Cleaner: Chapter Three - Part One

Elbow Grease

1

MELISSA

Two days after I’d last been at Dahlia Western’s house, Summertop, I rode the bus across the river out of Barton and up along the valley edge toward Pinecrest.

It was another sunny day and for a change I found the journey pleasant. Normally I hated it. I hated any kind of travel to work because it was time I wasn’t getting paid and it was time wasted.

Today the journey seemed filled with promise. After our escapades the other day, going back to the big house was an unknown quantity; a mystery waiting to unfold. How would Dahlia act? Would she want to do it again? Would she be different with me? Would it be embarrassing?

Knowing my luck, she would not only be ashamed of what she’d suggested; she’d fire me for good measure. That was my life all over.

The bus dropped me off and I walked up the lane the rest of the way, climbing the steep drive. I tended not to use the front door of the house. I had keys for the side. More appropriate for someone of my station. I might just as easily have been a servant in an old stately home, the respect I'd got. I’d been to visit a big old house like that in Yorkshire when I was a little girl visiting my aunt. The stories they had told about the way servants were treated were horrifying. But really, how different was that from my life now?

There wasn’t a sound in the house as I shut the door and listened. I hadn’t seen Dahlia’s car on the drive, though it could have been put away in the garage. She was probably out shopping or something, or visiting that brother of hers. She might even be away. Nobody bothered to tell me anything.

I walked round toward my cleaning cupboard but stopped dead when I saw Dahlia, not out at all but standing in the corridor, almost as though she’d been waiting.

“Oh, sorry Miss Western,” I said. I didn’t think anybody was in.”

“Hello Melissa,” she replied. “I... Hello.”

There was an awkward silence.

“I was just... How are you today?” she asked.

She never asked me how I was. She barely spoke to me. I shrugged uncomfortably. “Fine.” The pause that followed dragged on again until I found myself asking, “You?”

“Yes. I’m fine too.” She smiled primly and again there was an awful silence.

I made to go toward my cupboard under the stairs and she started to move at the same time, stepping in front of me by accident. There was a frozen second of indecision, then we both tried to go the other way, coming up blocked again.

Both Dahlia and I chuckled awkwardly then she put her feet together and gestured for me to pass first. I smiled curtly then walked on and she started to walk away from me.

Five steps on it came back to me, what I'd been thinking when I scrubbed the classroom floor in my other job two days earlier and I stopped.

“Er, Miss Western?”

She stopped too and looked back at me.

I don’t think I'd ever been involved in such a stilted exchange that this had become. Dahlia’s face was pinched but she raised her eyebrows in query.

I knew I shouldn’t ask – it wasn’t my place to. Who was I to broach such a weird subject with her, my boss?

But I saw myself on my hands and knees, scrubbing that floor again, and I said, “If you want, we can switch places again.”

She stared back at me, her thoughts rattling almost audibly.

I regretted coming out with it.

She looked almost angry.

Then she gave a smile every bit as timid as mine had been and said, “Alright Melissa. I think I'd like that.”