The Cleaner's Story

You can’t keep secrets from your cleaner. The story’s all there in the stains, smudges and smears of lipstick and it isn’t usually the same as the version in the papers. You’ve all heard the one about the sleeping beauty; you know the one, christening invitations lost in the post, resentment, pricked fingers, a lot of sleep and brambles and a dramatic rescue culminating in the inevitable fairy tale wedding. Well I am going to tell you the real story.

Don’t run away with the impression that I’m doing this for the sake of the truth. My motive, simple if not pure, is to make up for the loss of that contract at the palace. At the time it was the biggest contract I had won; it was going to turn me from a one woman outfit into a cleaning empire, a fabulously rich woman to boot.
It all started out so well. I dealt directly with Fay Godmanchester. She was head of the Queens’ people, they didn’t have job titles, just names, and Fay would send them here and there doing what was needed for the show or for the palace.
“As long as it’s clean and you don’t wake them on their days off, you organise things to suit yourself, Dawn.” Fay told me.
I did meet the Queens’ for a few minutes before we signed the deal. Gina and Rex, never Mr and Mrs, seemed like such a lovely couple to work for, modern and casual. Rex made a lot of jokes about my surname being just right for work in a palace and Gina kept apologising for his unfunny cracks and saying that she was sure with my surname I had heard all the jokes I ever wanted to hear on the subject.
The couple were insistent that I shouldn’t use a car to get to their house. The house was nicknamed the palace and the Rex's were the known as the greenest people in show biz because they owned the land for miles around and banned motor vehicles from setting a wheel across the boundary. All deliveries were brought to house from the main road by bicycle and the guests came up in rickshaws. I promised to use one of the bicycles they kept by their gate.
The Queens lived for their show, it was filmed at their house and the production team lived in. The show, An Audience with the Queens, was part chat show, part news show. They invited everyone who was going to appear to hangout at their house just as if they were friends of the Queens.
People got the impression that everyone was treated the same, but it wasn’t the case, Johnny Depp was invited for the whole weekend before a Monday show while the class room assistant who had given birth to quads was invited for tea and a walk around the garden.
The audience also got the impression that the show went out live but it was pre-recorded and they had one or two shows in store for contingencies.
An Audience with the Queens had the highest ratings of them all. It was said that an appearance on the show could make or break a celeb’s career, stars queued for an invitation.

That particular weekend there was the usual weekend house party for the show’s guest and as it was Gina’s birthday on Saturday, the party was going to be bigger than ever and, for the first time in their careers, the couple were taking a fortnight off afterwards.
Reg and Gina liked to party, they joked about having a special tank installed so they could have champagne bubbling from the taps People also used to say that the other reason for the house parties was that if all the guests were enticed into boozy antics in front of one another, no-one was likely to tell on anyone else, especially as it was all recorded on CCTV. There was never anything illegal at the parties, no drugs or underage girls, the hosts were too fond of their careers to allow anything like that under their roof. Any guest who tried had their appearance on the show cancelled and was never invited again.

But I haven’t introduced you to the heroine yet. Rex and Gina had a daughter. They kept her out the media spotlight and if you liked them you congratulated them for allowing her an unspoiled childhood; if you detested them, you subscribed to one of the many rumours that went around. You could pick from uglier than Gina, more beautiful than Gina, obviously not Gina’s daughter, clearly not Rex’s daughter, or any combination you cared to make up.
You can’t keep secrets from the person who does your laundry and I'd only met her once in person but I had seen her clothes and shoes and the occasional piece of homework. I have a son of my own, Charlie, who was doing the same school work so I guessed the secret was age. This daughter was too old to match Gina’s given age and couldn’t be Rex’s offspring as we all knew he had been married to some starlet’s auntie who had let slip that he'd been tested and found to be shooting blanks.
The daughter’s name was Bea, short for Beatrice and judging by the clothes and shoes and homework she was a perfectly ordinary eighteen year old doing her last year at school. So even if Gina did hide her daughter away to avoid revealing her real age, maybe it was all for the good.

