5

~ Hot water makes the ingredients in bleach inactive, so always use with cold water.

I turned up at Cleo's office on Monday morning in the relaxed version of what I wore for viewings: grey skirt, white blouse under a sleeveless knit, mid-heeled shoes. I wanted to show her that I was taking this job seriously, even though she was family, but at the same time that I wasn't breaking out the designer labels, in case it looked like I thought I was too good to be working for a cleaning agency. That was quite a complex impression to achieve, purely through the medium of a skirt and blouse. But first appearances really matter, and I took a lot of trouble to make a good one.

Cleo's office was located above the garage of the Edwardian semi she used to share with Elliot. It was a traditional oak-framed structure, with what I would professionally term ‘versatile potential', that is, it would have made an awesome gym, with its floor-to-ceiling window offering views over their back garden, or a therapy studio, or an au pair hutch. Cleo used it as her headquarters, and now Elliot's Range Rover had gone from the carport below, the space was filled with stacked boxes of cleaning solutions, branded with Cleo's cartoon logo.

I hadn't expected to feel so nervous, as I parked outside. Mum's wistful words about families working together had taken root in my brain, and I'd begun to imagine a rosier scenario in which Cleo and I bonded over my digital media insights, and she showed me how to deep clean my phone. Between work and motherhood and our different life choices, Cleo and I hadn't really had the chance to get to know each other as adults. Maybe this was it.

Cleo was already firefighting the day's problems on the phone when I knocked and let myself in; she waved at me, and pointed towards a pink loveseat opposite her desk. An upright man in chinos and a checked shirt was occupying the other pink sofa by the door in the reception area; he was pretending not to listen to the conversation.

I knew Cleo was struggling with her temper because she kept jabbing her pen on the desk, as if she were tapping out swear words in Morse code. She'd always done that. It used to drive her form teachers insane. If she started pulling on her earring, then I pitied the person on the other end of the phone.

‘… yes, if you could just … if you could … if you could just let me …' she was saying through gritted teeth, then put the phone on mute and snarled, ‘Just shut up, you impossible- to-please plank !' then unmuted the phone and carried on. ‘Absolutely, I understand … no, of course …'

I made eye contact with the man, and smiled. Bit surprising that Cleo was allowing a client to listen in on a conversation like that. Not the best first impression. Although somewhat reassuring to see Cleo still had some of her original features left, viz, her temper and occasional foul mouth.

‘Can I get you a coffee?' I asked the upright man, over the sound of furious pen-Morse. My first job for Cleo could be shielding a client from her Monday morning mood.

‘I'm waiting for …' He motioned towards Cleo.

‘I'm sure she won't be long,' I said, louder. ‘But a coffee? Go on. I'm making myself one.'

‘Well, yes, that would be nice.' He fumbled a smile, and I beamed back to put him at his ease.

‘Milk? Sugar?' Cleo had a fancy bean-to-cup machine on a table at the far end of the office; it was even flashier, I noted, than the one Dean had acquired for Marsh they reminded me of cuckoo clocks. Idling at the traffic lights outside, I'd admired the smooth lawn, with red tulips in cheerful lines along the borders, and pictured the interior to be equally pre-war smart – an enamel stove with printed tea towels over the spotless rail and bright Clarice Cliff china arranged on a sideboard. Spick and span, clean and tidy.

Which shows you how much even an estate agent knows.

The front door was wide open, and I could smell something bad before Jim and I were halfway down the garden path. It was as if the whole house had burped: a mixture of boiled cabbages and unmade beds, of damp and dust, papers left in piles for so long the layers of junk mail had started to compact like coal.

I stopped, revolted. How could it smell that appalling when the garden was so nice? I turned to say as much to Jim, but he was snapping on his rubber gloves in the manner of a crime scene investigator.

Inside, a whole team was hard at work. All the windows (original, Crittall, very nice, if not ideal for energy ratings) had been flung wide open, and a pair of hoovers was roaring away inside the house, upstairs and down. I spotted a yellow skip tucked down the side return, already one layer of bin bags full. A worker in Taylor Maid red overalls leaned out of a bedroom window as we approached and dropped a bag on top of the pile. It landed with a weighty thunk.

