Flesh Wounds

by Christopher Fowler

  As she carelessly loaded the machine she nearly started crying. She could not understand why life had to be so unfair. Everywhere she looked other people had jobs and lovers and something to look forward to. Nobody ever asked how she was. They were all too wrapped up in their own lives. She slammed the lid of the machine and dropped in the correct change. Pipes hissed somewhere in the wall as the drum began to fill.

  Why should it be me who ends up spending the evening alone in the laundromat, she wondered, wasting another page in the book of life, dropping another stitch in the tapestry of existence? It didn’t help that she was too damned smart for most of the guys around here. They wanted someone pretty by their side, someone to hold their beer while they took their pool shot, someone who didn’t spoil it all by talking too much.

  She folded the empty bag neatly and placed it on the table, then checked through the rumpled magazines, but nothing excited her interest. The room was slightly cooler now, and she realised that the tumble dryer had stopped. The metal ticked and tapped as it contracted. The owner of the clothes hadn’t returned to collect them. What if he was attractive and single, as lonely and alone as her? Love could flourish in the most mundane places. Hadn’t her mother always told her that?

  She checked the dusty clock above the machines. Her laundry was still on its first cycle. The room was growing cold. She tugged the hem of her old brown sweater over the waistband of her jeans. What if the owner of the clothes in the dryer was cute? She’d dressed in her sloppiest outfit. Perhaps he’d think she was being fashionable in a grungy waif kind of way. What if it wasn’t a man? There was one way of finding out. She could remove the clothes from the dryer and fold them for him. It would give them a conversation opener when he finally returned.

  ‘How kind of you! You shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble!’

  ‘Oh, it was no trouble. It gave me something to do.’

  ‘I don’t understand what a pretty girl like you is doing in here.’

  ‘Well, one needs a rest from partying occasionally.’

  ‘I know what you mean. Why don’t I give you a hand with your laundry, then we can go and get a cup of coffee?’

  ‘That would be lovely. I don’t know your –’

  The crash of something falling heavily against the glass doors snapped her from her reverie. A grey-bearded drunk had fallen against the step and was trying to get up without releasing his grip on the litre bottle of cider he carried.

  ‘Fuckin’ hell’s teeth!’ he shouted, rolling uselessly onto his side and thumping the reverberating door. Vernie backed away to the dryers, making sure that he couldn’t catch sight of her. She counted to twenty beneath her breath and looked in through the dimpled window at the dried clothes, trying to ascertain the sex of their wearer. When she looked back up, the drunk had moved on and the street outside was once more empty.

  She pulled open the dryer door and emptied the warm clothes into one of the red plastic baskets stacked below. The wash definitely belonged to a man. Faded jeans, denim work shirts and underpants, quite sexy ones. She pulled the full basket aside and began sorting the socks into pairs. It felt strange, touching the warm clothes of a total stranger, as if she was breaking some private taboo.

  Something rattled in the dryer behind her. Or rather it made a scrabbling noise, as if a lizard was clinging to the roof of the perforated steel drum. She immediately thought that a rat had somehow jumped through the open door, for the warmth perhaps, but it scarcely seemed possible. The interior of the dryer was still scorching hot. She approached the drum and pulled back the door. Perhaps he had lost a cufflink or a bracelet in there and it had become entangled in the holes of the curving steel roof. Enveloped in the searing dry heat, she put in her right hand, extended her fingers and felt about.

  Nothing.

  She moved her arm further into the drum. Something rattled again, skittering toward her bare skin and clamping down on it. She screamed, jolting upright, cracking her head hard on the top rim of the machine. For a moment her vision clouded and she lost her balance, falling back against the plastic chairs. She briefly sensed something peering out at her from the drum, something dark and spiky with glittering black eyes. Then it was gone.

