The Laundry Basket

by G. M. C. Lewis

  “Just a load of old bones,” says Nat.

  “Exactly. So anyways, o’ there on the other side of the village is this church, right an’ soon as I looked at it, it feels jus’ wrong, like somethin’s out of place, aye, so I asks this wee guy, ’What’s wrong with that church there?’ and he says, ‘That’s where they’d take the villagers and shoot ‘em’, and I knew it straight away. It was stark, like. It was a bad place, you could tell, like something got left there when the villagers were killed.”

  “Have you ever walked into an empty room,” says Nat, “and found there’s an obvious tension in the atmosphere as soon as you walk in, and later you find that your parents have had a blazing row, then stormed out before you got there, or some such?”

  Pedro once more surfaces briefly, like a marine beast taking air. “Eh Nat, tha’s bullshit baby – you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Ach, just because your emotional and spiritual sensitivity abides on the same end of the spectrum as neeps and tatties, that doesn’t preclude the possibility that others might be picking up on frequencies above the subterranean. I know what you mean love, aye,” says Hendo.

  “If the emotional release of an argument can reverberate for hours afterwards, imagine the reverberations of watching every single person you love getting shot in the head and then having your own brains blown out. It’s hardly surprising that we can connect with these currents decades after the event,” Nat says, as she finishes rolling.

  “That’s right,” says Hendo.

  Elsa is crunched up on her chair and looking distant, but then she starts to speak slowly:

  “The house I grew up in was a huge old stable block. It had a courtyard, a clock tower, forest all around… We weren’t rich, but my parents looked after the place so we were allowed to live there at an affordable rate. As a teenager, I always wanted independence and space, so I took a room as far away as I could from the rest of the family, across the courtyard and under the bell tower – it was cold and damp, but it was freedom. Rumour had it that no fewer than three people had died in tragic circumstances on the property: one man shot himself in the greenhouses in the walled garden, another girl was accidentally trampled to death by a horse in one of the stables and another man hung himself in the clock tower. In the daytime, it wasn’t so bad. If you went into the bell tower, you could still feel the building’s energy, its sadness, but it was during the night that this sadness turned to anger. It may sound ridiculous, but it was a very real presence that flooded through the dark empty spaces of the house. As real as the light in this room, or the smoke in the air an oppressive, palpable, malevolent force, it would find me isolated and alone, hiding in bed under my blankets.”

  “Aye, the best thing for that is to get up, get the lights on and face your fear,” says Hendo, trying to shake the haunted looks that have crept around the table.

  “I know, that’s what Scott used to tell me, but sometimes I just couldn’t, I just froze up…”

  A moment of quiet descends. Whisky is sipped. Hendo lays aside his cloth and picks up the communal guitar and starts playing a Tom Waits song by the name of ‘Trampled Rose’, his voice guttural but surprisingly tender.

  She’s drifting as the music flows over her, her eyes looking at the grain of the table top as her fingers toy with the blue tassels of her trousers. Her grief comes to her gently now.

  Sweater

  Gary’s eyes are watering and he can feel the nitrogen trioxide getting into his lungs. The red gas burns his eyes, so he opens the window a little further, but not before it sets him coughing – and that really hurts like a mother fucker. He lifts his sweater up and holds it over his nose and mouth. This is always the worst bit of the process and his wounded chest is not helping. He knows he should get out of the room, but the lowest heat on the stove is just a little too hot and so he needs to stand over the mixture of sulphuric acid, potassium nitrate and sodium nitrate to ensure that the nitric acid, which is running out of the retort into a beaker that is sitting on the side in an ice bath, is correctly produced. He knows very well how important it is to keep every ingredient required for the making of RDX stable.

  His best and oldest friend, John, works as a cleaner at UCL and has access to every laboratory in the university. He’d given him his shopping list and told John he was experimenting in making fertilisers for his allotment and there were a few ingredients he was finding it hard to source. John had agreed to do it on the condition that he paid a small sum to the value of the chemicals that John could donate to the university and that John would be able to sample one dinner’s worth of vegetables for him and his wife Barbara, once the crop was in. Gary gave him £100 and a promise on the veggies and John brought him the goods the next afternoon, each ingredient sealed in a dry glass jar as instructed.

  The rest of the required ingredients and equipment he picked up from Halfords, Blacks and Boots.

  Gary considered hunting down the two animals who had worked him over, but deep down he knew that they were merely instruments obeying the instructions of a higher power. He’d decided, as he’d poured neat vodka into the gaping wound in his chest, that he wanted to take matters up with whoever that higher power was. Fat lot of good it would do, he was sure, but there were principles to be maintained.

  Gary was both resourceful and well connected, and he also had a considerable number of favours to call in. He’d saved several lives when he was posted in Northern Ireland and they weren’t the kind of people who forgot. Barnes had provided the bolthole – a caravan near Dartford, where he was currently hiding out – and Jonesy had confirmed that the instruction to apply pressure had come via a small-time thug called James Kent, from the resolution manager of Seagull; a certain Miss Grace Evans. He’d also provided Gary with a residential address in Blackheath. Both lads had offered additional services, but he’d said no, this was personal.

