by Diana Simmonds

“Nadine’s in fabulous form. Fabulous. Nine business shirts in eleven minutes seventeen point two-four yesterday.”

Candace took three deep breaths, exhaling with deliberate calmness between each. She tried to ignore the voice and return to meditating on the textures and shape of the traditional wicker laundry basket. The time clock, suspended high above the auditorium, ticked away the countdown; the hubbub around her rose while the competition officials entered the arena and strode toward their places.

Candace stared at her basket, concentrating hard on it, attempting to block out the sounds of anticipation rising in the hall. But her shoulders had already tightened at the sound of Les Nash’s voice. The basket – set on the table in lane five, beside the regulation, competition issue ironing board with pink floral cover – was full. It was not her favoured colorways, but not as bad as the aqua and lime-green jungle pattern – lane seven – or the burnt orange Marimekko-style print that meant lane eight. She shuddered and averted her eyes from the burnt orange. A large, check flannelette shirt concealed the rest of her allotted garments. Candace resisted the urge to lean forward for a glimpse of what lay beneath, hoping instead that she might have scored some plain, tailored shirts – the preferred item for most contemporary competition ironers.

For a moment her reverie was deeply satisfying as she let her mind wander back over the amateur years, when the dread of frilly garments and sticky starch disasters dominated her life; to her meteoric rise through the professional ranks when relentless nights of training at Mr Ho’s traditional Chinese laundry had finally paid off, Les Nash’s voice cut through the hum from somewhere over her right shoulder.

“I hear she’s been practicing her frills this week. Got a nine-nine for her dress shirt last night. Reckon Nadine’s unbeatable, mate.”

Candace knew that if she turned around and glared at the Sydney Morning Herald’s Chief Ironing Writer, all would be lost. She resisted, feeling the tendons in her neck responding to temper, which had escaped the calm centre she strove so hard to maintain. Bugger, she thought, furious that she had allowed him to breach her concentration.

She glanced at the clock; a minute to the off. She had time to regroup, to pump up and fixate on the goal. What is the goal? The goal is to be World Champion. And what is stopping me? Nothing and nobody, she told herself. This is my time. I have worked for this. I am the best. I deserve it. I will stay calm. I will accept the garments I find in my basket and I will work with them as they work with me.

A tiny, treacherous memory popped into her head of the last-but-one Pan-Pacs in Oahu. The memory ran, giggling, right around her mind before she could swat it. That night in Hawaii had been the worst of her professional ironing career. She had looked up for a split second, to savour the roar of the crowd as she swirled the last white shirt onto the board and took up her iron. She was a full half garment ahead of Dennis Bahouth, the Californian champion and – that night – Nadine had not even made the finals. But in taking her eye off the board for that one dreadful moment, Candace failed to notice the small inset nylon-embroidered panel on the shirt front.

The catch and grab of heated metal on synthetic had been unmistakable. And the blood in her veins stopped flowing for as long as it took her to gasp and snatch the instrument up; too late. A tell-tale blackened streak of petrochemical residue marred the iron’s base plate and the front of the shirt was ruined. The squeals of horror from sections of the crowd mingled with her own silent cry. But her face remained impassive as she set down her iron, back to front, in its metal holder. It signalled retirement. It had been the smartest thing she’d done in that calamitous minute. Disqualification – Garment Spoil (DGS) would, of course, have meant more overall championship points lost than a simple voluntary retirement.

What a night that had been. Candace breathed deeply again, thankful now that the recalcitrant memory had done its worst and starched her wilting resolve back to its normal state of gleaming impregnability. (It was a phrase once used to describe her by the American ironing writer, Sam Cox, and Candace often recalled it. She also enjoyed the description "lachrymose", indelibly pinned on Nadine Deleurs by the same journalist after a disastrous year on the US circuit.) Candace breathed deeply and slowly, feeling confidence flowing through her veins, bringing with it a tangible sensation of ease and relaxation. The feeling made her think of Margo Morrissey who, tonight, was in lane two, although Candace didn’t raise her eyes to check. Margo was an attractive and talented competitor.

At first, in those early days on the junior circuit, Candace had thought her manager was being an old fusspot when he sought to have rooming arrangements changed to ensure she was not billeted with Margo.

“For heaven’s sake, Ted,” she said to him one day in Miami after he’d caused a brawl about accommodation. “I like Margo, she’s really good fun.”

