Married Love Read Online Free Page B

equipment, but sometimes they left out broken old mops or brooms so heavy you could hardly lift them.
    Shelley switched her mobile off before she started working; otherwise, she couldn’t concentrate. Her son Anthony was in Afghanistan. Roy said that statistically Anthony would be in more danger if he were still playing with his rugby club, but Shelley was always waiting for some dreadful kind of message. There was a big operation under way. Anthony had told them that he’d had his leave cancelled, but Roy was sure he’d volunteered to stay. It wasn’t only that her son might be killed or injured – Shelley pushed those possibilities right down in her mind until they weren’t any more than shapes in the dark. She never watched the news; she only listened in from the kitchen while the others watched it. But when there was that fuss about the friendly-fire incident with the Danish soldiers, she fixated on the idea that Anthony had been involved in it, even though Roy insisted that he’d been nowhere near where it had happened. — Why d’you have to make up trouble, he said, — as if there wasn’t enough of the real thing?
    Inside, the warehouse was a big open hall, divided into metal cages piled high with different grades of insulating material. Yellow forklifts were parked as if resting in the aisles between them. Fibrous orange dust was everywhere, but Shelley and Pam weren’t contracted to clean the warehouse itself – the men were supposed to do that. The canteen and toilets were along one wall, the offices upstairs on a sort of mezzanine. You could see why they needed the scrub-off: the regular cleaners hadn’t been doing much of a job. All the pipes in the canteen were thick with dust. Under the plate rack on the draining board and at the bottom of the plastic pot for the cutlery was a murky grey sludge. The toilets stank; the cleaners had actually mopped around a roll of toilet paper that had fallen on to the floor, not bothering to pick it up. One of the sinks was blocked and full of scummy water.
    To be fair, Pam said, the boss had only been paying the regulars for two hours a day, which wasn’t enough: there was a kitchenette and a separate toilet upstairs with the offices, too. Two hours would be just enough time to wash the cups and plates and put them away, and give the toilets a quick once-over; to do the place properly you’d need four hours at least. Shelley knew what it was like if you had a job like this: you got your regular routine going, and then that was all you saw; you played your music and went into a kind of dream, wiping and sweeping, until you hardly knew what you were doing, just going through the motions. But she wasn’t the sort of person who took on this kind of work as a regular thing. She had a proper job at a school as a lunchtime supervisor. She wasn’t such a fool, either – she knew that somewhere like this, if they saw that you were keeping it clean in two hours they’d cut you down to an hour and a half. Why should you care whether the place was as filthy as hell?
    By the time the men came in at eight, Shelley and Pam had finished the kitchen and Shelley had just got going on the toilets. One man barged in, despite the notice she’d put on the door, and then looked surprised to see her scrubbing on her knees with her backside in the air.
    — What d’you need to go for already? she said, pulling out one earphone from her music player. — You only just got here!
    He was sheepish. — Two cups of tea for breakfast. Bladder control’s not what it used to be.
    — Use the one upstairs.
    — Don’t tell me they piss the same stuff as we do?
    — You’re not coming near my toilets until they’re spotless.
    It was better when the men were in, there was always the opportunity for a bit of a joke. He probably liked the sight of my backside better than my face, she thought when she got up to refill her bucket and caught her reflection in the mirror above one of the sinks,