The Midnight Cleaning Company

Chapter 12

We had all been too caught up in our recollections of the past to properly analyse the present. We were catching this early, a thing which the previous generation of Cleaners had failed to do so, hence their requirement for an army.
"He's a lot smarter than he looks", laughed Michael from the other end of the body bag.

My colleagues and I joined in the laughter, but more from relief than humour.

We embarked upon our limited scale recruitment drive the next evening.
The six of us split into two groups of three; took a van each and set off on a campaign of talent hunting.
We had a specific requirements for a candidate for recruitment. They had to be found far from the office, have no family or none that would search for them after their disappearance, and of course had to appear to have the qualities of a potential Cleaner.
I drove one of the vans out through the sliding door, with no specific destination in mind. The plan was to drive until we came across somewhere that would breed the right kind of candidate. Somewhere desolate, where the is an abundance of tough survivors who would not be missed.
In the back of my van sat George and opposite him, a nervous Andre.
Andre was uneasy about the concept of turning someone, and had a lot of questions. Unfortunately for them both, the only one free to provide answers was George, who sat through the interrogation staring back blankly with a narrow-eyed irritated glare. Andre's increasing frustration at his torrent of questions remaining unanswered amused me for the duration of the drive.

George hammered his fist on the driver's partition to signal that this was a good location. I looked around at the scummy fast food joints, the closed down pubs, and boarded up shops, agreed and promptly parked the car at the side of the road. George emerged from the back of the van carrying two half empty black hold-alls. He tossed one to me and I slung it over my shoulder.
There were a few people loitering on the street. Half a dozen faded sleeping bags were huddled in the doorway of a betting shop. The vibrations indicated that each cocooned a shivering person inside. I watched them for a moment, thinking that they fitted two out of the three criteria for candidates, and that perhaps a couple could have potential, before realising that I was just being lazy.
An elderly man shouted at an off-license shopkeeper further down the road. A group of teenagers in fancy dress strolled by laughing at the angry old drunk, who bellowed something incoherent at them in response to the sniggering. Judging from their costumes, I realised that it was Halloween, an American import I found particularly perplexing as it was alien to the vague memories of my distant youth. Children dress like monsters and beg door to door for sweets from strangers as a bribe to not commit vandalism. Surely that contradicted the contemporary parent's obsessive fear of predatory strangers? Looking around at the neighbourhood I found myself in, I doubted there would be any children skipping happily with plastic cauldrons brimming with colourful sweets.

The three of us walked slowly along the pavement, scanning the desolate area for signs of life. The street was lined with empty shops. They were mostly once small boutiques but they had been hit hard by the recession and now every building except the fast food and charity shops had been closed down. Through the dirty windows I could see overflowing piles of unanswered mail. I could tell from the kind of shops that had left their hollow shells behind that this had once been a fairly affluent area. These days the local population shuffle between the job centre, where they receive small government handouts; the betting shop, where they drag any last fragment of naïve hope they have remaining and squander it as well as their subsistence money; and the off-license, where they procure cheap booze in two litre plastic bottles to obliterate their memories of the depressing day. This forgotten and rough environment is exactly the type of place to find the ideal candidate, for Cleaners are also forgotten and rough.

My thoughts were interrupted by the furious cry of a man being thrown out of a bar across the road. Two bouncers in big black overcoats dragged the man by one arm each and tossed him out onto the pavement. He crashed down hard onto his shoulder and rolled into a dirty puddle in the gutter. The bouncers stood firmly in the doorway of the grotty bar to prevent any attempt to re-enter. Instead of taking the hint however, the man dragged himself to his feet and charged head first at them both. He slammed into one in an attempt at a drunken and uncoordinated rugby tackle. The bouncer took a few steps back to absorb the momentum and pushed the drunk man to the floor. The drunk rolled up into a ball to protect himself from the boots of the two bouncers as they thumped into him. He managed to crawl away through the hailstorm of steel toe-caps and boot heels, and dragged himself to his feet once more, before stubbornly charging forwards again, thrashing wildly with both his arms in the direction of the two bouncers. He made a terrible grunting noise as he exerted himself with every hopeful punch he threw.
"Perfect", George said out loud to himself as he peeled away from Andre and me to cross the road.