That would clench in moments of pain that Greg would not ever have been able to save her from no matter how hard he tried.
What if, he’d said.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispers. “I only ever wanted to protect you.”
“From what?” she whispers back. Her stick thin hand cups his cheek. It is so cold. “Come on, Dad. You’re almost there.”
The Scrub Club shop floods with fizzing Daylight White light. It’s so scouringly bright, it illuminates every crevice of the place. Throws every mark, every stain, into merciless relief. And Greg, sitting in the empty shop in the small hours, cannot look away now. He stares at the foulest, the greasiest of the stains, and he stares and he stares. He stares for thirty two minutes exactly, which is the same length of time he sat in the car waiting for Layla to die.
Greg should call Sandy. He must call Sandy. But he can only sit, shaking and weeping out his remorse and self loathing.
There is no one there to comfort him apart from his mates, the machines. And the machines stay silent.
Originally published in Black Static, Issue 78/79, Spring 2021.
