Pelt

My grandmother worked at a laundry in the East End, back in the 60s. She’d love to describe it to me, the basement packed with rattling machines, the floor slick with puddles and the air billowing with steam.
It’s all change now, she sighs, although she hadn’t been back in decades. The poky tenements are all gone, bones scuffed over with concrete, glass pillboxes piled atop. Private streets lined with towers. Supermarkets at the bottom of long escalators. Quiet weekends. Steel bollards forming a strange frontier, a sterilised border that creeps further every year, driving out the old blood. I imagine if she stayed she’d have been pushed past the M25 by then.

I used to find talking with her frustrating at times. On some matters, she was as modern as anything. As a single mum in her time, you’d have to be. On other things, her views had…calcified, it’s fair to say, not helped by the steady drip-feeding of bile she got from the papers. To get a break, I would ask her about those years she spent as a washerwoman, before she met my Granddad, before she had my mum and uncle and tried on a housewife’s life only to find it didn’t fit. She’d laugh and flex her forearms, baring the remaining screws of muscle, the liver spots blurring into old burns.

“Picked up a fair few of those,” she’d say, following my gaze. “Course, bosses wouldn’t give you the time of day if you complained. And you wouldn’t get sympathy from the girls, neither. Just had to go through it a few times before you learnt the tricks.”

They had a commercial cleaning arm, for chef’s whites, hotels, that kind of stuff, but they also took stuff off the high street. All kinds of things would come in for washing, things you wouldn’t believe. Judge’s robes covered in vomit and urine. Little girl’s dresses sized for what could only have been a four-legged creature. Bloodstained velvet gloves. Her boss told her they had all kinds of customers, and that a professional business had to be discrete. That meant no calls to the press, even if an ID slipped out of the pocket of a particularly grim job. You go in, you wash, you go home. That’s it.

“Sounds like an awful place, doesn’t it?” she’d say, and pull a wry grin when I nodded.
Once you got used to it, she said, it really wasn’t that bad. She quite enjoyed it some days. The hum and whirr of the machines, the crispness of freshly rolled sheets. You could just empty out your mind while your body went through the motions. Labour, using her hands – she put a lot of stock in that. Even with the carers bringing in her shopping and cleaning her house, she insisted on doing her own washing, right up to the end. She found it soothing, I think.

When you’re young, you don’t really know your family. You think you do, but you don’t. It’s only until you’re old and they’re even older that you begin to see the person that was there the entire time, waiting for you to notice. Too late, really. It took my Gran getting to her eighties and moving in with us to crack me out from my own solipsistic shell. She loved to tell me stories, and as I listened I would look into her eyes and imagine them set into a younger face, that of a woman with dreams and fears and ambitions, not yet knowing the arc of her life. There were always pieces missing. I never found out why she had divorced my grandfather. I suppose the closest thing I can compare it to is dark matter, out in space. There’s the stars, sure, and between them it’s all black, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing there. She knew that anything could be a story, and she would take that stuff between the stars and swill it out it until I could see it clearly, for what it was. I wondered now how much of my own life was dark matter to her as well, hidden by my ego, or my shame.
There’s one story she told me that I keep coming back to. Or rather, it keeps coming back to me, arriving on quiet evenings when my partner is out and the TV is turned off and all I can hear is the rain. I roll it around like a pebble, trying to see it from different angles, wondering what else it could tell me about my grandmother. It wasn’t like the other stories. No matter how much I tried to cast light upon it, it remained dark matter. Fuzzy around the edges.

She’d been working at the laundry for about a year when she encountered the pelt. By then she wouldn’t bat an eyelid at the strangest stuff. It left a mark on her personality. She would laugh telling stories from that time that made me wince. But for this tale she didn’t chuckle much at all, and when she did it was dry and hollow, as if she was forcing herself to see the funny side of it.
When I’m sitting in my bed, the lamp on, reading but not really taking in the words that pass before my eyes, I think about the story of the pelt. I think about my grandmother fumbling at the bottom of a great drum and bringing something up, something wet and heavy, flopping and clinging to the hot metal.

It’s a good story. It never fails to get a reaction when I tell it to people – only if the timing’s right, mind you. When it’s a lock-in at the pub in mid-October, and everyone’s in the mood to be a little perturbed. I suppose it’s my way of keeping her memory alive, that part of her which was so hard to quantify in any meaningful way.

