LITMIR.BIZ

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rails and that was that?’ His eyes are enormous.

      ‘“We’ll call,” she said.’

      ‘We’ll call?!’ He thrusts his belly out even further.

      ‘Yes, that’s what she said.’ Coco carries on nodding and just stops herself from saying: bad, isn’t it?

      ‘And that was that?’ Hans asks.

      The water boils, Coco turns down the heat.

      ‘Oh yeah,’ she almost shouts, ‘whether I’d had my hair cut, she asked that too!’

      ‘What a horrible woman! She must be a ho-rri-ble woman.’

      Coco grins from ear to ear. She basks in the indignation he is so good at.

      She says, ‘Oh well,’ and again, ‘oh well.’ She carefully lowers the truffle pasta into the water with a wooden spoon and waits for more indignation, louder exclamations.

      ‘You can put the plates on the table, we’ll eat in three minutes.’

      ‘Oh well?’ Hans repeats.

      ‘Oh well,’ Coco says, ‘perhaps she was caught off guard.’

      ‘Oh well?’ Hans says again.

      ‘Oh well.’

      ‘Are you going to be like that?’

      ‘Huh?’

      ‘No, no, no.’ Hans takes a couple of steps backwards, as though he wants to view the situation from a greater distance. ‘This is typical of you. Feeding me horror stories about your parents and then playing it cool. “Oh well.” And then you keep coming up with new details and let me do the swearing and then you go and defend them. I’m not going to go along with this. I refuse to have an opinion about this. Yes, well tell me, Coco, what do you think?’ Hans looks triumphant. He doesn’t lay the table and the pasta will be ready in two minutes.

      ‘The plates,’ she says. Hans gets the plates.

      ‘Well?’

      ‘Perhaps she shouldn’t have told me… like that?’

      ‘I don’t know, you tell me.’

      Coco looks at the clock on the microwave and feels like her party has been spoiled.

      Hans doesn’t stay. Hans has to work.

      ‘A client?’

      ‘I have to work.’

      ‘Reading.’

      ‘You can read here.’

      ‘Sweetheart,’ he kisses her forehead, ‘I’ll give you a call before I go to sleep, all right?’

      She nods slowly.

      ‘Or you should say: “It’s very important to me that you stay.”’

      Coco doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t know whether it’s important or not. It seems like a trump card that she can only play once. She’ll keep it.

      She met him a year ago in the launderette. A middle-aged man who didn’t know how a washing machine worked. She had just loaded her wash and was wondering whether to go back to bed or go somewhere for coffee. She suspected that she was still drunk from the night before and that the headache would come later. That was when he came in. She was still crouched down next to the machine. He was wearing one of those expensive, long, soft woollen coats. He just stood there in front of the machine next to hers. He had a book and a newspaper under one arm and a large leather weekend bag under the other. He sank to his knees, the soft coat touching the tiles. He opened the machine and put his coloureds and his whites in together. The back of his neck was freshly shaven, still a little red, just been to the barber’s. He stared at the machine, she stared at him. She wondered whether he had a piano.

      He sighed and she wanted to say: give me your washing, love, come here, let me do it. As though she knew she would never see him this hopeless again, that it had to happen now, otherwise the man would just disappear from her life with his soft coat, his shaven neck, and his piano.

      She began to speak to him very quietly, so that nobody would hear that she was helping him.

      ‘You need to take out all the really white things. They’ll discolour.’

      He looked at her but didn’t do anything. She felt it was an invasion of privacy to touch his washing but did it anyway. She pulled two white towels and a T-shirt out of the machine.

      ‘Anything else?’

      He slowly shook his head, no.

      ‘Go for the coloured wash option at forty degrees. Here. Forty is always good. Or is there any wool here?’ He shook his head again. ‘Do you have any detergent with you? Or do you want the stuff from here?’

      ‘From here?’

      ‘It’s horrible.’ She took a box of washing powder out of her bag. ‘Use mine then. Two scoops. In the drawer there. Right-hand compartment, left is for prewash.’

      He didn’t take the packet, so she filled the compartment with washing powder. She put her own softener in as well. He carried on watching her while she worked.

      Instead of thanking her, he said, ‘You’re good at that, helping me, you’ve got didactic skills, you should do something with that.’

      The way he was trying to turn the tables moved her. It made him even more helpless—a man unable to accept help.

      He stood up and went to sit on a bench against the wall. He left his book in his lap, and opened the newspaper. She didn’t tell him that he could simply give the owner an extra euro and he would put everything in the dryer and fold it up afterwards so that you didn’t need to sit here and wait. She sat down next to him and asked for a section of the paper.

      ‘Which part do you want?’

      She didn’t want to say that it didn’t matter, so she said, ‘Business please.’

      She remained silent and felt his body warmth, smelled a faint whiff of aftershave. She pretended to read the stock-market report and tilted her head slightly to be closer to him. She wanted to rest her head on his lap, on that woollen coat.

      She would have liked to have said, ‘If you want, I’ll stay home tonight.’ She would never have to go anywhere again. She thought about her friends and how she’d be happy to swap them all for a man with a piano.

      Even though she dried and folded her own washing that afternoon, she gave the owner a euro afterwards, along with her phone number, so that he’d call her the next time the helpless man came to do his laundry. She had loved him instantly, conclusively. So here he is, she thought, like a mother looking at her newborn baby, so here he is. There was nothing more to be done.

      That second time in the launderette, she deliberately hadn’t taken much washing with her.

      She nodded at her bag. ‘If it wasn’t so intimate,’ she said, ‘we could just put everything in one machine.’ She smiled at him girlishly, giving him the opportunity to play the conquering hero. He took her bag from her firmly and put her washing into his machine. Later on he’d say it had been his idea.

      The first time they arranged to do something together, he simply announced it to her, ‘We’re going out for dinner. I’m paying.’ It sounded like a gift. She was amused that he was ordering her around like that, and because she found it amusing, she didn’t mind being ordered around.

      He picked her up, he was wearing a suit. In the restaurant she tried to see what kind of body was hidden under the jacket. She loved his body before she’d even seen it. He told her about his divorce, which hadn’t officially come through yet. He didn’t have a piano. He loved the fact that she spoke Russian. He asked her to translate all the names of the dishes into Russian. She was much younger than him, but luckily there was one thing she could do that he couldn’t. Without

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