The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths Read Online Free PDF Page B

A couple of taps and I’m talking to a yawning Buzzman.
    But I’m not allowed to phone him. Not him, not Mam or Dad, not Ant or Kay. No one at work. No one.
    So I don’t.
    Just stand at the window, eat bread and margarine, listen to the argument above me. Traffic curls down the A406. I can’t see the mouth of the M1, but somehow you feel its presence. Exhaust-fumed, grimy and congested. An ill-tempered beast, belching lorries. My hair feels greasy but I don’t have a hairdryer here and I don’t want to go to bed with wet hair.
    I’m out of clean underwear, so I wash three pairs of knickers in the bathroom sink and hang them out on a radiator. They won’t be dry in the morning.
    I do my teeth, but without fervor. Look at my hair, which is greasy. Still don’t wash it.
    Bed.
    My bed is made up of a second-hand mattress lying directly on the floor. Sheets clean enough and the duvet warm. I think if my eyes were like other people’s, they’d be aching to close. I’d be half asleep already. But it doesn’t work like that for me. I am tired, but that doesn’t always mean I find it easy to sleep. So I just lie down and look at the light on the ceiling until sleep overtakes me. When it does, it’s dreamless and dark.
    The alarm clock rings at two forty. It’s dark outside and the flat is cold.
    Still wrapped in my duvet, I walk to the shower, get it hot, then step into it. Wash my hair. Wash everything else. Do you have to brush your teeth if you last brushed them less than three hours ago? Don’t know, but I do anyway.
    My knickers are still roughly as damp as they were when I hung them out last night. I choose the least wet.
    Get dressed. My uniform consists of a pale grey polo shirt, a pale grey fleece top, black trousers, which I had to supply myself, and a mid-blue tabard which is in a unisex style and fit and consequently too big for me. I put it all on. The shirt, fleece and tabard all have the same corporate logo: YCS Cleaning and a meaningless geometrical logo in orange and blue.
    Into the kitchen. Ponder the breakfast menu briefly. Opt for bread and margarine, but don’t manage to eat much.
    Then off to work. There’s a direct bus which is theoretically faster, but it’s unreliable and I’ve already had a warning for being late. So I walk to Cricklewood station, take a night bus in to Baker Street, take a second bus out to the Harrow Road and walk from there. It’s a ridiculous way to make the journey – an hour to travel about five miles – but it gets me there on time.
    We gather in the dark, my colleagues and I. Six of us. Me, Amina, Ruqia, Diwata, Maria and someone whose name I’m not quite sure of. I think Milenka. Amina’s huge smile cleaves the darkness. I smile back, though I doubt if my version cleaves quite the same.
    Maria has cigarettes. I want one badly but I bummed a cigarette off her yesterday and in this world you need to give back. It’s cold out and though I’m wrapped up, I still feel it.
    At five to four, a black Honda Accord pulls up. Marcus Conway, our boss. He greets us, ticks our names off his list, then unlocks the main office door and leads us down to the service basement where the cleaning stuff is kept. A trolley each. Cleaning stuff. Large transparent waste sack. Spare liners for the office bins.
    We’re each allocated a different floor, because they don’t like us talking to each other when we’re working. When Conway gives us an instruction, we’ve been trained to answer, ‘Yes, Mr. Conway.’ To start with, that all felt a little Victorian-mill-owner to me and I’ve never been the best little Victorian factory girl. But if it’s good enough for Amina, it’s good enough for me and when Conway tells me, ‘Fiona, you’ll take the fourth floor. All the computers need cleaning and the internal office windows. Have you got that?’, I just mutter, ‘Yes, Mr. Conway.’ And when he asks me to check I have the right cleaning kit for the screens and keyboards, I