The Launderette

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a washing machine that hates you personally." — Prof. Ivo Strand, Domestic Appliances and the Fall of Rome (privately printed, unread)

There are those who will tell you that the universe is a vast and ordered machine, ticking along on cosmic rails toward some great and terrible purpose. These people have clearly never used the launderette on Cobb Street, where the dryers ran on a philosophy of pure spite and machine number four had, on at least three occasions, produced socks that were not the socks you put in.

Desmond Pilbeam was not a man built for destiny. He was, by trade, a man who repaired accordions that nobody played and, by temperament, a man who preferred not to be looked at directly. He had come to the launderette on a Tuesday, as he did every Tuesday, with one bag of washing and no ambition beyond getting it done before the football results, and he would later reflect, at length, and to anyone who'd listen, which by that point was almost no one, that this was precisely the sort of week that ought to have known better than to start on a Tuesday at all.

It was Ethel Grigson who noticed it first. Ethel had spent forty-one years perfecting a working knowledge of static cling so total, so encyclopaedic, that she had once been consulted, unofficially and against everyone's better judgement, by a man from the council about a fault in the electrics of the town hall. She was, by any reasonable measure, wasted on laundry. She was about to become considerably less wasted.

"Des," she said, in the tone of a woman who had found something in the lint trap that oughtn't be there. "Des, come and look at this."

What Des found, upon looking, was a sock. An ordinary sock, wool-blend, size nine, save for the fact that it was glowing very slightly and had begun — with the patient, unhurried confidence of something that had all the time in the world — to hum the opening bars of a tune Des didn't recognise but which nonetheless made the hairs on his arms stand up in a manner he associated with thunderstorms and unpaid bills.

"That's not right," said Des, who had a gift for understatement he would come to rely on heavily in the weeks ahead.

"No," agreed Ethel. "It's not."

Neither of them moved to touch it. This turned out, on reflection, to have been the single most sensible decision either of them made for some time.

Des picked up the sock using a pair of tongs he kept for retrieving things from the tumble dryer that had gone in as one item and come out as several, and this, in itself, tells you a great deal about the sort of launderette this was.

"Put it in a bag," said Ethel.

"What sort of bag?"

"A good strong one. Not a bread bag. This isn't a bread bag sort of problem."

Des did not ask what sort of problem it was, on the grounds that he suspected the answer would only make things worse, and went instead to fetch one of the sturdy blue bags kept behind the counter for customers who'd underestimated how much washing they actually owned. The sock, once bagged, continued to hum, now working its way, with what Des could only describe as smugness, into something with a chorus.

It was at this point that Cyril Nunn came in.

Cyril Nunn ran the launderette in the sense that he owned the building, collected the takings, and had once, memorably, been unable to explain how a washing machine worked to a class of visiting schoolchildren without using the phrase "and then the magic happens" four separate times. He was not, by his own frequent admission, a details man. He was, however, extremely fond of rules, in the manner of men who have found that rules save them the trouble of thinking, and the first thing he said upon entering was:

"No singing in the launderette. It's on the sign."

"It's not singing," said Ethel. "It's a sock."

Cyril considered this. He had a way of considering things that involved a great deal of frowning and very little actual progress, and after a moment he said, with the air of a man laying down a ruling from which there could be no appeal, "Well, it can't sing if it's a sock. Socks don't have the — " he waved a hand vaguely at his own throat — "the apparatus."

"Tell it that," said Des, holding up the bag, from which the sock had now progressed to something with what might generously be called a bridge.

Cyril did not tell it that. Cyril, instead, did what several generations of Nunns before him had done when faced with a problem that refused to fit inside a sign: he went to put the kettle on, on the grounds that most problems, given enough tea, eventually solved themselves or else became somebody else's.

This particular problem had no intention of doing either.

The sock had, by this point, stopped bothering with anything so restrained as a tune. What emerged from the bag now was less a hum than a growl, the sort of noise you'd associate with something ancient and displeased being woken up several centuries early and by the wrong sort of person. Ethel would later describe it as "Cthulhu with a head cold," which wasn't quite right, but nobody present was in a position to offer a better comparison, and so it stuck.

The bag itself had taken up a rhythmic, convulsive jerking, of the kind Des associated unhappily with the tumble dryer on a Sunday, and which he now understood to be a considerably worse omen in a bag than in a dryer.

"Where's Cyril?" said Ethel, in a voice that suggested she already knew the answer and resented it.

Cyril, as it turned out, was in the tea room, where a man of his convictions could generally be relied upon to retreat the moment a problem grew louder than the kettle. His voice carried through regardless, thin and put-upon. "I said no singing. It's on the sign."

"It's not singing, Cyril, it's furious," Ethel called back, which struck Des, even at the time, as an oddly precise thing to call a sock.

It was somewhere around the second verse , if verse is the word, and Des was no longer confident that it was, that the door gave its usual apologetic ping, and a young man came in dressed entirely in black, with the general bearing of someone who had once been told he had a nice smile and had spent the years since making sure nobody ever found out.

He stopped. He listened. And then, to the very great surprise of everyone except possibly the sock, he began to nod along, with the private, satisfied rhythm of a man hearing a favourite song at a party he wasn't expecting to find one at.

"There it is," he said, to no one in particular. "Get in."

"Is this," said Ethel, holding up the bag at arm's length, "yours?"

"Yeah, that's my banger, that." He said banger the way other men said amen , a small word doing a great deal of religious work, and Des would notice, over the course of the next unsettling minute, that he said it roughly every third sentence, regardless of whether a banger was actually under discussion.

"It's a sock," said Des.

"Yeah, and it's a banger. Both things. I was at Trauma Concept Wednesday, front row, proper banger of a set, and I must've left me sock behind, must've come off in the pit, know what I mean, banger of a pit an' all —" and here he took the bag from Ethel's unresisting hand, reached in without apparent concern, and lifted out the sock, which fell instantly, sulkily silent, the moment it touched his fingers, as though it had only ever been putting on a show for an audience of one.

"Cheers for that," he said, already halfway to the door. "Save us buying another pair."

The bell pinged. He was gone. The launderette, robbed of its growling accompaniment, seemed unnaturally quiet, in the specific way rooms go quiet after something has stopped that you hadn't fully registered as a noise until it wasn't one any more.

Cyril emerged from the tea room at exactly the point it was safe to do so, which was a skill of his, honed over many years. "We'll be charging extra," he announced, "for anyone bringing in that sort of washing."

Ethel didn't answer. She was looking at the tongs, the good tongs, the tumble-dryer tongs, which Des had left resting on the counter, and which had, in the last minute or so, become very faintly, very quietly warm.

She decided, on the whole, not to mention it.