Blood Jobs: The Cleaner

The worst job I ever had? Easy, I had a temporary hours contract with an outsourcing company as a “hygiene technician”. The pay was awful, the company were a bunch of chancers, I think some gangster or other funded them. Needless to say they were not the most charitable of employers. If that wasn't bad enough I was the only person paid to clean an entire college. The place was Carleton Community College, which served the towns of Goyleside, Wraithlin, Suthering and a few other overspill dumps. It was really small by comparison to most colleges, most secondary schools too. It had sixteen rooms, a gym, a cafeteria area and two study rooms, all of which I was expected to clean in four hours, usually on a Tuesday and Thursday night. The reason for that was that those were the nights they kept open for night shift classes which were of questionable academic merit but they helped pay to keep the lights on. The shift was a pain in the arse but it wasn't what made it the worst job I've ever had.

The students were all little arseholes, the type of spoiled brats only bred by the deluded 'aspirational' working class. Thick as mince, soft as shite and with such hubristic self-assuredness that their inevitable catastrophic comeuppance would make the most compassionate Buddhist laugh like a giddy child. Twats, the lot of them. Luckily they were always filtering out by the time I got in so I had little dealing with them other than their bewildered snobbery upon interacting with a mere cleaner. The same could be said for most of the actual lecturers who were all thankfully gone by my 8pm start. I dealt mostly with independent people who rented out the rooms for classes and the like. There was a local abstinence group, a retired woodwork teacher offering classes in basic and advanced D.I.Y. a young couple who taught guitar lessons, and the inevitable creative writing class ran by some smug cock from Glasgow who apparently wrote successful crime fiction but I'd never heard of him. Most of them were alright I guess, but there was one who I could have easily strangled. Her name was Ms Mildred. She was one of those airy fairy types that believed that crystals spoke to her, or some such bullshit. You know what I mean, all that enlightened spiritual hippy bollocks. For someone who claimed to have almost supernatural empathy, she was an utter cunt to the denizens of this mundane sphere.

I realise I don't sound much better with all this bitching, but seriously, it was a really unpleasant place and Ms Mildred was the particularly foul turd that topped this cake of shit. Ms Mildred was about 5 foot and so fat I was sure her chin ended at the bottom of the saggy boobs that lolled over her enormous belly. She had a severe black bob which I suspected as being a wig and wore thick black national health glasses with lenses so warped her eyes looked tiny. As unappealing as she was to observe it could not compare to her manner. She acted like some 19^th Century school Marm with sadistic qualities and nothing I ever did was good enough. I should have known right at the start.

Her first words to me were “darling, could you do me a teensie favour?”

You see the place was so utterly unprofessional that they allowed me, the cleaner, who wasn't even hired by them, to be one of the key holders. As such I locked up at midnight. Ms Mildred had asked if she and her group could have just another half hour. I agreed, thinking it was only the once but it came to pass that every single Thursday night they'd get later and later.

I complained but she had some sway over the college head and it was soon agreed that I'd be working 'til 2am on a Thursday, it was two extra hours, I was broke and I knew if I pushed it I'd be back signing on. So I agreed. After about eight or nine months I had a great routine and would be finished well before midnight which meant on Thursday nights I was getting paid to play spider solitaire and listen to Spotify. Occasionally Ms Mildred would bark at me to help her move some equipment into the room for her “girls” as she called her class.

You are probably wondering at this point what it was her class was. You are more curious than I, for nearly a year I listened to her and her class “om” of an evening, bang drums and chant like native Americans. A whole class of deluded white folks thinking they can somehow wake up from the nightmare of history through esoteric nonsense from cultures which are frankly, deluded. To be honest the real reason I got curious was because one night she asked me to help her into the room with one of her boxes. I managed to lift it alright but what was inside was too heavy for the bottom and the supporting tape split and spilled out the contents. It was half a dozen old gothic looking hardback books, some long piece of tapered wood painted red, a silver goblet and a strange device.

