The Dead Side of the Mike by Simon Brett Page A

lethargic self-distaste. What had a fifty-one-year-old man of diminishing charms to offer to a girl like her? He was far too old. He was glad he hadn’t made any advance; he had thus saved himself the embarrassment of her puzzled and gentle but inevitable rebuff. And to think of using the suicide of her friend as an excuse to wriggle his way into her affections was shabby, the trick of a dirty old man.
    No, Andrea Gower’s death had been no more than it appeared. The poor girl, to whom life had dealt more than her fair share of knaves, couldn’t face the descent from the manic happiness of her trip to New York and had taken her own life. Whether Mark Lear or anyone else had spoken to her just before the suicide was not particularly important. It hadn’t affected the outcome.
    Andrea Gower had committed suicide. There was nothing else to think.
    Two things happened on the Friday afternoon to change that conclusion. The first took place, with the perversity that dramatic revelations have for choosing undramatic settings, in the launderette.
    Charles didn’t visit the launderette as often as he should. The little sink that lurked behind a plastic curtain in his bedsitter was good enough for drip-dry shirts, Y-fronts and socks. And such items dried satisfactorily from hangers by the window in summer, or on a Heath Robinson system of strings over the paraffin heater in winter. These methods, and occasional trips to the dry cleaner with jackets and trousers, could keep him reasonably nice to be near for most of the year.
    But the bedsitter really couldn’t cope with sheets. They wouldn’t fit in the sink, they took up too much space when hung up and they took too long to dry. A fellow actor of similarly unambitious domestic habits had recommended that he buy fitted nylon sheets, which, the sponsor assured him, would dry in no time and could be put virtually straight back on to the bed after washing. Charles did actually buy some, but, after one night of feeling like a kipper fillet sealed in its individual polythene bag, relegated them firmly to the bottom of his wardrobe. The action gave him the righteous feeling that he still had some standards left.
    But rejecting the nylon solution made the launderette inevitable. Every now and then he had to take his prized cotton sheets down to be washed and, more importantly, to be dried. The gaps between the now and the then were longer than those recommended in most books of household management, but at least the visits always happened eventually.
    Westbourne Grove was the setting for his nearest launderette, which he often considered must be the most depressing place in the world. A few other candidates – one particular lino-floored pub in Edinburgh, the waiting room at Victoria Station, the Regent Palace Hotel, the South Bank Arts complex and all of Wales – occasionally vied in his mind for the title, but usually the launderette won.
    It wasn’t that it was dirty. It was regularly swept and the pervasive smell of detergent suggested cleanliness. But the dejected row of plastic-covered metal chairs, the piles of blue plastic baskets and the instructions unevenly printed out in felt pen suggested the set of some Beckett paean to despair. The characters who inhabited this bleak landscape matched.
    Perhaps they weren’t all miserable, perhaps they hadn’t all just been kicked out of loving marital homes or recently widowed, hadn’t just had their illegal immigrant status discovered, and weren’t facing imminent deportation; it’s just that they all looked as if they had. As soon as he walked into the place Charles felt he had joined the shifting and shiftless population of London, the sort about whom earnest reports keep appearing in the
Guardian.
What made him feel guilty was that he rather enjoyed being there. Such total abnegation of human hopes had a perversely cheering effect on him.
    Two things never changed when he went to