Spin Cycle

by Sue Margolis

  “Oh, I dunno about that,” she said, feeling herself starting to blush.

  They carried on chatting over sandwiches and several cappuccinos. Pretty soon she was telling him about Sam, her marriage to Joe and why it ended.

  “Wow,” Matt said, putting down his tuna fish sandwich.

  “Yes, that’s how I felt for a while. But I’m OK with it now. Sam just takes having a gay father in stride. He’s amazing. I keep worrying he’s going to get bullied at school, but so far there’s been nothing.”

  They’d been sitting talking for over two hours when Rachel suddenly remembered her appointment at the bank. She looked at her watch. It was almost half three.

  “Oh God. Look, Matt, I’m so sorry, but I really do have to run. I’m due at the bank in about three minutes.”

  She could see the disappointment in his face.

  “Right, I’ll drive you back to your car, then.”

  She explained that the bank was just over the road and that she’d be fine walking back to her car afterward. She reached into her bag and offered him some money toward lunch, but he wouldn’t hear of it. She thanked him profusely.

  “Look,” he said, a trace of hesitation creeping back into his voice, “if your washing machine ever breaks down, this is where I am.”

  He took a business card out of his wallet and handed it to her.

  * * * * *

  Rachel came out of the bank, virtually punching the air with delight. Mr. Lickdish, her avuncular bank manager, had given her a long lecture about living within her means before taking pity on her and saying that although the bank wasn’t happy with the way she was managing her account, they were prepared to let her overdraft continue for the time being.

  “What you have to understand, though,” Mr. Lickdish had said, leaning forward over his desk and taking off his glasses, “is that the bank isn’t a charitable institution. At some stage in the not too distant future, we will have to insist that you put your house in order.”

  “I understand,” she said with what she hoped was appropriate gravity. “And thanks again.”

  She almost ran out of the office, petrified he would change his mind.

  “Oh, one last thing, Miss Katz,” he called out as she was halfway down the corridor.

  Rachel felt the color drain from her cheeks. Mr. Lickdish trotted along the corridor until he caught up with her.

  “Here’s a joke you could use in your act, and you can have it for free. I promise it won’t appear on your statement.”

  “Oh right,” she said, mightily relieved. “Go on.”

  “Well,” he said, “have you heard the Vatican has patented a new, low-fat communion wafer? It’s called I Can’t Believe It’s Not Jesus.”

  “Wonderful,” Rachel said, forcing a smile. “Absolutely hilarious. Thank you so much.”

  * * * * *

  She felt like doing something to celebrate her reprieve from fiscal ruin, but she couldn’t think what. Shelley was away and most of her other friends were at work. In the end she decided to phone her parents and invite herself over for a cup of tea. It would be a chance to gently quiz her mother about Tiggy Bristol.

  * * * * *

  Faye answered the door, cordless clamped to her ear. “No, you’re right, Coral. I think there’s a lot to be said for regression therapy.” She beckoned Rachel in, planted a kiss on her cheek and mouthed that she wouldn’t be long.

  “OK, so she hypnotized you, this woman. What then? You became an Egyptian princess and then you drowned in a bath of asses’ milk? Well, I tell you, it would certainly explain your allergy to dairy. . . . Look, Coral, I’ve got to go. Rachel’s just arrived. Love to Ivan. I’ll speak to you later. . . .”

  Faye stabbed the off button. “You know, Rachel,” she said thoughtfully, as they walked down the hall toward the kitchen, “maybe I should have a go at this regression lark. How many years is it I’ve had that recurring nightmare about being with Captain Oates when he went for that final walk in the Antarctic? That could explain my phobia about shopping in freezer centers.”

  * * * * *

  They chatted about nothing in particular while her mother made tea.

  “Oh, I meant to tell you,” Faye said, pouring milk into mugs, “Hylda Klompus phoned over the weekend to say she’s prepared to knock off another five percent if we make a quick decision.”

  “Mum, please,” Rachel said firmly. “You promised to let this Hylda Klompus thing drop.”

  “OK, OK,” Faye came back defensively, “I just wanted to tell you, that’s all. I won’t say another word.”