The device, well at one end was a sort of dish which looked very like a red plastic lemon squeezer but with the central bump extending out about eighteen or so inches so it looked unhealthily like a sex toy. The end of the dish funnelled into a whole range of wires which were bound into a tube connected to the device at the other end. This device seemed to be some kind of large ornate glass gourd, almost like a cookie jar. The glass was black, glossy and reflective it was hard to see anything inside but the occasional pale sparks that twinkled. I didn't ask. I didn't even want to know but she was pissed off that I'd spotted her device. Some part of me thought I'd rumbled some horrid menopausal lesbian sex cult, the rest of me refused to even entertain that.

Anyway, Ms Mildred started barking to me to “leave it, leave it! Go do whatever it is you pretend to do you awful man” and who was I to deny her? I went back to playing spider solitaire. Still, as I said, I was curious, so I picked up the college brochure, just to check out her racket. I still have it, I kept it afterwards, a memento of the worst job I ever had.

“Knowing oneself. Ms Mildred's guide to Higher Living.”

An accredited teacher of the famous Astra Sophia Foundation for

Spiritual Harmony, Ms Mildred offers an ongoing instruction

programme for those who wish to undo themselves from the

shackles of rational certainty, to read between the lines written

by science and to explore the uncharted higher realms together.

Every Thurs: 8p.m. to Midn. £15.

She was a kook, no doubt, every movement and expression seemed to be over-considered, until dealing with her felt like you were dealing with a character who'd escaped from a poor am-dram production into real life. Still she was packing the seats. People came from all over the shop to attend her classes but most of them only came once or twice. She only had a small group of people, women mainly, who came week after week.

One Thursday night I got caught in a traffic jam and got to work late. I'd been stuck for an hour and a half and as soon as I arrived that fact was noted to me by the never pleasant Ms Mildred. As such, she said, I owed her an extra hour and a half. Half past three in the morning. I protested but she promised it would only be the once and she wouldn't have to let management know about my shocking habitual tardiness. I didn't have the energy to fight with her so I agreed.

It was a quiet night, most of the other classes had finished for the term, so she had the place to herself, except for me obviously. The place didn't need much in the way of cleaning so I went into the staff lounge and watched the late movie. Around half eleven, the noise from Ms Mildred's class was ridiculous. They were shouting and chanting something or other, I could hear Ms Mildred whip them up into a right frenzy, she was speaking in tongues, the whole bit. I could hardly keep a straight face, I shook my head and turned the T.V. up. They kept at it for quite a while and then stopped. I was thankful but had to turn the T.V. down quick. She was exactly the sort who'd make that noise and complain that you were disturbing her.

I watched the rest of the movie. It was French Connection 2, which wasn't bad. After it had finished I noticed they'd been quiet for a while, which was unusual. You could normally hear Ms Mildred at least, it was like the woman was cursed never to stop wagging her finger or her tongue. Not that night. That night the place was as silent as, well, as an empty college. For some stupid reason I got concerned and went upstairs. I just happened to glance in through the little rectangle of wired glass on the door as I walked by the room. It was just a glance but what I saw was enough to give me the creeps for a while. The entire class had sat cross legged in a circle all facing one another. They seemed to be meditating but in the centre of them was the contraption I had glanced earlier. It was emitting some kind of vapour, dark and grainy, it looked somewhat like a cloud, somewhat like a vortex. I didn't think much of it, that was until I was a metre or two from the door.

There was a heavy thud, a single shudder that rippled through the building. I could have put that down as a coincidence, maybe. A tremor or something, easy but there was a bass thump in response which left me with blood in my snot and a headache for days afterwards. I suspected she'd used some gadget which gave out some kind of concussive pulse for effect but it had been too strong. I turned back to look into the room but the door had burst open and three women, in tears and clearly out of their wits with fright, ran down the stairs and out the building. There was some arguing and shouting going on and Ms Mildred seemed to have a riot brewing. She looked out towards me, I hope for assistance, since I walked by enjoying her plight.