‘So,' said Jim in a matter-of-fact tone as we stepped over buckets of cleaning products and another industrial hoover to get into the hallway, ‘the way we normally work on a job like this is two cleaners to a room. We've been assigned the kitchen.'

He pushed the kitchen door wider, moving a trolley piled up with jam jars, margarine tubs and skeletal geraniums shrivelling in desiccated soil. The kitchen was like nothing I'd ever seen before, not even in my own worst nightmares.

And the smell .

‘Oh my god.' I couldn't help it. It was terrible. But what was worse was the clutter. Every surface was piled with so many things that you couldn't actually see the surface. Nearest me was a stack of newspapers. I checked the top one: it was seventeen years old. My chest tightened with every breath until it felt like I was suffocating. ‘Where do you even start ?'

Jim ignored my shrill tone. ‘You get your Marigolds on,' he said, ‘and start in a corner, work outwards.'

‘Who lives here?' I asked then, in the light of the age of the newspapers, amended it to, ‘I mean, does someone live here? Have you just found it like this?'

The cogs in my brain had begun to turn. The gloves, the urgency, the smell … Had someone died ? Was that why it smelled so bad?

‘It belongs to a lady called Margaret Jennings.' Jim was scooping piles of junk mail from the counter top and dropping them into a green bag.

‘Is she … still with us?' I asked as delicately as I could, given that I was barely breathing in.

‘She's in hospital, recovering from a hip operation, and her family have booked us to get the house sorted out for when she's discharged tomorrow.'

Thank god for that. Margaret was alive! But …

‘Tomorrow?' The initial relief swiftly drained out of me, as I looked around us at the chaos. ‘There's no way this will be clean by tomorrow.'

‘Yes, it will, if we get on with it.' Jim was being cordial, but I wouldn't call his tone friendly. While we'd been speaking he'd filled a recycling bag with the newspapers; now he tied it and dropped it outside the kitchen door, where another cleaner carrying four more bags bent with a neat dip, picked it up and carried on out of the door. I heard a distant thud as all five bags joined their mates in the skip.

When I looked back, Jim had made a marble counter top appear from nowhere. Well, a corner of a counter top. It looked vulnerable, a little island bravely holding out against the hungry tide of clutter, but it was a start. He picked up the roll of bags, ripped another off, and passed it to me. ‘Start obvious. All junk mail, newspapers, parish magazines, everything in there.'

I hesitated, because … how were we meant to know Margaret Jennings wasn't saving the parish newsletter for some important phone number? I had loads of magazines and things lying around my house that I would be furious if Mum threw out before I'd had time to read them.

I picked up a flier for a steam train trip to Inverness and a specialist reading light and bagged them. ‘Do you think she's keeping this?' I asked, waving a Stannah stairlift leaflet.

Jim didn't break his regular pick-chuck-pick-chuck rhythm. ‘Bin it. It's all information available on the Internet.'

I was willing to bet Margaret thought differently but I binned it obediently. ‘Oh, maybe this …' Flowers – with a special offer! Maybe save that. Funeral homes. Probably shouldn't leave that. Bit morbid.

‘There's no need to inspect everything. Important post goes in that plastic box by the door – Mrs Jennings' daughter is coming round later and she'll go through it.'

‘OK.' I dumped some food delivery leaflets without looking, then immediately worried I might have ditched a council tax bill within the pile. I jiggled the bag to check there was no brown envelope. This was going to take forever. But I had to admit it was easier than tackling my own junk.

‘What about recycling?' I picked up two jam jars. Most of them were rinsed clean, some had labels from supermarkets I hadn't seen in years. When did Safeway stop trading?

‘Skip it. The skip people have a sorting station.' Jim had finished the counter top and was opening the tall cupboards above it.

