What’s your home decoration style?
CHARACTERS
THE STYLIST – a woman in her mid-twenties; junior props buyer and aspiring interior stylist
THE CLEANER – a woman in her late forties; specialist cleaner of homes following unattended deaths
Scene. A Central Line 1992 Stock train carriage. The train has been stationary for some considerable time in the tunnel between St Paul’s and Bank stations. Saturday, 29th July, 1995. Approximately quarter to five in the afternoon, though one would not know it from the dark.
Beyond the sealed windows: nothing. The tunnel is absolute. The glass throws the interior back upon itself in a cold, distorted replica – light on black. The fluorescent strip lights overhead buzz and dip at irregular intervals, cycling between their usual pallid white and something greener, something medical, before dragging themselves back. The ventilation grilles set into the upper panelling are quite silent. No breath moves from them.
The air is a physical presence: dense, metallic, suffused with the heat of bodies and hot rubber and a hundred thousand previous journeys. The grab rails are untouchably warm. The moquette seating – that familiar geometry of red and blue and ochre – has taken on the smell of hot dust. On the ribbed rubber floor, a faint haze of moisture from the standing passengers at the far end of the carriage, all of them breathing in one sealed space. The air itself has weight.
Two women sit in a facing section of seats at this end of the carriage. No one else is near them. They are separated by the aisle and the breadth of three empty seats; but in the sealed dark of the tunnel, three seats might as well be three inches.
THE STYLIST is in her mid-twenties. She sits with her spine rigidly upright, as though posture is the final fortification. She wears a cream, unstructured linen suit jacket and narrow-cut matching trousers. The jacket has darkened at the collar and beneath the arms; the trousers are acquiring creases that would have horrified her at ten o’clock that morning. Her delicate leather sandals press against the ribbed rubber floor with a faint adhesion, each small shift accompanied by the quiet protest of warm skin on warm rubber. On her lap sits a large leather portfolio, distended with fabric swatches, paint charts, and hand-mounted mood boards. Where the portfolio has sagged open at its top edge, the leading mood board is just visible: hand-lettered in neat black pen, SHABBY CHIC SUMMER LIVING. A thin stain runs down the cover where perspiration has tracked from her wrist. She fans herself, slowly and without much conviction, using a loose piece of raw linen from the portfolio’s outer pocket.
THE CLEANER is in her late forties. She sits directly across the aisle. She is dressed entirely wrong for the weather and entirely correct for her work: heavy-duty rubber boots to mid-shin, thick canvas work trousers in a colour past naming, a cotton shirt washed thin at the shoulders. Her hands lie flat on her thighs, palms down, quite still. She has not fanned herself, adjusted her collar, or shifted in her seat since the train stopped. In the dead air of the carriage, there is a faint and not immediately identifiable quality to her presence: something sharp and clean. Ozone. Industrial bleach. And beneath both, barely perceptible, peppermint oil. Her face is angled slightly toward the dark window. She is not watching her own reflection in the glass. She is looking through it.
From the tannoy at the far end of the carriage, a crackled announcement resolves into nothing intelligible. Somewhere further down, a tired voice says something impatient and is not answered.
The lights flicker. Dip green. Hold.
THE STYLIST recrosses her ankles. The portfolio shifts; she steadies it with both hands. She looks at the sealed window. Then at the silent grilles. Then, in the manner of someone reaching for the nearest available handhold, at the woman sitting across from her. Her jaw is tight. Her breathing is controlled in the way that breathing is controlled when control is the only remaining option.
THE STYLIST (Brightly. Slightly too loud for the quiet end of the carriage.) What’s your home decoration style?
A pause. THE CLEANER turns her head from the dark window and regards THE STYLIST without surprise. The gaze is unhurried and complete: the gaze of someone accustomed to looking at things that do not look back.
THE CLEANER Clean.
THE STYLIST (A short, uncertain laugh.) I’m sorry?
THE CLEANER I like things clean.