After that she somehow placated her students and nervously and quietly they left. I reckoned her whole thing had been an elaborate hoax and had backfired. She was sobbing quietly in her room, which I interrupted reminding her we had to leave. She nodded, seemed weakened, defeated. I thought that I might have seen the last of her after that. As it turned out, she wasn't about to go without a fight.

The following Thursday she had eighteen people show up, which was much less than usual which averaged about 40 people give or take. All of them were her regulars. I had been asked to speak to the College Head that night who explained to me that Ms Mildred had made another request. I wondered what hell she was going to put me through but as it turned out she was making me an offer. Ms Mildred explained that she and her group knew how inconvenient it was making me stay so late each Thursday and so rather than cause any animosity between us she wondered if it was possible for me to stay until half past three every Thursday and for my trouble they would pay me £500 a week.

I was skint so of course I said yes. I could put up with her whole Witch Queen routine for half that. The fact that it was over and above my shitty wages made the job, for that moment, seem bearable. Just for that moment though. Because it was right after that things began to make me suspect there was something wrong with Ms Mildred and her crackpot coven. The group were excited and chatty when they went in and before too long they started doing the whole loud chanting thing again, which I thought had been the source of some controversy the week before. Whatever they were up to wasn't working, I remember thinking Ms Mildred was going to pull another stunt and braced myself but she didn't. Still I jumped when the drinks machine downstairs started to flicker and then the bulbs behind the display burst leaving a dark char on the image.

Whatever happened on that night the group were disappointed, Ms Mildred was apologetic but still much more positive than she had been the week before. I knew she was up to something, I suspected some kind of long con and began to consider myself being like a spy, waiting for something I could use to catch her and reveal her as a charlatan and grifter. This was mostly self interest, I thought if I could reveal her before she got caught there was less of a chance I'd be incriminated along with her. I was in her pay after all. Granted I was having those thoughts an hour after I'd agreed but as I said, I needed the money.

On the way out she was quiet, she had a confident smile and a frown which changed when she saw the burn mark on the drinks machine. “Good heavens, when did this happen?”

I told her it had been earlier, just after they'd finished their singing, I used the term singing to be polite and feign ignorance of her game. Her hand traced round the burn mark which was a large oval shape. “Remarkable.” she said, as if in awe. Part of me began to suspect that she might not be a con woman, but a genuine lunatic.

Our relationship began to change, naturally considering she was paying me. She had less qualms about ordering me about, I had less qualms about letting her. Soon I was helping her prepare her room for her classes. Taping up windows and bringing in large stones, making sure the room was filled with just the right incense, all sorts of bullshit that she tried to engage me with but I paid no attention to. Crap about Odin and fairies and all sorts of nonsense she'd picked up and jumbled together into a “system of magical practice”.

One night she showed me a sculpture she owned. It was about five inches tall, little more than a roughly hewn stone. It had the vague outline of a human in a squatting position and some rough detail on the face, it looked a bit like a grimacing fox. Apparently it was nearly eight thousand years old and was some storm god of some bunch of primitives from the Middle East. To tell you the truth it was pretty primitive and the shape of it reminded me less of some storm god and more the burned mark left on the drinks machine. Still, after seeing that it hit home that she really believed in all the stuff she was preaching, what's more it seemed she'd found a receptive audience. I began thinking perhaps I was watching a cult in the making. My perspective may have changed but my suspicions did not. I still thought I was going to reveal something to the world, something potentially dangerous.

I found myself feigning an interest in her nonsense. She'd mention odd books that she'd assumed everyone had read and I found myself going home and checking out what I could, just so I had something to say to her. It was all bluff. I've never read “Vermin Cults of the 20^th Century” nor the “Song of Sligeach”. Never even knew there was a god called Sligeach let alone it having its own song, but I made do and soon she came to trust me.

The annoying thing was that Ms Mildred's group became the focus of my attention just as the college began to need more. First of all the fuse boxes kept blowing, day or night. After a couple of electricians came away bewildered and suggested perhaps the whole college needed rewired, the Dean decided to do nothing about it. So it kept happening. It happened one Thursday night around eleven. When the power came back on the printers in the computer lab printed out reams of gibberish. I collected it all and binned it. It was interesting that amongst all the random letters there were words, phrases sometimes but I guess that random gibberish will from time to time chuck up things that look sensible.

