"Whites in first, love. Whites, then the socks, then the bibs, and the bibs on their own because they stink."
"I know, Denise."
"You say that."
"I've done it thirty times."
"You've done it twenty-nine times and put the bibs in with the socks once," Denise Wragg said, "and I have not forgotten it, and I never will."
Ka-chunk.
The big drum went round and started filling.
Glug-glug-glug.
Denise Wragg was sixty-one, built like a postbox, with reading glasses on a chain and forearms off a woman who had shifted wet kit for twenty-seven years.
She had done the laundry at Meadow Lane since 1994, and she talked to the machines more than she talked to people. She talked to Ellie Prentice.
"Was it any good?" Denise said. "I never watch it. I've been down here since half one."
"They had ten men."
"Who did?"
"Torquay. From twenty-five minutes."
"And?"
"One-one."
Denise made a noise in the back of her throat and started matching socks. Flip. Flip. "Your dad'll be thrilled."
"He's already texted me twice."
"Go on."
Ellie got her phone out.
Dad: 65 MINUTES
Dad: SIXTY FIVE MINUTES ELLIE
Dad: anyway are you getting a lift or
"He's had them two seats since 1994," Ellie said. "Row H. Same year as your machine."
"Then he's suffered worse than tonight."
"He was here when they went down."
"So was I, duck. I was stood right there sorting that." Denise nodded at the basket without looking at it. "You want to get off. Your mates'll be out."
"They're in Ocean, and I would rather do the bibs."
"That is the saddest thing I have heard all week," Denise said, "and I listened to the whole of the second half on the radio."
Bzzz. Bzzz. Ellie's phone went again on the shelf.
Jodie: where r u
Jodie: dont say work
Jodie: ellie
Jodie: its SATURDAY
She turned it face down. Clack.
"Him?" Denise said.
"Jodie. Off my course."
"What is it you do again?"
"Sport Business Management. Second year."
"And that's a real thing, is it?"
"It's a real thing. There's an exam and everything."
"And you're doing that so you can end up down here doing this?"
"I'm doing that so I can end up in a building like this doing something else," Ellie said.
"You have to start somewhere. Everyone on my course is doing an internship at a rugby club in Loughborough, and I'm at Notts County, and I'm the only one of them who has ever been inside a changing room."
Denise looked at her over the top of the sock she was matching.
"You applied for this on the same day it went up, didn't you?"
"I rang them at half four in the afternoon."
"I know. Barry told me. He said there was a lass rang up so fast she had not read the hours."
"I'd read the hours."
"You had not read the money."
"No," Ellie said. "I had not read the money."
Denise laughed, and coughed, and put her hand flat on the machine to steady it, because it walked when it spun, and it had done that since about 2009. Rattle-rattle-rattle.
"Right. My Kev's outside." She pulled her cardigan off the hook. "Leave the bibs soaking and do them Monday. And don't be in here till nine again, because there's nobody left in this building after eight, and it's not right."
"There's stewards."
"There's two stewards, and one of them is seventy." Denise stopped in the doorway. "Go on. Say goodnight."
"Goodnight, Denise."
"Goodnight, love."
Thunk.
The door.
Then her shoes going away up the corridor, tap-tap-tap, and a shutter coming down somewhere over by the ticket office, clatter-clang, and then nothing except the drum going round. Whirr. Whirr.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
The dryer cooling down. Somewhere above her the tannoy coughed once and died, and a tap ran in the referee's room and stopped.
Ellie sat down on the plastic chair by the dryers and let the building empty.
She had worked something out about herself at fourteen, and she had never said it to a single person.
Her dad took her to Meadow Lane for the first time when she was six. He had the two seats in row H, and her mum did not want them, so Ellie got the second one every other Saturday from the age of six until she was old enough to have opinions about it.
She loved it.
She loved the noise and the pies and the bloke behind them who swore at the linesman in a voice like a shovel, and she loved that her dad became somebody different for two hours, louder and younger and easier to talk to.
She did not know the rules. She still barely knew the rules. She could not have told you what offside was at fourteen, and she could not tell you now without a diagram and two minutes.
Then at fourteen she noticed something, and it took her about a season to be sure of it.
She never watched the ball.
Never for a goal, never for a save, never for any of the bits where six thousand people stood up at the same time.
Her eyes were always somewhere else on the pitch, on somebody's legs going, on the way a lad's shirt stuck to his back in the second half, on a centre-half with his hands on his knees at eighty minutes with his chest going like a dog.
She tested it.
Is it just that they're fit? No.
She had sat through two hours of a boy band on a screen at a sleepover at fifteen and felt nothing at all, and one of them was objectively the best-looking human being she had ever seen. Is it the shirts? No.
It was the sweat. It was the fact that they were the only people she ever saw who wanted something so badly in public that it came out of their skin.
Nobody in her life wanted anything like that. Her dad wanted a point. Jodie wanted a table in Ocean.
And on a Saturday afternoon, twenty-two grown men ran themselves into the ground in front of her for something that did not exist and could not be held.
She never told anybody. Not her mum. Not Jodie. Not the girl she shared a room with in first year, who told Ellie everything there was to know about herself over nine months and got nothing back.
Then in July there had been a job posting on the club website.
She had read it standing up in her mum's kitchen, and rung the number at half four the same afternoon, and the man on the phone had said, "Are you free Tuesday?" and she had said, "I'm free tomorrow," and that had been that.
The routine after that was simple, and it was very nearly perfect. Lectures in the morning, Meadow Lane in the afternoons and every matchday.
Because the players trained in the mornings and went home, she almost never saw one.
She had made peace with that inside a week. On a day with no lectures, she came in early and stood at the back of the gym with a mop she did not need.