Like a House on Fire Read Online Free PDF Page B

perambulation of those with an endless, unvarying stretch in front of them.
    The cleaners spin out their morning’s tasks, glazed and unhurried. I don’t get this at first. Not quite eighteen and fresh out of school, I’m saving money to go to London and I’m eager-beavering my way through my allotted duties on this holiday job, intent on making a good impression.
    Marie, the head cleaner, is annoyed with me when I finish early on that first day and seek her out, conscientiously, for another job. I surprise her in the linen cupboard, feet up on a chair and the daily paper opened to the births and deaths.
    â€˜I’ve finished!’ I announce as she looks up, startled and sprung.
    â€˜Have you now?’ She smiles thinly, a cup of tea and two biscuits balanced on her palm. ‘Well, Dot’s on bedding today and Noeleen’s doing floors. So you can … clean out the ash bins.’
    At the grand entrance to the hospital stand two tall black bins for cigarette butts and other detritus abandoned by hurrying visitors, things smoked and gulped and discarded as nervous relatives pace outside. Inside each can is a toxic soup of ash, butts, coffee and polystyrene. I tip each bin into the industrial skip, groping for the high-pressure hose, the smell of them making me turn away and retch until tears come to my eyes. The smell will stay hanging on me all day, burned and stale; Marie’s revenge on me, I realise belatedly, for working too briskly.
    We break at 7 a.m. to sit in the kitchen and drink tea from thick cups while the catering staff stands at the huge industrial benches stirring gigantic tureens of custard and tomato soup. Dot tries to sell us mail-order cosmetics and cleaning products. She’s nervy and keen to please, cheerfully volunteering for the unpleasant jobs. I’ve never met anyone like Dot, whose hair is backcombed into an actual beehive and who blinks hard with watery-eyed nervousness when anyone addresses her directly. While we’re restocking the paper towels in the toilets, though, she tells me the best-value toilet paper to buy, the one that’s rolled more tightly than the others, so you get more. It’s criminal, in Dot’s opinion, what those toilet-roll companies are allowed to get away with.
    â€˜Well, thanks for the tip,’ I say as she heads off along the corridors with a wheelie bucket and mop, ready to attack the expanse of cafeteria floor. Lysol is still stinging my nostrils from the emptied ash bins, now sitting pristine back at the entrance, and I have already made a lifetime vow this morning to never smoke.
    One of the patients calls me back when I’ve finished cleaning his room. An old bloke, ex-Army.
    â€˜You look like a lovely girl,’ he rasps, grabbing for my wrist. ‘There’s a few dollars in my bedside table there, how would you like to do an old man a favour and go down to the kiosk and buy me a packet of smokes?’ He names the brand, his gaze upon me steady and desperately hopeful.
    Under no circumstances, the matron has already told me, her lips stiff with disapproval, am I to comply with this request. The man’s dying, his lungs already clagged with tar, it’s unbelievable. He tries it on with everyone.
    I smile apologetically at him. ‘Sorry, Mr Moreton.’
    â€˜Matron’s got to you, has she?’
    â€˜Sorry, but yes.’
    â€˜Dunno what’s gunna kill me first,’ he mutters.
    I give his breakfast tray an ineffectual rub. He hasn’t touched his poached egg, and I can’t blame him — it’s sitting there like the eye of a giant squid. Mr Moreton has an oxygen mask, but tells me he hates using it.
    â€˜Feel like that thing’s choking me,’ he says. ‘Like in the war.’ Constrained in his bed, he lies with his fingers constantly rubbing each other, missing the smokes.
    Mr Moreton’s never asleep, even at 5.30 a.m. when I clock