I stopped, unable to tear my eyes away, bracing myself for what might be inside – Jars of human teeth? A dead cat? – but to my great relief, there was almost nothing. A box of teabags, some powdered milk and a faded mug on the bottom shelf. On the very top shelf, a nested set of apricot china teacups and saucers, unused. Behind it, another nest of cups, and another.

After the tumbling mess everywhere else the sparse cupboards were surreal. They were the cupboards of someone who didn't expect visitors, I realised. Someone who didn't think it worth treating themselves to a nice biscuit or the best china cup for their Horlicks. It felt like an intrusion to know that about Mrs Jennings.

Jim didn't pause. He took out the coffee and the teacups and started spraying and wiping the shelves. Without looking round, he said, ‘Would it help you focus if I set an alarm? We've only got two hours on this kitchen. Then we have to move onto the dining room.'

I didn't reply. A strange emotion was bulging and rumbling inside my chest like a thundercloud: it wasn't just revulsion at the reek of neglect, or fury at Cleo for tricking me into cleaning, or panic at the scale of the task, or even pity. It was something else. Something I hadn't been expecting and couldn't put my finger on, beyond the fact that I didn't like it at all. It felt personal, like a dream I'd forgotten but which still lingered at the edge of my consciousness.

I grabbed the jam jars and dumped them in the bag so hard Jim turned round.

He looked at me for a long moment, assessing me with his shrewd grey eyes.

Probably trying to work out where he knew me from. I'd seen that look before.

I lifted my chin, defiantly.

‘Careful,' he said in his mild voice, and carried on bagging.

I dealt with the overwhelming kitchen by making a mental list – bin, bag, recycle – and applied it over and over until I could see clear shelves, countertop, floor. Then I sprayed and wiped that section, and moved on to the next. I refused to look further than the section in front of me, because if I did, the fizzing panic distracted me. Meanwhile, Jim cleaned the units, replaced the contents (minus the items that were out of date, which was nearly everything), scrubbed tiles with a giant toothbrush and de-gunked the hob. It was bright stainless steel underneath the black crust.

He worked with a relentlessness that made me feel slow in comparison but the satisfying emergence of order in the chaos motivated me to carry on. If this was sped-up on the Internet, I thought, I'd watch it for hours .

Jim must have been aware of me observing him because he stopped, wiped his forehead with the back of his hand and said, ‘You look like you could do with a break. There's coffee outside if you want some.'

He said it as if he personally wouldn't be stopping but a lesser mortal like me might need to.

I glanced at my watch: we'd been at it for an hour. It felt like a lot longer.

‘I'd love a coffee,' I said. ‘White, no sugar. Mind if I check my messages?'

There was no phone reception in the kitchen, and I was waiting to hear back about another job. I couldn't remember when I'd last not checked my phone for this long.

‘Sure,' said Jim. ‘The refreshment table's outside. Help yourself to biscuits.' Then he went back to his systematic elimination of built-up grime.

A woman called Veronica informed me that ‘crash teams' were provided with a refreshment table outside on jobs like these, ‘so we don't use the client's facilities and get in the way of the kitchen squad'.

‘I'm the kitchen squad today!' I said, cheerfully. ‘Me and Jim.'

‘Jim?' She looked vague.

‘Tall bloke? Short hair.' I paused, not wanting to say, ‘Looks like a headmaster', in case they were friends. ‘Quite … stern?'

Her face cleared. ‘Him? Wow. Good luck,' she added as she sailed off with four coffees clumped together.

I helped myself to a biscuit. I hadn't expected such a generous offering from Cleo: two boxes of mid-range M Jim shrugged when I popped out to reply. Knowing I had options made me feel better about the back-breaking work, and maybe I spent a bit longer replying than I meant to.

Maybe I went outside more than I should have done. I had literally only nipped out for five minutes to text Mitch an idea I'd had about targeted marketing, when someone tapped me aggressively on the shoulder.

‘What?' I spun round.

A woman with a long ponytail was standing with a mop in her hand. ‘Stop slacking,' she said.

‘What?'

