Drycleaning

Dry cleaning

  James Milsom

  Published by James Milsom

  Copyright 2013 James Milsom

  Find out more about James Milsom at fearofbirds.com

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  Jeffrey watched the tiny bubbles popping, patternless, randomly, chaotically. Borne of a spider-webbed gas cylinder beneath the smoky pub. Infused with liquid in a cluster of glassy orbs, to each its end in a miniscule explosion, then nothing. The bubbles constituted the frothy, feeble barrier between the outside world and the beer in Jeffrey’s glass. They popped a few at a time, in threes or fours or fives, on this side of the glass and that. One would burst at the side of the glass nearest to him, and simultaneously another would burst on the opposite side. Before he’d had the opportunity to complete a count of the bubbles just passed, another few would burst.

  Jeffrey imagined the noises he couldn’t hear over the comfortingly typical pub soundtrack, that if he were in a room in complete silence, he would probably hear the bubbles bursting. Little pops and snaps, like breakfast cereal.

  The room, at that time, was far from silent. It was also far from the loudest it had the capacity to become. Jeffrey’s thoughts were focused upon something for the first time that day, a Wednesday, and his keen focus may have, he reflected, been a result of the sounds that filled the space around him. The white lights above him buzzed in their housing; a square paneled ceiling, from which panels sections were sometimes occasionally removed to conceal the car keys of overdone regulars without insight into their likely driving prowess about to get behind the wheel.

  The phone rang now and then. Who rings a pub? Jeffrey had wondered. He had never called a pub. Didn’t know the number for one. Jeffrey only lived a couple of blocks away. His daughter edged into his mind. Must call. Tomorrow, for sure.

  ‘Tat!’, Jeffrey called, his focus abandoned, forfeited to nothing. The publican emerged from the cool room with sweat on his brow. Jeffrey registered the contradiction, then discarded the thought as quickly.

  ‘Did you know in office buildings in the city they play white noise through speakers hidden in the ceilings of the offices? They've got hidden speakers to get people to work harder.’

  ‘No’, Tat replied, ‘I hadn’t heard that. I dunno why you’d reckon I needed to hear it right now, neither.’

  Jeffrey either ignored or was was ignorant to the lack of interest in Tat’s tone and, indeed, his words. ‘Yeah, it’s true. I don’t know for certain that they do it in every office in the city. They will do, though. Soon enough.’

  Tat knew from experience that, embrace it or otherwise, this conversation would not terminate at his discretion. It was beyond his control.

  ‘OK. Couple of questions. What is white noise, and where do you get this bullshit from?’

  Jeffrey's face brightened to pink.

  ‘Yep, OK. Fair enough. White noise. I don’t know. I guess it’s just noise. But maybe you can’t hear it unless you really listen for it. Like… maybe like the noise from the lights.’ He motioned to those inset in the ceiling.

  ‘It’s from a study they did. Blokes at a big uni in the States', Jeffrey continued.

  ‘You’re keeping up with your American academic developments, then?’, Tat replied, simultaneously intrigued and skeptical, but only exposing the latter.

  ‘Not all of them, no. But when there’s one in the paper it’s hard not to know about it. Anyway, they reckon if they use up one of your senses, the others can work … better. So they play you this noise that takes care of your ears, and that’s it.’ Jeffrey’s point, he considered, was made.

  Tat smiled.

  ‘I suppose they could give you something for some of the other senses too. Smelly spray for your nose? And a stress ball, for your fingers? Or just a dog? Smells and you can pat it.’

  Jeffrey placed his finger tips behind his glass, now emptied, gently slid it forward, tipping it back toward himself so as to allow it to safely scale the rubber beer mat that stretched the length of the bar. Tat placed a full glass next to it and took a few dollars from Jeffrey's pile of change that would, before sunset, all be in the cash register.

  Jeffrey slunk to the bathroom. Stood at the urinal. Glanced down at his sagging trousers.

  It wasn’t raining outside, but the cuffs of Jeffrey’s faintly pinstriped suit trousers were dappled with spots of mud, concentrated heavily at the heel and thinning out towards the calf. Two of the three suits Jeffrey owned hung at the dry cleaners, a couple of blocks from where he lived, and just a couple more from the pub.

  A smudged receipt lay deep in one of the musty compartments of Jeffrey’s briefcase. Had he examined the receipt, he would have discovered that two months, three weeks and five days prior, he had been made aware of two crucial pieces of information when visiting the dry cleaner.

  First, his suits would be ready three working days after he had dropped them off. The second piece of information, aligned to the centre of the receipt and decorated on either side by an emboldened asterisk, was a caution. In the event of his failure to collect the suits within three months, title in them would vest in the dry cleaners and they would, at their discretion, be entitled to sell or dispose of the property.

  ***

  Six hours after his stilted, near unilateral conversation with Tat had begun, Jeffrey was sitting on the same stool in the same room. He could no longer hear the buzz of the white lights. Instead, an extraordinarily large flat screen television threw up a constant, undying auditory exclamation mark.

