Stories of the street - Six A and B

----A ----

One of the most enduring sights on the road is that of the young man who is always cleaning a car. He is not a professional car valet although you might have thought that such a job would have suited him well. He simply loves cleaning cars of all sorts and owns a car that is cleaner than any factory-new model could ever be. He is an repair and maintenance engineer with a large company and drives a van around a wide number of sites to carry out his work.

After a couple of months in his new job his boss noticed just how incredibly clean and tidy the young man’s van was. He even congratulated him on it and told him he did not need to clean the van but the young man said that he would carry on doing it any way.

The manager dropped the lad’s van off the cleaning roster and then did some calculations. They had six vans in the section and he hired a valet company to give them a good cleaning every six months. After some deliberations he announced that headquarters were passing a new directive. The average van’s life is extended if you rotate them across a wide range of users; good drivers cancel out bad drivers and bad drivers do not have a van long enough to ruin it. Everyone moaned but could see the logic of it. For the first six months they swapped vans every month, then they began swapping every two months.

The truth was, the manager earned his efficiency bonus by stopping the contract with the car valeting company and he maintained a better level of cleanliness for his vans by leaving it all up to the young man.

When the young man was not cleaning his car, his van-of-the-month or his mother’s car he was cleaning his girlfriend’s car while she sat with his mother watching soaps on cable TV.

He had one secret dream. A wish he only half dared to admit to himself. But when he was cleaning the cars or vans he would slip into a little fantasy where he was a forensic scientist and he had to extract every bit of dirt, dust, hair and smudge so that he could study them all back at the lab. The phrase, “back at the lab” would sent little shivers down his spine, especially when he detected a hair or clothing fibre in the carpet of the car.

Today, his mother’s hubcaps are being attended to with great care and determination.

-----B-----

Postcard on the unswept floor of No 42B.

Dear Harry, it has not stopped raining but that’s OK. We are all in the big living room, reading and playing cards with old Santana and new Belle and Sebastian in the background. Have you sorted things out yet? Are you coming out to see us? I miss you so much. OK, we all do! Satisfied, now? Come ASAP and everything can be sorted out. Love you, Deb and the crew XXX