To Hell and Back P.O.M Writing

Chapter 1
_{Introducing Carla/Beginning/First Draft
(CW: A few bad words throughout...!)}

Carla was only awake for an hour and she already hated today. Seriously, who has a job being a bus driver and decides to not stop for someone who was signalling for the man to stop and let them on? Clearly the driver who oversaw the bus Carla needed to get to work, that’s who. Even when she was trying to flag him down, waving clear as day to him, he drove off like she didn’t exist.

Carla stood at the bus stop and watched as the bus disappeared into the city centre. She looked at her watch. 7.16am. If she started now, she could still walk quickly through town to get to where she needed to be.

Carla sighed and nodded at the idea. It wouldn’t have been so bad if she thought to bring her headphones for some pretentious protagonist walking. Then again, she didn’t think this morning’s bus driver would be a ponce and neglect her at the stop.

She crossed the lights and began stalking through the back end of town where she knew it would be the quietest. Hands in her coat pockets, she marched past the derelict car park and the overpriced convenience store. She felt the pavement get stickier when she got to the edge of town where she travelled along a street completely dominated by pubs, all silent in the early hours while patrons – and possibly some of the security staff – were more than likely sleeping off the shots from the night before. The air was pungent with vodka and Magners, with something Carla was praying didn’t come from the insides of someone who may have had too much.

Turning into a side alley leading to a street with far too many beauty parlours on the block for its own good, Carla progressed to the main road. The clamber of shutters being pulled up, steel-capped shoes and heels snicking off the pavement as they hurried to whatever office or watch sellers they were headed, and the rattle of trolleys pushed to and from delivery trucks and stores was a common show for Carla every time she passed through in the early mornings. One store owner in particular off the street corner – a self-employed barber - made a habit of dousing the end of the street in hot, soapy water. ‘To purge the bacteria for extra measure’ was always his reasoning. Carla always thought, and once joked to his face, that his future was better off in a hospital or a janitor.

Even if she was joking back then, Carla never felt surer of that statement than now. Janitors were supposed to be the unsung heroes of society, the invisible warriors of the workforce, cleaning up the mess when people too helpless or too lazy couldn’t do it themselves. Carla liked the sound of that when she was job hunting last year. Five years cleaning up after herself in her bedsit, she didn’t see cleaning as anything other than easy money. After touring the building, getting a feel for the place, being shown the cleaning stores and feeling assured she would be a rising star on the housekeeping team, Carla took the job.

Of course, like all jobs in the end, the smoke and mirrors would fade and the reality of it all would settle in too comfortably. Carla was lucky to have bonded with all of two out of the twenty-six employees across the entire Carlisle Hotel, and those bonds were only at the lowest bar of social interaction. Carla’s relationship with the bartender, Trevor, was as stilted as Jack Torrance and the bartender from the Overlook, though she appreciated his genuine interest to lend an ear while serving her fizzy apple cider on Two-For-Tuesdays on her lunch break. It was a pity that this far into her tenure that she couldn’t coax any more than small talk about work with him.

Carla also found a vent through Maribelle. A fellow cleaner in her twelfth year with the company and mentor when she first started out. Maribelle had the voice of someone in her twenties yet exuberated the aura and hairstyle much older than that. Not to mention a very privileged view of the work experience around the hotel. Carla assumed it came from being with them for so long, believing Maribelle’s casual personal empowerment a case of, “I’ve worked this gig for so long, I’m just that good.” It turned out it was an even more popular case of, “Boss knows me well enough that I could take sick leave for two weeks and still get paid, even though I’ve done fuck all.”

Carla huffed thinking about her boss. Tanya. Some bosses are patient and relaxed, others are strict but fair, but at the end of the day they’re still encouraging, patient and they care. Tanya was nothing like any of that. She was a tyrannical twat, narcissism and bullying her known fortes. She took pleasure in verbally assaults and emotional manipulation, no matter if things went her way or not… Well, to Carla at least. She acted like a best friend to everyone else. “It’s because she doesn’t know you yet,” Maribelle always kept telling her. “She’ll come around eventually.”