  “So, Mum,” Rachel said casually, taking a sip of tea, “you got any more plans to see that friend of yours? What’s her name? Tiggy?”

  “Maybe,” Faye said, looking and sounding distinctly shifty now. “But she lives in the Midlands. It’s such a long way for her to come.”

  “Oh? Where in the Midlands, exactly?”

  Just then Jack—dressed in track suit bottoms and a sweatshirt—staggered into the room, red, wheezing and breathless. Perspiration was pouring off his face and there was a huge wet patch on the back and front of his sweatshirt.

  “Dad,” Rachel gasped, “what on earth have you been doing?”

  He pulled a chair out from under the kitchen table and sat down heavily. “Jogging,” he said, between puffs.

  Faye brought him a glass of water. “Sure you’re all right?” she said gently.

  He nodded and began knocking back the water.

  “But Dad, you never exercise.” Rachel was still shocked. “In all the years I’ve known you, I’ve never seen you do anything more physically taxing than lifting your hand to your mouth.”

  “Well,” he announced, pausing to catch his breath, “all that’s changed.”

  He put the glass down on the table and grabbed a roll of stomach flesh through his sweatshirt.

  “I went for my checkup last week and the doctor says I could do with losing a few pounds. So I’ve started exercising. Don’t worry, he said I’m up to it—and your mother’s put me on a diet.”

  At that moment the cordless went. Jack picked it up. “Yes she’s here,” he said, turning toward Faye. “Whom should I say is going to be listening?”

  He shot Faye a wicked grin. She returned it with a look that was seven-eighths glare and one-eighth amusement.

  Jack covered up the mouthpiece with his hand. “It’s Simon.”

  “Oh right, excellent,” Faye said.

  “Simon?” Rachel mouthed to her father.

  “Yes, he’s the, er, upholsterer. He’s got the fabric your mother ordered. She’s re-covering the three-piece.”

  Although Rachel sensed an uneasiness in her mother’s tone and facial expression, she failed to detect it in her father’s.

  Faye took the phone from Jack. “Hello, Simon,” she simpered. “Sorry about my husband. He’s under the illusion he’s got a sense of humor.”

  She walked over to the door and disappeared into the hall. Rachel turned to Jack. “But Mum’s only just had the suite re-covered in that pink velvet fleur-de-lis,” she said, frowning. “She loves it. She invited half the neighborhood in to see it when it was done.”

  Jack shrugged. “She changed her mind. Said she wanted something a bit more contemporary.”

  “But it must be costing a fortune to get it done again.”

  Another shrug.

  “If it makes her happy . . .”

  Jack stood up. “Right, I think I’ll pop up to the loo to see if maybe the exercise has got me going.”

  “Dad, have you still not been? You really should tell your doctor, you know.”

  “Ach, doctors,” he said, waving a dismissive hand, “what do they know?”

  It was the line Jack always took with doctors. When Rachel was growing up, all the other children would be busy playing doctors while she was busy suing them for malpractice.

  After he’d gone, Rachel put the kettle back on to boil. She’d just dropped tea bags in
to three mugs when she heard her mother giggling. Rachel sneaked across to the kitchen doorway to listen. The giggles were coming from the living room.

  “You forgot to ask me what the other day? Oh . . . how long have I been married? Well, Simon, let’s put it this way—I’m on my fourth bottle of Tabasco sauce. . . . No, really, I am . . . I don’t? Ooh, flatterer—well I certainly feel it some days.” By now Faye’s tone was positively coquettish. “Yes, I think it’s important to stay in shape. I try to get to the gym a couple of times a week.”

  More giggles. Then: “Friday?” Faye said, suddenly lowering her voice. “. . . I’m not sure. It might be difficult. . . . OK, I’ll try. Look, I’ll phone you if there’s a problem . . . yes me too. Me too. Friday at five thirty, then . . . No, neither can I . . .”

  Suddenly Shelley’s words, “Perhaps she’s found herself a boy toy,” began echoing around Rachel’s head.

  * * * * *

  But people flirted with each other all the time, Rachel kept telling herself on the drive home. It was nothing more than a bit of harmless fun. It didn’t mean they were about to jump into bed. By the same token, her mother waxing her bikini line and buying expensive new clothes was probably nothing more than an effort to keep herself young and attractive.

