IT IS 11.30 IN THE MORNING and I am lying in a single bed upstairs in the attic room of my parents’ house in Dublin. I am listening and counting as Randall climbs the stairs. Randall is the name of an incredibly athletic and thorough Filipino house cleaner who visits my parents once a week in order to dust, vacuum and buff various hard-to-reach surfaces.
Lying in bed thinking about it, I’m pretty sure Randall is not his birth name. I recall a friend of mine who teaches English as a foreign language to Asian students once telling me that upon arrival in Europe, Asian students chose names that appealled to them with scant regard for convention. In his time, Eoin has taught a Jam, a Rocky, a Lance and a Donut.
Back to the attic room, and if I am occupying a single bed up here at 11.30 in the morning, it must be the season of goodwill. Indeed it is, it’s Christmas Eve, and Randall is on his way. I don’t know him well enough to greet him while I am in the scratcher, but he fast approaches nonetheless. Over time, I have discerned his cleaning pattern. He vacuums a step then turns off the vacuum cleaner, moves up one more step, turns on the vacuum cleaner and vacuums that step, then turns off the vacuum cleaner and climbs another step. There are 16 steps up to my little eyrie, and I know this because of those nights I have crept upstairs from various social engagements and counted them out, trying not to wake anybody up. Randall is currently on step eight.
Once, I walked into the kitchen and encountered him standing on top of the sink, holding a shelf for balance with two fingers and swabbing the top right corner of the kitchen window with balled-up newspaper in his other hand. If memory serves, his left foot rested on the horizontal window surface while the right was balancing at the very apex of the tap’s curve. It was a thing of sculptural beauty – “weightless man at work, w/Windex”. My mum does not belong to the ranks of the idle rich (who does since the advent of the money munch?), but neither is she half as flexible as Randall. She and he are of a mind in that she sees dirt in the top right-hand corner of the kitchen window, and so does Randall, but he has the tools to float on up there and work that magic sponge.
Back in the garrett, Randall has scaled step nine and is firing up the Hoover once more. I am beginning to worry about being viewed by him as some useless dilettante – but not worried enough to get out of bed and actually do something about it. The thing is, he’s blocking the route to the bathroom now, so I’m stuck. I could get dressed here, but then I’d have to get undressed once he left in order to take my shower, and altering my behavioural patterns so much for his sake seems a little contrived. It makes far more sense to lie perfectly still, as I have been doing for the past nine or so hours.
I’d say Randall encounters quite a few of us at this time of year; hopeless man-children cowering in various box rooms across the city, our Thomas the Tank Engine duvets pulled up to our ears, our mobile phones charging on the far side of the room, phones which contain voicemail outlining the age-inappropriate hi-jinx of the night before (“Are you eating a kebab? That is . . . unforgiveable”). He sees us emerge only once the smell of a cooked breakfast begins to permeate the upstairs area of the house, and we smile sheepishly, uselessly, at him, in a “what can I say? I love bacon” manner as we step over the Hoover flex and go down to the trough.
Step 10. Frankly, it’s amazing how it is the potential disapproval of a guy who couldn’t care less that causes me all this anguish, and not the probable (yet charitably unexpressed) disapproval of my long-suffering parents downstairs. If Randall wasn’t on the stairs now, I’d be fast asleep, pretending to be 10 again. Lying in a single bed puts you in a different frame of mind, somehow. More dreams about the FA Cup final – less agonising about money. But the bed is not responsible for all my infantile regression. At least once on this trip I have been downstairs and caught myself saying: “I’m going to my room”. Doors have not been slammed nor voices raised, but even to hear that phrase once more, spoken by me . . . it never ceases to amaze me how far I have not come.
Right, Randall’s on step 11 and I am in my mid-thirties. It is time to get up – emphatically so. I haul myself up and throw on a T-shirt and shorts, and open the door with a brisk corporate tug, as if I have been awake for hours up here, and am emerging only because I have to fetch a vital legal document from downstairs. I do not refuse to feel guilty on my holidays – the opposite. It wouldn’t be the holidays without a little self-imposed guilt.
I swing the door open and cannot believe my eyes. Randall is not the one doing the vacuuming after all – it’s my mum, having appropriated the one-step-at-a-time Randall-move, the sneaky divil! I could have stayed in bed for another hour! I am momentarily overcome with teenage sullenness and nearly pass out from the sense of déjà vu. Then a pleasant image floats past – that of Randall at home in Manila, lying in his single bed waiting for the smell of garlic fried rice and scrambled eggs to summon him down in the early afternoon. At least I hope that’s where he is.