Chapter 2
Aoife
Bleach is the smell of someone else’s mess becoming your problem.
I spray the bathroom counter and wipe in long strokes, working left to right because that’s the system and the system exists, so I don’t have to think.
Thinking’s dangerous on a ten-hour shift.
Thinking leads to questions like how I got here, is this it, and what happened to the plan.
None of those questions has an answer that makes the next several hours pass more easily.
The mirror is streaked. I spray it again and buff until my own reflection stares back at me.
Blonde hair scraped into a bun that stopped being neat around hour three.
Green eyes with dark circles that no amount of concealer can hide because I ran out of concealer last Wednesday, and payday isn’t until Friday.
The hotel uniform doesn’t do anything for anyone.
Gray polyester tunic, black pants, shoes that squeak on tile.
I look like I’ve been folded into a box and left on a shelf.
I look exactly like what I am. A twenty-eight-year-old woman cleaning toilets for eleven euros an hour.
“Aoife!” The bark comes from the corridor. Sandra. Shift supervisor. Built like a greyhound and twice as lean. “Room 412 needs turning. The guest checked out early, and the next one’s arriving at three.”
I check my watch. It’s 1:47. “That’s an hour and thirteen minutes for a full turnover.”
“Then you’d better move, hadn’t you?”
I bite my tongue. Literally. I feel the dull press of my teeth against the side of it as Sandra’s footsteps click away down the corridor. The woman has a talent for making a reasonable request sound like a personal insult. I gather the caddy and the fresh linens and head for 412.
The corridor stretches ahead of me, identical doors on both sides, each one hiding a different version of the same story.
Business travelers who leave wet towels on the floor.
Couples who think a Do Not Disturb sign excuses the state of the sheets.
The occasional guest who is genuinely kind, tips, and makes eye contact when they say thank you.
Those ones are rare. I remember every single one of them.
Room 412 isn’t kind.
The guest has left the minibar open and empty.
Every tiny bottle, gone. The bedsheets are twisted into a nest. There’s a room service tray on the floor with congealed eggs and a half-eaten rasher stuck to the plate.
The bathroom is worse. I’ll spare myself the details.
My brain learned to switch off the disgust response somewhere around month three of this job.
It’s a survival mechanism, like not reading the comments on a job listing that says must be flexible and enthusiastic when they mean must accept being treated like a doormat.
I strip the bed first. Pillowcases, sheets, duvet cover.
I work fast because fast is the only gear that gets me out on time.
The fitted sheet has a stain I choose not to identify.
It goes in the laundry bag. I remake the bed with clean linens and hospital corners because Sandra checks and has strong opinions about hospital corners.
The minibar gets restocked. I count the bottles as I place them: two vodka, two gin, two whiskey, two wine, one beer, one water that costs more than my lunch. I log it on the tablet and move to the bathroom.
Bleach. Cloth. Spray. Wipe. Repeat.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. I ignore it because Sandra has a sixth sense for phones, and I’m not in the mood for a lecture about professionalism from a woman who eats tuna sandwiches in the linen closet.
The bathroom takes twenty minutes. I scrub the shower until the grout looks new, replace the towels, fold the ends of the toilet paper into that little triangle that no guest has ever once appreciated, and line up the miniature shampoos like soldiers on parade.
I step back. The room looks like no one has ever touched it. That’s the job. Erase every trace of the person who was here so the next person believes they’re the first. I’m good at it. I hate that I’m good at it.
Back in the corridor, I check my phone. “Nailed it,” I self-congratulate because no other fucker is about to.
I pocket the phone as Sandra rounds the corner with a clipboard. She peers past me into 412, scanning for flaws. I wait. She checks the bed. She checks the bathroom. She runs a finger along the windowsill, and I resist the urge to ask if she would like a magnifying glass.
“Fine,” she says, as if the word physically hurts her.
“You’re welcome,” I say.
