This was a hip movie when I was a student but probably not many people would remember it these days. It was also written by one of my favourite writers, Hanif Kureshi. It made being in a North London laundrette something you could feel good about.
When you think of laundromats you think of student days. You think of late nights and weekends spent watching the blur of jeans and t shirts. But I am middle aged. But still in possession of a broken front loader. Its breaking started with a difference to the quality of the sound of the spin before it gave up with a belly full and spewed it out undigested, wet and heavy. It worked again once more on gentle spin, then after that died completely. Not even a spray of WD 40 to the door catch did a thing. Now it is a block of useless heavy machinery in our bathroom – waiting for the next bring out your dead.
I go to a laundrette to find it no longer offers self serve. Probably haven’t operated that way for three years – too much vandalism, says the woman taking a delivery of business shirts from the arms of a customer, as I look searchingly around the room at the silent, disused washers with piles of named packaged clothes upon each one. I know I will not want to pay her to wash my pile of dirty laundry, but I ask – out of interest. Looks like two loads, she says. Thirty six dollars.
She directs me to another laundromat I had never noticed, but I drive on by when I see it has steps. I know one without steps. It is twenty minutes away, but the drive is familiar and never feels long. Down roads that I once peddled my bike with a transistor strapped to the handlebars. Afternoon Delight on the radio, a White Knight slowly dissolving in my mouth, as I ride the bitumen in the hot sun. I never tire of these streets. The smell of them.
The laundromat is called a laundrobar, but of course has no bar. I expect students. No one is there. One machine is in use – all the others are vacant and free with their lids up saying come feed me. It is five dollars for a load and two machines are labelled as taking both $2 and $1 coins. I figure they are the new machines and so use them although they all look identical. I imagine developing a rapport with a machine and wanting to come back to this particular one. Like the favourite seat on a bus, on the train, in the cinema. Such a creature of habit.
A small Indian man enters and asks me about self serve dry cleaning. I say I have never heard of that. It is very expensive otherwise, he says. Yes I imagine. He wears a checked woollen scarf tied around his neck despite the fact it is nearly forty outside. The drier makes the laundrette hot too and I wonder what mental illness he might have to ask about dry cleaning and be wearing a scarf in this heat. I decide to tell him how the normal washing process happens in case his choice of words was incorrect and he really just wants to do a regular wash. He listens to me drone on about how to use a washer and a drier and then says politely yes so No dry cleaning here and turns and walks away.
I think of the laundrettes I have used. The time spent watching clothes fall about themselves in a drier. It is dead time. But still beautiful. They appear to dance, but be boneless too. All flesh and jiggle. I am distracted by my phone, but stop myself scrolling through Facebook and instead watch the clothes do their disco in the machine. There are the clothes of a partner and a son in there. Spinning. I fold underpants, not mine. I think how in my youth it was always just my stuff. The regretful pang at a loved t-shirt shrunk by the intense heat of the drier. Not responsible for anyone but myself. How easy it is to care for yourself. When you are one.
the chook house 