Ted was persistent, however, and Candace had mostly roomed with a religious girl from Belgium called Bernice. It had been dull, but she was made suddenly grateful for the boredom when a reporter sprang Margo with two Thai girls and a lot of cocaine in a Bangkok brothel. That was rather more than “really good fun” Candace had been forced to admit. What she did not admit, however, at least not to anyone but herself, was that she rather envied Margo. Yet in the final analysis, ultimately and at the end of the day – as her inner voice put it during an extended lecture – a topflight ironer such as she had to make sacrifices; and drugs and kinky sex were among them.

“Competitors, set.”

The amplified voice cut through the buzz of the crowd and her musing and Candace instinctively shifted her stance up a gear from relaxed alert to quivering readiness. She fixed her eyes on the check shirt.

“Ironers...” as the klaxon wailed, imperceptible forward propulsion took her across the line fractionally ahead of her rivals. It could mean the difference between gold and oblivion in top competition where success was measured in hundredths of a second. In two quick, long steps she was at the basket, her knees bending gracefully as, without breaking stride, she took up the red and blue shirt and turned to the board. Her style was much admired by purists even as they looked askance at her sometimes overly aggressive psychological methods. Without interruption to her forward motion, Candace switched the garment from her left to her right hand. Her right wrist flicked hard and the shirt billowed, its creases falling away as it settled upon the board. It was perfectly positioned for the first stroke of the iron. Up the right front it swept, with the fore and second fingers of her right hand smoothing the way and ensuring the revers did not fold back, crease and cause vital points loss.

As Candace flipped the shirt around to start the back, the roar of the crowd was already fusing with the tiny but all-important hiss of steam and the virtually subliminal soughing of hot metal on fabric. The spicy scent of heated cotton rose in the vapour and Candace breathed deeply through nostrils that flared prettily beneath a costly retroussé snout. The ability to keep a steam iron at peak performance heat by detecting the moment before scorching began was another of Candace’s trademarks. Her idiosyncrasies were another. She was an acknowledged goddess of the ironing board and she had gradually acquired little quirks to go with the status.

Her personal appearance contracts were legendary in the ironing world. Where other stars demanded jelly beans, bourbon, twenty-four hour room service and the like, Candace’s requirements were simple: her suite must be free of air fresheners and flowers; smokers would not be tolerated in any establishment she visited; neither could staff wear perfume, scented deodorant, cosmetics or unguents. And she had not travelled on public transport, other than carefully vetted first class sections in aircraft of select major airlines, since the day after a head cold, caught in Aeroflot’s business class, had almost cost her a second world championship. Thus she preserved her nose and with it, her competitive edge. She had a few other peculiarities too, but they were strictly private.

As she turned the flannelette sleeves and faultlessly performed the tricky manoeuvre into the crease-vulnerable cuff zone, Candace knew she was feeling as good as she had ever felt. That afternoon a journalist from The Monthly magazine had asked her a question she often asked herself these days.

“How long do you think you can keep up your competitive edge?”

Candace had pursed her lips and gazed out the thirty-fourth floor window of her favourite Sydney hotel to where ferries put long white creases in the perfect blue silk of the harbour. “That's a good question, Robert,” she had said, smiling a smile which did not reach her eyes. “I think I’ve probably got a couple more years at the top in me. But I’ll know how I really feel after the Olympics.”

“So you will be at the Olympics if Ironing gets the nod?”

Candace’s mouth had twitched into what he would later describe as a “world-weary” smile.

“After the struggle I’ve been through to get ironing properly – globally – recognised, there’s no way I’m missing Beijing.”

And now, as she hit the underside of the collar and smoothed it with one stroke, turned it and passed the iron lightly over the fold to give it a nice sharp lie, Candace knew it was the most truthful thing she’d said in years. There was no way she would miss out after those months of excruciating parties and personally ironed gifts to all those third world drongos who had the power to give the sport the nod.

There was a swelling clamour from the crowd as she skewered a coat hanger, flick-flack, under the shirt’s flawlessly pressed shoulder yokes and chunked it firmly on the rack. She didn’t pause to check her completion time. She knew it was good. The appreciative roar of the spectators only confirmed her instinct. The next item was a simple T-shirt, apparently easy but potentially tricky. She sniffed it for the telltale sweaty-sweetness of treacherous poly-cotton mix, but it smelled of glorious 100% natural fibre. Candace’s index finger left its precautionary poised position over the temperature bezel; she shifted her grip slightly and held the iron at an unusually wide angle as she drew it across the shirt. The idiosyncratic grip and aspect meant she could cover the body of the shirt in three clean strokes. It was a flashy and risky move and one that few dared emulate, but Candace’s confidence was soaring and the T-shirt was folded and set aside before all but aficionados had a chance to appreciate her artistry.