THE STYLIST (Gathering herself.) Right. Yes. Of course. I only ask because… look, I know it’s a mad question. But I find it helps, when you’re stuck somewhere, to talk about ordinary things. I work for a magazine. Home interiors. I’m a props buyer, sort of, but I’m crossing over into editorial this year as well, so. (She pats the portfolio. The leather gives a damp, soft sound.) I’ve been sitting here for the better part of twenty minutes thinking about nothing at all except the fact that we are underground, in the dark, and the air has completely stopped, and those lights are…
The lights oblige, flickering briefly.
THE STYLIST (Cont.) …doing that. So. I thought I’d make conversation. You can tell a great deal about a person from their approach to the home environment. I can look at someone and I know, straightaway. Country Cottage. Or Modern Minimalist. Or…
She tilts her head, studying the Cleaner’s rubber boots and canvas trousers with polite, strained attention – the expression of someone reading a menu in an unfamiliar language.
THE STYLIST (Cont.) Well.
THE CLEANER Well what?
THE STYLIST I was going to say Industrial. There’s a piece this month in Elle Decoration about reclaimed factory fittings. Exposed brickwork, scaffold-pole shelving. All very raw.
THE CLEANER (Looking back toward the dark window.) Is that right.
THE STYLIST It’s a rather brilliant look, done properly. Strip everything back to the bones of a space. There’s a kind of purity to it. (The linen swatch droops in her fanning hand.) God, it’s warm. I’m sorry. I ramble when I’m… I don’t do well in enclosed spaces. I’m fine. I’m absolutely fine.
THE CLEANER (Without turning from the window.) You don’t sound fine.
THE STYLIST (A beat.) No. I don’t suppose I do.
A silence. The stillness of the other woman is, somehow, both aggravating and steadying.
THE STYLIST Do you live in London?
THE CLEANER Hackney.
THE STYLIST Hackney’s becoming extraordinary. I know people from the magazine who bought a Victorian terrace near London Fields last year and done the most wonderful job with it. They found these reclaimed floorboards from a church hall up in Stoke Newington and –
THE CLEANER I work in Hackney mostly. Walthamstow. Stratford. Out to Ilford sometimes.
THE STYLIST What sort of work?
THE CLEANER Cleaning.
THE STYLIST Right. A cleaning company?
THE CLEANER For myself, mostly. I get called in for jobs that need someone who knows what they’re about.
THE STYLIST Domestic? Or commercial?
THE CLEANER Domestic. Always domestic. People’s homes.
THE STYLIST (Briefly relieved to be on familiar ground.) You must see an incredible range of interiors, then. Professionally. The variety of spaces.
THE CLEANER (A pause. Then, quietly:) I go into places where people have been living alone. And died alone. And weren’t found for a while.
A long, charged silence. At the far end of the carriage, a child begins to cry softly and is hushed. The ventilation grilles do not stir. A bead of sweat tracks down THE STYLIST’s temple and reaches the hinge of her jaw. She does not move to wipe it.
THE STYLIST (Very quietly.) I’m sorry?
THE CLEANER Unattended deaths. That’s what they call it. When someone goes at home and there’s no one to take notice. I go in after. Once the coroner’s finished. And I clean the property, so it can be used again.
THE STYLIST (Barely above a whisper.) You clean the…
THE CLEANER The mess of it, yes.
A silence. THE STYLIST holds the portfolio with both arms now, clasped to her front.
THE CLEANER (Cont.) There’s a smell. Once you know it, you don’t forget it. But you learn to work round it. Some people use masks. I find a few drops of peppermint oil under the nose does better.
She touches, briefly, the hollow above her upper lip. A matter-of-fact gesture.
THE CLEANER (Cont.) You put it here.
THE STYLIST (Faintly.) The peppermint. I noticed it. I thought it was…
THE CLEANER Most people think something else.
A pause.
THE STYLIST How long have you been doing it?
THE CLEANER Twelve years.
THE STYLIST absorbs this. There is nothing in the Cleaner’s tone that invites pity or dramatisation. It is simply a fact, like the temperature, like the dark.
THE CLEANER (Cont.) You asked about home decoration.
THE STYLIST (A small, strange laugh.) I did, yes. I did ask that.