  His unit in Northern Ireland was specifically trained to locate and neutralise IRA bomb-making factories and his superiors made sure he had a comprehensive understanding of how the mind of a bomb-maker worked. He could manufacture a dazzling array of plastic explosives and produce pressure triggers, electronic triggers – you name it. For this particular job, he’d opted for RDX, which he intended to wire up to the target’s ignition. He’d chosen RDX because, with a detonation velocity of over 8,500 metres per second, RDX was considerably more powerful than C-4. And he was pissed off.

  He was also conscious of the fact that he needed to make a statement. It was only a matter of time before someone blabbed that Chris was his son and he was not prepared to expose his son to danger if he could help it.

  The nitric acid is ready. He takes more ice from the freezer and adds it to the various ice baths that he has prepared and then begins to break up the hexamine that he purchased in Blacks. This will be slowly dissolved into the acid and then the RDX will be cold-filtered out. Once it’s dried out, this stuff will blow under one and a half grams of pressure. It is not the sort of explosive Gary would recommend for the beginner. It is not particularly hot in the kitchen, but Gary is perspiring heavily nevertheless.

  His target (always good to follow the training and emotionally disassociate yourself with the living and breathing facts of the job, even when it’s personal) is located at a substantial private residence on Pond Road, just off Blackheath: pool, tennis court, sauna, the lot – clearly the business of extortion is a lucrative one. He will park on South Row, stroll down Pond Road to the target, do the necessary and then pop in to the Princess of Wales for a jar round the corner when the deed is done. It’s always good to have a pint after work.

  He will begin operations at the exact moment of the final whistle of the Millwall game. They are playing at home and the police will doubtless be expecting aggravation from this particular fixture. This is an old trick the IRA used to use; they would always coincide the arrival of large shipments of drugs or weapons with the Orange marches, knowing that the police would be str
etched to capacity.

  Once the RDX is drying, he has some time to kill. He could do with some milk for his tea and needs some more painkillers and dressings. Gary decides that some dinner would probably be a good idea as well, so he drives into Dartford. He orders a funghi pizza to take away and then goes to the supermarket while his food is being cooked. He automatically checks the price levels and general quality in the fruit and vegetables section and makes a mental note to tell Charlie to offer a couple of pallets of clementines out to the traders. The stall is overstocked and the market is clearly short. Gary puts one pint of full-fat milk in his shopping basket and then, on an impulse, puts a large carton of blueberry yoghurt on special offer in his basket. He wonders whether his actions are a result of subliminal messaging or some other advanced marketing technique, or just a hungry belly, as he wanders off in search of dressings for his wound.

  Gary is walking down an aisle that is stocked with toilet paper and washing powder when he suddenly stops dead in his tracks. He begins to pick up different boxes of washing powder and smell them, until finally he finds the one that hooked him: Linda’s brand. He has not thought directly of his ex-wife for a long time, but he knows that she is always there in the back of his mind, waiting for a sensory trigger to release her.

  She was never the best-looking girl, but she could move so well; whenever she danced, Gary’s heart would do what his two left feet never could and take the position of her partner. She dances again, across the mindscape of their relationship, as Gary stands there with the box of washing powder in one hand and the basket with the milk and yoghurt in the other. She dances towards him in a fluorescent tank top, out of the smoke and the dry ice of the club where he’d first kissed her. She dances around him in her white dress at their wedding reception. She dances in a maternity dress, in the officer’s club with the other soldier’s wives, in the life in Ireland that he dragged her to that she hated. She dances two backward steps in the beige lamb’s wool sweater, the same sweater which he is wearing, in their kitchen; she dances two backward steps and falls on the floor, in their kitchen, where he first hit her. The only time he hit her. He saw her only once more, her hair cut short and her glasses replaced with contact lenses, and he begged her to forgive him, if only for the sake of their two-year-old son, Chris, but she didn’t need to tell him, because he could see. The dance was over.

  He places the box of washing powder gently back on the shelf and finishes his shopping.

  *

  Gary stands at the bar of the Princess of Wales, fingering the moth-eaten frayed edges of his sweater, having just taken his first deep draught from his pint of London Pride. Everything had gone exactly according to plan: he got back to the caravan and took a lot of painkillers, finished making the bomb, then ate his cold pizza and the yoghurt and had a cup of tea with milk. After this he undressed and cleaned all of his wounds before applying fresh antiseptic and dressings. He put clean black clothes on, but with his usual beige sweater under his lightweight black jacket. He put the bomb in a small rucksack, along with a mini Maglite, some wire cutters and crocodile clips, then got in the car and drove extremely carefully to South Row, on the edge of Blackheath. He walked silently down Pond Road, disappearing into an alcove, when a couple approached from the opposite direction. He located the drive and found, to his relief, that the gate to the property was open. He had not fancied pulling himself over walls and fences with his torso in its current condition. He located several motion sensors as he made his way up the shadowy edge of the drive, which he bypassed and then disabled with the crocodile clips and wire cutters.