  The air seemed warm and hazy, filled with choking motes of dust. Perhaps the blow to her head had left her with a concussion. Vernie glanced at her arm fearfully, expecting to find a bite wound, but there was nothing, not even a scratch. Her head throbbed, though. She looked at the gaping dryer drum, then across at the glass entrance door with the wind moaning beneath it. Perhaps she had imagined the whole thing. Somebody had been horribly murdered in one of these desolate places recently, a friend had told her all about it. Alarmed, she sat on a corner of the folding table and allowed her breathing to return to normal. And as she sat listening to the flopping and sopping of her laundry in the far washer, she remembered the story that Mrs Delphine had once told her, when she was just a tiny little girl.

  Mrs Delphine was from Venezuela but had spent most of her life in Trinidad. She was a heavy, downcast woman who grudgingly visited Vernie’s mother once a week to ‘help out’ as she called it; a matter of pride prevented her from thinking of herself as a cleaning lady. Every Wednesday afternoon after school, Vernie would sit and watch Mrs Delphine as she ironed and folded the household sheets, and would listen as she grumbled about the English weather before fondly recalling her life in an unimaginable tropical paradise.

  One day Mrs Delphine held up a corner of a cotton vest in her plump right hand and tutted. ‘Dear oh dearie me,’ she said sadly.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Vernie, struggling to see. The centre of the vest was torn to shreds, as if it had been repeatedly slashed with a razor.

  ‘Somebody’s brought in the Laundry Imp,’ she replied, bundling up the vest and taking it to the bin.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Vernie. ‘What’s the Laundry Imp?’

  ‘I shouldn’t be telling you, it will only give you nightmares.’

  But Vernie could see that it wouldn’t take much for the woman to speak. Her mother wouldn’t be back for a while yet, and Mrs Delphine loved to recount scraps of lore from her homeland, particularly if they were of an unsavoury, doom-laden nature.

  ‘See, the Laundry Imp is the fiercest little creature you can get in your house. It has a nastier mind than a mongoose and sharper teeth than a weasel, because it’s born of lazy dirt.’

  She upturned the laundry basket and began looking cautiously through the remainder of the unwashed clothes.

  ‘At first it’s very small, see, so small that you can hardly see it, like a shiny black flea. It grows in the clothes that folks have worn too long and worked too little in.’ She looked off through the windows of the laundry room, at some middle-distant point of the garden. ‘It feeds from the secretions of the rich and the idle, and it moves from one pile of dirty laundry to another to keep from being cleaned. As it moves through the clothes sucking in all the stains and the smells, the imp grows until it is the size of two knotted hands’ – she entwined her strong brown fingers in demonstration – ‘and it looks like a cross between a lizard and a monkey, with shiny black scales like pointed toenails, and a soft, bare underbelly, and tiny needle teeth, and beady little eyes and long sharp claws. It moves very fast and jerks its head like a bird because it’s watching all the time.’ She approached the unnerved girl, who had gingerly raised her feet from the floor. ‘And because it has grown in the lazy waste of warm, slow bodies, it is very, very poisonous.’

  ‘But what does it want?’ Vernie asked, sitting back on the table and surreptitiously checking underneath it.

  ‘It’s searching for the scent of the poor,’ Mrs Delphine murmured beneath her breath. ‘It’s a mean-spirited creature of supernatural origins, born from a curse once placed upon a cruelly idle man.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I’ll be getting in trouble …’

  ‘Please!’

  ‘Very well.
’ She moved the iron to one side of her workbench and sat for a minute.

  ‘In Venezuela there was once a nobleman named Count Arturo Lombardini who was very rich but also very mean and lazy. He was searching for a wife, but no woman would stay with him because he never washed, and although his clothes were imported from France with finely embroidered dentils and epaulettes and silken panels, the count wore them until they fell from his back because he was too mean to wear them out by washing them. He proudly boasted that he had not washed his hair in sixteen years, but he went to great pains to pomade and arrange the sleek black tangle so that a row of greasy curls ringed his forehead. Such a look he felt no woman could resist.

  ‘Every morning a gypsy girl passed beneath Count Lombardini’s bedroom window, hawking warm bread from her basket. The nobleman was in love from his first sight of her and had his servants fetch her to him. But when she was ushered into his chambers (a suite of rooms he rarely left), the terrible smell of his body overpowered her and she fled from his residence, dropping her basket of fresh bread.

