Closed For Cleaning

Graham knew that he needed a car wash. He had been putting it off for the last two weeks and now he knew he couldn’t put it off any longer. He had bought a code for a top wash a fortnight ago, when he had filled up with petrol. He didn’t do it very often. He preferred to wash it by hand. He liked the feeling that he was responsible for the basking gleam that resonated from the car when he washed it. That the hard work he had diligently put in had paid off. But, this wash would be under different circumstances, and it had to be done today without fail. Today was the final day that the code was valid and he absolutely hated wasting money. Now, the time had come and he cursed himself for not doing it sooner. He had too much to do today, and getting a car wash was just an inconsiderate waste of time as far as he was concerned.

He looked at his watch. The digital display cheerily told him that it was half past two in the afternoon on June 18th. He had an hour and a half before he had to be round at the Dressall’s. He had mapped out his route the night before and drove there just after dusk to make sure that he knew where he was going, and also to see how long it would take. It took 20 minutes and that was in moderate traffic.

He glanced out of the bay window overlooking the car on the driveway. It was an MG MGB, intricately coated in his favourite shade – British racing green. It sparkled magnificently in the warm June sunshine.  He looked at the machine lovingly and felt a pang of guilt rise up in his throat at what he was going to do.

He reminisced back to when he had bought the MGB in 1979. He had heard a rumour that they wouldn’t be making them anymore and decided, on a spur of the moment to go out and buy one new whilst he still could. He still adored the car. He had felt on top of the world driving around in that. True, it looked a bit outdated now and he was slowly losing his battle with the rust that threatened to invade and take residence in the immaculate bodywork, but he still adored it. However, he had needed the money badly and decided (not lightly) that the only quick solution to get out of his financial quagmire was to sell the only thing that was of any value. Seeing as his house seemed not to qualify, the car was the only feasible option.

He moved away from the window, removing himself from the sorrow he felt looking at his beautiful machine that would soon not be his, and consoled himself by wasting time further in a variety of extraordinary ways.

The clock chimed for three o’clock and Graham awoke from his doze in the armchair. The television was on showing another celebrity cooking challenge and he turned it off with a faint sneer of disgust. He prised himself out of the chair and went into the kitchen to run himself a nice cool glass of tap water. He drank it luxuriously and reached for the keys to the Merc that were dangling almost regally from a brass-plated ornamental hook over the small desk in the hall that lay host to the telephone. When you made a call in Graham Evanson’s house you were drawn to the keys. But, not for much longer.

He sighed as he reached for his casual jacket and put it on, leaving it unbuttoned. He made the familiar swoop for his keys and headed for the door, pausing long enough on his porch to marvel at its beauty for one final time, before reasserting himself to the difficult job in hand by slamming the door. The glass rattled in its frame, holding on for dear life. He must get that fixed, especially with winter on the way. Note to self, buy glass and then fix the front door before the chilly winter air blows in and gives you pneumonia in the middle of the night when you’re fast asleep. That’d teach you for slacking, eh? He silenced his mind and walked to the car.

He slid the key into the lock and slid comfortably into the driver’s seat and slammed the door shut. He placed the key delicately into the ignition and fired up the engine. The car was never the same after the government had insisted that every car be fitted with a catalytic converter in an attempt to save the environment. They clamp down on the cars, but they don’t give a stuff about the factories, or aeroplanes for that matter! Philistines!  The engine had lost its predominant roar, and with it its place in Britain’s car culture. Now, it just purred pathetically as if it was about to embark on its final voyage, which, to Graham, felt like it was.

He reversed the car down his slightly sloping driveway and turned the wheel firmly so as not to hit the kerb on the opposite side, and cruised slowly away, down the road and out of the idyllic village into the bustling chaos of the city.

It took him a little over quarter of an hour to reach the garage where he had bought the car wash code and he felt exasperated with himself. What the hell was he thinking?! Twenty minutes in modern traffic?! Pssh! He let himself slowly cool down and pulled onto the forecourt.

The place was empty and the kiosk had all of its lights off. All of the pumps had been barred off and all of the fire extinguishers had been rolled in. The shutters were down on the weatherproof containers that lay underneath the windows, usually bulging with charcoal briquettes, paraffin and all kinds of so-called ‘essential’ summer fuels. He looked across to the other side of the forecourt where the air and water machines looked desolate. He heard the soft scuttle of leaves dancing on the abandoned tarmac and a slight uneasiness crept up within him, branch by branch, vein by vein. He heard a muffled THUNK! and whirled around, only to find one of the newspaper box lids opening and closing inviting him to just put his hand inside and play a game. It’ll be a laugh!