  The Tiggy Bristol issue, on the other hand, did bother her slightly. She was as certain as she could be, with no real proof, that the woman was a fiction. Then again, she thought, Faye could have umpteen reasons for inventing her. Maybe she was “up to something.” But whatever the “something” was, it wasn’t necessarily sinister and it certainly didn’t have to be an affair. Apart from anything else the idea was far too hideous to contemplate. In the same way that parents didn’t have sex, they most certainly didn’t have affairs.

  Rachel decided not to delve any further. Her mother would tell her what was going on, in her own time.

  * * * * *

  The first thing she did when she got home was check her answer machine. She hoped there might be a message from Shelley, but wasn’t totally surprised to discover there wasn’t. Mrs. Peach was a sweet soul, but she was also one of the most self-obsessed individuals Rachel had ever met. She was in no doubt that Mrs. Peach had completely forgotten to tell Shelley she’d phoned.

  As she picked up Adam’s fridge egg, which had arrived this morning and which she’d unwrapped and left on the hall table, it occurred to her that she’d still had no word from him. This was completely out of character. Undemonstrative as he could be, Adam always made a point of checking in with her every day—sometimes twice a day—whenever he was out of the country. She looked at her watch. It was nearly seven. Since there was no time difference to speak of in South Africa, he would probably be in his hotel room, getting ready to go out for dinner. (Uncle Stan and his wife, Millie, had offered to put him up, but he’d politely declined. They lived in a luxurious but compact apartment and he thought things would get too crowded. Rachel also suspected that Adam feared their hygiene standards might not be up to his.) She decided to phone him. She had the number written on a yellow sticky note, which she’d put on the wall, just above the phone. She peeled it off, sat down on the hall floor and dialed the number. The girl on the switchboard answered on the first ring. A few seconds later she was waiting to be connected to Adam’s room.

  “Yah.” It was a woman’s voice. Very brusque. Very South African.

  “Oh, hello,” Rachel said tentatively, assuming she’d been put through to the wrong room, “is this Mr. Landsberg’s room?”

  There was a long pause.

  “Mr. Landsberg,” Rachel repeated, “Mr. Adam Landsberg.”

  “Er . . . ,” the voice said eventually, “Ah’m afraid Mr. Landsberg isn’t here raght now.”

  “So this is his room then?” Rachel said, wondering who on earth this woman could be.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, do you know where he is?” Rachel was convinced she could hear the shower running in the distance.

  “No,” the woman said. “Ah’m afraid I have no idea. No idea at all.”

  “Oh right. Well, do you mind telling me who you are?” By now Rachel’s suspicions about what Adam was getting up to behind her back were well and truly aroused.

  “Me? Raght . . . Me.” The woman sounded distinctly nervous now. “OK . . . Ah’m . . . Ah’m the hotel manager.”

  “Really?” Rachel said, her tone distinctly skeptical.

  There was another pause. “Yes, you see all the rooms on this floor have been invaded by um . . . a swarm of locusts.”

  “Locusts,” Rachel repeated, frowning.

  “Yah. In fact the whole hotel has been invaded by locusts. They flew in from, er, Zimbabwe—or maybe it was Botswana—and, anyway, we’ve had to evacuate the entire building.”

  Rachel was aware of the woman moving away from the phone. There was a loud thwack of what sounded like a rolled-up newspaper being brought down sharply onto a hard surface.

  “Shit. Missed,” she heard the woman yell. Two more thwacks. More swearing. Then: “Aha, gotcha.”

  “What’s that noise in the background?” Rachel asked. “It sounds like a shower running.”

  “No, no, no,” the woman said anxiously, “it’s not a shower. It’s . . . it’s the noise of the pest guys spraying insecticide.”

  “What, with you in the room?”

  “They’re down the corridor.”

  “I see,” Rachel said dubiously. “Sounds pretty dangerous to me.”

  “Ach, it’s not that bad. We’ve all got masks. The fumes should die down in a few hours. All being well, the guests will be able to move back into the hotel the day after tomorrow. Meanwhile we’ve got to find everybody alternative accommodation.”