She gives me a look that could strip paint. I give her one back. This is the dance we do. She pushes, I push back just enough to keep my self-respect without losing the job. It’s a narrow line, and I walk it every single fucking day.
I move through the remaining hours like a ghost, haunting one anonymous room after another. I clean seven more before clocking off at six. My back aches. My hands are powdered from the gloves, feeling like paper. Girl could use a manicure, but fucked if I can afford one.
I change in the staff room, swapping the gray tunic and leggings for jeans and a black tee that has seen better days but still fits well enough.
I pull my hair out of the bun and let it fall past my shoulders before scraping it back into a low ponytail.
It needs a wash. It needs a cut. It needs a lot of things that cost money I don’t have.
Waiting for the bus takes twenty minutes.
The bus ride takes forty. It’s a hot summer night, and I stand because there are no seats, wedged between a man with a backpack the size of a small country and a teenager playing music through a phone speaker like the rest of us have done something to deserve it.
Dublin public transport at its finest. I stare out the window and watch the city slide past with people out for drinks, going to restaurants and bars that I can’t afford and can’t summon up the energy to even try.
If I had anyone to go with.
Finally, I reach my bus stop and climb off, sweaty, foul-tempered and ready to burn through half a bottle of wine.
My apartment is on the second floor of a building in Stoneybatter that the landlord described as full of character, which means the heating works when it feels like it, and the window in the bedroom has a draft that no amount of tape will fix.
Freezing in winter, boiling in summer. It’s small.
A kitchen that doubles as a living room, a bathroom where you can sit on the toilet and touch all four walls, and a bedroom that fits a double bed and not much else.
But it’s mine. My name on the lease. My mugs in the cupboard. My mess on the couch. After the last two years, having a door I can lock behind me and shut out the shitty world isn’t nothing. It’s everything.
I shower. The hot water lasts about seven minutes, which is enough if I’m efficient and don’t stand there staring at the tiles like some kind of existential crisis is going to solve itself under a weak stream of lukewarm water.
I dry off, pull on pajama bottoms and an old t-shirt that’s so washed out I can’t remember what color it used to be, and walk into the kitchen.
The fridge offers me half a block of cheddar, a yogurt that’s optimistic about its expiration date, and a bottle of white wine that’s been waiting for its moment to shine. I pour a glass, cut a chunk of cheese, grab some crackers and call it dinner. Somewhere, a nutritionist just felt a chill.
I take my gourmet meal to the couch and sit with my legs tucked under me. The apartment is quiet. Not peaceful quiet. Empty quiet. The kind that reminds you no one else is here, and no one is coming.
I choose this silence. I tell myself this over and over.
After the last two years, I’ve earned the right to pick emptiness over noise.
I made this decision. The small apartment, the shit job, the starting over.
I chose all of it because there was no alternative.
My life was ripped out from under me because of one stupid decision, and now this is it. This is my life until I can fix it.
The wine is cool and refreshing, and I drink the first glass too fast, but I have zero fucks left to give.
My phone sits on the coffee table, dark and silent.
I could call someone. I could scroll through the contacts and find a name that isn’t a takeaway or a utility company, or God forbid, Sandra.
But the list is shorter than it used to be.
Two years will do that. Two years of disappearing from your own life tends to thin the crowd.
I finish another glass of wine, slower this time, and rinse the glass, leaving it on the draining board. The cheese and crackers are consumed, which makes the stomach growling settle for now. The yogurt gets one more day of optimism.
I brush my teeth and get into bed, sighing when my head hits my semi-soft pillow.
Tomorrow is another shift. Another ten hours of bleach and Sandra and rooms that erase themselves the moment I finish with them.
My eyes close. My body aches in that deep, bone-tired way that should make sleep easy but doesn’t, because my brain hasn’t gotten the memo that the day is over.
But it’s a life I’m rebuilding. Tomorrow I’ll get up and do it again because that’s what people like me do. We show up. We scrub. We go home.
We survive.
That’s enough.
For now.