Carla always called bullshit on that. She didn’t need to be told one way or another how Tanya felt about her. Thirteen months is plenty of time to make a judgement call and Tanya called Carla “a fumbling newborn deer with no sense.” One of many descriptions Tanya had given her over the course of her time working under her.

Carla could see Tanya through the front window of the hotel as she marched up the steps towards the door. She had her bleached hair done in the usual messy bun. She was laughing about something to three of the other cleaners. Carla could tell by Tanya’s face, the one where it looked like she was pissing in a hot tub and getting away with it. Carla rolled her eyes, her Tanya-based catchphrase falling out her mouth in a quiet, comfortable but no less bitter whisper.

“Bitch.”

Carla slipped through the door and made haste for the lift. If she could conserve anything good about this morning, it would be to avoid any interaction with Tanya where possible.

“Carla!” The familiar grating voice reached Carla before her fingers to reach the button to the lift. Carla’s face soured instantly.

Shit…

Carla quickly plastered a sweetly smile and approached Tanya slowly. Tanya frightened her as much as she annoyed her more than a cold sore that won’t stop coming back. She scolded her on pretty much the full seven-hour shift basis; things she still had to do, something she forgot, something she should’ve left alone, and the rest of the time was just her slamming on her existence. Carla cried the first few months of working for her, saving her tears for the pillow as best as she could while being humiliated in front of paying patrons every wit’s end. But at this point, not only did she cry when she got home but she took to pommelling a poor waste bin at the back of the building out of stress. She’d make it up to Billy the Bin someday… It was just hard to find out what to gift a bin for enduring assaulting kicks and punches nearly twice a week.

“Good morning, Tanya,” Carla greeted timidly, her voice lifting five octaves higher.

“Floor nine, Carla,” Tanya commanded. “Bathrooms and replace the toiletries. I know you’re good at that.”

That was almost a compliment, had it not been for the reluctance in Tanya’s stingy tone. Carla nodded stiffly. Everything she saw was law as far as she was aware. Any sign of resistance would undoubtedly bring forth Tanya’s wrath, and it was far too early in the morning for that to be happening.

“Yes, Tanya.”

Tanya turned to the others when Carla retreated to the lift. As she waited for it to come down, she overheard snippets of their conversation.

“She’s doing that shy thing again. As if she thinks that’s cute…”

“C’mon Tanya, just send her to do something else aside from lumping her with us—”

Carla flipped them off behind the lift doors when she stepped inside. Carlotta and Nichole were just as bitchy as Tanya. The Trifecta of Twats. Rumour spreading, name-calling, demoralising twats. As the lift began to move, Carla could hear a shrill bleat of laughter back out in the foyer, the sound fading the higher the lift travelled. Carlisle Hotel was practically a high school in disguise.

Arriving at the ninth floor, Carla made a sharp turn to the left and dug out her collection of store keys, unlocking the cleaner store ahead with the appropriate one. Inside were all her cleaning chemicals, labelled and organised by chemical, post it notes stuck everywhere to denote the quantity of each one. She reached for a red bucket already carrying one of each chemical inside, along with an assortment of scrubbers and pads. She reached for her cleaning uniform that hung behind the door, a fitted green smock that she threw over the top of her baseball T-shirt and dumped her bag in the corner, grabbing the bucket as she propped the cleaner store when she got out.

She sighed.

“Suck it up, Carla…”

_{Word Count: 1562}

Reducio

@Ava Winchect Pinged as promised

Keep Calm And Clean For Your Life
_{Chapter 2/establishing routine pt.1/pre-inciting incident
CW: More bad words!}

Yep. Today was going to be a shit day. Bathroom duty was a slippery slope of good and bad whenever Carla was assigned to it. If it wasn’t streaky shower doors, it was stained toilet seats. If it wasn’t stained toilet seats, it was streaky shower doors. The odd smudge of coagulated shampoo on the shower walls or a hair on the toilet rim was nothing more than routine at this point, otherwise the rest were smooth sailing… Though those rooms were very few and far between shifts. Things like that felt trivial in Carla’s career as the Wonder Cleaner – an apt nickname she adopted when the worst of her previous battles included vomit, pleasure-based discharge and a bizarre case of spaghetti hoops that one time.

