Merri Andrew
When recruiting, the first thing Tricia looked at was the candidate’s orientation to Mess. She ruled out those who had too much of a crusading spirit, those who seemed to think Mess was evil. Of course, controlling Mess was vital for survival, but extreme thinking was contrary to the spirit and function of In Balance Inoculation Service (IBIS).
Tricia’s latest recruit, Kevin, had the right kind of attitude, she thought. As they walked up the steps to his first job, she observed him approvingly: confident, polite, concerned for the client’s wellbeing. And he had studied at UTyn, the best college for Mess Studies, where the great Professor Deborah Cantworth had first isolated, measured and photographed the fundamental building block of Mess—the inevitron.
Tricia herself had done a summer school at UTyn, as preparation for setting up IBIS. After Kevin’s interview they enjoyed a few pleasant minutes reminiscing about the old campus, its raucous sticky-floored bar and musty lecture theatres, Professor Cantworth’s eerie brilliance and intimidating aura. Tricia hired him on the spot, in her mind, although of course she checked his references and waited a dignified two days before calling him with an offer.
As he lifted his hand to knock on the door of his first call-out, Tricia could see that Kevin was wary but not frightened of Mess. That was important. She excluded at least one or two in each recruitment round who were recklessly blasé about the danger. Some even held quasi-religious ideas about the value of Mess, about preserving it against the forces of modernity. They tended to speak at length about ‘wild spaces’ and how human immune systems needed to be exposed to dirt. Tricia was sympathetic to their cause, but IBIS was a pragmatic, solution-oriented business, not a church.
Now she watched as Kevin rapped his knuckles on the client’s door with just the right level of assertiveness, then stepped back politely. Or was not so much politeness as self-preservation? Tricia had told him about recent client visits that turned out to be ambushes: as soon as the door opened, she’d met a barrage of invective. All predictable Eliminationist stuff, delivered in that high-handed brittle tone they had. Just words, she told herself, just words. But the shock and hurt of it had lingered long after, and the disgusted way they had looked at her, as if she herself was contaminated, the pity and hatred in their faces—well, now she questioned clients a little more before agreeing to a home visit, and she never went alone.
Kevin looked over as they waited and gave her a friendly smile, and she was glad for his presence. When the door opened, she was relieved to see the client was a quiet, slightly stooped man, with long, delicate hands emerging from slightly too-short shirt sleeves. He welcomed them in, but seemed to shrink away from their gazes.
“May we look around?” Tricia asked, keen to get down to business.
A large photograph of a woman with chaotic red hair and playful eyes hung in the entry hall, and a candle burned with a neatly-trimmed wick just beneath. Apart from the image of the woman, though, everything was sterile.
Already Tricia could detect the tell-tale signs: the scoured surfaces, the strong smell of cleaning products and, most notably, the utter lack of clutter. Not a set of keys on the bench, not a book left on a table, or a coaster ready to receive a cup. Not a bag slumped against the wall or a tossed-aside brochure to be seen.
Everything was put away. And she guessed too that, unfortunately for this client, if she were to open a cupboard there would be no unruly cascade of objects escaping. This was not a healthy, superficial clean, with pockets of clutter and dust establishing the necessary equilibrium. This was the kind of dangerous, total clean that IBIS existed to correct.
The beep of the inevitrometer in Kevin’s hand confirmed her assessment: levels in the thousands, well above the safe range (0-800in). It was a good thing they’d come now. Even one more day and there’d be an interplosion.
It was happening more and more now. Tricia herself had seen it twice, and she wasn’t keen on a third time. Especially with Kevin by her side, on his first day. She really didn’t want to have to recruit again, after the last interplosion had led to the Cora’s resignation.
Cora had been a very good employee, for the two months leading up to the interplosion. Tricia tried to explain to Cora at the outset what an interplosion was like, what it was they were trying to prevent, but it was different actually seeing it in someone’s home, or what was left of someone’s home: the photographs with faces and hands erased; the howling hole in the centre of the master bedroom, and the heartrending weeping coming from it; the children’s toys ground to a chunky dust the texture of cremated human remains and sprinkled evenly (so evenly) over their stripped and empty rooms. Cora could not handle it.