‘I've seen you. This is the fourth time you've snuck out here to text or do whatever it is you're doing.' She glared. ‘This is a team, and we get paid as a team, and you are delaying completion.'

‘Hey, that's not …' I took a nervous step back.

‘I miss my bonus, you owe me.' She jabbed a finger in my direction.

‘OK, Sierra.' Jim had appeared behind me. ‘You've made your point.'

‘Jim, talk to her.' Sierra wagged the finger and stalked off.

‘Did you hear that?' I demanded, shaken and also offended. ‘She can't speak to me like that!'

‘Listen, I appreciate this is your first day and this is a baptism of fire,' said Jim. ‘But we've got nine hours to clean this house.'

‘We're here for nine hours?'

‘We're here until it's done. As a team. We get a team bonus if we finish on time.' He gave me a level look. ‘And if we're late, or there are issues, none of us gets the bonus. A few extra quid might not make a difference to you, but it makes a difference to other people on the team.'

I bridled at the implication that I was some posh girl slumming it. ‘I'm doing my best! Do they know this is literally my first job? And that some of us aren't natural-born scrubbers?'

That last comment came out before my brain could filter it. I'd meant it in the sense that Mum and Cleo liked cleaning, whereas I didn't, but too late I realised that wasn't what it sounded like to anyone who didn't know us. The split-second reaction I saw in Jim's eyes made me feel about five centimetres tall.

‘Not many of us are,' he said, reproachfully.

‘Sorry,' I mumbled at his retreating back.

Two hours till home time.

We were done by six. I couldn't remember the last time I'd felt so exhausted, but the dining room was spotless and I'd thrown thirty-five bin bags into the skip.

At ten past, on the dot, a minibus appeared, most of the crew piled in and announced they were off to the pub. There were cheers, hugs goodbye. Not for me, obviously. No one asked me if I wanted to come to the pub.

Jim was in charge of signing off the job. I was trying to salvage my nails when he appeared with a woman about my mum's age: Sarah, Mrs Jennings' daughter; smart looking in a navy suit, Bluetooth earpiece still tucked under her blonde bob. Her body language screamed: I am a very busy woman.

She shook hands with us both. ‘Thank you so much for fitting this in at such short notice. The family … we're so grateful for your help.' She spoke quickly, and though her voice was pleasant, the muscles in her neck were tense.

Too busy to clean her own mother's house, I noted silently. And she knows we're thinking that too.

‘We've done a top-to-bottom clean as discussed with Cleo,' said Jim, steering her down the hall, drawing her attention to the now-glossy woodwork. ‘The skip will be collected by lunchtime tomorrow and the stair carpets will be dry enough by the morning for the stairlift people to start fitting.'

Even I was impressed by the transformation. With light filtering through the windows, delicate rainbow prisms glinted off a collection of crystal glasses, washed, polished and lined up on the shelving units. The grey rug in the middle of the sitting room was pink, with a Persian pattern. I definitely wouldn't have guessed that first thing this morning.

But Sarah said nothing.

‘We've filed any paperwork on the dining-room table,' Jim went on, as if her lack of response wasn't rude, given how hard everyone had worked, ‘and the laundrette is going to deliver the bed linen in the morning. If you want one of us to be here to collect it and make up the beds, that's not a problem.'

There was a long silence, then eventually Sarah turned round. She was holding a porcelain cat that had been under the sofa, along with a bag's worth of used tissues, three remote controls and a dead bird. Obviously, we hadn't left those for her.

I realised she was struggling to hold back tears.

‘I'm sorry. It's …' she said, then swallowed. ‘I gave Mum this cat for Christmas, the first year I got a job. I haven't seen it in decades. Seeing it again reminded me how …' She squeezed her eyes shut.

Jim looked at me, and tipped his head towards the kitchen.

‘Would you like a cup of tea?' he asked Sarah, gently. ‘Sounds like you've had a long day. Did you say you'd driven from Newcastle?'