Carla was only an hour in and already she had four streaky doors and three stained toilet seats, the latter of which were all really bad. One of them had a thick smell of something that strangled her nostrils. She cleaned it with one hand, the other firmly clamped over her airways until the smell had dissipated. As it turned out, it was the caked-on layer of brown that covered the bottom of the toilet. She prayed she wouldn’t run out of acid to lift it. After the ordeal, she had a quarter bottle left… A little less than what she was hoping for. Dammit. It was good stuff but she knew Tanya wouldn’t order more for her. Tanya lauded beating down on Carla so much that she started despising seeing her happy over anything. She gave her a disgusted look once when she found Carla enjoying a cartoon of chocolate milk once. She would probably end up being offended somehow if Carla approached her about ordering some really good chemicals that help her do her damn job.

Carla groaned quietly. Chances are she would have to try and find some of it online and order it herself.

“Paycheque, my ass…”

She hauled her bucket to the next room. She knocked, called “housekeeping”, waited ten seconds, knocked again, then walked in.

Carla smiled. She loved it when the room was empty. She plopped her bucket onto the small cabinet where the resident’s TV sat. The bed was half made, the duvet stretched out but not padded down smoothly, the TV remote lying abandoned amongst a rumpled patch. One of the wardrobe doors was left slightly ajar.

Either they had a conference or the tour bus was leaving earlier than usual, Carla thought. The little details that jumped out at her whenever she cleaned rooms seemed to make more sense to her after every shift. She felt she could safely assume a few scenarios, such as whenever someone had brought a girl back, or had dumped them, or had misplaced their wallet and upturned the entire room to find it only to realise they had it in their jean pocket the whole time. Those kinds of things involved the mattress being shifted and the pillows dropped onto the velvet carpet. Other scenarios were a little trickier to visualise. Carla knew when someone had been in a scuffle with another. There was an unusual carefulness in how the duvet would be creased when they sat down, or how very little of the room would be untouched otherwise. The biggest indicator would be the frantic use of the ensuite, the ceramic sink splashed with the tap turned on at full power after trying to clean a cut or bruise. One time, Carla found the tiniest stain of diluted blood just underneath the rim of the shower door. To this day, she couldn’t figure out if it belonged to the client or the one they had pommelled.

She waltzed into the next bedroom. Another empty room. Rather well made but absolutely reeked of toiletries.

“Ohh… One of them.”

The kind of person that dresses like an A-list popstar, has the vanity of an A-list actor but has the maturity of a 15-year-old girl. The line of Chanel bottles along the bathroom countertop only confirmed Carla’s guess.

And alongside that was another streaky shower door, painted with a selection of hair products that were scattered over the floor. All of them had a big brand label smacked on the front of them. Now Carla was thinking this person – no, woman, definitely a woman – was more than likely from Essex. As Carla brushed the bottles to the side of the shower and drenched the door in hot, soapy water with her bucket, she caught sight of a can of tanning spray.

Definitely going with Essex.

The smell of washing up liquid briefly overpowered the pungent stench of L’Oréal Luxe wafting in the air. A few more douses afterwards and the smell was all but faint, the bathroom span dangly glistening after assaulting it with glass cleaner and soap. Carla reorganised the bottles by size, the smallest on the left of the countertop and the taller ones on the right. She left the bathroom door open, wanting to show off her masterpiece of the shower floor that was now two shades whiter as much as it was her way of saying, “I’ve cleaned your room, keep it that way.”

She polished the job off with two small vials of shower gel and conditioner topped onto the cabinet shelf. She glided the mop behind her as she exited the bathroom. Once she left the room, another cleaner swooped in to take care of the bedroom.

The process was rinsed and repeated for the next three floors. In the beginning, Carla worried herself sick thinking how she was meant to hit nearly twelve rooms worth of bathrooms on a single floor in a short amount of time. Now, after faced with the most bizarre messes she had to clean in that time frame, she found herself nowhere near as fazed as she used to be. Carla had her tricks and saving graces which was part of the success. Days where she could just keep her head down and work without Tanya hovering over her shoulder like a gnat were what brought her back to work each day, but the satisfaction of knowing that Tanya couldn’t fault her when she didn’t get a single complaint from clients was the reason she kept fighting for the paycheque.

