Photo by Aleksi Partanen on Unsplash
by Mairead Robinson
They start in the attic with buckets and bleach, their efficient brooms sweeping spiders into tiny binbags as sunlight spills through gaps in the broken shingles and drips on the newly polished floor – they tut and mop it up.
‘What shall we do with this clutter?’ they call as they manhandle my long dead father from out of his easy chair, him grumbling as they prise his fingers from the cracked leather; we thought Mum had cleared him out years ago but, ‘it’s amazing what people hold on to,’ the cleaners say.
They move to the bedrooms and scrub away the carpet, the skirting boards, the doors, until there’s just the staircase, which folds neatly behind them as they descend to examine the bruises on the kitchen walls; ‘We’ll need extra bleach for all this shouting,’ they advise, ‘and something stronger for these stains,’ they add, pointing out the silences between.
They vacuum, polish, dust, until there’s just the cellar left; its trap door opens with a twist of rusted key, a dark creak, and ‘this might take some time,’ they say, ‘because even we’ve never seen so many wounds all in one place.’
It’ll take them the rest of the day, so we leave them to it and head to the hospital, to sit at my mother’s bedside and watch her sleep.
When we return, they’ve boxed up everything we might want to keep – the labels read Healing, Forgiveness, Love.
Mairead Robinson teaches and writes in the South West, UK. Her work has been published in various literary magazines, and last year she won the Bath FF Award. She enjoys biscuits, coffee, and biscuits, and skeets at @maireadwrites.bsky.social.