  When he got to the house, he made a quick, careful circuit and, having ascertained that the target was entertaining a gentleman in one of the upstairs bedrooms at the rear of the house, he made his way back to the front of the house where two cars were parked in the drive. On the one hand he felt lucky that the cars were not parked in the garage, which would have been an extra hassle, but on the other, he needed to make a decision on which one to wire up. In the end he opted for the white Audi sports car; the alarm and immobiliser were considerably more sensitive, but he just couldn’t bear the thought of destroying that beautiful old Jag and, besides, it is Monday tomorrow and the Jag was surely only for weekend afternoons.

  He set the bomb, slipped back down the drive and then walked back along Pond Road, turned onto South Row and made for the Princess of Wales on the corner.

  Gary is thinking about that night again, fourteen years ago. After Linda had called her mother, she had gone upstairs and showered, then she had dressed, packed a bag and taken Chris in his buggy and walked out of the house. He had followed her from room to room, too drunk to really comprehend what was going on, just leaning in the doorframes saying sorry over and over. When she had left the house, he had followed her to the front door and watched his wife and his son walk off into the night. After a time he climbed back upstairs and took the bloodied sweater from the bathroom floor and washed it in the sink. He washed it over and over, with soap, bubble bath, shampoo – anything he could find – until there was no trace of blood left, then he’d pulled off his jumper and put on the beige lamb’s wool sweater, all heavy, wet and cold, and sat on the bathroom floor until he was well and truly sober.

  She had refused to see him, until the day of the dissolution of their marriage when he had begged her to change her mind. He had told her he could make things better, he had cleaned up his act, he was off the drink, but to no avail; he wasn’t going to be able to wash this one off.

  Gary stands at the bar and twists his pint on its beer mat, first left, then right, and thinks about going back up the drive.

  String Vest

  Edgar twists his wine glass from left to right and back again. The waitress approaches his table and, giving him a hand towel, says delicately:

  “Will Sir be dining alone?”

  “Actually no, thank you. After giving it some careful consideration, I’ve decided to dine in tonight,” he says, mopping his face. “May I have the bill please?”

  “Certainly Sir, I’ll bring it right over for you,” she says as kindly as she can.

  He looks around the restaurant; people are beginning to return their attention to their own meals. He can feel red wine running down his belly, into his underpants and collecting around his balls. Well, it had been a good run of luck, but it had to end sometime.

  It had started yesterday when he was trying to dig the dirt on the councillor that Izzy was interested in. He’d tried all his usual methods for hacking into the guy’s background – doing web searches and analysing the data for abnormalities – but it was considerably more challenging to try and look around in the shadows of an individual’s private life than it was to poke about in a publicly limited company’s dirty laundry, even one who works as hard as the councillor to maintain a high profile in the public eye. Photos of the guy’s mug were literally everywhere on the council’s website and in the local newspapers, but nothing in the way of shady deals – and certainly nothing to suggest that he was into kiddie fiddling.

  Edgar located the councillor’s email address and managed to find his way onto the council intraweb, but after a couple of random guesses in the dark about what the councillor’s password might be, he gave up. Besides, what were the odds that there would be anything incriminating on his council email address? What he really needed was to get onto his private home server and email, but how could he do that?

  He ran a couple of searches on the internet on how to be a hacker. A lot of the results appeared to be duds that showed you how to create a skull and crossbones screensaver and various other techniques to ‘impress your friends’, but he was already considerably more adept at this side of hacking than the online tutorials. Edgar had to admit that when he thought about it, the odds are probably pretty remote for a search engine to offer up links for people to learn skills that would essentially undermine the authority of the company behind the search engine.

  Finally,
he found what appeared to be genuine information about a hacking community and was horrified to discover that he was not only not a hacker, according to the general definition of the word, but he wasn’t even a cracker, which was apparently someone who could break into a phone system and ‘phreak’ it! The article made multiple references to learning code in the manner of a Zen master and that to become a hacker was like learning any discipline – it took years of hard work and intensive study. The article went on about being prepared to make sacrifices, such as foregoing sex, money and social approval – Edgar believed that he already ticked all of these boxes – and the importance of not falling into the trap of calling yourself a ‘cyber punk’ or getting involved in ‘flame wars on UseNet’. Edgar began to realise that he couldn’t even speak the language that instructed the student in learning the language of the hacker.

  The article stated that, contrary to public opinion, hackers and nerds were highly likely to make good lover or spouse material, and advised the hacker initiate to attend science fiction conventions (where hackers tend to hang out), and learn a martial art or musical instrument. At no point did the article give even one hint or tip for the beginner on how to engage in some sort of basic hackage. Specifically, it did not tell him how to access the councillor’s private home server.

  Edgar was essentially a very lazy man and realised quickly that investing ten years of his life in high intensity study was not going to be on the cards. He had gone way beyond the point already where he would have normally given up on this particular line of enquiry, but he had never failed Izzy before and she really believed that he was a hacker. In fact, she had inferred as much at parties, which had done no end of good to his kudos at the housing co-op where he lives. He looked at the screen and saw that the councillor’s home address was shown on the council website. He could go over there and break in. Edgar instantly dismissed this thought as quickly as the ten-year hacker training plan – balaclavas and bolt cutters really wasn’t his scene.