Objet Trouvé
Sean and Ruth were curled up watching television when the music started playing. At first they thought it was in the film, but soon realised it was coming from Ruth’s backpack. Sean got up to answer it, “Did you change your ring tone?”
“Not intentionally. Is it your phone?”
“Not mine.” He found her phone as the song rang out. “It says Alessandro. Who is Alessandro?”
Ruth put out her hand for the phone. “I don’t know any Alessandro.” The phone was a Samsung. This was an Apple house. “Who’s phone is that?”
Weird.
The phone rang again. Ruth tried answering it, but couldn’t, and it rang out again. This time a phone number appeared on the locked screen. If found, please ring.
Ruth listened as Sean dialed the number on his phone. “I have your phone.” There was a long pause, someone speaking on the other end. “It’s at our house.” Pause. “I don’t know how.”
The day had been full of strange happenings. Earlier Ruth had the wrong night for dinner with her mother and cooked a meal the older woman wouldn’t eat because, Darling, you know how I am with food. So Sean ate it instead. Wine had been drunk. Rain abated. Home they drove. Earlier, Ruth had washed all the underpants and bed sheets which now needed to dry before bedtime. So Sean and Ruth detoured to the ‘washing shop’ where there were some public dryers — at 9pm.
The modern laundry had the bright lighting and the shiny ambiance of a bar. It was busy when they arrived. All the machines whirring. Two other customers occupied chairs on each side of the room. One, a woman in her early 40’s was on her phone talking animatedly in Spanish. The other, a young man whose age was hard to tell under his face mask and headphones, watched a movie on his computer.
One dryer that was out of order, and another wouldn’t accept cash or phone banking, only cards. A third had finished its cycle so Ruth emptied it while Sean emptied another.
Ruth noticed the washing was warm, but also cool enough that the owner should have claimed it by now. The machine was a Tardis full of towels, sheets, underpants, an entire wardrobe of clothing. It took two buckets to fill.
They loaded and locked the machines, the looked for a place to sit. The woman on the phone had moved closer to the door in a way that meant she occupied the whole banquette. “Do you want to sit there or here?” Asked Ruth, indicating a chair next to the man on his computer.
“Here,” said Sean. And they sat down and were absorbed by their devices.
People came and went, clearing the washing machines, but not using the dryers. A woman come in and put a load of washing on. Then she left.
After about twenty minutes the man with the face mask closed his machine and left. Sean and Ruth looked at each other in amusement. “Nothing in the dryer?” Asked Sean.
“Seems not.”
“I guess he wanted to wait somewhere warm.”
“Maybe he came in when it was raining? Maybe he wanted to get out of the house.”
Then the woman hung up her phone call and came over to the dryer. She observed the linen Ruth had place in there, and. recognising her own washing in the buckets, pulled out a huge Ikea shopping bag, and filled it with her dried laundry and left.
“Wow, that was her’s all this time?”
Another couple came and started fiddling with the machines. “That one doesn’t work,” said Sean. ‘It doesn’t accept money.”
The woman was genial, the man handsome, “We want one that you can change the temperature on,” she explained
“You can do that?”
“Not all of them. That one does it.” She indicated the machine Sean had filled. “Is that yours?”
“Yes.” Said Sean. “It might be dry by now.”
“We can wait,” chimed the young man, who bent over to stroke Ruth’s dog.
“Watch it, she bites.” But the dog wasn’t biting. The man sat in the chair Sean had vacated and talked to the dog in Italian.
Ruth opened the dryer door, feeling the floating clothing tumbling to a halt. “Yes, it’s dry.”
Sean double checked. “Yep. That’s dry.”
“You can have it,” Ruth told the younger couple, piling her laundry onto the centre counter to sort. “We’re done. But you know this laundry door locks at 10 pm.” It was ten to ten. “You can stay inside, but the lights go off.”
“I didn’t know that,” said the woman. “We live next door.”
“We got stuck here one night,” added Sean. “It started to rain, and we came inside — which turned out for the best, because the automatic door shut on us and we wouldn’t have been able to get our washing.”
The couple talked among themselves, “We could pick it up in the morning…”
“No, I need a few things tonight…”
Ruth and Sean resumed putting their washing into bags. When it was their turn, the young couple put their washing in the dryer and left.
“That’s odd,” observed Ruth, “They haven’t turned the machine on.”
“No, and it’s like,” Sean looked at his phone. “Three minutes to closing.”
“Should we turn it on for them?”
“They had an opinion about the temperature.” Sean hoisted the bag onto his shoulder and left. Ruth took one more look at the washing — then followed him.
At home, Sean and Ruth were curled up watching television when the music started playing. At first they thought it was the film — but realised it was coming from Ruth’s backpack. Sean got up to find out what it was. “Who’s Alessandro?”
Sean rang the number, and agreed to meet downstairs. “It’s the couple from the laundromat.”
“So why do we have their phone? Was yours in your pocket?”
“Yes.”
“Huh.” She said, “There were two phones in my bag, I must’ve thought one was yours. They must’ve put it on the table when they were checking out the dryers. I emptied our laundry onto their phone, and then packed it up thinking it was yours.”
After fifteen minutes, Sean looked out the window. “I’ll go downstairs and wait for them.”
“Great,” said Ruth. “Take the dog.”
Sean hooked the leash and took the phone downstairs. Sitting in the apartment, Ruth could hear him laughing with the young woman from the laundromat. She heard the dog bark, and the man’s voice talk to her in Italian. They spoke for about five minutes before Sean returned.
“She asked me if if I did that often,” he said, laughing.
“She thought you went around laundromats stealing people’s phones?”
“That’s what I said.”
“She commented that we set it up by telling her that the place was going to lock. It didn’t lock while they were there.”
“Was she serious?”
“She was joking, but they were wondering.”
“And why didn’t they ring to say they were outside?”
Sean looked at his phone. There were four missed calls. “What a strange evening.”