Speaking of which…

“Tanya,” Carla bravely called out to her while she discarded her blue gloves for break. “About last month’s payment… Is it… Coming?”

“I don’t have an accountant, Carla,” Tanya spat back without even looking at her. “It’ll come when it’s counted.”

“But… Everyone else got theirs and—and my rent is overdue—Could you please try and--?”

“You get trust money from the government, yes?”

“No…?”

“Well, that’s always an option.”

“But—” Carla’s voiced wavered under Tanya’s judgemental eye. “You have to meet very specific criteria to even be considered to get those grants. I don’t—”

“Then you’ll have to be patient then!” Tanya fired back. “Money doesn’t grow on trees, Carla! It’s not my fault your cheques always end up bouncing!”

“Neither is it mine--!”

Carla mentally kicked herself. Git.

Tanya scoffed. “Work harder then. Customers pay what they see. They see you’re good, so be better to take more off them.”

Carla watched Tanya march away while she fought back the comeback that sizzled on her tongue. “No, they bloody do not, Tanya,” she would’ve said. “They’re forced to pay the overpriced bollocks the company owner charges them for.” £178 a night for these tiny box rooms and amateur service was not worth it, not even from a tourist standpoint. The only thing worth seeing in this place was the bar, because everyone in the business knew Trevor was a badass bartender.

Carla hammered the tap down after she rinsed her hands in the cleaner store. She knew shit like this was bound to happen today… And it all started with the bus driver, that twat.

Fuck Tanya though. Always fuck Tanya.

Carla shovelled a Twix bar into her mouth before armouring herself in a fresh pair of blue gloves. She snatched the bucket and stormed to the next floor.

“Same shit, different day,” Carla muttered. “Thanks Tanya…”

*****

Carla was the last to leave work again. Everyone else left pretty much on the time their shift ended. Carla, however, always stayed at least fifteen minutes after her own hours carrying mops, brushes, hoover and bucket all the way down back to her cleaner store like a packed mule, shuffling precariously down the stairs until she forced her way through the doors and dumping everything in the corner of the store and promising to tidy up properly the next day, which she always did.

Everyone always said goodbye to Tanya when they would punch out. Carla never did. She brushed past her like she wasn’t even there, because Lord knows how many times Carla had fantasised about Tanya being a non-existent entity. Not that Tanya was any more or less fussed about it. It’s not like she said goodbye or showed any hint of formal acknowledgement to her in return.

Carla slipped out quietly back onto the streets of the city centre. The journey home always started with her stood awkwardly at the lights for five minutes before progressing into being swept into the current of pedestrians filtering through town during home-time traffic.
Carla was usually home within the hour thanks to her shortcut behind the main street shopping centre. Sitting on a grassy island at the end of a carriageway was a tall beige building, one of several that housed bedsits up and down. Carla sped across the road while the traffic was clear and went in through the side door.

After waiting an eternity for the lift to finally come back down, she took it back up to the sixth floor, a gloomy grey landscape of cracked paint, dimmed lights that were on the verge of blowing out and navy carpet with decades of stains that the landlord didn’t bother replacing.
Carla wandered the corridor until she arrived at the first room that appeared around a sharp right corner. However, instead of being greeted with the drilled in “614” on her door, a large orange letter was taped to her door.

Printed at the top was a red stamp bearing the words Carla never wanted to see in her life.

NOTICE OF EVICTION.

Carla felt something plummet to the bottom of her stomach when her eyes digested the words. One of the many fears she dreamt of had finally arrived at her doorstep – bloody literally. It was funny how fear and circumstance worked like that, where you imagine the worst-case scenario for so long until it eventually comes true. Or maybe it wasn’t. Carla certainly didn’t.

Because now, unless she was able to overturn her late-coming rent, she’d be out on the streets within the next four weeks.

_{Word Count: 1820}