THE CLEANER I’ll tell you what I know about it, then.
She settles her hands flat on her thighs. She addresses the reflected carriage in the dark window as much as the woman across from her.
THE CLEANER (Cont.) I’ve been in four hundred homes, give or take. The first thing you notice, before anything else, is the walls. Whether they painted or papered. What they chose. When it was done. You can tell a good deal from that alone. Some places you walk into, the wallpaper goes back thirty years or more. Pre-decimal patterns. Brown swirls on cream. That harvest gold. And the person living under it was in their sixties when I arrived, and it had never been changed. Never got round to it, or never had the money, or simply never thought it mattered. (A pause.) And other homes you go into, and someone has been at the walls with a paintbrush every few years. Four coats deep in the corners, if you look properly. Racing green. Then cream on top. Then terracotta. Every time things changed, or went wrong, or a bit of money came in, they’d had another go at making it new again.
The lights dip briefly, recover.
THE CLEANER (Cont.) Makes no real difference, in the end.
THE STYLIST (Quietly.) No.
THE CLEANER I went into one last November. Over in Leytonstone. A woman in her mid-fifties. She’d been gone about three weeks when the council was called. (A pause. She turns this over carefully, as one turns over something fragile.) And her front room was… she’d done a lovely job of it. Whoever had decorated that room understood what they were about. There were curtains, floor to ceiling, properly lined. With that heading tape, with all the loops gathered together…
She pauses briefly, reaching for the term.
THE CLEANER (Cont.) The name’s gone from me. The loops, bunched up…
THE STYLIST (Automatically, in spite of herself.) Pencil pleat.
THE CLEANER Pencil pleat. Yes. Thank you. (Continuing, without pause.) And a sofa with the cushions all matched and laid out straight. Dried flowers on the windowsill. Framed prints on the walls, all evenly spaced – you could see she’d taken a ruler to the gaps. And the antimacassars on the armchairs had been pressed and put back just so. Even the antimacassars.
A pause. The fluorescent lights hum and hold.
THE CLEANER (Cont.) She was found behind the sofa. She’d fallen. Her heart, most likely. It can go quickly in this sort of heat.
A silence.
THE CLEANER (Cont.) All those careful curtains. All that care about the space between the pictures. And the cushions were still lying perfectly straight when they found her.
A long, charged silence. THE STYLIST is looking at the floor. She does not appear to be looking at anything on the floor. She appears simply to have stopped looking outward.
THE STYLIST (In a sudden, pressured rush:) I’m working on an editorial at the moment. For our September issue. Shabby Chic Summer Living. The whole aesthetic is about things that look worn, aged, distressed, imperfect, and making them beautiful. The philosophy of it is that there’s charm in things that show their history. Distressed wood. Faded linens. Enamelware jugs with chips in them. It’s meant to be honest. A resistance to having everything new and shiny and perfect. (She stops. Swallows.) I have spent three months sourcing props for a magazine shoot that is, essentially, about making things look as though nobody cared for them.
A silence.
THE CLEANER I know those rooms. I’ve cleaned them.
THE STYLIST (A brief flare of something defensive.) That’s not the same thing at all.
THE CLEANER No. You’re right. It isn’t.
A pause.
THE CLEANER (Cont.) I’ll tell you the one that stays with me most. Not the worst I’ve seen. Not by a long way. But the one that stays.
THE STYLIST does not ask to hear it. She does not indicate anything, one way or another. But she does not look away.
THE CLEANER (Cont.) Old man in Walthamstow. Lived alone in his terraced house for about fifteen years after his wife went. And you could see, in that house, the exact moment where she’d stopped. The line of it. Her side of everything had been preserved. Her dressing table. Her ornaments on the mantelpiece. Her side of the wardrobe, her clothes still hanging. The whole of her side of the bedroom, neat and kept, as though she’d just stepped out. But his side was chaos. Boxes piled. Dirty. Fifteen years of letting himself go. You could see the line between where he’d maintained everything for her memory and where he’d simply… surrendered everything that was for himself.
A pause. Even the distant murmur from the far end of the carriage seems to have fallen away.