In short, an interplosion was not just a mess but a malevolent dis-ordering of home. And it lingered like a curse or radioactivity, so that even long after an interplosion was cleaned up, things happened. A man mopping the floor would look down to see the water had turned to muck, and he’d smeared it over half the kitchen floor. During the night, all members of a household would dream the same dream: every wall of the home fallen, the interior exposed, the roof gone, nothing to protect them. Refrigerators would stop working and food would spoil. The effects were not fatal, but accumulated to destroy the feeling of safety and comfort that should come with ‘home’.
Tricia would not wish it on her worst enemy, she certainly would not let it happen to this nice man—she checked the intake log—Carl.
She noticed that Kevin looked a little nervous now that they were in the unstable and sterile confines of the house. Good, he has a brain in his head, she thought.
She did hope Kevin wouldn’t get supernatural about it. There were still those who wanted to blame ghosts, or evil spirits. There was even one cult that had sprung up where members purposely tried to bring on interplosions, thinking it would put them in touch with the divine.
Ridiculous, Tricia thought, the divine what? Divine task of picking crushed heirlooms out of your sugar-bowl? Divine cost of replacing every blue item in the house because now it smelled permanently of roadkill? Divine chore of sifting through the compost bin to retrieve your daughter’s coin collection?
Totally unnecessary, when Professor Cantworth had definitively identified the mechanism by which the charge built up and then interploded. And by extension, how to prevent it, as IBIS was employed to do.
“It’s best if you wait outside, Carl, or elsewhere,” Tricia said gently. “We only need half an hour.”
Reluctantly Carl left, lingering by the bedroom door, and they got to work.
One of the rules was to work with what you had. If there was a lid without a pen lying in a drawer, good! Move it up onto the top of the dresser, perhaps behind a picture so that the resident wouldn’t see it and tidy it back away. If there were a few too many books crammed side by side, take one and place it across, atop the others. But just one; the aim was to incrementally increase the untidiness just enough to bring the inevitron levels down, without alarming the resident and setting off a new round of cleaning.
Kevin got to work in the living room, un-straightening cushions and tilting the rug just a degree off square. Tricia watched approvingly for a moment, then set off to tackle the kitchen: the epicentre of Mess mitigation, as well as the heart of the home.
Just then Tricia heard a light tapping from the back of the house. Kevin poked his head out into the hallway too. It got closer, pausing now and then as if… someone… stopping: There was a woman in the hallway. She was dressed from neck to boot-tip in stern navy twill. Her cane tapped on the spotless hardwood floor, landing next to the newly un-straightened rug, which she bent to inspect before pushing it square again with the end of her stick.
Tricia and Kevin gawked. The woman was somehow seven or eight feet tall, but her face was meek, a beige embroidery of features. When she spoke, the menacing judgement of her tone contrasting jarringly with her mild expression.
“Fools. It has taken humanity millennia to crawl from the muck, and now you want us to live up to our necks in it?”
She pivoted her whole body in even, jerky increments to address a point near Kevin, but not quite him.
“Never!” she continued, “My mother, her mother, and all our foremothers did not sweat and toil so we could compromise with filth. You spit on their labour at your peril!”
After this speech she was awkward still for some seconds. Then she turned back, bit by bit, lay her cane perfectly parallel to the skirting board, and picked up a bucket and scrubbing brush that had not been there before.
Tricia thought about her foremothers. Until her mother’s generation, they certainly did all spend a great deal of time cleaning.
Her own grandmother was rounder and less stern than the tall woman, but she was similarly determined to push back the tide of disorder. Tricia remembered sitting next to her on her sofa, in front of a symmetrical array of best china she didn’t dare touch. Her grandmother rearranged the folds of Tricia’s dress on the sofa between them, making a neat pattern of three equal pleats, and then when Tricia wriggled and the folds shifted out of place, her grandmother delicately scoffed and flared her fine nostrils, as if she was at once disappointed and unsurprised.
