The Autumn Avenue Laundrette

If you turn just off the main street, past the blaring cars and heaving crowds of students and workers during the daytime or the uncountable rainbow flashing lights of all the restaurants, bars, clubs and pubs casting petrol-like glow on the often-wet tarmac at night, you will find my business. Well, it’s not my business per se but the owner is hardly ever around. She hired me as her only worker and I was so good she didn’t need another, so to our customers, the business is my responsibility so it might as well be mine.

So you’ve turned off the main street down one of the thinner back alleys, the one with the old but not old enough cobbles that they just look outdated, the bad graffiti on the right and the good graffiti on the left. That’s the one, keep going, you should pop out on an avenue lined with both trees and concrete brutalist social housing. Don’t be afraid, the low-lying blocks of flats look rougher than they are, think of the trees.

There, do you see it? The corner of the first block you see?

That’s us, “The Autumn Avenue Laundrette“. Now, unlike the name suggests, we are actually open all year round 24/7, and to make the neighbours happy, we have kept our orange cursive lettering (sat on its white backing that I clean once a week) to a dim glow - readable to our customers but not distracting to our neighbours - this is very important.

We have twelve machines total lining the right hand wall in our compact shop, six washers on the top, six dryers on the bottom. I think they look like eyes, the washers open and glistening, the dryers closed and asleep. The way they spin and shake calms me, like a mother rocking their baby and the constant hum of garments endlessly turning warms my soul - there were never a more comforting sound.

The machines themselves are metal, worn and reliable, with rings on the washer doors like a monocle on a respectable old Victorian gentleman. The boss said she chose to paint them a pale and fresh baby blue and, minus the pockmarked chips, which were getting more common with time and use, I still very much thought that the colour brought a breath of fresh air and life with it. The walls were a gentle terracotta and the ceiling a white that had been scuffed with time. From it hung a single wire to a bulb with a small, cream, cone lampshade. It was always slightly crooked no matter what I did. I had been on at the owner to get me a new one, but she said no. I guess it had its own kind of charm, especially at night when it cast a clear circular shadow on the ceiling.

Now, when you enter through the plastic door with the frosted glass window and the letterbox, you will hear the gentle tinkling of a bell just above the inner doorframe. Don’t worry, this is just so I can greet my customers with a comforting greeting but I bet you already knew that. I try my best to be calm and collected but most importantly useful. First, I must smile the brightest of smiles (which isn’t hard because I love my job), then I ask you what it is that you want to wash and when you tell me, I can go through the cycles and types of detergents I believe would best suit your current predicament.

Across from the washers and next to the only window that towers from halfway up the wall to the very top of the ceiling stretches the bench right from one end of the laundrette to the other. It is simple in design, five long slats like a park bench without the back and coloured with a faded orange stain. I promise it’s far more comfortable than it looks. I will seat you here next to our other customers and ask you to politely wait whilst I go through the back door to retrieve the detergent and fetch a token for your machine.

The back door is wood stained a dark chocolate colour, due to age, it is starting to look a little patchy in places like the door had vitiligo; I had passed through that door so many times since starting my job here that I knew each blemish intimately and it filled me with a satisfying sense of familiarity. The door leads to the back room or the toilet or the kitchen depending on what it thinks you need at the time. The front door (if you were wondering) would take you back into the main room with the washers and dryers via the back door until your washing cycle was over.

Here, you wait for me to return from the back room and take a token - it’s a thin disc of silver stamped with falling leaves for “Autumn” - when I offer it to you. You look at it knowingly, flicking it lightly in the air with your thumb, watching it flip and flip and flip. Personally, I like running my thumbnail along the ridges of its circumference when I’m bored. I have a whole drawer full of our tokens that rattles every time I open and close it which sounds very different to the more angular sound you will hear as your specific token makes its way through the guts of your washing machine.

We walk over to your machine and you hand me your heavily stained white apron and it goes into the machine. I slam the door with a satisfying crunch - I have to, they are old machines - and then I look over at you. I can’t technically start a machine until the token has been inserted into the little slot in the bottom left-hand side. My boss has trained me well and she has said explicitly that, because I have given the customer their token, it is their job to put it in the machine, not mine. If I ever put a token in a machine myself, I have been told that that would be the end of my job and that is a fear that has been living nestled deep in my heart for the several years I have worked here.

You stare at me and I stare back, giving you a subtle nod towards the token slot.

 Insert it, I tell you with my eyes and you do.

We stand there as still as deer do in the woods when people are nearby, listening acutely as your token scrapes its way downwards behind the baby blue exterior until there is a gentle click of the door locking.

Next, I will go out of my way to check on my other customers as we wait for your cycle to start. You have taken your seat again.

We get a wide range of customers, people of all walks of life, people who are teenagers barely scraping adulthood right the way to 100 or older, men, women, rich, poor, the brightest of academics, people who spend their whole day outside shifting heavy building materials and, of course, you.

