Two Sides of a Street

Farrow Road is eleven metres wide, kerb to kerb. On the even side, at number 40, a warehouse that packed tea until 1981 now holds forty-four flats. On the odd side, at 41, Nadine has run a launderette for twenty-two years.

She opens at seven. Between seven and nine the customers are the ones she can name: Errol, who brings four bags on a Tuesday and reads the paper cover to cover; Mrs Sandhu; a man everyone still calls the taxi driver, although he now works nights at a hotel.

The flats opposite were finished four years ago. They came with communal machines in a room on the ground floor, two washers and two dryers for forty-four households, which anyone who has ever shared a machine could have told the developer was not enough.

So they cross. Not all of them, and not at first. Theo came over in his second week and asked whether the machines took cards. Nadine said no, and then said there was a shop four doors down that would give him coins, and he has been in most Sundays since.

Sundays are the crossing days. The old regulars come early in the week; the flats come at the weekend, when they are awake and the week's washing has reached the point where it can't be ignored any longer. The two groups sit in the same eight chairs and rarely at the same time.

Nadine's rent went up in the spring. She had expected it, having read about the road in the local paper eighteen months earlier, and she did the arithmetic on the back of a receipt with the shutter half down. Had the increase come two years earlier, she has said, she would have closed.

What saved the sums, she is careful to point out, was the four dryers. People from the flats wash at home and bring the wet clothes over, because a dryer is the thing a small flat with no balcony cannot solve.

Theo, who works in an office he describes vaguely and is on a twelve-month tenancy, asked her once whether the street had changed. Nadine said the bus route had changed in 2009. He waited for more, folding a shirt he had already folded, and she went to empty a coin box.

There was a skip outside number 40 for most of August, filling steadily with the furniture of people moving out at the end of their year. Errol looked at it across the road on a Tuesday and said that in a building like that you'd never get your deposit back anyway, and went back to his paper.

Nadine keeps a lost-property box under the counter. It currently contains eleven socks, a set of keys with a wooden fish on the ring, a child's glove and a paperback in Portuguese. Asked how long she keeps things, she said she had never thrown any of it away, which is not the same answer.

In October a woman from the fourth floor of number 40 came in with a dress that had been ruined by a communal machine two weeks before and wanted to know whether anything could be done. Nadine looked at it for a while, said probably not, and then said to leave it with her.

The lease on the launderette runs to March. The letter offering another five years is on the shelf beside the fuse box, where it has been since the eighteenth of September, held down by a bottle of fabric conditioner. Errol has asked about it twice. Theo doesn't know it exists.

At half past six on a Sunday in November the lights in the launderette were still on and the last dryer was still turning, and across eleven metres of wet road most of the windows of number 40 were lit as well.