I am tiny, staring up at the huge glass porthole in the even vaster metal cabinet as it spews suds against the window with a dull slap, suds that surge down the glass to be replaced by new suds splashed up by the drum’s steady churn. It is my task to watch over the wash, and amongst the nightdresses, underwear, leggings, hoodies, towels, pillow cases, swirling like sea lettuce in the current, there is one T-shirt with a text across the front that is mine, I know. It is my story, a text that will unlock the mystery of my life. But again and again, no sooner have I glimpsed it, struggling to read it through the toughened porthole, thick and angled so that it distorts what it reveals like the whorls on old window-panes, no sooner do I begin to read, indeed to unravel the text that the drum’s churn has wrapped into a tangled ball, than the next turn of the drum spews its suds over the text and hurries it away.
If I sit here long enough, I think at first, bit by bit, letter by letter, I will eventually see enough of the shirt’s message to be able to piece it together, won’t I? So I strain to match a briefly glimpsed, sud-smudged letter’s position on the shirt to its position in the message I know is there. But even though I stare so long and so intensely that my eyes begin to ache as they unconsciously follow the drum’s rotation, I can only guess at the whole, for the shirt is multiply folded, crumpled, wound in and out of other garments. Gradually I realise that the time it will take to unravel this message is longer than I have patience for, indeed may be longer than my life itself. Perhaps, though, I think, after all this waiting, I might reach an age where, abandoning the urgencies of my younger self, I will have the patience to sit and watch, sit and wait, for the drum’s steady churn to throw up enough brief glimpses of fragments out of which I can make sense. And after all, I’ll be older, wiser, better able to piece it all together. But then again I am flooded with the gloomy thought that by then I will be too feeble, physically, mentally, too locked into other commitments, or all three, to act on whatever message the shirt, my shirt, eventually reveals.
Then a single clank. The machine’s timer reaches zero, time’s up, the shirt stays half-hidden and unreadable as the drum slows to a halt like a fairground roundabout when the last coin has been spent on the last ride on the gaudy horses. Now, I think, I can remove the T-shirt, smooth it out on the bench, read what has been tormenting me. I tug hopelessly at the unbudging glass door; there must be some code or combination to unlock it, and even though I cannot read the message on the shirt, I know with a dull certainty what that message is.
Moray McGowan, a Hiberno-Scottish silverback, wrapped chocolate, delivered mail, dug trenches, picked fruit and baked boiler insulation, taught for forty years at universities in Germany, the UK and Ireland, and now shuffles between the marshlands of Somerset (UK) and the jungles of Berlin.
