مرد اتوکش

Chapter two

The Ironing Man

When the door bell rang Marina did three things. Firstly, she did nothing because no-one ever rang the door bell. No-one came to visit, no-one came at all, so she did not believe it was ringing. Secondly, she put the iron down on top of the shirt she was ironing and looked up. Thirdly, she walked to the door. She walked slowly, carefully and quietly.

She looked through the small hole in the middle of the door. There was someone there. Someone was standing outside her front door. She could not see if it was a man or a woman because the hole was in the middle of the door. She could not see a face but there was definitely someone there. She looked again through the hole and then jumped as the bell rang again.

She tried to remember what to do when this happened. When they had lived in London she had just opened the door and not really thought too much about it. But in London people very often rang the door bell. Here in the village it almost never happened. People did not visit each other, people did not go from house to house selling things. Who could it be? Maybe it was a wrong number. No, wrong numbers were just on the telephone, weren’t they?

The door bell rang again. It rang the same way, not more impatient than the last time, not more impatient than the first time. She thought of the film on television she had watched the night before. It was a horror film about dead people who come back to life in a small village: A young woman is alone in the old dark house on a night when the rain comes down like a river and the wind shakes the trees and the windows. The lights suddenly go out and there is a loud knock at the door, and then another knock, and another, heavier than before. The young woman goes to the door and asks ‘Who’s there?’ in a shaking voice but before the words have left her mouth the door opens and the.

But this was not a film and it wasn’t raining and anyway Marina did not really believe in the ‘living dead’. Not in the middle of the day, anyway, when it was light outside. The door bell rang again and this time Marina opened the door.

He was quite tall, good-looking (very good-looking) and he was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt. And he had a smile that you only see at the cinema or on television.

‘Hello.’

‘Hello.’

‘I’ve come to do the ironing for you,’ he said.

Marina smiled at him. Then she stopped smiling and looked at him. Then she smiled at him again and turned her head to one side. Just a little, because she did not want to look away from this face, this smile. Then she stopped smiling again and tried very hard to think of what to say next. Finally it came to her.

‘Sorry?’

And then she thought of something else.

‘You’ve come to do what?’

The man continued to smile at her and explained.

‘You wanted someone to do your ironing for you,’ he said. ‘You hate doing ironing. You made a wish, remember? About your ironing? That’s why I am here.’

The conversation might have continued like this for some time. But suddenly the smell of burning shirt reached them and they both ran into the kitchen.