Tricia’s mother had laughed and snorted her tea into droplets that rained onto the expensive rug. They retreated soon after to their blessedly chaotic flat. This was where Tricia’s mother worked on her collages and drawings, which spilled out of the tiny sunroom she used as a studio, landing everywhere and especially under the furniture. There, they clogged the vacuum, causing a high panicked whir in the motor every time they did a proper clean-up (every three months or so).
During one cleaning session, Tricia’s mother accidentally spilled the vacuum bag, scattering its contents onto the sunroom floor. Instead of despairing, she stepped carefully over the dirt to fetch her camera and photograph the mess, complete with magazine clippings, kitchen skerricks, pen scribbles and curls of coloured paper as well as dust and tangles of hair, before vacuuming it all up again. The resulting photos, blown up to A2 size and saturated with colour, had looked like ornate Liberty-style prints, almost floral until you looked closer and saw the dried peas and snipped fingernails.
Tricia generally felt, and thought again now, that her upbringing uniquely prepared her for this line of work. Work that this monstrous apparition, or assemblage, or actor was trying to end. The massive figure stepped forward, holding the brush like a weapon, and Tricia was suddenly very sure of her corporeality. That brush, too, now seemed terrifyingly solid, its bristles sharper and stiffer than they should be.
The figure was close enough now that Tricia could see the warp and weft of her lapel, the powdery folds of her neck, and she could smell something organic and… human.
Just then Kevin dashed forward, past the menacing figure, towards the back hallway. Coward! Tricia thought. She should have hired that other candidate instead, the tough-looking woman who had just come out of the army.
“Kevin!” Tricia called.
The tall woman turned to follow Kevin’s movement, her brush scraping ugly gouges along the spotless wall.
Tricia saw then that Kevin was not fleeing; he was tackling someone in the bedroom doorway—Carl!
Carl gripped an ancient mother-of-pearl comb, large and luminous, angling it towards the tall woman as Kevin collided with him. The comb jerked upwards, and the tall woman raised her vicious brush in a matching movement. Tricia saw what Kevin had already understood—that Carl was controlling the big woman somehow with the comb.
Kevin wrestled Carl for the comb, jerking it around wildly, and with it the towering figure of the woman, until Tricia ducked under the swinging brush and applied an upward elbow-hit to make Carl release the comb. Kevin slammed his foot down on it quickly, holding it in place away from Carl.
The large woman fell like an oak, smashing a side-table and spilling water from a broken vase all over the silk cushions.
Good, thought Tricia. They hadn’t gotten very far with the inoculation process and she was sure the inevitron levels were still dangerously high. This new damage would help.
Tricia looked down and saw she was holding Carl’s wrists and his face was turned to the side, tears welling in the hollow of his uppermost eye. She loosened her grip but didn’t let go.
“What are you doing?” she shouted. She felt weirdly calm and the harshness of her voice surprised her. Only now did she notice the adrenaline cramping in her veins as her pulse slowed.
“They said… they said, if I helped with this, they’d try to bring back my wife, or at least let me talk to her.”
Tricia thought of the painting in the entrance hall, the mischievous, wild-haired woman, and loosened her grip further.
“They? Who’s they?”
Carl didn’t answer.
“Now they won’t help me, and I’ll never see her again,” he moaned, turning his pitiful face towards Carl and the tall woman as if to enlist their support.
The tall woman had recovered a little but stayed down on all fours, scouring a patch of the polished floor so hard that motes of wood dust were floating, glowing around her in the light from the frosted glass of the back door. Stripped of its varnish, the wood looked raw and pale. She took no interest in their conversation, caring only for her task, in which she seemed to be stuck, like a wind-up toy whirring against a wall.
“Who’s they?” Tricia repeated, louder, and moved her hands up to shake Carl’s shoulders.
Kevin picked up the comb, which glowed intermittently.
“Eliminationists,” Kevin said, indicating the small inlaid design on one end of the comb—a stylised broom inside a circle.