He pulled up closer to the entrance of the car wash that was situated just next to the entrance to the kiosk on the right-hand side. There was a keypad just in front of the machinery where you typed your code. He edged the car closer and wound down his window, praying to the sky above that it would be working today. It had a bit of a reputation as being the most unreliable car wash in the area. It was forever breaking down and when it did you had to have a degree in Italian in order to read the instruction manual for it! And getting parts for it was a different story altogether. It would have been cheaper just getting a new car wash. The only reason he was going to use it was because it was a good deal cheaper than all of the other rip-off merchants.

He was level with the keypad and a smile beamed across his face. The display simply read: CARWASH READY. ENTER CODE. He wound the window right down and he leaned out delicately pressing each key so that he entered his code correctly. It was embarrassing entering the wrong code, especially when the keypad sounded an awfully loud siren, before resetting itself to let him have another go. It might as well have had an automatic tannoy on it just to complete the charade. ‘ATTENTION! ATTENTION! THE PERSON ATTEMPTING TO USE THE CARWASH HAS FORGOTTEN THEIR CODE! WHAT A CLOWN! NOW, EVERYONE POINT AND LAUGH HYSTERICALLY!!’ Good job, it doesn’t have a Chip and PIN facility or we’d be here all day, he thought dryly.

He depressed the last numeral key and waited whilst the computer churned through its verification processes. After an age, the machine beeped cheerily and the display message had changed: CODE ACCEPTED. PLEASE PROCEED FORWARD UNTIL RED LIGHT SHOWS.

He wound up his window and edged the car forwards, little by little craning his neck upwards to see the light change from green to red.

Still green.

A little bit further then.

Still green.

Further even more.

Nope, still green.

Come on! I’m nearly out of the stupid thing!! Where’s the red light?!

Still green.

This is ridiculous! It’s broken! I knew it! I goddamn knew –

The red light came on.

He jerked the car to a stop and stalled the engine. Not that it mattered much as the engine had to be turned off anyway. Good job, this place is empty. Wouldn’t have liked anyone to see that! He mopped his slightly sweaty forehead with a handkerchief and waited for the brushes to rotate against each other. He waited for what seemed like an ice age. Then, the brushes started to move. Slowly at first, gradually getting quicker until the multi-coloured stripes became nothing but a swirling rainbow of melted colour.

The mechanical frame that held the cleaning brushes jerked creakily into life and slowly began to move on its caterpillar tracks towards the car. Graham saw the windscreen of his MGB fleck up with spray and turned his thoughts to the exchange that lay ahead. He didn’t like Richard Dressall much. Dressall was the kind of man who seemed to have built his entire empire by standing on the backs of other people who had done all the work. Dressall had taken over a doomed electrical component manufacturing firm and, by some miracle, had managed to completely turn it around. Graham worked for a similar sort of business but mainly dealt with isolation materials. He had come into contact with both Dressall and Dressall’s merchandise and he had come to the conclusion that both were cheap and tacky. Unfortunately, Graham also knew that Dressall was rich. Very rich. He also had a keen interest on Graham’s pride and joy, his British racing green MG MGB. He had even joked that if Graham ever wanted to sell the car, then he should give him a ring. His number was always in the phone book and he could be reached at any time. He wasn’t that far up his own backside to go ex-directory. He hadn’t even given the prospect a second glance, until recently.

The death of his wife a year ago had really knocked the stuffing out of Graham. He was a handsome man for his middle-forties. He still had a good crop of light brown hair and he was always cleanly shaven and looked very debonair even if he was just going to the local grocer for a pint of milk. But, life seemed to have left him behind in a dead and incomprehensible world and had moved on without stopping to realise that it had dumped a passenger quite by accident. He couldn’t find his purpose in life any more and so he chose the wrong road and turned to the bottle. Luckily for him, he discovered that he didn’t have the taste for it and tried something else instead. And that was where he encountered gambling. It was very exhilarating at first, walking into a swanky casino dressed sharply in a pinstripe suit with gleaming shoes. He felt excited for the first time in a long while. But, then he noticed that he couldn’t play any of the games at all. He kept losing at Black Jack, Roulette, Craps, Poker and even on the slot machines. He was useless. But, he couldn’t give up this newfound lifestyle and so he researched each game to see if it would better his chances. No such luck. It infuriated him more when he lost. How dare he lose! He studied the entire history of the game, some of the game’s most famous players and had stayed up countless hours practicing the skill required in the game, how dare it do this to him!! So, he decided (foolishly) that the reason why he wasn’t winning was because he was playing safe and needed to play a little more dangerously and with a lot more money. As well as a lot of money that wasn’t really his. And that landed him in the current predicament he was in. Credit card debts and overdrafts spiralling wildly out of control and with the danger of his house that he had worked so hard to make his own in danger of being repossessed, he had this final, if not morose, roll of the dice and he intended to win. Even if it meant swallowing his pride and calling Dressall up to ‘negotiate’ a ‘reasonable deal’ for the MGB.

