blood & gunk

Nadya

I don't know how many kids Nadya has, but I know she's been cleaning hospital floors and toilets for over a decade. Her husband died a couple years ago, and you'd think it's something you can see in her body, but you can only know that through a colleague by accident over coffee in front of Nadya. You'd think you can read it in the first time you meet her or when you hear her yell bloody murder when a culprit steps a dirty foot in cold blood onto her alarmingly still-wet spotless landscape painting, or her ruthless outcry when she runs out of muppets. You'd think you'd done your research the tenth time you see her reckless eye-rolling and opting for oblivion oversizing a single department. You think you know Nadya, but you don't even see her when she stops mopping suddenly and looks at you to say her son returns from duty for ten days and she has no days off. The world doesn't know Nadya either. It hardly knows what minimum wage is to parenting or what ageing is like; bending back for dirt and having creaky knees; watching young men grow taller than your twenty-six-year-old boy could ever be because scoliosis goes unspoken as blasphemy on the dining table, shrugged off as slouching, after eight-to-twelve hours of cleaning after ICU5's explosive diarrhoea. He kid says it's fine because it's always been okay seeing where Nadya is and having a bump - backs been bent enough times it doesn't matter if we have boiled cabbage for dinner again. The world doesn't want to know what's going on. It widows man from humanity until what's left of him is bollocks stuck in a toilet chair. "Just take a close look at yourself and the degree of rottenness you've come to. There's no mystery about it, no more room for fairy-tales; if you've lived this long, it's because it's squashed any poetry you had in you"... I don't know why you've never seen it, but you've heard it all from a colleague once, and Nadya hasn't been the same since then.