One Plus One

Chapter One

Chapter One

Jess

Jess Thomas and Nathalie Benson slumped in the seats of their van, which was parked far enough away from Nathalie's house that they couldn't be seen from inside. Nathalie was smoking. She had given it up for the fourth time six weeks ago. 

"Eighty pounds a week, guaranteed. And holiday pay." Nathalie let out a scream. "Bloody hell. I actually want to find the tart who left that earring and thump her for losing us our best job." 

"Maybe she didn't know he was married." 

"Oh, she knew." Before she'd met Dean, Nathalie had spent two years with a man who turned out to have not one but two families on the other side of Southampton. "No single man keeps color- coordinated scatter cushions on his bed." 

"Neil Brewster does," Jess said. 

"Neil Brewster's music collection is sixty-seven percent Judy Garland, thirty-three percent Pet Shop Boys." 

They had cleaned together every weekday for four years, since back when the Beachfront Holiday Park was part paradise, part building site. Back when the developers promised local families access to the swimming pool and assured everyone that a large upmarket development would bring benefits to their little seaside town, instead of sucking out what remained of its life. The faded moniker, benson & thomas cleaning, was stenciled on the side of their white van. Nathalie had added underneath: a bit dirty? can we help? until Jess pointed out that for two whole months half the calls they had received had nothing to do with cleaning. 

Nearly all their jobs were in the Beachfront development now. 

Hardly anybody in town had the money - or the inclination - to hire a cleaner, except for the doctors, the solicitor, and the odd client like Mrs. Humphrey, whose arthritis had stopped her from doing it herself. It was a good job on the one hand. You could work for yourself, organize your own hours, pick and choose your clients for the most part. The downside, weirdly, was not the crappy clients (and there always was at least one crappy client) or that scrubbing someone else's toilet somehow left you feeling like you were one step lower on a ladder than you had planned to be. Jess didn't mind pulling lumps of hair out of other people's plugholes or the fact that most people who rented holiday homes seemed to feel obliged to live like pigs for a week. 

What she didn't like was that you ended up finding out much more about other people's lives than you really wanted to. 

Jess could have told you about Mrs. Eldridge's secret shopping habit: the designer shoe receipts she stuffed into the bathroom bin, and the bags of unworn clothes in her wardrobe, the tags still firmly attached. She could tell you that Lena Thompson had been trying for a baby for four years and used two pregnancy tests a month (rumor had it she left her tights on). She could tell you that Mr. Mitchell in the big house behind the church earned a six-figure salary (he left his pay slips on the hall table; Nathalie swore he did it deliberately) and that his daughter smoked secretly in the bathroom. 

If she was so inclined, Jess could have named the women who went out looking immaculate - hair faultless, nails polished, lightly spritzed with expensive scent - who thought nothing of leaving soiled knickers in full view on the floor. Or the teenage boys whose stiff towels she didn't want to pick up without a pair of tongs. There were the couples who spent every night in separate beds, the wives insisting brightly when they asked her to change the spare-room sheets that they'd had an "awful lot of guests lately," the lavatories that required a gas mask and a HAZCHEM warning. 

And then every once in a while you got a nice client like Lisa  Ritter and popped over to vacuum her floors and came away with a diamond earring and a whole load of knowledge you could really have done without.