  Tat screwed the lid onto a giant jar of nuts, sporting a sheen of oily residue over its label. Tat wiped a mixture of salt, peanut husks and oil on his plain black t-shirt and slid the jar onto the top shelf. He turned to the bar once again and began extracting the springy, rubber pourers from spirit bottles.

  Jeffrey felt one of his eyelids fall shut. Tat filled a stainless steel wine cooler with soda water from the post mix and threw the sticky pourers in. The patrons were spread across the small, dank, sticky carpet in their usual formation.

  Ken had the part of Jeffrey’s attention he was still competent to give. Ken He was about a decade older than Jeffrey, who himself was old enough to have a daughter who was, last he had heard, studying at university.

  A larger proportion of the patrons sat on stools a couple of metres from the bar. Among their number was the one woman in regular attendance, of whose persona the most accurately known detail was that she was named Kerry. Or Carrie.

  More than once Kerry or Carrie had been mistaken by a visitor to the pub for a man. She wore vests, had a thick accent and didn’t dispute her heritage being Irish, Scottish or Welsh, each of which was a description she bore regularly.

  Carrie or Kerry’s husband, Michael, always sat diagonally opposite her at the table. He set himself apart from the group by keeping his glass snug and safe in a stubby holder. He said it kept the beer cold. It bothered Tat, who liked to anticipate the refilling of glasses, in which pursuit he was foiled by the concealment the holder afforded.

  Jeffrey’s remaining open eyelid was beginning to close when Tat called last drinks. Jeffrey jerked to what approximated a vertical position, swaying with the momentum of his sudden movement. A call to arms. All responded, as if conscripted, and stockpiled a couple more each.

  ***

  Jeffrey had the appearance of someone far older than he was. This was attributable to a few aspects of his appearance in particular. His eyes were sunk far back int
o his skull and what had begun as pale, pink blotches cast below them had, over the years, darkened to maroon. His skin was otherwise pale. His hair was greying but almost entirely red, without being so bright, flaming red that he’d ever been nicknamed ‘blue’ in the manner in which Australians were often accustomed.

  An onlooker could easily guess at Jeffrey’s body shape from the way his suit was draped over him. His shoulders hung like a blanket airing on a washing line. His chest had withdrawn back toward his spine and up into his throat. His belly protruded rudely, as if to make up for the hollow where his chest ought to have puffed.

  In the mornings, Jeffrey ate toast. He drank tea at home, then coffee at work. Some days he got the early tram to work. Others he was on time.

  On arrival at work, there he would walk a gauntlet of middle aged, paunchy, cardiganed typists, and if he timed it right he could float by them unnoticed amid a particularly juicy piece of gossip.

  Jeffrey sat down in his office on the sixth day of the fourth week in the third month after he had dropped off his dry cleaning and looked up. The ceiling in the office building could have contained anything. He had heard about someone on another floor hiding files up there, removing the panels and replacing them once the files were all gone.

  He sat perfectly still and listened hard. He heard nothing. Placing his hand to his ear and fashioning it into a cone, he beckoned the latent noises of the office to fill his ear drums.

  ‘What can you hear?’, said a mouth atop one of the cardigans. Jeffrey didn’t recognise this one. Her face shared very little in common with the other faces that lined the gauntlet. No wrinkles. No grey. A nice smell.

  ‘I’m Trudy’, said the face. ‘I started a couple of weeks ago and I keep seeing you walk past, and I think I’ve met everyone except you now, so I thought I better pop my head in and say hi!’, she blurted. Jeffrey found a smile, then attempted to reduce it in size and found himself nonplussed, or at least appearing so.

  ‘I’m Jeffrey. I do up the pays and that. Hi.’

  ‘Do you know I think… Wait. I think this is a bit forward, but… I’ll tell you. I think you’ve worn the same suit every day since I started here.’ Jeffrey maintained his nonplussed facial expression, now grateful for its sudden appropriateness, following its former inexplicability.

  All of the breath Jeffrey had unknowingly been holding came out in the form of something between a stammer and a stutter. No words in the English language were constituted by it. She smiled and fled, her scent hovering over Jeffrey.

  Jeffrey turned to his desk, then back toward the gauntlet and, assured of his privacy, he lifted the lapel of his suit jacket to his nose. It smelled of wet wool, like a private school classroom in winter.

  He pushed outwards and edged away from his desk, a swift head check, then curled his body over and craned his neck toward his lap. He could faintly smell beer, piss, cigarettes. He stood up, propelling the office chair back with his calves. Searched his memory. He couldn’t place the last rainy day.

  Jeffrey reached under his desk for his briefcase and pulled it onto his lap, purposeful. It was almost empty. A gift from his daughter. He didn’t take his work home with him. Didn't need to. But he liked to carry the case.

