Diary fragment · 3 min read ·
My Corridor Dries First
A ward porter who mops the long corridor finds one bay dry by the time he looks back, and it is always the same bay.
- dated: "the mopping season"
- narrator: "Stanley Breck, ward porter"
First Monday of the mopping season. The ward's long corridor runs six bays from the lifts to the day room, and the mopping goes the way it has gone since before my time: bucket at the lift end, one bay to a fill, sign the floor book at the finish. The drying is what the season is named for. Cold ward, wet floors that take an hour to give up. Except the drying is not what the floor book thinks it is, and I will put it down here in order.
Because when I look back — and every mopper looks back, it is how you keep your cloth off the wet you have done — the bay behind me is dry. Not drying. Dry, right into the skirting, gloss off the boards, done. And it is not the bay I have just left. It is always the bay behind that, one back, and it is always the same bay: the third from the lifts, the one with the dead radiator and the corridor chair. I have stood in the second bay and watched the third, and the wet comes off it while I watch, brisk and businesslike, the way a coat comes off a man in a hurry.
Which means, my maths says, that when I was mopping the third bay I was mopping a bay that was already dry, except I have my cloth down the boards and the water up, buckets or no buckets, and I know what wet I put down. So one of us is wrong about the order, me or the floor, and I signed for the floor either way, as the book wants.
Wednesdays now. I have kept at the round and kept at the book, and the floor book holds three of my signatures this week with the drying time written in — an hour, an hour, an hour — though the drying has not once taken an hour anywhere but that third bay. Ordinary mopping takes an hour to dry and I stand by my hour. The third bay takes one look. In the day the cleaners run over it and say nothing, and it is only a porter on nights with a bucket who is on to it.
The nights I most mind are the ones I have not been scheduled. Last Thursday my rota put me on the north lift and the corridor mop fell to no one, the wet floor signs still in the cupboard at ten. At eleven I had cause to go the length of it with a chair, and my boots — my boots with the whole car park's slush on them — came back the far end dry. I looked down at the third bay on the way and it was showing dry on a wet night, and the chair runners were dry too. I signed nothing. The floor book has no line for a floor that dries without its mopper, and rightly so, I would have said last month.
Since then I have taken to doing the third bay last, of a mind to catch it out wet. It is never wet. The bucket sits in it now while I take my tea at the finish, and it is always the same: floor dry, chair dry, my tea cold over me watching for the water to show.
The question I have stopped saying out loud in the porter's rest room: that bay dries first whether I bring it water or not, all season, same bay, same boards — so what is it the floor thinks I have mopped, and what was I leaving behind me in the early weeks that wanted drying up.