Denise told me this three times over about a year, and it wasn't the same story twice. That's the main reason I still don't know what to believe.
First time, we were on our break in the staff room at the depot. She said the sound was a car alarm going off outside. She'd been alone on the night shift at the Wash n Dry on Bello Lane, mopping under the machines, and this alarm kept cutting in and out. Then she stopped mid-sentence and started again. Not outside. Dryer six, the big commercial one at the end, doing its finished cycle, that three-note chime it does. She only worked that out because she went to check the street and there was no car there at all.
She went to empty it. Nobody had put anything in dryer six that she remembered. But there was a load in there, a man's shirts and a pair of jeans, still damp round the seams the way things are when the heat cuts off too soon. She folded them, boxed them for the lost property shelf, because that's just what you do. The whole bundle smelled of smoke. Not cigarette smoke. Something that gets into brick.
Second time, a few months later, we were sat in her car outside the cash and carry waiting for it to open. This time the alarm had become a smoke detector, going off somewhere upstairs in the flats above the launderette. She was sure of that detail. Then she caught herself again. There are no flats above the Wash n Dry. It's got a flat roof and one of those satellite dish companies up there, a big sign you can see from the roundabout. So it had to be the dryer again. Same chime. Same shirts, she said, though she also said she couldn't remember now if it was shirts or a duvet cover. The smell she was sure of, though. She said it had a taste as well as a smell, like the inside of your mouth after a bonfire, and it sat on her hands through two washes.
Third time she'd had a couple of drinks and the whole thing came out different again. This time the sound wasn't an alarm and never had been. It was a phone ringing, in the office at the back where the owner kept the till float. She went through to answer it and there was nobody on the line. Just static with a rhythm to it, like breathing through a scarf held over the mouth. When she came back out, dryer six had already finished. No coins had gone in it. Nobody had started it.
That was the time she told me about the button.
She said it was down in the lint trap after she'd taken the clothes out. Small, brass, the kind off a blazer. Warm to the touch, though the machine had been off ten minutes by then, she was fairly sure it was ten, maybe closer to fifteen. She meant to hand it in with the lost property and never did. She still had it. She took it out of her coat pocket right there in the car and held it up to the streetlight so I could see the black crescent scorched along one edge, like something had been pressed flat against a stove and only the button had come through it whole enough to say so.
"Cotham Hill Laundrette, Bristol" by Brokentaco is licensed under CC BY 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/.