Anyway, as I said, Gina and Rex were taking a holiday after the show for the first time in ages and I was given a paid week off too. I was very pleased because the universities were holding open days and I planned to visit a few with Charlie.
After a visit to one of the more distant colleges, Charlie and I travelled back overnight so I could get back in time for work and Charlie had agreed to come in with me and help. When we got to where the Queen's front gate had been there was a mass of mile-a-minute creeper blocking our way.
“Can we go home then?” Charlie was hopeful, neither of us had had much sleep but I was focussed on the bottom line.
“Course not. Can’t let Russian Vine get between me and a week’s pay. Cycle home and bring back the hedge cutters and anything else you think might do the job.”
We hacked and slashed and pruned our way round to the back door into the huge utility room and store that led to the kitchens. Inside everything was quiet.
“I think maybe they’re still on holiday.” I didn’t think that at all, I had the screaming heebie-jeebies, but I was doing the mum thing and not alarming Charlie who stood there all of six foot and muscled holding a pair of hedge trimmers.
Charlie didn’t answer and when I looked toward him I realised that he wasn’t just holding the hedge trimmers, he was pointing towards an open doorway. We tiptoed closer. There were slumped bodies all the way down the corridor. When I was near enough to recognise Fay with her distinctive white blonde hair I gasped, pointed and gripped Charlie’s arm. Charlie loosened my hold, squatted down and bent his head close to her face,
“Be careful!” I hissed.
“This isn’t science fiction Mum, A hand isn’t going to burst from her chest and grip me by the throat.”
“No but you might catch something.” Even I thought I sounded lame.
“Don’t think so. I am a first aider you know. No sign of injury, breathing normal, pulse normal.”
“You sure? Nothing about this seems normal to me. Don’t you think I should call the police?” I asked.
“I’m not sure that there’s much wrong with them. Listen.” There was the sound of snoring coming from another room, “Publicity management Mum, the Queens are very keen on it you know. You don’t want to lose your contract do you? Let’s look at the famous CCTV.”
I led the way to the lounge where the main party had taken place. Sleeping people lay in the corridors, curled up, stretched out and one man sitting up, propped against the wall. As we got nearer to the lounge, the dresses and suits became fancier and my cleaner’s heart sank lower. People had dropped glasses full of pink champagne and plates of caviar onto white upholstery.
“Drugs.” Charlie said, looking at the sleeping people. One man’s face had dropped onto a plate of yellow stuff looking very like hummus that had dried like cracked cement.
“Oh no! Nothing like that. I’d have known.”
“Not those kind of drugs, pharmaceuticals, legal ones. I saw the trailer for the show. An herbalist and a doctor debating some new cure all."
So we watched the CCTV film on fast forward until we found them. It was like watching an old home movie, there was sound but faint and squeaky and everything was a bit fuzzy and jerky.
On the screen, Doctor Price wore a severe black three-piece suit while Mr Heart wore hairy trousers with a homespun look and a collarless shirt. We found their names on a clipboard showing the show’s running order that had been left on a counter and we knew who they were because all the other guests at the party were famous. For the first few minutes they stood in silence on either side of a small table looking neither at each other, nor at anyone else. An hour had passed on the film counter in the bottom of the screen and there were empty glasses building up on the table.
Dr Price turned to Mr Heart, “I’m Sandy.” She slurred a little. “Wa’s your name?”
“Jim.”
“I think we were invited for a fight. What do you think?”
“Chose us for our clothes too. The image you know.”
“I was told what to wear. I don’t dress like this usually and I didn’t know about the party thing so I didn’t bring any other clothes.”
“Really? Good. I could quite fancy you except for the outfit.”
“Really?” Dr Price laughed for ages here, “I thought the same about you.”
“Good, cos these are my gardening clothes. And I’m not an herbalist. I’m the PR man for the manufacturer."
They both laughed. We fast forwarded the tape and they were no longer on either side of the table, they were almost side by side and their heads were close together talking but not loud enough for us to hear. A little further on and they began talking distinctly. They were holding hands.
“Does it work, this wonder drug of yours?” Sandy asked.
“Of course!” Jim sounded indignant but he was smiling.
“Want a competition? I’ve got some samples in my case upstairs.”
Jim nodded and whispered into Sandy’s ear and they left the room. Next time we found them on the tape they were in the kitchen, there was no-one else in the room and they were standing over a huge saucepan on the stove. Jim had champagne bottle tucked under one arm and a large brown bottle in the other hand.
“But I want to do this one.” Sandy sounded petulant. She was holding a cardboard carton full of metal tubes with plastic stopper like hi-tec Smartie tubes
“But I specially want to spike the soup!” Jim pretended to wrap a possessive arm around the saucepan and burned himself in the attempt. He yelped, Sandy took his hand and licked the burnt spot, saying “Trust me I’m a doctor.”
Canoodling followed and when they untangled themselves Sandy pointed at the saucepan,
“Let’s both do it!”
”Yes!” Jim punched the air and the champagne bottle slid from under his arm and smashed on the tiles, “Oops!
He upended his brown bottle over the pan while Sandy began deftly flicking the plastic caps off the tubes and emptying each one into the mixture. Next Jim peered at the label on his bottle.
”Aah, maybe I overdid the dose. But I’ve still got another bottle left. I think we should go now. Watch the results on TV. My place or yours?”
Sandy didn’t need to be asked twice and the last time they appeared on the film she was climbing over the gate while Jim emptied his remaining bottle into the nearby flowerbed.
Charlie looked at me, “We should probably call the police.”
“Well, I think I might risk a minute or two more to check for anything scandalous. I don’t know what the herbal medicine was but I think they will recover from the conventional remedy. I recognised the label; it’s an indigestion tablet, mainly bicarbonate of soda. And I've just thought of something. We’ve got the overgrown castle, sleeping people and a young and handsome Prince, now all we need is the beauty.”
“Ugh! Mum!”
“I was being partly serious, where’s the Queens’ daughter?”
“I didn’t know they had one.”
“She’s about your age. Very nice. Only met her once. She keeps out of the way. Better go upstairs and look.”
If this was a proper story, we would have gone in different directions to search the house but we were sensible and stuck together and there weren’t any dragons or anything like that. I was the cleaner so I knew where her bedroom was, It was a suite of rooms actually, but it took a while to get there because we came across more people asleep and Charlie would insisting on ‘assessing the casualty’ as he called it.
When we got to Bea’s suite, in the first room we entered the TV was still playing without sound and there she was stretched out on the sofa, the remote on the floor by her hand. There were smudges of chocolate on her face but apart from that she looked every bit the princess, the purple hair notwithstanding. I turned off the TV, tutted a little at the crumbs of chocolate bar that had fallen onto the silky cream rug and watched as Charlie went through his routine.

As he felt for her pulse, her eyes flicked open and she said, “I hope you're not going to do the kissing thing next.” And began trying to sit up.

Charlie dropped her hand as if it was red hot.

“Because prince or not, I definitely don’t want to get married and live happily ever after. Bloody hell! How long have I been asleep for? Have I missed all the uni open days?”