Monday, Oct 25, 2004
Spin Cycle by Zoe Strachan
- Anjana BasuAnjana Basu taught English Literature, briefly, in Calcutta University. She writes poetry, stories, features in the local newspapers and in Cosmopolitan. She has had a book of short stories published by Orient Longman, India. The BBC had broadcast one of her short stories and her poems have featured in an anthology brought out by Penguin India. In America she has been published in The Wolfhead Quarterly, Gowanus, The Blue Moon Review, and Recursive Angel, to name a few.
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Book Name:Spin Cycle
Publisher: Picador Books
Price: 10 pounds 99p
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PASS THE DETERGENT PLEASE!
Laundry. Most of the time it causes a feeling of embarrassment, a kind of snigger unless you’re discussing brands of detergent and fabric softeners.. After all, one’s laundry is a very personal thing, the dirty underwear and sheets revealing, we fear, far more than we usually want exposed about our lives. That’s why the ‘washing one’s dirty laundry in public’ phrase. Not that that matters in India where laundry is publicly aired on riverbanks and dhobi ghats throughout the country with much beating and jostling of stained sheets. But then, in India, the most private things are publicly aired. In the West, dirty laundry is best stuffed into plastic bags and then into the washing machine, with a glance over the shoulder to make sure no one’s watching.
Laundry is an issue of underwear choices and their luxury and condition thereof, sheet choices, fabric choices – what stains are those there and do I really want anyone to see them? Men and women shuffle their laundry hastily into the machine with the furtiveness of one hiding the evidence of a murder. So far laundrettes have been the stuff of comedy, admittedly in some cases black. And then there’s Zoe Strachan’s Spin Cycle.
Spin Cycle is the result, it seems of careful laundry observation spread over time. It captures the atmosphere of a small laundrette to perfection along with its three somewhat dysfunctional workers. An obsession with washing may or may not be British – presumably it isn’t, since the only other work that comes close is Hanif Kureishi’s extravagant take on racism and love. That beautiful laundrette, as shown in the film, was a huge neon lit thing filled with muzak. It had Daniel Day Lewis and Gordon Warnecke as the lovers and Saeed Jaffrey as the father and laundrette owner who was too busy shagging his mistress to notice what was going on under his nose. And it has very little to do with Strachan’s compact claustrophobic world. Shakespeare does of course talk about freshly washed sheets, but clean laundry is a different matter altogether – there’s nothing telltale about white sweet smelling fabric just off the washing line.
What is it about laundrettes and obsessions? Is it because they have a bubble bubble toil and trouble kind of atmosphere? A laundrette and three women, the owner and her two employees. Three lives closeted by other people’s dirty linen that have nothing at all in common – unless it’s the fact that they all have something to hide. Strachan’s book pins down the corners of Glasgow to a tee and details lost dreams and hidden passions in a steamy combination of old crime, sex and obsession. It puts a totally different spin on life in the UK, with intriguing insights and a discerning eye for detail.
Myrna craves a glamorous lifestyle lit by big brand names and luxurious trappings. To finance it she finds herself a job with an escort agency that takes her out partying at night and inevitably gets her into dangerous situations. Siobhan seems to be naïve in comparison , but before she knows it is stalking her favourite customer through her underwear, an attractive woman who lays seductive snares. Meanwhile the recently widowed Agnes, who is older, more mature and the owner of the laundrette tries to mother the two, but she is haunted by the murder of her glamorous cousin. The murder frets at her threatening to turn her into a man hater. Throw these three into a washing machine together and something’s bound to run.
The book is full of details about the everyday lives of these three women. Some of it is mundane, some is embarrassing. Siobhan’s throwing her leg over the back of the sofa as she fantasises. Myrna smoking a cigarette strung out with nerves.
Love does creep into this claustrophobic world, love between women finding refuge from the pressures of a male dominated world – none of it’s the My Beautiful Laundrette kind of flamboyant raffishness. It’s a quiet lifeboat kind of love, a desperate attempt to escape the unbearable. Perhaps that is what finally puts the spin on the cycle.
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