On Wednesdays and Thursdays, I clean houses on the lower section of Wenceslas Avenue- 190-220 on the right, 191-222 on the left.  And that means that I get to go into people’s houses while they’re away and see what strange things they keep in there.

Here are a few of them.

Number 222- The one with the locked door

When I started cleaning here, the owners left me a note to say that it was very important for me to never go into the spare room upstairs with the locked door.  There was a set of keys on the table, with the one for the spare room already labelled, so I’d know which one not to use.

So every time I go into this house, I clean every other room, but I leave the one with the locked door alone.  Once or twice, when I was vacuuming the upstairs hallway, I smelled something bad- stale food or something- and whatever was causing it was definitely behind that door, because I left that house spotless.  So I left the owners a note telling them about it and asking if they were absolutely certain about me not cleaning in there.

They replied.  I was never to go into that room.  I was never even to open the door.  So I shrugged my shoulders and left whatever was in there to its own devices.

A week after that, I went upstairs and saw a puddle of red liquid oozing out from under the locked door.  It was the kind of bright red that’s dangerously close to pink, and it made the entire upstairs hallway smell of syrup.  It’s honestly getting kind of sad at this point.

Number 198- The one with the excitable dog and the even more excitable old lady

The first time I came here, the dog- Sprocket- decided to launch himself into my stomach, nose-first, the second I opened the door.  “Oh, he does that with everybody!” said the old lady as she pulled him away, “I’ll put him out in the garden for you.”  So that’s how it’s been ever since, Sprocket howling and throwing himself at the back door while I clean the kitchen.  Of course, sometimes Sprocket gets drowned out by his owner.

Her name is Dorothy, and she lived in the house with her son and daughter-in-law.  She’s nearly eighty, she doesn’t trust food that’s not from Sainsbury’s, she thinks it’s a tragedy that children don’t do PE in school anymore (I’ve told her I’m pretty sure they do, but she didn’t seem to hear me), she really hates Graham Norton, she can tell everything she needs to know about a man from the way he ties his shoes, and she wishes she was back in the old days where you knew where you stood and there weren’t so many foreigners about.

Lately, she’s been telling me that her daughter-in-law is a scheming gold-digger who’s out to drive a wedge between her and her son.  By sheer coincidence, she has three other children, and they’re all married to scheming gold-diggers, too.  Personally, I think she has to accept some blame for raising them to have such terrible taste.