It's A Good Day So Far: Chapter Twenty Three, The Third compartment

Chapter Twenty Three

I haven’t been able to write much lately. When I started this diary I was just an average kid doing, you know, average kid stuff. We’ve been learning about Karma in Religious Education and I think, if somebody asked me to go all spiritual and say what I’ve learned from this experience, I have an answer. The one thing that I’ve learned most is that Mum has really spoiled Dad. He’s flipping useless. He can’t cook, he can’t use the washing machine, he can’t iron, and trying to change the beds is a fiasco.

The first time we tried to do the weekly wash was hilarious. Weekly wash, let me tell you right there, that was a mistake all by itself. It took us all day and it was raining, and then we had all this wet washing lying in piles all over the kitchen while we waiting for the dryer to finish up. Then the cats decided to lie on the stuff that was dry and all folded up neat, ready for ironing. They are getting their summer coat, which, of course, means that they are losing their winter ones and the pile of washing was covered in a blanket of white hair so we had to wash it all again. But before all that, we had to work out how to use the washer. I looked to my dad to know, well, he is the grown up.

He bent over and stared at all the buttons and dials as though he could suss it out, but he seemed terrified of it. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘what do you think?’

‘Dunno.’

‘Well, can’t you just sort of intuit it, or something? You’re a woman, kind of. Aren’t you supposed to just know these things? How do you think your mother learned?’

‘She probably asked her mother?’

‘Good plan. Katie, you’re a genius. Annie,’ he shouted, ‘Annie can you come here a minute love?’

Mum came in and she was like someone in a science museum where you get to try out all the sensory stuff and gadgets and the like. She pressed every button and turned every dial and when she found the button that opened the door, she just kept opening it and then pushing the door closed, and then opening it and pushing the door closed. Any setting that had been in the right place to begin with, certainly wasn’t now. And now there were three of us getting in the way and mucking things up.

I knew, don’t ask me how I knew, but I did, that you have to separate stuff so that it doesn’t all go in the same load. Dad was just going to bung it all in together and hope for the best. So I made two piles, one of white stuff and one of coloured. But what about all the gear that is like baby pink or pale blue? They aren’t white, are they? But surely you can’t put them in with jeans and things like Dad’s navy blue shirt. So then we had three piles, but I didn’t know if you can do bedding with the clothes, so then we had four piles. And Dad had been working in the garden over the weekend and he had a pair of jeans and a t-shirt that was covered in mud, so then we had five piles. But can you just put two items in together? I didn’t know, so I added some of his underpants and stinky socks to that pile.

We started with the whites, because that was the biggest pile but we’d only put half of it in when Dad realised that the door wasn’t going to shut. We had to split the whites into three piles and then we had to split the bedding into two, the towels took up one load by themselves and we had to stuff them in really tight to get the door to close—that was nine loads of washing. How can three people make so many dirty clothes? Dad said that if we set it to cottons and do it on a thirty degree wash, because that’s what it said you should do on the television adverts, it would be okay for everything. I was doubtful, but he was being all bossy and thinking that he knows best. So that’s what we did.

And you’d think that would be it, wouldn’t you? We’d put the clothes in the washer and managed to shut the door—just. We’d sorted out the dials and knobs and we were almost good to go, but when Dad opened the drawer to put the powder in, there were three compartments. Three! First we had an argument about the powder tablets. I said that they went in the drawer, but Dad wanted to put them straight into the washer with the clothes. I’d definitely seen Mum put them in the drawer bit.

‘But we can’t just do what Mum does, she’s nuts,’ he pointed out.

‘But she wasn’t nuts then, Dad, trust me, the tablets go in the drawer.’

‘Okay, if you’re sure.’

‘I am.’

‘Which compartment?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I thought you’d seen her do it?’

‘I have, but I didn’t watch closely, did I?’
‘Do we work left to right, that seems logical?’

‘I suppose’

‘You suppose? Okay, let’s go on your supposition then.’ He put the tablets in the first compartment and the fabric conditioner in the second one, but that was only a tiny little one and we didn’t know if it was right. That still left the third compartment empty.

‘What goes in here?’ He was all red in the face and looked exhausted and we hadn’t even set the first load off yet.

‘Nothing, I don’t think.’

‘Well something must, otherwise it wouldn’t be here.’ He looked under the kitchen sink where we keep the washing stuff and started pulling out bottles and cans. The only thing that was washing related were some smelly paper things that went in the dryer to make your washing smell nice. ‘Here we go,’ he pulled his head out of the cupboard and looked proper proud of himself. We’ll chuck one of these in.’

‘Dad they go in the dryer.’ I took the box off him and showed him.

‘Yes, I know it says so, but things advance all the time, don’t they. Maybe they put the extra compartment in the drawer so that you can put them in either the washer or the dryer; stands to reason, doesn’t it? His reason, maybe. He stuffed the sheet in the empty compartment and closed the drawer fast before I could argue with him. He pushed the start button and we grinned at each other as though we’d achieved something really good when we heard water filling up the machine.

‘And to think your mother does this all the time. I think we’ve earned a rest, put the kettle on, love.’

Dad does the washing most of the time now, he does a little bit every day. I’ve learned that ironing is fun the first time that you do it, but after that it’s horrible. At first, I ironed everything, but now I only do my uniform and a shirt for Dad when he needs one. We’ve worked out that if you take the clothes out of the dryer while they are still hot, you don’t need to iron them, well most of them anyway. I’ve learned a lot about house stuff. And Dad’s learned that dryer sheets don’t go in the washer.

Aunty Linda came round last week and she moaned because Mum was wearing a cardigan that hadn’t been ironed. She said that Mum looked like a tramp and that annoyed me. I know she does a lot to help us, but she doesn’t stand up for hours to do the ironing when she’s got a geography project that she’s behind on, does she? Well she doesn’t have a geography project, but you know what I mean. She made me and Dad feel guilty because she says that we will be judged on the way we care for Mum and we can’t be seen to be lacking.

Jeez, we’re doing our best.

Mum and I were sitting on the bench in the garden yesterday. She was looking out but not seeing anything. She had that stupid smile on her face that she does nearly all the time now.

I looked though, and I saw.

Dad has always been in charge of mowing the lawns and chopping the hedges, but Mum does all the fancy stuff and weeds the flowerbeds and patios and all that. She keeps it tidy and looking really nice. I looked at it and it all looked grotty. There were weeds coming out of all of the patio stones and mossy stuff. It just looked sad, like us, I suppose, like a reflection of what our family has become. It was as though everything we’ve been through has leaked into the garden and started to kill it. There were dead flowers in amongst the live ones, and everything was overgrown. Mum would never have allowed that. I got some stuff out of her shed and started trying to tidy it up for her while she sat on her bench looking out at some other place.

‘Mum, is this a weed, or a flower, I’m not sure?’

‘Hmm? What did you say dear?’

‘This purple thing, here, what do I do with it?’

‘Well you, preheat the oven and then put it in for thirty minutes on twenty fifty degrees.’
‘Thanks Mum, really helpful, I’ll do that.’ I looked up and smiled at her.

But she’d already left me.