On being a housekeeper

 

 

Language is the fabric of reality.

 

It started with an email. I was recently home from Mexico, university was a long stretch away. It was for a housekeeping job, in a extortionately priced hotel situated in a isle off the coast of Scotland. The manager I emailed had a funny sound name, like an onomatopoeia. I took the train north, a journey I knew well, made up of small naps, a room temperature sandwich, and the English countryside whizzing past. I checked into a hotel I also knew well, the price cheap and the workers distinctly unfriendly. I stayed a night and in the morning I greeted, for the first time, the onomatopoeia. I got into my small talk while the roads became lanes and we eventually saw the water. We boarded a large passenger boat, we listened to our bearded captain telling us the safety procedures. To my surprise, a Spanish footballer and his girlfriend also boarded but I didn’t recognise him. His counterpart was donning a white coat and had very straight hair. I followed the waters movements, rising against the boat then crashing into what it’s made from, enjoying the sea spray on my face. I went into the lounge area of the boat and stretched out, closing my eyes. When I opened them, the footballer was already looking at me. Despite feminism, I felt flattered.

 

We reached the isle, so small there is only a community shop/pub, another hotel, and a whisky distillery. I clambered off, mistakenly going before the celebrity couple, which was reprimanded with a cold glare from a tall blonde woman. Another car ride through the small island, I marvelled at the row of dinky houses along the edge of the sea, the long winding road towards the hotel dotted with deer on either side of the car. The Onomatopoeia talked of duties, roles and responsibilities, while I nodded absentmindedly beside him. We reached the house in which I would be staying in. I noticed that there was no lock on the door, he just walked in calling a girl’s name. My housemate, another housekeeper.

After tea at the main dining area, I get to work. I meet another woman, a strange, shifty woman of 40. She tells me how there are three main times that we go into a guests room, not counting check in and check out. During breakfast, after lunch (which is when guests would be playing golf) and before bed. We dust, mop, hoover and wipe. Make the beds, very intricately, with precision. Turn on the fire, lay out their pyjamas, fold their clothes. For £2000 a night, they had attentive mothers who scrubbed the toilets down and switched off the lights.

The hotel itself was sprawling, with lawns and gardens, a golf course that went all the way down to the sea. A cinema room, a lush dining room, with stags nailed to the wall and aged furniture, resembling an aristocrat’s room from the 1800s. The rooms had details that only cleaners would notice, Google Alexa’s and £80 candles.

I eventually met the rest of the team, my general manager, the wait staff, the bartender, the alcoholic groundskeeper. I know that because he had bottles of whisky and mouthwash in the backseat of his car and he always looked red eyed. I also met the head chef, a short man with a bad temper. Gossip trickled in that he had a drug problem and was frequently attending AA meetings. I did notice him on Zoom a lot, his back against the wall, looking down at his phone.  We first spoke when he drove me home after a shift, his mood quickly changing when I said passingly ‘you aren’t as scary as people say’ in which he angrily snapped ‘who’s been saying I’m scary?’

He then went on a rant that he was not in fact head chef but rather a consultant for the general manager. I agreed with myself that it may be a good idea to stay away.

His underlings lived in converted ship containers affectionately named “bed bins”. The sous chef was the only woman working in the kitchen and she was treated poorly by the rest of the staff. The rest were foul mouthed, chain smoking chefs who would be mean to the waitresses and tell each other dirty jokes. The kitchen porter would take me on the golf buggy down to the beach house, the ride so thrilling, I would think that at any swerve my body would launch out and I laughed all the way down the dirt tracks.

Later I had a spat with the head chef in his kitchen. He was in a particularly bad mood, sneering at the way I placed on the plate on the rack. ‘Just because you were on the Beeb (BBC) doesn’t make you special!’ I exclaimed across the kitchen as I walked out.  He shortly came looking for me afterwards, shouting until he was red. I squared up to him and looked into his eyes (we were similar height) pointing my walkie talkie at him. ‘Oh look, now she’s threatening me with her walkie-talkie!’. My general manager said that I needed to say sorry to him or he will file a complaint and the paperwork isn’t worth it. I thought about him going through withdrawal, his recent divorce from his wife, the lack of friendship in the workplace. Instead of saying sorry, I gave him a rare edition of a Herman Hesse novel. He looked genuinely grateful, like a small boy being given a toy he didn’t deserve. This was towards the end of my stay. Couple of times I stole a morning pastry from the kitchen, fresh from the oven, smelling of warm butter despite his roving anger. Our meals were cooked in the kitchen and sometimes he would bin my lunch or dinner as punishment for stealing.

 

My work was easy and you got brownie points if you had an eye for detail. I would spend hours gently dusting the reception area (never used) and the dining room, going into rooms. The stags and deer’s had sad looks cast over their glossy eyes, their deaths immortalised. My housemate and I would chat and listen to our music while pressing linens and putting on the laundry. We had a similar music taste, but I’d put on Umm Kulthum while on my own.  

 

The isle itself felt small yet expansive, the mountains and forests all stretched out, while the water tucked everything back in. I would go wondering up the hills, venturing away from the sea. I played with my tarot cards and lounged on the grass, singing to myself like a child. I would then go back to my accommodation to fix the only meal I cooked during the duration of my stay there; Gigi Hadid’s vodka pasta without the vodka. The staff houses, bed bins and hotel was owned by an ultra-wealthy Australian hedge-fund manager whom we had to address only using his last name. We got news that him and his banker buddies were coming to stay at the hotel, and it started to feel like the lord and lady of the manor were arriving, everyone zipping back and forth, new sheets, new linens, wipe down the shower and bath, prepare the menus with food he requested.

 I was in a room cleaning when a black-haired man with a face of a baby appeared.

‘Oh you are not supposed to see me’ I say to him. He laughs, apologises, and told me he was only here to pick something up before dinner with the lord of the house. His room resembled a toddlers, with clothes strewn on every piece of furniture. I dutifully picked them up and folded them, making a pile. I caught the scent of expensive perfume and that distinct sweaty man smell and felt slightly like a wife.  But we were worlds apart. The line between us was clear, marked further with my maroon shirt donning the logo of the hotel and him and his khaki cords and polo shirts.  They came from the world of money, so much money that they don’t know what to do it with, so they buy an estate and take coke in its dining room.

 

Due to the nature of the isle, the rumour mill generated a lot of fodder for the day. That people have had threesomes with guests, that the estate manager had killed a man while hunting, that I was 17 years old. You say one thing to someone and by lunchtime the entire isle knows and it’s the topic of conversation in the pub later. The pub itself was an institution, the only gathering space. Low hanging lights, wooden panelling, the windows overlooking the sea, it welcomed a few tourists and all the locals. It was where I tried my first expensive whisky and realised that it made me cruel. The anecdotes I heard were not wrong, whisky is the devil’s drink.

 

I left the isle vowing that if I ever came back, it would be to stay at the hotel.

 

Small print: everything in this text is from my imagination and does not go against any NDA agreement.