  ‘The next day, the count instructed his men to lie in wait for the gypsy girl, and they kidnapped her as she passed the palace doors. In a fever of anticipation, Lombardini sprayed himself with eucalyptus water, but this only produced a more emetic effect on little Sapphire, for that was the girl’s name. Her parents had perished at sea long before, and she had been raised by an aged uncle who had taught her that daily acts of cleanliness were something even the poorest could perform to bring themselves closer to God.

  ‘Incensed by the girl’s obvious repulsion, the count bound her hands with rope and tied a silken bandana across her mouth. Then, with the help of a corrupt family priest, he arranged a simple wedding ceremony, so that even though it was against her will she would be betrothed to him, and he would be legally entitled to enjoy his conjugal rights.’ Vernie did not need to know the meaning of that word in order to appreciate the unpleasantness it conveyed.

  ‘That hot night he bore her to the stifling bridal chamber, and she was horrified to see that when he tried to undress himself the shirt he was wearing was so matted with sweat he could barely remove it from the stickety flesh of his back.’ At this point, Mrs Delphine exercised rare restraint in her decision to gloss over the more grotesque details of the wedding night.

  ‘Thankfully,’ she added, ‘no moon rose in the sky to illuminate the scene, but after the unspeakable terrors of those endless darkened hours the gypsy girl became crazed with grief for her lost decency and decided to take her own life.

  ‘At daybreak, while the count was still asleep, Sapphire ran to the filigreed bedroom balcony and leapt from it, only to be trampled by the count’s own thoroughbred horses, which the ostlers were riding below in the street. But before she finally expired, she cried out to the heavens and placed a strange curse upon the count.

  ‘Lombardini was sorry to lose his new wife but thought only of himself in the matter. Raising his sweat-stiff wedding shirt from the bed, he donned it once more and considered how he might secure another bride. The next evening, when he tried to remove the shirt before retiring, he found something growing in the silk – a tiny black imp that hopped from the chemise onto his back before he could stop it. The little mite burrowed into the skin between his shoulderblades, just at the point no man can ever reach to scratch. And it got plumper and heavier with every passing hour.

  ‘Lombardini soon found that he could not sit back in a chair, or lie in a bed, for fear of squashing the imp. You see, every time it was squeezed it screamed and chattered and dug its claws deep into his flesh, almost until it could touch his spine. It crushed his nerves and twisted his muscles and burned his skin, but no one else could see the imp, so they simply thought the nobleman mad. He remained in his private chambers even more than before. All his meals were brought to him and were left outside the door. He cut the backs from his chairs so that he could sit after a fashion, and hacked a large hole in the headboard of his bed so that he could doze without disturbing the imp, but nothing would dislodge the hellish creature, which screamed and hissed as it grew wise to Lombardini’s ways and chattered all night to prevent him from sleeping.

  ‘Soon the count was a shadow of his old self, a wasted, yellowing skeleton with dark-rimmed eyes set in a gaunt, haunted face. His hair fell out in slimy clumps and he developed a stoop from the constant cramping of his back. He stalked the rooms at night, whimpering and whining for the pain to end, but was granted no relief. Often the servants stood at the door listening to his half-mad moanings.

  ‘One night he drew a poker from the blazing fire in which it had lain and repeatedly slapped the glowing orange shaft across his back, searing his flesh, trying to dislodge the imp. But it was too quick for him and uprooted itself, scuttling around to his chest, where it tightened its grip more than ever before.

  ‘When the servants finally broke down the doors and found the count with his codfish eyes turned over in their sockets, they saw that his spine had been scratched and frayed until it had severed, as if a hundred cats had reached inside and clawed away in a crimson frenzy.

  ‘But the imp lived on in the nobleman’s old clothes. It bred through the palace, multiplying in the rumpled sheets and the piles of rancid laundry left by other idlers, spoiled relatives of the count who lived lives of waste. Then the imps headed out into the streets for tastier, riper fare.’

  ‘So the gypsy girl’s curse backfired,’ said Vernie. ‘She had her revenge, but the imps went on to hurt poor people, and she herself had been poor.’