That last thought spun him out of his daydream. He looked down at his watch and saw the big hand move past the six and the small hand move ever closer to the four. Damn! He was going to be late! And he wanted to be especially punctual for that smug hypocrite Dressall! Curse his procrastination!

He felt the brushes make contact with the car as the car jerked slightly backward as the brush rolled over the bonnet like a tidal wave getting ever closer to oblivion. Graham shifted uncomfortably in his seat and unbuckled his seat belt. He hated car washes. He got a very slight feeling of claustrophobia being stuck in these things. Especially, when all he could see was an endless cycle of blue, yellow and green stripes that seemed to hypnotise you with their cyclic rhythms if you stared at them for too long. It was like looking at a psychedelic barber’s shingle only four times as big.

He felt the car jerk sideways as the wheel brushes got to work, cleaning his slightly grubby hubcaps and reaching deep inside the chassis to get at the dirt that thought it could escape if it hid in the dark. No sir! Not with these super-deluxe Italian brushes!

It was then that he began to hear a high-pitched whizzing noise coming from near the wheels. It sounded like a dentist’s drill that someone had forgotten to switch off. He craned his neck forward to see if he could find out what was causing the irritating noise. It was then that the big horizontal psychedelic brush collided with the windscreen, splaying out its hundreds of fingers across the transparent glass, making the car judder further.

Graham shot back into his seat and tried to control his breathing. Come on! It’s only a car wash, plenty of people go through these things every day. Hell, the snobs go through here every time they take their vehicle out of their drive!! Come on, son, get a grip! He sided with his mind and told himself that he was just being stupid and a little on-edge because of what he would be doing after. He had committed himself, after all. No backing out of it now.

He could still hear that high-pitched whining noise though, slightly muffled in the background being drowned out by the noise of the ancient machinery all around him, but nevertheless still there. The horizontal brush had finished licking his windscreen and it hadn’t done a bad job. It now seemed like it fancied a taste of the roof. The two vertical brushes began caressing the wings of his MGB almost lovingly at first, but that soon rapidly changed as they began to spin faster and faster, each brush trying to outdo the other and he could feel the car rocking around like an aeroplane that’s had the misfortune to fly straight through a pocket of turbulence. The brushes groaned slightly as the friction deepened and spun even more viciously, emitting a buzzing sound that was getting louder as the brushes got faster. Graham looked out of the windscreen with a kind of morbid curiosity as he saw the two brushes both fly into a frenzy that looked more like circular saw blades than a few fibres bundled together. They raced up the sides of his car and he could hear the paintwork being devoured as they careened their way up the length of his car. He watched in horror as one of the brushes seemed to get caught in a gap in the bonnet and then wrenched itself free, tossing the bonnet away as if it were aluminium foil. It flew towards the windscreen and Graham ducked, manoeuvring his head under the steering wheel as he heard the sickening crunch as it hit the glass. He could feel the car being jerked violently from side to side as if two gigantic bullies were tossing it around.

With an almighty jerk, the shoving stopped. Everything was still apart from the sound of a jet happily wasting water lightly against the side of his car. Well, vehicle now shall we say? Graham still lay shaking underneath the steering column, furiously debating in his tattered mind whether or not to risk a look outside. Risk a look at what the monstrosity had done to his beautiful car. But, then he thought of the deranged way that the brushes had span and how they had seemed to reverse and move forward again as if they had missed a part the first time and wanted to make damn sure that they annihilated it the second time around.

He decided to chance it, and gradually pulled up above the dashboard. The brushes were still there and still spinning menacingly in front of him almost gleefully admiring their handiwork. His fright gradually turned to rage as he looked closer at the demolition. The bonnet was now wedged in the windscreen at an awkward angle on the passenger side. It looked like a futuristic tortilla chip going for a tasty glass dip. He could see the engine inside steaming slightly as well as the radiator. That was not good. He shouted unpleasantries at the psychotic car wash and wondered if the car would still work after he got out of this infernal contraption.

But, he never had time to fully answer his question as with lightning speed that was surely impossible for such an ancient, rickety piece of machinery, the brushes were bearing down on him again. The horizontal brush had advanced to the top half of his windscreen and he could see the bonnet see-sawing both left and right with the force, like a sail caught in a hurricane. He failed to notice that with each see-sawing motion, the glass was becoming more and more cracked and with just the right amount of pressure …

… it would shatter completely. And it did. Glass fell like rain inside the car and the machine seemed to utter a tremendous creak as if that was its victory cry. The vertical brushes aligned themselves parallel to each other flanking the horizontal brush as they raced up the wings again spinning dervishly. Graham watched in horror as they approached the wing mirrors and saw them disappear deep into the swirling mesh of colour with a sickening crunch.

