Asha smiled despite herself, her face worn over months of mornings just like this. “You can sleep while I clean. I have a little surprise for you.”
There was a pause.
Then the blanket shifted, just a little. Two twinkling brown eyes peeked out at her before his mouth opened in a wide yawn.
“Okay,” he yawned, like a king granting permission to a subject.
Her chest felt full for a fleeting second and she offered a silent prayer to God. His eyes were hers, the shape of his mouth too. A mirror she hadn’t asked for, but couldn’t look away from. She preferred not linger on the parts of him that were like the man responsible for his existence.
“Brush your teeth and put our uniform on.,” she said softly.
He nodded, already sinking back into the pillow for that one more minute. She had to carry him to the bathroom, strip his pyjamas while he protested and shivered and hand his toothbrush with a frown that brooked no protest. She watched as he brushed his teeth, thought wistfully that in a a couple of years, he would have had hisUpanayanamceremony if they were still back at home. But the stars had shown them a different path.
She rose and slipped into the small bathroom, the light barely more than a dull glow. As she went through the motions—washing her face, untangling and tying back her hair in a braid—her mind drifted, as it often did during these precious moments of solitude, to those first days.
***
That morning six months ago, she had woken at five like she had for years.
It was the restless edge of a life that had taught her to sleep with one eye open.
The timbers and floorboards of the old building creaked like the house was alive and watching. But there were no footsteps, no sign of anyone around.
She had waited a few uncertain minutes at the door. Then she had risen and woken the boy, and together they had gone through their morning ablutions.
The cleaning supplies weren’t hard to find, stacked in a cupboard near the back, smelling faintly of bleach and the sour staleness of old cloth. Mavis had not told her exactly what was required of her, so she had started with the common room.
Either Mavis or her husband must have done a brief clean-up. But there were still sticky beer stains and what was possibly vomit in one corner. So, she got to it, scrubbing the floors until they gleamed while the boy wrapped himself in one of her shawls and slept in a booth seat. Next came the window glass—polished until they caught the faint grey of dawn creeping through the windows. Then, the tables were wiped down. She worked efficiently, with the practice of a lifetime spent doing these tasks—with her head down and hands moving while her thoughts wandered.
By the time the front door creaked open, everything was sparkling.
Patrick's heavy boots rattled the wooden floors, startling her into standing up abruptly.
He had stopped for a second, looked around before spotting her scrubbing a stubborn stain off the wall. The room gleamed in a way it probably hadn’t in years.
He grunted and kept walking to the back kitchen.
She might as well have been a part of the furniture.
“We start at six,” he muttered, not even looking at her as he passed. “Not paying you for the extra hour.”
Asha had stood there for a moment, cloth still in her hand. Then she nodded once, though he hadn’t been watching, and turned back to the suspicious brown stain.
Work was work.
Mavis followed five minutes later. Her shrewd blue eyes skimmed over Asha's bent head and wandered over the gleaming furniture before finally landing on the boy cocooned and asleep within his blanket in one of the booths.
“Here’s some bread an’ cheese for you an’ the lad,” she said, not even askin’ if she’d had breakfast. “Make sure you eat, yeah? There’s loads needs doin’.”
Then, she had started setting the tables for the lunch crowd, moving the upside-down chairs to their rightful place.
With nothing more to do, Asha had taken herself upstairs.
The first floor needed more effort. There was dust in every corner and along the skirting board and obscure stains that had settled into the grain of the wood. It seemed like the two common bathrooms hadn’t seen proper attention in months.
She had tied a cloth around her face and carried on.
That was how Mavis found her in the afternoon, bent over a basin, scrubbing hard with the smell of bleach in the air.
