The Laundry Basket
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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. Matador® 9 Priory Business Park Kibworth Beauchamp Leicestershire LE8 0RX, UK Tel: (+44) 116 279 2299 Fax: (+44) 116 279 2277 Email: [email protected] Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador https://twitter.com/GMCLEWIS ISBN 978 1783066 919 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Matador® is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd Converted to eBook by EasyEPUB Dedicated to the members of the Sanford Housing Co-op 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 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.