  “All right,” Rachel said, “not a lot I can do if Mr. Landsberg’s moved out. I’ll just have to wait for him to contact me.”

  She said good-bye and replaced the receiver. The most bizarre thought was occurring to her. But maybe it wasn’t so bizarre. What was bizarre was the idea of a modern hotel, where the windows would be sealed for the air-conditioning, being invaded by locusts. Loath as she was even to contemplate it, she couldn’t dismiss the possibility that Adam was cheating on her. The way she saw it, the woman had clearly picked up the phone while Adam was in the shower, panicked when she heard Rachel’s voice and made up this highly improbable story about locusts.

  But Adam was desperate to marry her. It made no sense that the man who had been nagging her for months to set a wedding date would go off and have an affair the moment her back was turned. It also made no sense that somebody would invent a tale as far-fetched as the locust story and expect to be believed. It was so preposterous, Rachel decided, it simply had to be true. Maybe they’d come in through the air-conditioning ducts like something out of a horror film. She shuddered. Poor Adam. She wondered if locusts could eat through plastic. If not, then Adam’s insistence on storing his socks, shirts and underwear in polythene bags might have paid off for once.

  * * * * *

  She took her glass of wine and the bottle into the living room. As she passed the small desk where she kept the fax machine, she noticed a lengthy missive had arrived from Barry the accountant. She would look at it in the morning.

  For the next couple of hours, she lay curled up on the sofa drinking wine. Having phoned Sam on the cordless and established he was eating properly and that his eczema was under control, she tried Shelley, but there was no answer. She assumed Mr. and Mrs. Peach had taken her out to dinner.

  Eventually she found her thoughts turning to Matt Clapton.

  She couldn’t get over how much she’d enjoyed their lunch. And the book. It had been such a kind thought. She was forced to admit she’d felt the kind of connection with Matt she rarely experienced with Adam these days. And unlike Adam, Matt had been so encouraging about her entering the comedy contest.

  She took a sip of wine. She barely knew Matt, she thought, and yet it felt like they’d been friends for ages. She reach
ed into her trouser pocket and took out his business card. For five full minutes she sat drinking and staring at it, without actually reading it. Instead she pictured his grin, his brown eyes, the rubbish on Van Morrison’s dashboard.

  She started to smile. OK, she found him attractive. And she had to admit she’d been strangely delighted to discover he didn’t have a girlfriend. But so what? She wasn’t a nun. She found loads of men attractive. Just because she was about to marry Adam, it didn’t mean she had to stop fancying other blokes. It wasn’t as if she’d ever cheat on Adam. She could never do that—except occasionally in her head when they were having sex. But that was OK because they both had mutually agreed fantasy people—Ralph Fiennes for her, Nurse Ratched for him (he said it was the tall, blond, Teutonic thing, rather than the sadism).

  Nevertheless she couldn’t help thinking that she would give anything to hear Matt’s voice. Her eyes focused on his phone number. It was his office number. If she phoned it, his machine would pick up. That way she could hear him without having to say anything. She carried on looking at the number, daring herself to do it. She dithered for a few seconds, then, spurred on by the bottle of Fleurie she’d drunk on an empty stomach and that was now causing her head to spin, she grabbed the cordless and dialed.

  Eight, nine, ten rings.

  “Hello,” the voice said. She waited for the message to follow, but it didn’t.

  “Hello?” he said again.

  Shit, it was him, not his answer machine. He clearly had his calls diverted.

  “Oh, er, hi, Matt,” she blurted, “it’s Kachel. Kachel Ratz.”

  “Oh, hi, Kachel, how are you?”

  Unaware of her spoonerism and his witticism, her addled brain battled to think of an excuse for phoning. “I . . . er . . . you know you said I could call you if my washing machine ever broke down? Well, it has. It’s making the most dreadful noise and I was wondering if you could take a look at it sometime. . . . Any time will do. There’s no hurry. . . . What, now? Oh right, you’re working in the neighborhood. But it’s after nine. . . . No, I was thinking of you, that’s all—it’s not inconvenient for me at all. Right, I’ll see you in half an hour, then.”