Sarah nodded, and he guided her towards a chair. I could hear him talking as I boiled the kettle. He'd barely said a word to me all day but now he was managing a soothing stream of barely audible conversation about the M1.

I gazed at the units, wishing I'd taken some before and after pictures so Sarah could see just what a miracle we'd worked. Since the house finally had company, I used the apricot teacups.

‘We had no idea Mum had let the place get into such a state.' Sarah was shredding a tissue, trying not to cry. ‘She's always been independent, refused to have anyone come in, not even a cleaner. We tried, honestly, we tried so hard , every time she came to stay with one of us we'd try to get help arranged but …'

‘A fresh start,' said Jim. ‘Much easier to keep on top of.'

I put the tray down on a coffee table that had until recently been hidden by Women's Weeklies .

‘Here you go,' I said. ‘Wasn't sure if you took milk and sugar. So I brought them both. We cleaned everything in the cupboards. And wiped them out. And the cutlery.'

Jim frowned at me, and I stopped. What? What had I said?

It wasn't as if Sarah was listening. ‘I don't think I realised how bad it had got until I saw what you've done today,' she was saying. ‘My sister took Mum into hospital after her last fall and said the paramedics struggled to get inside.'

‘It was quite a job,' I said. I couldn't help myself.

Sarah bowed her head, tucking her chin into her neck. ‘Please tell me it wasn't the worst you've ever done.'

‘No,' said Jim quickly. ‘Not remotely. Nothing a bit of elbow grease and some recycling bags couldn't sort out.'

I widened my eyes at him over the top of Sarah's chair. If the kitchen had looked like that, I couldn't even imagine what the bedrooms had been like. Or the bathroom! God, the bathroom …

But he glared back at me, giving me the full force of that eagle-like intensity, and I shrivelled.

‘These are pretty cups,' said Sarah suddenly. ‘Where did you find them?'

‘In the cupboard.'

‘I think they were wedding presents.' She smiled, and her face seemed younger. ‘I'm glad Mum's using them.'

Wisely, this time I said nothing.

Jim took me back to Cleo's where I'd left my car that morning.

‘Thanks for your help today,' he said.

‘I don't think I was much help,' I said. The glow of Margaret Jennings' house transformation had dimmed, and I kept thinking about the unused cups and the dead bird. Sadness clung to me like the smell. Which also clung to me.

‘It got done in the end,' said Jim, which wasn't the praise I was hoping for. ‘Will we see you tomorrow?'

‘I'm not sure,' I said. ‘Maybe.'

He inclined his head slightly as if he'd been hoping for a more emphatic ‘no'.

‘Are they …?' I hesitated. ‘The jobs, are they all like that?'

‘Not really. That was quite extreme. Mostly it's just cleaning showers and hoovering. But to be honest, I find houses like that the most satisfying.'

Of course he did. ‘Because you can see the difference?'

‘Yes, but …' Jim wiped a hand over his face. ‘In my opinion, cleaning isn't always about cleaning. It's about restoring order. Houses don't get like that because someone's too lazy to run a cloth over a sink. There's more to it. That's what you're helping someone with.'

I didn't say anything. I often felt as if the mess in my flat was ganging up on me. It didn't feel like a fair fight. The more stressed I was, the worse my house got. The worse my house got, the more I loathed myself.

Just thinking about my flat made me feel weary. I remembered I'd have to drag all my unironed laundry out of the bath if I wanted a soak tonight, and the ache in my bones ramped up another notch.

‘I will never let my bins get as bad as that though,' I said.

‘That's probably what Mrs Jennings thought at one point.'

I turned. Seriously? ‘Is that supposed to make me feel better?'

Jim's expression didn't change. ‘No. But it's the truth.'

Something about the vicar-ish way he said that, as if he was the only beacon of order standing between these poor slatterns and an unexpected burial under a pile of local newspapers, riled me.

‘Oh, for—'

There was a rap on the window and we both jumped.

It was Cleo.

‘Good day?' she asked, and I gave her the special deadeye smile we'd perfected as kids. I couldn't see, but I imagined Jim was doing something similar.