Chapter Twenty-Eight
The Cleaner
The cleaner knocks on the door, calls, ‘Cleaning!’ then waits for a few moments with her trolley. Nothing. A second knock, then she opens the door a crack, listening for any sounds of acknowledgement within. ‘Cleaning!’ Counts to five. Still nothing. Okay, in she goes, with her vacuum cleaner, her mop and her spray bottles, deliberately rattling around just in case somebody is still in the bathroom or bed, to give them a chance to make themselves decent.
The room is empty though and she glances around appraisingly. It’s messy– the bed covers rumpled, room-service trays piled up on the floor, damp towels dumped on the bed. So now the sheets will be damp too, she thinks resignedly, snatching up the towels in one soggy armful.
An older couple are staying here, not generally the messiest kind of guest– it’s the triple rooms of girls that she generally finds the most chaotic: beauty products littering the surfaces, hair straighteners and driers plugged into every socket, clothes scattered everywhere as if there has been an explosion in a textiles factory. Smears of make-up and fake tan streaking the bedlinen too, so that she has to do a full change of bedding every day. As for the empty alcohol bottles she finds rolling about the floor. . . well. The cleaner clucks about them to her husband when she goes home, but secretly she has a soft spot for the holidaying girls and their excesses. You enjoy yourselves while you can, she thinks– although, admittedly, not so much on the days when she has to clear up vomit (or worse) in their bathrooms.
The cleaner strips the bed, bundling the sheets and covers along with the towels into the large, wheeled laundry bin. Then she deftly puts on a fresh set of linen, corners tucked in tight, creases smoothed out, just like her mother taught her so many years ago. Her eyes have been opened by a few discoveries within bedsheets over the years, by St Gerasimos, so they have. There’s one young couple currently staying at the hotel and the smell of sex is so pungent each time the cleaner walks into their room she has to open every single window. Good for them though, she thinks, shaking her head as she remembers how, back in the day, she and her husband would fall on each other like animals given the slightest chance too. Now she counts herself lucky if he’s having one of his lucid days, and remembers who she is; if he gives her one of his smiles, the sort that still makes her soften inside. Marriage is a journey, not a destination, as her priest is fond of saying.
The cleaner goes through to the bathroom, where a woman’s nightie has been left neatly folded on the small cabinet there. It’s a scrap of a thing, thin-strapped and gauzy with a print of rosebuds, the sort that a husband might buy for a wife as a ribbon-wrapped gift. Or so the cleaner imagines, anyway, experiencing a slight ache as she wonders what that must feel like. She holds the nightie up against herself, shaking her head at her reflection in the mirror, then laughs and folds it up again. It’s not for the likes of her, of course. None of this hotel world is, other than the tabard she wears and the cleaning trolley she lugs around with her every day.
She sniffs the woman’s perfume– light and floral, very nice– then sets to work cleaning the shower and bath, scrubbing the twin sinks. When she first started working here, she was initially taken aback to be coming face to face with the lavish lifestyles of the guests– apparent from their designer clothing, gleaming shoes, the casual leaving around of fancy watches and jewellery. It had fascinated and shocked and sickened her all at once, being so close to their lives– smelling their smells, handling their clothes, scrubbing the stains they leave behind. She’s used to it now, of course, and views them as a visitor to a zoo might, peering with interest at this other species with their glossy facades hiding the real humans beneath.
‘Don’t you hate them a bit for it?’ friends of hers have asked when she has described a beautiful dress or piece of jewellery she has seen when cleaning, an elegant bag or pair of shoes. ‘It must be tempting, no?’
No, the cleaner can reply truthfully. She is an honest person, who goes to church every Sunday without fail, who prays on her knees each morning to her God. She is not tempted. The closest she ever came was the day after her husband’s accident, when they were told that he would probably never work again. That there was long-term damage. The shock had hit her like a fist; she was numb, uncomprehending, full of sorrow and tenderness towards her injured husband. Angry, too, that this could have happened to them. She had gone to work in a daze and found herself picking up a fine solid watch that had been left by one bedside, feeling its weight in her palm and wondering how much it was worth. Wondering how life could be so unfair as to give a fortune to some people but inflict challenge upon challenge on others. Her fingers had closed round that cold heavy watch for a brief moment, then she had put it down and burst into tears, upset that she could even have considered such a thing. Then she had gone to Dimitris, told him about her husband’s accident and explained tearfully that she wasn’t sure she could work that day after all. He has been very good to them, Dimitris. Very kind.
It’s funny though, how, even when you never see the people staying in the rooms you clean, you come to form little narratives about them while you work, if only for your own amusement. The couple in this room, down whose toilet she currently has the scrubbing brush? Well, they are wealthy, obviously, because this is one of the best suites in the hotel. She knows they are not young from their clothes (sober, classy, good-quality– the sort the cleaner herself would like to wear, if she had a spare thousand euros). The thick moisturiser in the bathroom is a giveaway too, along with various medication bottles– those, in her experience, tend to accumulate once past the age of fifty. Is this a happy couple? she wonders. Still laughing, still looking at one another with a gleam in their eye? That’s a harder one to call.
As she squirts bleach into the toilet, then crouches down to retrieve and empty the small bathroom bin, the cleaner weighs up the evidence. Well, she’s noticed a huge stack of books by the woman’s side of the bed, whereas there’s merely a plugged-in phone charger by the man’s side. Is the pile of reading because the wife doesn’t want to talk to her husband? she muses. Or is she trying to escape the reality of her marriage by taking herself to fictional worlds?
She frowns as she suddenly notices the torn-up sheet of paper in the bin while she’s emptying it. There’s handwriting on the scraps– a note from one of them to the other, maybe? She only knows a few foreign phrases– Guten Tag, Merci, You want cleaning? ,
that sort of thing– so is unable to decipher what is written there, but she can’t help wondering if the note was torn up in a moment of pique. The signs, she thinks, filling her mop bucket with hot water, are not promising.
There’s an abrupt bang of the door– someone has returned to the room. She turns off the tap and leaves the bathroom, mop in hand, to find herself face to face with a tall man with grey hair and big eyebrows. He’s red-faced and breathing heavily, dressed in running clothes and trainers, and doesn’t look particularly happy to see her. She bites her lip as he rattles off something she doesn’t understand.
‘You want. . . Ifinish?’ she tries uncertainly.
He thunders a reply and it’s another cross-sounding torrent of nonsense to her ears, although she’s pretty sure she hears the word ‘No’ in there. Yes, and he’s actually making shooing motions at her, as if she’s some kind of sheep he’s trying to herd out of his space.
‘Later?’ she tries, because the last thing she wants is for a complaint to be made that she hasn’t finished cleaning the room properly. Especially if his wife comes back and is cross that the floors haven’t been mopped. (Where is the wife, anyway?)
He’s shaking his head, and pointing at the door. No, he does not want her to come back later. She nods and puts up her free hand– okay, yes, message received– and retreats to the bathroom, trying not to take his curt dismissal personally as she silently gathers her cleaning things. As she wheels her trolley out of there a few moments later, she sees that the man is now sprawling on the freshly made bed, shoes still on, ignoring her in favour of his phone. No wonder his wife brought so many books with her on holiday, she thinks, pulling the door closed behind her.
The question rings around her head once more: does she hate the guests? Well– no, she doesn’t. Not really. But every now and then she’ll get a peek into their lives and it’s enough to make her feel that, in comparison, despite everything that life has thrown at her and her husband, they are actually the richer ones. The happier ones. And the guests? She feels sorry for them. Truly, she does.