Carol, official leader of Scary Clean Freaks Incorporated, put her head round the door assertively. Was it only a week ago I had checked out her ankle chain and pondered whether we’d ever get on? She looked at me sneerily. I sensed that she secretly knew of the scientifically proven inverse relationship between me and housework (the more messy things were, the less inclined I was to do anything about them), even though I’d attempted to be pristine for my first few days.
‘We were just wondering …’ she hissed.
Laura sniffed, noisily, behind her. Laura sniffed all the time. I always wanted to tell her that it was OK; no one was about to make her do double PE any more. Carol shot an evil sideways glance like a viper.
‘Ahem. We were just wondering, given that we’re – ha – divvying up the rota, if there was anything you particularly liked doing?’
I eyed her steadily, not about to be intimidated by someone who ringed their lips with dark lipstick pencil on their skin.
‘How about I take lightbulb-dusting and big spider removal?’
‘Ooh, that sounds good,’ screeched Farah from somewhere beside my knee. Carol dispensed another one of those Robert de Niro-to-doomed-gangster stares.
‘We thought you might prefer loos, sinks and floors,’ she said pointedly.
‘Oh …’ I said. ‘You mean, all of it.’
‘Ha,’ she smiled. ‘Don’t get around to much cooking, do we?’
I realized I’d been outmanoeuvred.
I counterattacked. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘I’m going to co-ordinate,’ she said. Laura nodded happily.
‘Oh, tough one.’
‘… that means I buy all the cleaning materials, arrange the rota, organize the external cleaning contractors, e.g. the carpet shampooers I’ve got coming in, arrange everyone’s telephone hours and oversee everyone’s painting choices. So we’ve all got quite enough to be getting on with, don’t you think?’
I wanted to try one last stance – perhaps suggesting that Farah take the floors, after all, she was closer – but all I could say was, ‘Telephone hours?’
‘I know, I thought of it,’ Carol said proudly.
‘It’s a great idea,’ said Farah, standing between Carol’s legs.
‘Basically, it means you can only use the phone or get phone calls at your set time each night. Then, when we get the bill in, you pay for all the calls in your time, and nobody lies about the expensive numbers.’
I stared at her.
‘Well, that’s going to cut down on my sex-line income.’
Laura’s eyes widened with shock. Carol laughed politely, to show me that if I felt like fighting her, she was up to it.
‘What’s to stop me making phone calls on other people’s time?’
‘We’re going to have a phone-lock that can only be opened by me. You come to me when you want to use the phone and I’ll see if it’s your hour or not. Really,’ she said, shaking her head, ‘your chores are much easier than mine, believe me.’
‘Oh goodness me, I think I just heard my mobile go off,’ I announced in a flurry.
‘Excuse me,’ I said, when they showed no sign of backing away from my door, ‘I just have to, ehrm, excuse me …’ Fortunately, the henchmen stuck next to Carol and backed away when she gave the signal, as my next move would have been to scream ‘Fuck off! Fuck off! Fuck off!’ whilst shoving them out of the door and pulling a hose on them.
I slammed the door behind them and sat on the bed. My mobile wasn’t going off, naturally, but I took it out anyway and thanked this little machine. How could I ever have thought they were only of use to wankers on buses who thought that someone not on a bus might want to know when they were on a bus? Oh – and how the fuck was I going to get out of here?
Some people pick the wrong men all the time. I pick the wrong places to live. Well, OK, I pick the wrong men too, but anyway. So it was that after finally getting totally creeped out by my last landlord, in Hackney, who smelled of piss and used to turn up at random hours of the night to ‘inspect’ things (my knicker drawer included) – which followed the three girls in Dulwich who had all joined a beardy-weirdy religious cult and refused to allow men over the threshold, except for the cult leader, whom they all slept with whenever he wanted them to – I had ended up here, in a new house-share with three banana brains who all worked in the local hospital as phlebotomists. Apparently this meant they took blood samples from people. I assumed in Carol’s case she simply bit them.
Anyway, they’d advertised in Loot for a fourth member to join a new household in tasty Harlesden, and, amazingly, I got it. Perhaps I was the only one who didn’t blanch at the interview, when Laura came in and reported obediently to Carol that she had just bleached the teacups.
‘And how often do you boil-wash the crockery?’ Carol had asked me.
‘Ehm … I find about every half-hour just about does it,’ I’d gone for, and noticed her put a big tick on my application form, which had been broken down into sixteen handy sections. The relief of going from the dissipated seediness of Hackney – where they wanted extra rent if you got an inside loo – to a brand new ‘executive’ flat in the famous industrial waste area of North West London made it seem like a good deal at the time, but had blinded me to the obvious: i.e., all these people were mad, but because they outnumbered me in the house I was beginning to think that they were right.
I began to inspect my mobile for germs, and was getting really close up when it rang in my face.
I shrieked, did a comedy clown fumble, and dropped the phone under the bed.
‘Are you all right?’ said Carol’s voice from just outside the door. She was obviously listening to everything. I shrieked again, swallowed some air, choked, coughed, and managed to wheeze, ‘Fine, thank you.’
‘It must be pretty dusty under your bed.’
‘Yes, yes it is, thanks,’ I said, sitting upright with the phone. Then I jumped – how the hell did she know where I was? I felt a cold hand of fear.
‘Hello?’ I finally choked into the phone.
‘Do you know, I haven’t made a woman scream like that for years,’ drawled the well-modulated voice.
I relaxed slightly.
‘Josh, you have never made a woman scream like that. In fact, have you ever made a woman?’
‘Oh ho ho. Yes, of course.’
‘In your country of origin?’
He paused.
‘Not precisely.’
I’d been teasing Josh about this for as long as I’d known him, which was a l-o-o-ong time. Because he was attractive and also nice to girls, most people assumed he was gay. For someone with a posh background, a good job, and a nice haircut, he did horrendously badly with the opposite sex, which I couldn’t understand – not that I’d ever wanted to shag him myself; he was so nice.
Anyway, thank God he’d rung me back. Worriedly searching the ceiling for CCTV, I sat back on the bed.
‘Josh, you know when you moved into Pimlico and I said I didn’t want to move there because it was snooty London and you were moving in with Kate who hates me?’
‘Um, yes.’
‘Well, you know, how’s it … how’s the whole flatshare thing going?’
‘It’s going fine.’
‘Right