Two pairs of chinos passed in a blur of perfectly creased khaki. Three silk shirts hit the rack with only one small sleeve wrinkle among them. Candace flexed her shoulders as the third, a rather delicious raspberry pink, ratcheted her elapsed time and fault ratio to all but impossible heights. Her mastery of the beautiful but treacherous fabric had been the subject of a long article in Vogue just two months back. At the same time, Sports Illustrated had asked her to be their cover girl for a record sixth time.

Ironically, Candace privately acknowledged, as a small grin twitched one corner of her subtly-enhanced lips, six men’s pocket handkerchiefs were more problematic. The low score per item and deceptive ease of ironing combined with the current controversy over folding methods made the common hanky a potential point-dropping hazard. American judges favoured a squared off fold while European judges seemed to award disproportionate marks for the rectangular, in-from-left-then-right, triple fold. The IIC would be meeting in Geneva before the Olympics to give a definitive ruling on the preferred procedure. Meanwhile, Candace favoured the three-fold rectangular for its unadorned elegance, something Asian judges also seemed to like these days, if the Worlds in Shanghai had been any guide. The former Communist bloc countries, on the other hand, were a whole other ironing board game, as she knew to her cost.

“The aesthetics got a bit lost out there, today, particularly towards the end of the second basket,” she’d told 60 Minutes after an especially torrid semi-final in Gdansk in July. “My concentration could have been better and my finishing wasn’t as sharp as it was earlier in the week. Some of us have been worried about these old venues in Eastern Europe, the air-con can be a problem with your starched items. But in the end, I think my work-rate in training really paid off for my cuffs and frills.”

While she had thoroughly enjoyed having the handsome, tanned reporter on the road with her for a week, it had undoubtedly led to jealousy in general and to the nasty on-floor scenes in particular. “But,” she was able to assure the camera with a smile that matched her still-immaculate champagne blonde chignon, “On the day there is only ever one winner and that’s ironing.”

And what a load of old bollocks that was. She could still hear her

manager chortling as they watched a video of the show weeks later. In the end, the winner was Candace McNamara. It was amazing that talking like a fridge magnet could still work so effectively, but it had. The very next week after the story went to air, Ted had negotiated an extra two years on the Nike Teflon and glycerine-jelly mounted Swoosh! steam iron contract and that very morning negotiations had been finalized with NewsCorp for a weekly “Candace - In My Own Write” column that would run in their top papers, with Candace’s choice of journalist to write it. And now, she could see the bottom of the basket, and there was only another T-shirt and a toddler’s jumpsuit to go.

Suddenly, a section of the crowd began to chant her name. Candace permitted herself a little grin and tossed her head. Nothing happened, of course. Her hair did not fly any more because, since her fifth world championship, she had taken to the sophistication of the Grace Kelly look. Was that a mistake? she wondered. The insouciant toss of her gorgeous, gleaming tresses had meant not only a maddening sign of supreme confidence to her rivals, but also a substantial haircare product contract. She would talk it through with her management after the mid-season break in the Caribbean.

“Candace! Candace!” The chanting voices had mysteriously amalgamated into one; it had an insistent and familiar tone. “Candace! Where are you?”

“Eh?” Her concentration vanished. With it went the roiling atmosphere of the auditorium. Instead, in front of her was the long, plump brown suede back of the sofa and peering over it was Jarrod.

“Where the hell are you Cand’, I’ve been trying to get through to you for five minutes.” Behind his tousled dark head, a series of twisted dead bodies and the rubble of ruined buildings flashed on and off the TV screen. Happily, the bright green mute sign concealed the worst aspect of one particularly mangled corpse.

“Sorry, Jarrod, I was miles away.” Candace flexed her back and stretched her fingers. Her muscles were sore and adrenaline still ran hot and sour in her veins. Around her, the room was draped, piled and hung with the immaculate results of her afternoon’s labour. Beside her was a stack of three empty wicker laundry baskets. Jarrod stood up and stretched. His old Levis were beautifully pressed, his pale blue denim shirt was perfect. He looked gorgeous, as usual.

“What’s for tea Cand’? I wish you’d put that bloody iron away. You bin at it for bloody hours. Anybody’d think you’re ironing for Australia or something.”

His eyes crinkled shut as he laughed at his own joke and he never saw the iron coming.