He moaned in protest and quickly stopped, when he heard a loud THUMP! from the top of the car. Mr. Horizontal had found the roof by the look of it. He squirmed back under the steering column again and looked upwards, fear filling his face ageing it by the minute.

He heard another loud thump from the side of the car and whirled around. One of Mr. Horizontal’s vertical brothers was right there spinning wildly gesturing him to get lost in its swirl. Graham screamed and hid his face in his hands. Annoyed, that this pitiful human had defied the almighty car wash brush, it slammed against the car, rocking it hard. Somewhere, Graham heard another creak. This car isn’t going to last much longer, you need to get out and quickly!!

Suddenly, there was a guttural noise of apparatus slowing down from overhead. Graham looked up hopefully but that was soon dissipated as he noticed that there was a huge bulge emerging from the ceiling. The brush was pushing down on the roof with too much pressure and the bodyshell couldn’t handle it. It was going to cave in. The metal was turning white with the strain and it was only a matter of minutes, if not seconds before it gave way completely. Another thump from the side rocked the car further and Graham heard a nasty squealing noise from near the bottom of the car. Looks like the wheel brushes want some action. Hell, everyone join in! Let’s go crazy and have a party!! Graham pressed his ear close to the door and he heard the brush scraping its way up the car to be reunited with its bigger brothers.

CLANG!! The roof had given in and had landed on the back seats. He strained upwards not wanting to see but he felt somehow compelled to, and there it was. The hideous brush spinning slowly as if to delay the attack. That guttural creak emerged from it again, and it swooned down into the car. At the same time, the vertical brushes decided to press into the car and pressured the window into oblivion. There was now nowhere to hide. Mr. Horizontal could get anywhere inside the car, and if it came across an obstacle, it would either flatten it or rip it out of the way.

Graham tried to bolt for the back seats, but was stopped in his tracks as a fresh jet of scalding hot wax hit him in the face. He screamed and fell backwards, flailing blindly, his backside landing hard on the horn. He could feel the acidic spray burn into his flesh, ripping his skin. He tried to open his eyes and felt a surge of white-hot pain rip through his skull, making it pulse with a sickeningly bassy rhythm. He attempted to get up again, but he felt something that made his spine tingle with horror.

Bristles. Loads of them. Millions of them. Mr. Horizontal was directly above him. He shrieked and tried in vain to escape. But, Mr. Horizontal was so quick it was frightening. It bore down on him and pinned him down to the floor, along with the gearstick and handbrake that rather painfully stuck in his chest and his groin respectively. He yelled in pain as he felt the gearknob break through his skin and pummel itself through his insides, ripping its way through vital tissue, muscle, organ and bone. The sickening crunch grew louder as Mr. Horizontal applied more pressure, uttering that guttural roar much louder and its brothers appeared to respond with their own series of terrifying creaks and groans.

Graham felt absurdly relieved as the gearstick sawed its way through his heart, separating the atriums from the ventricles before mixing them together in a bloody red slush, the pressure finally dispersing and the ultimate relaxation washing over him. One single thought arched through his mind as his body wound down, the flow of blood stopping from his severed arteries, if I can’t have this car, then that smug dirtbag Dressall won’t have it either. He smiled weakly and that was when all traces of life ceased for Graham Evanson.

It was 6am before anybody found the car, the car wash programme had long stopped. The petrol station’s owner had walked quizzically over to the empty shell that had used to be a very well looked after MG MGB, looked like it had been painted a nice British racing green colour as well. Pity, it had been beaten up as bad as it had. It would be no-one’s baby now, except the scrap yard’s. He looked inside and scratched his head in puzzlement. The inside was completely spotless. Gleaming. The gearstick was shiny even though it was completely smashed in and the same with the handbrake. Hell, it even looked like the damn pedals had had a makeover!

He scratched his balding head and went over to the garage building. From near the back door, he had dragged out a sandwich board. Damn thing’s decided to keel over again. The car wash was useless. Always braking down. They should scrap it really but the management was having none of it. Too expensive when this one works just fine, just needs a bit of tinkering is all! Yeah, right. He opened the board which displayed the message CAR WASH CLOSED FOR ESSENTIAL MAINTENANCE. SORRY and opened up the petrol station. Before, he switched on the pumps and began his shift. He rang up the local vehicle towing company. They would be annoyed at being rang so early in the morning but tough! They might understand what hard work is for a change!

In his amazement, the petrol station attendant had never thought to check the display readout to see what the problem might have been. It usually gave a basic inclination as to what the issue was on its LCD readout. It had blinked the same message: JOB COMPLETED. CLOSED FOR CLEANING. SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE.

When the tow truck arrived later that morning, the readout was blank.