As a child, Bella had watched them through the kitchen window, her mother dipping and spinning to Are You Lonesome Tonight, one round and one tall thin silhouette dancing beneath the striplight, impossible to see who was holding who.
“I call him Nechtan,” her mother had said. “It means clean and pure.” She popped Nechtan and his bucket into the cupboard under the stairs. “Don’t tell your father.” And she winked at Bella.
Forty years later Bella fell in love with a hoover called Henry whom she renamed Hal. Her mother would have liked Hal, so light on his feet and much more hygienic than Nechtan, who had succumbed to mould despite his name. And of course much more flexible.
Some of Bella’s favourite moments came to be the two of them gliding around the house, Hal’s hum making her fingers tingle. Bella would try to put into words what he meant to her. “I’m not into sex any more, as you know. But you’re the best partner I’ve ever had. You’re there when I need you, you don’t leave crumbs in your wake, and you don’t leave toenail clippings that catch in my socks.” She shuddered at the memory. “You don’t ask me where I’m going, or when I’ll be back, or explain about routes, or ask me why I don’t understand.” Bella fell quiet, and Hal slid to a stop, after which Bella turned him off.
It could have been a marriage made in heaven – if Bella had believed in marriage, or heaven. But after fifteen years of the perfect partnership, Hal developed a cough. Bella spoke to him softly, and gave him extra rests, ignoring the trail of breadcrumbs Hal left behind him, but when he started to smell of smoke, she had to switch him off and weep a little weep.
The repair shop was the brainchild of Martha, who knitted postbox toppers. The event offered seamstresses, carpenters, guitar tuners, and an electrician. Bella took her place in the queue and stared around the hall at the hundreds of other ex-lovers, each in their own private state of distress, waiting for someone to fix them. She ate biscuits with a barista cradling a teamaker and an acupuncturist clutching a candelabra; she traded stories with a drying paint tester who’d come with a lawnmower, and a ghostwriter in a onesie with a broken zip. How easy it is to fall in love, she thought.
The electrician unclipped Hal’s belly and probed his innards gently with a screwdriver. She was gentle, but firm. “I’m afraid he’s done for. This happens, you think they’re forever, but they aren’t.” She leaned back and looked into Bella’s eyes. “Sandra,” she said. “I fix things. Just not this one. I’m so sorry.”
Bella left alone. So many Henry’s in the room, so many fractured relationships. She thought about loss, forgiveness, and renewal. Tomorrow she’d buy a new hoover, maybe a Henrietta. She fingered the business card in her pocket; and call Sandra.