Moving to the City

In Pen Aber, where Elin Harrow grew up, you could not walk to the harbour without saying good morning eleven times. She had counted once, when she was fourteen and bored. It had seemed to her then like a rule of nature rather than a thing people chose to do.

The job in Leeds was a good one and she took it. The flat was on the second floor above a corner shop, the rent was more than her mother thought reasonable, and the deposit took everything she had saved in two years of living at home.

The removal van left at half past six on a Sunday morning. Her father carried the boxes up the stairs and said very little, and when he drove away he beeped the horn twice at the corner. Elin stood at the window until the van had gone.

The first week was fine because it was busy. She signed the tenancy agreement, learned the commute, and found the supermarket that stayed open late. The landlord came on the Thursday to fix a window and told her the flat had been empty since Christmas.

The second week was harder. She noticed that she had spoken to nobody outside work since the previous Friday, unless you counted the man at the till in the corner shop, who said four pounds twenty and nothing else. She had not expected the city to be quiet.

At home a stranger was somebody who came for a fortnight in August. Here, she was the stranger, and being one was not dramatic at all. It was mostly the sound of her own key, and evenings in which nothing happened that she could tell anyone about.

The flat had a washing machine but no dryer, and in November this becomes a problem. So on a wet Tuesday she carried a bag of wet clothes three streets to the launderette on Pelham Road, which is open until nine and smells of warm cotton and old coins.

The big dryer at the end ate her pound and did nothing. She hit it, which is what her father would have done. A woman of about seventy, sitting under the notice board with a small brown dog on her lap, said, "You have to hold the door and then press it."

Her name was Dot, the dog was called Biscuit, and she had lived on Pelham Road since 1974. She said the launderette had been a shoe shop before that. She asked Elin three questions and answered two of them herself, which Elin found restful.

After that Elin went on Tuesdays, even in weeks when she could have dried things on the radiator. Dot was usually there. Sometimes she wasn't, and then Elin read the notice board: a lost cat, a choir, Polish lessons, a man who repaired sewing machines in his kitchen.

In January she rang the number on the choir card, mostly because Dot had asked twice whether she had. The choir met in a church hall with a broken heater, and if you arrived early you were given the job of putting out the chairs, which meant you were spoken to.

She still did not know her own neighbours' names in March, and she had stopped feeling that this was a failure. But she knew the woman in the corner shop was called Sabina, that Biscuit was not allowed cheese, and which dryer takes two coins.

In May her mother came for the weekend and asked, on the bus into town, whether Elin had settled in. Elin said she wasn't sure. Then a man got off at Pelham Road with a small brown dog, and she said hello to him without thinking about it first.