So, Gran is working a late shift, or maybe call it a very early shift. They were pretty much open all hours. It’s a hot night, muggy, the middle of July, and there’s a thick layer of clouds covering the city like a blanket which just makes everything worse. She’s working late because they paying her time and a half, and she wants to get some new gladrags to wear next time she’s out with the girls. Making ends meet isn’t a problem yet, she’s still living with my great-grandparents, and all they do is nag for her to find a good fella. The work is easier at night. The loads aren’t as heavy and nobody is keeping track if you want to nip out back for a fag. She pushes a few empty tubs into position and starts taking out the laundry from one machine. I’m not sure if you’ve ever seen an industrial laundry, but its not like the stuff you have in your house. The machines are big, and loud, and you have to watch yourself around them. Especially the mangle…you ever read that Stephen King story?

Nevermind. She’s taking out a dark wash, various workman’s overalls in shades of indigo, some with oil stains so deep they’ll never get shifted. It’s hard going, the clothes have formed a soggy boulder that she needs to peel apart layer by layer. She’s murmuring under her breath that she’s almost done, just a few more loads, she can practically see the glittering foyer of the department store now…but as she makes a final check she can see there’s something at the back of the machine. Something darker than the rest. It’s not overalls, she knows that much. For a split second she freezes, wondering if it’s perhaps an animal of some kind. But then again, even if it was, how could it survive being battered around in scalding water for an hour?

Her colleagues are on the other side of the floor, and she can’t shout to them over the racket. She leans in, tipping herself over the lip of the machine, trying to repress the fear that she’ll overbalance and topple over. Hand reaching out, she closes her eyes when she grasps the furry thing and heaves, dragging as much of it as she can out of the gloom, nearly throwing out her hip as she does so.

She knows what it’s not. It’s not a bearskin, or a wolfskin. It might be a costume of some kind, but even by the standards of what comes through their doors it’s the strangest costume she’s ever seen. A huge pelt of long and wiry pitch-black hairs, four long limbs terminating in four thick claws, tips filed off but their curve suggesting a wickedness they once possessed. Her fear speckled with curiosity, she grabs it again, flips it this way and that. A rug, maybe? No. A rug would be…tidier, than this. There’s no head to speak of, only a ragged flap where it must’ve been torn from the hide. The underside, the flesh side is a mess of trailing fibres. Whoever did it, she reckons, it must have been a hack job. She spends a long time examining it. Wondering.

Her colleagues find her examining it when they invite her for a smoke break. Mabel and Beatrice, I think they were called. Mabel, or perhaps Beatrice, thinks it must be a hanging from some upper-crust townhouse, separated from the rest of the moth-eaten batch that would confirm her theory. Beatrice (Mabel?) snorts, says it’s probably some joker, a Halloween fancy dress come early. Gran doesn’t know what to believe. She leaves the thing, faintly steaming and waterlogged, stretched out on the lino floor and goes out for a smoke with the girls.

When she comes back in, ten minutes later, it’s still there. It hasn’t loped off of it’s own accord like she feared. She weighs up her options. Should she leave a note for the manager, in case it really belonged to someone important? Should she search the other machines, in case there are more pelts in those steel burrows? After a moment, she decides not to do anything at all. Best to leave it on top of the machine for the next shift to deal with. Her own is nearly over and the sun will be rising soon.

That’s…mostly it. The part that I don’t tell so often, the dark matter of the story, is what she told me a few weeks after, when my questions got too much. Following such a strange experience, how could she just…walk away from that? Wasn’t she curious? Surely she was. And she sighed, and tightened up a bit around the eyes, and I worried I’d overstepped the mark. But then she said she felt something when she was handling that pelt. An unwholesome feeling, like a gin hangover, or the smell of overripe fruit turning to rot. The pelt wanted her to wear it, she was sure. To drape it over her shoulders, for those long limbs to run alongside her own. And she was tempted, too, before the girls had found her staring at the thing, glassy-eyed and slack-jawed. She shrugged, took a last drag on her cigarette. Maybe she would have, maybe she wouldn’t. Who can say? Who can say what kind of woman she would have become?

After that, she had dreams of the pelt. They would always begin in a familiar location, the Sunday market, or just outside the family home near the bus stop. At first, everything would seem fine, just a normal day, people bustling about, but then she would spot it. Always at a distance. The pelt, standing upright like a man. Not a person wearing the pelt, she stressed. There was sunlight where the head should have been, a looseness to the upper body which rippled in the breeze. It never approached her. It just wanted her to know it was there, she reckoned.

Whoever in the laundry found it after her didn’t make a fuss. If anyone had found it, that is. Those dreams grew less frequent until they stopped altogether, never to return. And she kept working at that place, until she met my Granddad and married him after a brief courtship. The rest, as they say, is history. Unrecorded history.

Sometimes I wonder what I would do if I dreamt of the pelt. If I saw it standing, bodiless, in the corner of some ordinary scene, inexplicably there and present. Perhaps I would ask it to fill in the gaps of this tale.