“It was all them,” Carl said, “I only held the comb. And controlled Edith. Oh, and I wrote her speech. I was a political speechwriter before I retired,” he ended, a trace of pride briefly eclipsing his fear.
Tricia tightened her grip on his shoulders.
She gestured to the tall woman. “Is she…?”
Despite being pinned to the ground, Carl seemed to relish the chance to explain.
“Dead? Oh no. Well, not in a singular sense.”
Kevin and Tricia exchanged an eyeroll. Whatever his pitiful reasons, they’d make sure this sneaky gasbag wouldn’t get away unpunished.
“She is an amalgam of matriarchs and mothers past,” Carl continued. “The Elims made her from family photos, stories, clothes, brushes, buckets—but the interesting thing is that she was activated by sweat.”
The smell, Tricia thought.
“You know a lot for someone who was hardly involved,” Kevin said.
Carl blinked and then continued his explanation, eyes shining excitedly.
“All the district members, when they were doing their housework, they collected their sweat.”
Gross, thought Tricia. Carl seemed to want to explain further, but Kevin interrupted, bringing the comb down swiftly onto his upswinging knee, breaking it in two.
“So, the aim was what, scare us into shutting down IBIS?” Tricia asked.
Silence from Carl.
“Worse? You were going to make her hurt us?”
Tricia glanced around and they all turned to see that the giant woman was gone, together with her bucket and brush. More fine wood dust rose from the patch of floor she had been scrubbing and faint sounds came from the kitchen.
Tricia dragged Carl to his feet and Kevin held his other arm as they followed the clink of crockery. Edith was bent over, looking in the fridge. Her brush and bucket lay abandoned by the door. One hard, clean, short-nailed finger tapped the outside of the fridge door as she looked, finally pulling out a container of cake and placing it on the table.
“Edith,” Carl hissed, “the mission!”
She glanced at him blankly and turned back to the dishwasher, which had just finished its cycle and popped open, steam rising. Edith opened it, pulled out a warm, clean spoon and held it up to the light.
Her plain, neutral face softened and a smile spread across her features as she sat down, still staring at the spoon. Her huge knees bumped at the table as the layers of navy twill squeezed under.
“Edith!” Carl called. There was no response and he muttered, “The codeword…” before calling out again to her: “Hygiene! Hygiene!”
Carl tried to grab the pieces of comb from Kevin, but Kevin pulled them away. In doing so, he knocked a plastic magnet off the fridge. They all looked at it lying there on the floor. It was a vibrant purple against the polished wooden boards. A little Mess, beautiful. A shifting beam of light touched its edge and ignited a violet glow. Mum would love that, Tricia thought.
Carl moved to pick up the magnet but Kevin put his foot on it and shook his head.
They stood listening to the sound of Edith’s spoon rhythmically clinking on the glass container, watching the pleasure she took in devouring half the raspberry vanilla sponge cake. When she had eaten her fill, Edith put the dirty spoon straight onto the table, pushed the dish away, and put her head down on her arms. A moment later two narrow black boots flopped out from under the table with a flump. They stayed where they landed.
“Don’t you bother her!” Tricia whispered menacingly to Carl, as she let him go. “She needs her rest.”
The inevitrometer clicked gently from the other room and Tricia could tell from the tone that it was now showing around 900—almost in the safe range, thanks to Edith. Maybe, Tricia thought… would she have room in her team for another worker? A decision for another day, she told herself, taking a loose button from her pocket and dropping it into the fruit bowl.
“Payment is thirty days, Carl,” Tricia said.
She glanced at the large piece of cream and berry cake that remained.
“You can wait outside while we finish up here.”
MERRI ANDREW is a writer who lives on Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country in Canberra, Australia. Her work can be found in Strange Horizons, Luna Station Quarterly, Corporeal, Five on the Fifth, Daikaijuzine and Antipodean SF. Merri enjoys baking, naps, and watching praying mantises. You can read more of her work at www.merriandrew.com