Presently, we have two others in, one machine to the left of the one that is yours and one to the right. The man to the right has had a bit of a rough time, he came in several days ago in ragged gym clothes marred with rings upon rings of crusty salt sweat stains. His clothes hung off him like rags off a scarecrow. Shoes were practically disintegrating - and they were far beyond the shade of off-white regular trainers got from a normal amount of use. His eyes popped from his skull, bags deep purple underneath, cheeks hollow and face gaunt. His thin wispy hair traversed the air like gravity didn’t exist or perhaps he’d been lucky enough to be struck by lighting and survived. When he spoke to me, I noted his teeth looked too big to fit into his face properly and when I gave him his token, his fingers looked delicate and knobbly in just the wrong way like a sick old person‘s hands.

…except he was definitely in his twenties…

It doesn’t happen often but rarely, just once in a blue moon, a customer comes in whose clothes on his person are the items to be washed and this man fell into that category. In which case, we have a protocol for that: I am to go into the back room and fetch from the drawers underneath the tokens one of our few sets of spare clothes. They matched my uniform pretty closely which was an orange dress with a white apron, brown tights and pale blue sliders to match the colours of Autumn (and the inside of the laundrette itself). We had four sizes of rusty orange T-Shirts, brown trousers and skirts, some underwear, which was always washed on our hottest most brutal washes, and a few pairs of the blue sliders.

I told him to change in the back room, which he informed me when he came back out revealed itself to be the toilet on that occasion, and when that was done, I placed his bundle of dirty laundry in the machine nearest the front door with a generous helping of detergent.

I let the man insert his token and we both watched together as the little screen with the green numbers thought really hard about how long the cycle needed to be.

It ticked to 1,488 hours, the longest I had seen so far! My mouth opened wide with an excited grin as I saw it. I turned to look back at the man to see his expression. It was… sad.

No worries, I told him, I would look after him day and night to the best of my ability!

And he has been here ever since, unable to exercise too much, glumly eating all the food and drink I make for him.

After the second week he even started talking to one of our other customers.

I tell this all to you.

He is sat right behind you, looking better than ever after his first three weeks, his cheeks were starting to fill out, eyes beginning to light up with the energy he had allowed his body to have.

You sit.

I apologise, I have been talking too long.

The woman sat to your left has streaky dyed blonde hair, fringe cut straight across her forehead bold and blunt. You can see the caked mascara clawing its way upwards beyond the furthest reaching hairs of her fringe. Underneath, smudged eyeliner gives the impression of a ghost of a black eye and her foundation, too bright orange, matches the walls. Her skirt is too tight and short, shirt buttons bulging where she purposely bought a size too small for her chest. Tall stiletto heels pushed her knees uncomfortably into her face. All in all, it looks like a bad Halloween costume of an office worker. She also smells very strongly of booze.

With a tired and slurred voice she asks me if she can leave early because she must be at work the next day and that she has a lot to catch up on and can’t take overtime for her overtime and how she has plans to meet her friends in the pub again that next night, and I reply with what my boss says, “You can only leave when your cycle is finished and I can no longer be of service“ and leave it at that.

She harrumphs at you, crossing her arms and angrily folding herself into a pretzel.

You look at her machine, it reads 19 hours.

At this stage, you start to worry.

I can see it in your eyes and the way you begin to knit your fingers together over and over.

You want to ask how long you’ll be here but the sentence gets stuck halfway up your throat and you manage to swallow it back down. The silent hangs, well, as much silence as can be over the two spinning washers.

“This place-“ you begin.

“-is special,“ I continue. “It is a place for those who need to wait, for those who need the space and the nothingness that they themselves have removed from their lives. For the people who try to remove themselves from their own humanity by being busy, obsessive and damaging.“

But you know this spiel already, the boss taught it to us.

„Look at the man to our right, controlled by numbers, by grams of protein, by hours in the gym, numbers of reps, miles underfoot, calories and most importantly stones on a scale.

All he needs is a place to do nothing but eat and drink, where he can’t move an excessive amount - he needs to wait.

The woman on your left, owns a three-bed flat in central London, works for one of the larger bank branches, can afford champagne every night and dinner out.

She is barely home to enjoy it, barely makes it to the pub exhausted after overtime and is barely sober to even enjoy the company of her friends.

Her wine-stained cardigan swimming around and around for another-“

I craned my head to check her timer.

“-18 hours is her time to slow down, to actually allow herself stew in her own thoughts, be aware of her surroundings and feel deep down what she wants with her life.

She needs the time and the space to just wait.

That is what we provide here, open 24/7; when anybody needs us, we offer them a space cut out from the rest of the world to just stop and exist for a while, to make up for self-care missed, to make them wait.“

I beam at you.

“It’s a brilliant business model from our boss, isn’t it?“

It dawns upon you, clicks painfully in your mind, eyes as wide as the washers, yes, you used to work here. And you did what this woman did with her work and the man with his exercise. You worked, and worked and worked and worked, never taking a break, constantly moving, constantly cooking, cleaning, retrieving tokens, welcoming customers, watching the wait times appear, horror set in.

You did this for years, not even stopping once to sleep, desperately hoping that the constant busyness would remove the faces of your customers from your mind, the dreadful thoughts worming through your grey matter. And it did work - you did forget.

Until now.

You did this for years.

The timer finally lit up its green numbers on its black display. It wasn’t even bright, but it seared its way right to the back of your eyeballs.

175,320 hours.

I smile at you.

I speak.

„I hope you enjoy your time here.“