“I don’t,” said Dot.
I did. It was another one of Steve’s favourite themes. Practically everybody was gay in Steve’s world, but nobody was just getting on with it. Everyone was sublimating and repressing and suffering. Everyone from Billy Bunter to Jimmy Krankie. Anne of Green Gables and Henry the Eighth. Everyone you could think of-except, of course, Steve, who was just interested in the subject in an objective way. And was single. And hung out with a load of women in a clothes shop all day.
“No way,” I said. She’d been with a different bloke before Dillon was born and then a different one again to get knocked up this last time. “Becky was as straight as a… ” And then I wondered. What about the fact that Gus had never managed to-
I felt myself blushing.
“I’m right!” said Steve.
“About what?” Dot asked him.
“Steve,” I said, “do women who’ve not come to terms with their… selves”-this was for Dot; there was no whisper quiet enough for the words I needed to say-“ever act promiscuous with men?”
Dot squeaked and started clearing the coffee cups away. Promiscuous had done it for her.
“Oh yes,” said Steve. “The Goldilocks Syndrome-looking for some individual in the societally acceptable gender who’s just right. That’s very common.”
“Well, in that case,” I told him, “I think, for once, you might be right, then.”
Should I tell him?
Would it make it worse, or would it make everything clear so he could grieve and recover and be free? Would it help him not feel guilty that things never worked between them? Or would he feel humiliated and worse than ever? He was a guy, even if he was a good one, and guys can be funny that way. So, even though I had thought that the worst bit of my new job at Sandsea would be the loneliness, when four o’clock came round, I was dying to leave Gus and the kids in the cottage and head out to the first van to scrub it down and think things over.
Not that getting rid of Gizzy was easy. You’d think cleaning a caravan was the kind of thing you could just crack on with, but I wouldn’t have hit on the Gizzy system in a million years. First, she told me, you Hoover everything, for the sand. Even when you can’t see it, there’s always sand. She’d never been able to get them told that they couldn’t fill the caravans with sand.
“Well, on a beach holiday… ” I said.
Then-she ignored me-you turn the water off at the outside valve.
“So you’re not tempted,” she said.
“Tempted to…?” I climbed up the metal steps after her and went inside.
I’ve always liked caravans. They make me think of Wendy houses, Polly Pocket and pop-up books, playing at life instead of slogging at it like you do in a house. And then they’re so totally, comprehensively, unrelentingly plastic. I’d checked with Gizzy because I’m paranoid, but I’d have dropped dead to come across them in here. Foam inside polyester, microfibre inside acetate, polymer inside viscose, all wrapped up in plastic walls with plastic windows and plastic cupboards full of melamine. A caravan was like a shrine to the by-products of the petroleum industry, like a spaceship from a world where no one had ever thought of ripping the coats off of poultry and stuffing them in bags for keeping warm. They were my kind of place, and this one was a classic. Every shade of brown, orange, gold, tan, beige, yellow, and cream that had ever been turned into dye and used to colour polyester was in here. It looked like a big bag of smashed toffee popcorn and, what with the crackle of the nylon carpet and the gritty squeak of the sand down the sides of the Crimplene cushions, it sounded not far off it too.
“Tempted,” said Gizzy, “to use water to clean.” She set down her bucket on the floor and took out three Spontex cloths and three bottles of cleaner. “Lemon in the kitchen, pine in the bathroom, lavender in the living room,” she said. “You soak a cloth”-she showed me-“and wipe it round and if the muck doesn’t come off, that’s special cleaning and they lose their deposit. Any questions?”
“How d’you clean the toilet seat?”
She stared hard over my shoulder. “Pine in the bathroom,” she said.
“Same cloth as a the sink and shower?”
“Doused in this stuff,” she said, shifting her gaze. “You could eat raw pork that’s been soaked in this, you know.”
I swallowed and smiled. “What about the bedrooms?” I said.
“Duster,” said Gizzy. “It’s in the rules there’s no food or drink allowed in the bedrooms. There shouldn’t be any need for wet cleaning in there. And if there is-”
“They lose their deposit.”
“You’ll go far,” she said and almost smiled. Unless I stay in one of your vans and contract C. difficile and a side of E. Coli, I thought but said nothing.
“And,” she said as she turned, sloshing lavender Flash over her cloth, “don’t think you can go maverick on me and I’ll not know. The water metre’s right by my desk, and it’s broken down van by van.”
“But wouldn’t it be cheaper to use soap and water?” I asked, following her past the breakfast bar to where the fitted orange and yellow bench ran round the end wall under the window.
“Water,” said Gizzy, wheeling round and gripping her cloth so tight that drops of purple cleaner fell on the laminate floor, “is the enemy. Our septic system is our biggest single expense. Bigger than gas. Bigger than the electric. Bigger than the two-stroke for the mowers and the batteries for the solar glows put together.”
“I thought it was the… other stuff that buggers your septic,” I said.
“It’s both,” said Gizzy. She had wiped the big table and the fitted shelves and now she was backing across the floor, swiping the cloth over the laminate. I had to say, it was pretty shiny and smelled fantastic too. “We’ve eighty-five vans here, Jessica. Eighty-five families of eight in high season-and more than eight often enough; they can’t fool me!-all drinking too much and not letting their barbecues heat up before they sling the chicken legs on. Have you any idea the strain that food poisoning puts a septic system under? Not to mention the chip oil down the sinks, nappies down the bogs, biological washing powder glugging down my drains like there’s no tomorrow. I see them. Kids soaked in cola from head to toe at bedtime one day and then the self-same clothes sparkling white again by the next day’s tea. Try and tell me they get that done on septic-friendly soap flakes! I tell you what-those dry toilets in Portugal? If I thought I could get away with it, I’d have a good go.”
“Don’t they stink?”
“Honk to hell,” said Gizzy, “so I’m stuck with it.”
She stood showed me the face of the cloth she’d been holding against the floor. It was the dark grey of a drowned mouse.
“Pigs,” she said. “Filthy pigs.” Then she turned the cloth over to the clean side and started on the nooks and crannies of the fireplace wall.
It wasn’t so bad. Bit of bog roll for the toilet seat instead of the cloth of horrors and I could just about believe that I was really cleaning. And it was nice to think of the families rolling up here next week for half-term, kids hitting the beach with their buckets and spades, grannies and granddads sitting on the benches in ten layers of fleece, watching them. And nothing that any of the last lot had left behind made them out to be filthy pigs, as far as I could see. I found shells and dried seaweed (nothing worse, thank God) in the bedside drawer in one van. Cleared them away and hoovered the sand out, but I lined them up on the outside sill of the big end window. Only wished there was a starfish to prop there too. I took the soy sauce sachets and half-empty ketchup bottles out of the cupboards like Gizzy had told me-“no one wants secondhand cup-a-soups,” she’d said. I laid out the trays with the two shortbread biscuits, two teabags, two nondairy creamers, and three paper straws of sugar: the Warm Scottish Welcome, it was called in the leaflet, and I folded the ends of the toilet rolls into points and stuck them with gold labels embossed Where the sand meets the sea, which was bound to make you start thinking about where the sewage emptied every time you unpeeled one.