3

Daisy

I like doing laundry. That’s weird—I know. I know I could send it out but I don’t, I just like doing it. It feels like something normal people do. Teachers do laundry. Social workers do laundry. Secretaries do laundry. Mechanics do laundry.

A few years ago I asked Julian to have them build my dream laundry room. I’ve got two of the Samsung 6.0 cu. ft. Smart Washer with FlexWash[*] as well as the Samsung 7.5 cu. ft. Smart Electric Dryer with FlexDry, both in the Fingerprint Resistant Black Stainless Steel. An ironing board and a farmhouse-style folding table in the centre, which someone puts white tulips on every day, but I don’t know who.

It’s my safe place in here.

The washing machines are actually devastatingly quiet now.

When I was a kid, if there was something happening at the house that no one wanted me to see or hear, Julian would bring me into the laundry room. He’d put on our old washing machine, even if it was empty. Sometimes he’d put coins in there so it made a louder sound.

At the time I thought it was cool and sort of a weird thing my brother and I did together, but now I think there was probably someone dying somewhere in this house and this was their way of keeping it from me. It’s quite hard to un-hear someone dying once you’ve heard them. I hear my parents dying most days still for no real reason other than simply because that’s the sort of shitty thing your brain tries to fill a silence with. Mostly it’s the sound my dad made when he fell on the sand. Most of it was swallowed by the sand but there was a dull thud that plays on a loop in my brain.

Anyway, I have a reclining leather chair and a stack of cooking magazines by the big bay window that looks out from the utility room and onto some of the grounds out back that Happy tends to,[*] though that’s not a part of his mercenary job description.

A cup of tea, the barely there hum of my washing machine[*] and I can lose hours in here.

I think it’s the instant gratification of prewash sprays.

Or maybe it’s the everything getting clean in here.

I do the whites tonight.

Picking things out of the basket and treating them.

My favourite kind of stain remover at the minute is Vanish Gold for Whites. Also, I like their soap bar, because it’s so tactile. And bleach. I love bleach. Everything about it. How it smells. How it brightens. How it removes all traces of sin.

Do you know what original sin is?

It’s this theological concept that we were all born innately sinful and my brother loves it.[*] Says it’s one of his two “get-out-of-jail-free cards”.[*]

That we were all already born sinful, so he’s just living up to his nature.

But I don’t like it. I don’t like the idea that we’re born bad because if we’re all born sinners, I don’t know if we can ever really wash ourselves clean.

Do you believe children carry the sins of their fathers? Have you heard of that? Generational sins, ancestral sins—do you believe in those? My brother does. Because our dad did what he did—that’s Julian’s second pass. He’s already wearing Dad’s sins—what’s a few more?

He says it’s just the family business but I call it the family sin. He doesn’t like it when I say that, but I think he thinks I’m right, he just doesn’t know what to do about it. Neither of us do. We are who we are, and what we are is all we’ve ever known.

We have rules I made up when I was little that we don’t break, things Julian promised he’d never do that makes everything we do seem a little less bad.

People we won’t work with, no matter what. Sapanta Asad, Mata Tosell, Roisin MacMathan—people who fuck with people how they fuck with people, it’s a no-fly zone for us. Julian would never. I need him to never.

And it’s then I pull out a white T-shirt of my brother’s from the laundry basket.

I shouldn’t let him buy white, I always tell myself every time I do the laundry—stop letting him buy white things. There’s really no point, it’s just money down the drain—it’s a waste of time and white is unsalvageable for the best of us. Boys will be boys is what I used to tell myself . . . Boys will be boys and gang lords will be gang lords.

It’s a nice T-shirt. I bought it for him.

It’s from Mastermind Japan. Plain white.

And I pretend my heart doesn’t sink as I inspect it all stained.

It doesn’t take a med student to know this, just anyone with a working pair of eyes could tell you: there’s too much red on the shirt for the person it came from to still be alive.

16:04

Julian

The girl at breakfast was different to the girl at lunch.

That’s astute, Daisyface . . . very good.

They teach you that in med school?

No

Do you know what they do teach us about in med school though, Julian?

Communicable diseases.

I’m clean as a whistle.

That seems both categorically untrue and factually inaccurate.

So I guess this is a no to me bringing a hot bartender home for dinner tonight?

3 for 3?

Are you joking?

. . . .yes.

Ew

Firm no, then?

EW!!!!