Best Day at Work, a Leeds story, written by Chris Baillie and read by Liz Kitching for #SLANT…
Best Day at Work.
Hayley and I had volunteered to go clean his flat whilst he was in hospital. Dan was schizophrenic and had been supported by our team for the past few months. He had the filthiest flat I had ever been in. I’d worked in mental health for fifteen years, I’d seen muck, but this was horrific. I had tried to get the home care team to do a ‘dirt clean’ (it was a thing back then – home care, that is!) They had come to do the assessment and fled. So, our team decided to do it.
Me and John, another co-worker, had been the week before but he had actually vomited when he went in to clean the bathroom. He’d then stood in the doorway squirting bathroom cleaner into the room at arm’s length. Neither use nor bloody ornament! So they sent the hard core in – nowt fazed me and Hayley.
So, resplendent in overalls and the boot full of cleaning paraphernalia and latex gloves, we set off for Middleton. I was brought up in Miggy, but the house we were going to was at the ‘rough end’ – near the bottom of the Avvy. Blocks of semi’s curved round an open field full of scrap and rubbish, mainly because all of the gardens were already full of rusting cars and bed posts. It was grim. The kind of houses no one bought when Thatcher decided to sell off social housing.
We drove up to the house and took our last breaths of fresh air. Once inside, we put on the gloves and decided where to make a start. The last time I had been there to start cleaning; Dan had actually been at home. He watched me like a hawk as I tried to clean the grease off a chest of drawers, complaining loudly that I was ruining the furniture by using soap. I then plugged the vacuum cleaner hose into the wrong end and it blew air rather than sucking, sending a million bits of burnt rizlas he’d discarded onto the floor once the ashtrays were full, up into the air like an episode of the Crystal Maze – ‘Start the fans please!’ He wasn’t amused.
It wasn’t long before we were laughing hysterically trying to get up the stairs to the upper floor where no one had dared to venture. Pushing each other in a mock fight shouting, ‘no, you go first!’– always professional us two, we made it to the landing.
His bedroom was sparse. A bed in the middle which had been burnt through to the springs, so just had the edge showing. No sheets, just a brown duvet with no cover strewn across it. It smelt bad in there. A small chest of drawers and a double wardrobe were the only other things in the room, apart from the rubbish – bits of broken crockery, single shoes, dirty clothes, an overflowing bin and another million bits of burnt rizla papers.
Hard to know quite where to start when faced with this level of disarray.
We started throwing things into a bin liner. I opened the top drawer and found a haul of seventies porn magazines. These kept us entertained for a good half hour – mimicking the coy poses and reading the letters to one another. They were from a more innocent time.
Then I made a start on the wardrobe. Not many clothes in there, mainly just a stash of guns.
Guns!
In a house in Middleton!
I closed the door and shouted Hayley. She’d gone for more bin bags from downstairs. I opened the wardrobe door again and we stared at the sight in silence. The bottom of the wardrobe was full of all sorts of guns – rifles, hand guns, some still in some kind of packaging. We started counting them. Twenty two. Then Hayley reached to the back and pulled out a small silver hand grenade.
‘What the fuck is he doing with a bloody hand grenade?’
Once the giggles had calmed down, I decided we had best call someone. This might be a bit serious. We agreed that I would call Simon, our useless manager, then the police. We went back downstairs and decided to start a fun game of hand grenade catch whilst I made the calls. We were pretty good at the game – laughing and insulting one another whilst the grenade was flung through the air into the other’s hand. Simon said he would pop over with some sandwiches for us seeing as we could be there for a while. Not totally useless then.
I rang 999, chatting with Hayley about what an exciting Thursday it had turned out to be whilst waiting for an operator to answer.
I finally got through and began to give an account of what we had discovered. I assured her that I didn’t think Dan was going to go out shooting at will, but he was vulnerable and someone could break in and find them. I told her about the hand grenade, and she became very concerned.
‘We will need to send the bomb squad over,’ she said as I reached up to catch the flying missile.
‘You haven’t moved the grenade, have you?’