Madeleine Accalia
£600 a month
You have to plug in the washing machine every time you want to wash something.
Because of the plumbing. I imagine. Maybe four winters ago – a phone call: ‘I would
like a washing machine.’ ‘Okay then. We will be round on Thursday.’ I imagine
it was not that easy. I imagine, ‘I would like a washing machine and it is a condition
of my contract renewal: a condition of my contribution to your mortgage: of my dual
tenancy with the ants and slugs and mice.’ ‘Okay then. We will be round on
Thursday.’ I imagine them arriving as they do now. Overlarge torsos, wading their
way through our home like it is theirs. Because it is. The smell of inner city land
rover, personalised aftershave that could be Lynx Africa. ‘The machine will go
here,’ he would say. Park it by the oven like a pregnant cow. We all wait for the
show. It is intimate, for two people to watch an overgrown man push a washing
machine into a hole in a kitchen the size of a stamp. I am breathing onto his shoulder,
creating mist in the three-inch gap. There is a shadow on the top curve of his ear that I
realise was once a cartilage piercing; he does a good job of hiding his youth in his
hairline. People who own more than one house cannot have thought about getting the
word ‘love’ tattooed on their wrist in Sanskrit at nineteen, I think. There are so few
types of people. The man, squatting now, pushes the machine into the wall and turns
to me, sweat drips from his forehead like onions on low heat. ‘When you want to
do a wash, just plug it in the front. Same thing, really.’ We all stand as he
demonstrates. Putting the dangling grey plug into the socket on the countertop, then
out again. I fantasise about singing nursery rhymes. ‘Always turn the switch off
when you aren’t using it, it saves you money.’ The fact sits on my tongue like a
piece of lime. ‘Okay then.’ ‘Ok.’ They shuffle out then, the two men. I retreat into the
mouth of the bathroom and stand on a dead ant. ‘See you.’ They turn, as if their
bodies are shared. ‘He’s my guy for all the houses,’ he told me on the phone, ‘we
go years back. Trustworthy. Reliable.’ I lean onto my left foot. A gentle lick of
air coats me from the open window and I stare at the rust on the hinges.
MADELEINE ACCALIA is a writer from Brighton. She is an alumna of the Roundhouse Poetry Collective, and was a finalist of the Roundhouse Slam 2018. She has a first class degree in Scriptwriting and Performance from the University of East Anglia.