  ‘Curses always find a way of backfiring,’ said Mrs Delphine, returning to her work with a sigh. ‘These days the wealthy wash and perfume themselves, and the imps spring from unhygienic clothes to spend their lives searching for the acrid scent of poverty. They move from one warm place to another, and when an imp finds the clothes of a working man, or a working woman, it draws its strength and burrows in, building its nest, slashing a bed for itself. And if it is disturbed it will burrow through a person, scratching and scrabbling through an ear or through the mouth or through the bellybutton, until it comes out of the other side …’ She spat on her iron and slapped it onto a shirt. ‘So many wicked, dirty things around us, and not even being a good Catholic can save you.’

  Two days later, Mrs Delphine was dismissed for filling the child’s head with frightening stories. ‘What could she have been thinking of,’ Vernie’s mother asked her husband that night, ‘telling the girl such nightmarish things? Isn’t the world filled with horrors enough without imagining more?’ She felt that Mrs Delphine was insulting the household by implying that her husband, of whom she clearly disapproved, had brought in the Laundry Imp.

  But for Mrs Delphine such creatures were real, just as they were for Vernie, who had seen the damaged vest and had spent the rest of her childhood screaming unless she was given clean clothes to wear.

  Vernie raised her right leg and gave the dryer door a hard kick with the heel of her shoe. It slammed shut, but she had kicked too hard for the magnetic lock to catch, and it bounced back open. A sharp squeal reverberated within the drum, then there was silence.

  Vernie had taken a step class earlier in the same shirt she was wearing now. She had meant to add it to the wash before leaving the flat but had forgotten. What if the imp could smell her and even now was searching for a way to cleave itself to her sharply scented skin?

  She realised with a start that her own laundry had completed its cycle and now required emptying. Even if the imp proved to be more substantial than a product of her childhood imagination, she was determined not to be bullied into leaving the laundrette without her washing. Closing the door more carefully this time, she dug out some coins and switched the dryer on. Surely the heat, magnified by the emptiness of the rotating drum, would prove too much for the creature? She walked to the front of the room and stared at the lid of her own silent machine. Gingerly, she raised the metal flap and lowered her arm inside, scooping out the warm, dam
p clothes.

  There was a noise behind the washer, the sound of tiny scaled feet running along a pipe. It was using the water system behind the machines to cross the laundrette. She slammed the lid down hard and backed away. Suppose it could get into any of the tubs in this fashion? She looked at the clothes she had extracted so far, carefully unfolding a T-shirt and holding it up. To her horror she found herself holding a mirror to her childhood terrors. The shirt was tattered beyond repair, scored with a hundred tiny slashes.

  The clatter of the lid made her raise her eyes, and she found herself staring at the Laundry Imp itself.

  It was the size of a small cat but stood on curving hind legs. Its thin ebony claws formed sharp little hooks. It was worrying one between its teeth now, an eerily human gesture, watching her with quick, furtive movements. Its lips were pulled back about its tiny black snout, so that it seemed to be grinning at her.

  The glass front door twanged open and closed behind her. She couldn’t bring herself to move. She was sure that if her concentration broke for just a second, the imp would set itself upon her.

  ‘Are you okay?’ The question took her by surprise and she jumped, involuntarily turning. The owner of the other wash load was everything she had hoped for, but now the thought of a romantic liaison was the farthest thing from her mind.

  ‘Uh, yes, I’m – fine.’ She turned back, but the imp had vanished from its place on top of the washing machine. She glanced to the floor. Perhaps it had dropped back behind the appliances.

  ‘I think they may have mice in here,’ said the man, watching her. ‘I heard something moving about earlier.’

  ‘Yes – I heard it, too.’

  ‘Hey, thanks for taking my stuff out. Christ, it’s hot in here, like the jungle or something.’ He walked to his basket of clothes and slipped his leather jacket from his shoulders, dropping it onto the folding bench. His white T-shirt was sweat stained at the armpits. As he began shovelling his laundry into a large blue plastic bag, he looked back at her, concerned. ‘Are you sure you’re alright?’