  ***

  Jeffrey left the office early, just after four. ‘The dentist’, he had said, which reminded him to make an appointment to go to the dentist. He waited at the tram stop anxiously. When the tram came he scrambled up the steps and sat, alone in the back carriage, with the backs of his legs to the wall and his brief case over his crotch, disguised as a sunken-eyed, pigeon-chested, paunchy man in a relatively clean suit.

  Walking from the tram, he squinted into the sun, which hovered just above the tree line at the end of his field of vision.

  The dry cleaners was on the corner, and a curled, yellow sticky note on the inside of the door said ‘Out to lunch’. It was almost five. Jeffrey pushed the door and it opened. The note floated feather-like to the floor.

  He dialed in the combination, slid across the latches. Shielding from view the contents of the briefcase, or embarrassing lack thereof, he produced the receipt.

  The attendant was Thai. Or Vietnamese. Somewhere he’d been on holiday with his daughter, when he still went on holidays with his daughter. She carelessly pushed rows of hovering, empty, plastic people by their wiry throats and came to a tag with Jeffrey’s name on it.

  Leaving the dry cleaners, Jeffrey lit a cigarette for the walk to the pub. He was through to the butt by the time he got home, so he went inside. Jeffrey hung his suits on the mantelpiece and the sun cut his vision again. This time, though, it was distilled and refracted through the double-glazing of his living room window, unfocused, bending imperceptibly.

  He traced the line of the last of the day’s light from the mantelpiece where he stood, across the stained carpet, peppered with burrs, to the window giving it passage. Moving in the direction of his back yard, Jeffrey stopped in the hall where a great beam shone through the skylight. It was the first time in, he figured, at least a year. He was home before the sun went down.

  Breathless, Jeffrey sat on the hall carpet, propped himself against the wall, and closed his eyes.

  ***

  Two weeks passed. February. Jeffrey woke up in the mornings. Tea at home. Coffee at work. He left work at five, like the cardigans did. Like he always had. But he went home.

  The first few nights he stopped at the little supermarket in the city and bought the basics. Onions, garlic, a little bottle of olive oil. At home he found powdered chicken stock in one cylindrical conglomerate. He chiselled powder from the block and cooked.

  ***

  August. Jeffrey’s tram crept up the hill behind an inordinate number of lone commuters in cars. A crackle sounded through the speakers in the ceiling, an electronic clearing of a machine throat, begging attention, if you please.

  A woman’s voice politely mandated the trams evacuation. Technical difficulties. Your earliest convenience. Feeling inconvenienced, Jeffrey puzzled over the contradiction.

  Jeffrey left his travel companions by the road side and started up the hill on foot.

  Jeffrey walked by his old stop, right by the Christian brothers school. His parents house shared a back fence with the school, and he hadn’t been past for a while. He’d seen it advertised in the paper, rendered in rough cement layers beyond recognition and set behind a soothingly staged multi-level landscaped garden.

  He stopped at the milk bar and lingered for a few minutes outside before continuing past. A milk bar window shopper. The owners must have been confused.

  Losing himself in his wandering, Jeffrey soon found himself outside the pub. ‘Can’t hurt’, he said aloud in the doorway. He pushed the door and entered.

  ***

  There was a strange smell about the pub. Paint. And it looked different, too. Paint?

  ‘Where’s Tat?’, Jeffrey asked the room in general. The bar tender, much slimmer and tidier than the subject of the query, gave him a confused look.

  ‘Tat?’, was the monosyllabic, echoing reply.

  ‘Tat. The bar tender here.’

  ‘You’re looking at the bar tender here. I’ll prove it to you, mate’, the man said to Jeffrey, with a well intentioned, encouraging, footy coach smile as he pulled Jeffrey a beer.

  ‘Where is everyone?’, Jeffrey asked. He looked around him and there were a few men in suits, huddled over beers as if they held steamy, soupy goodness to emanate. Jeffrey realised his question would have sounded bizarre. It went unanswered. The bar tender was serving someone else. The television was covered over with a sheet. Sacrilege. Ambient grooves from a CD labeled ‘Ambient Grooves’ filled the bar from the corners, where tiny white speakers were imbedded in the ceiling.

  Jeffrey ran his fingers along one of the freshly painted, matte finish, rouge walls. He didn’t know Tat’s full name. Or maybe even his real name. He had known him… It must have been ten years. At least since his old man was around.
And the others. No phone numbers. Nothing. He could trawl the streets, he thought, looking for them. But if he did find someone, what would he say?

  Jeffrey finished his beer and slunk home. When he got there he slid some leftovers out of the fridge and spooned them into a saucepan. He struck a match, put it to the gas, and watched as the little flames gathered from the point the fire had broached the stove, in two semi-circles, racing exponentially faster and colliding at the other side, a ring of fire. He slid the saucepan onto the heat.

  Jeffrey picked up the phone and dialed. His daughter answered after three rings.

  ‘Hello?’

  ###

  Find out more about the author at fearofbirds.com.