I started getting the creeps to tell you the truth, Ms Mildred's brain softening bullshit had some effect on me. I started feeling weird in certain rooms of the college. Nothing I could put my finger on, just… Well have you ever been at a party and immediately knew you were neither welcome nor expected but no one actually says or does anything to suggest it? It was like that. At first.

I'm not the smartest guy in the world, the only college I was ever in was the one I'm talking about, I admit I get forgetful, that sometimes I do things and then surprise myself half an hour later but I'm not delusional. I say this because one night I cleaned Hall 4a and I placed all the chairs on the tables in order to mop the floor. I received a text from a friend when I was cleaning the room and left my phone in there. I forgot about it for about ten minutes and when I went back into the room to collect it all forty seats were stacked against the back wall four rows ten high and almost toppling.

I thought someone was playing silly buggers and I swear I heard someone hiding in there, breathing heavily but I discovered no one. I concluded it was one of Ms Mildred's vindictive little japes. When I mentioned it to her she claimed she knew nothing about it but I swear there was a mischievous gleam in her eye that night. What else was it going to be, a poltergeist? The very idea is laughable.

Which is why I don't normally even tell people I was a cleaner.

I'm not saying there was a poltergeist, because how can you make a claim like that? I've no idea what a poltergeist is meant or not meant to do. Oh I've heard loads of stories but since none of that is remotely anything but total pish, I can't truly say what I experienced was a poltergeist. It was something though. Those rooms I mentioned the ones I felt uncomfortable in, well that ramped up to a tangible sense of hostility. I started to avoid them whenever I could. I kept hearing noises in the broom cupboard, thumping and rattling which revealed nothing. I asked around if others had shared similar experiences but no one mentioned anything. I began to get really anxious, began having nightmares, jumping at my own reflection, even Ms Mildred noticed I was stressed.

I should've left then but I kept pushing it, I needed the cash. So then one night everything is quiet, normal, the cult are on good behaviour, nothing out of the ordinary is happening, then I hear Ms Mildred call me from the gym. I wondered what she was doing in there and noticed as I approached, the lights were all off. The gym has big windows and so the lights of the car-park shone in. There was something in there, something big and dark and squatting, something that hunched over was about the size of the front of a bus. It reminded me of something, that stone of Ms Mildred's. I gasped and looked again but it had been nothing more than a trick of the light, my imagination running rampant.

I took the following week off. I planned to stay away forever, to hand in my notice and indeed on the following Thursday that is what I did. I felt good after that. I had two more shifts left and then I was gone.

As it was, I was lucky. My replacement for the shift I took off, along with nineteen women, including Ms Mildred were found slaughtered the following morning. The news claimed that it looked like they were torn apart by wild animals and the police said they were looking for several perpetrators and mentioned the possibility that it was some act of terrorism. They came to my home on the Saturday and asked me some questions but seemed satisfied that I wasn't to blame, at least I never heard anything from them again. As for the college, all further classes were cancelled and the Head said I didn't need to work either shift, if I did him one last favour.

It was that which made it the worst job in the world.

You see, after the forensic team had their way, someone had to clean up what was left and that was left to me. I would imagine it looked worse before I was let loose on the place but they didn't do a thorough job. There was still blood everywhere, the place stank like a neglected abattoir. It was revolting, repulsive. I found a tooth, still set in a dark chunk of gum hidden under a lectern; Half a woman's sandal which looked as it if had been cut in two with huge scissors. I recognised the shoe, remembered the small quiet woman with thinning grey hair and buck teeth that wore them. It was horrifying to hold that in my hand and recollect her, recollect all of them had been gutted. But, that, even that, as vile as that was, it wasn't that which made it the worst job.

What made it the worst job was finding Ms Mildred's little statue, caked in blood, under one of the bookcases in the library and seeing it's fox-like face, no longer an angry snarl but a satisfied, satiated smile.