THE CLEANER (Cont.) Every morning for fifteen years, he must have walked past that dressing table. Past her powder compact, her little bottle of eau de cologne, the photograph in the frame. Thought: she kept things proper. I ought to as well. But he couldn’t manage it for himself. Only for her.
A pause.
THE CLEANER (Cont.) I cleaned her side last. Did his mess first, all the boxes and the chaos of him, and saved her side for the end. Out of respect, I suppose, if that’s the right word for it. And when I got to the dressing table, under the lace mat, under the compact and the eau de cologne…
She takes the pause properly, as the thing deserves.
THE CLEANER (Cont.) There was a shopping list. Her handwriting. Old. Butter. Bread. Tin of salmon. Carnation milk. Just an ordinary shopping list. But he’d left it there, under the mat, where he could see it. All those years.
A very long silence. The fluorescent lights have stopped their flickering. They burn steadily now, without variation, with a flat and pitiless clarity.
THE STYLIST’s portfolio slides from her lap. She makes no move to catch it. It drops to the ribbed rubber floor with a flat, damp sound. The mood boards fan out across the carriage: faded linens, chipped enamelware, whitewashed furniture, the curated evidence of her working life, spread across the tunnel floor in the dark beneath London. Neither woman moves to collect them.
THE CLEANER (After a moment.) You all right?
THE STYLIST (A small, steadied shake of the head. Then, with a strange, measured composure:) I am having a very small nervous collapse. I want you to know I’m aware of it.
THE CLEANER (Without dramatics. Not unkindly.) Good. Knowing it is the first half.
THE STYLIST What’s the second half?
THE CLEANER Sitting through it. I’ve never found another method. (A beat.) Breathe slowly. Don’t look at the windows. Think about something outside.
THE STYLIST (Eyes closing.) The sky.
THE CLEANER If you like. Or just the street above our heads. There’s a street up there right now. St Paul’s is somewhere above us. People walking past at this very moment, sweating in the heat, buying ice lollies, moaning about the buses. The whole ordinary carry-on of a Saturday afternoon in London.
A pause. THE STYLIST breathes. The portfolio lies on the floor between them. The loose piece of raw linen has settled separately, near the Cleaner’s boots.
THE STYLIST (Eyes still closed. Quietly.) Do you ever think about dying alone? From doing this work?
THE CLEANER (A considered pause, as the question deserves.) I think it sharpens the mind. (A pause.) There’s a passage I’ve come back to, from Ecclesiastes. “There is no man that hath power over the spirit to retain the spirit; neither hath he power in the day of death.” I’m no churchgoing woman. But I’ve said that over to myself in more rooms than I can count. It settles things. The order of them.
THE STYLIST (Opening her eyes.) What does it mean to you, when you say it?
THE CLEANER It means none of us have more time than we’re given. And that fretting over whether to use sage or duck-egg is probably not the worst possible use of whatever time that is. (A dry warmth enters her voice, faint but present.) It means you might as well get the mood boards right, since you’re here.
THE STYLIST looks at her. Something has left her face: the bright, brittle social glaze. What is underneath is younger, less composed, and more itself.
THE STYLIST I was going to use the raw linen.
THE CLEANER Use the raw linen.
THE STYLIST It photographs better. In natural light. (A pause. Then, unexpectedly:) My mum’s house has got Laura Ashley on every wall. The Regency stripe in the hall. That pattern with the little bows in the bathroom, the one with the little pink…
THE CLEANER I know the one.
THE STYLIST She’s had it since about 1986 and she’ll die before she changes it.
A small pause. The word lands in the air between them.
THE STYLIST (Cont.) Sorry. I didn’t mean to…
THE CLEANER You’re all right.
THE STYLIST I love that wallpaper, actually. Spent my entire childhood hating it. But I love it.
A silence. A different silence to those that have come before it. Something has shifted in the quality of the air between them, though the air itself remains dead and warm and suffused with the long afternoon’s heat.
Then, deep in the tunnel: a low, mechanical groan. Not close. But real. The faintest vibration transmits through the floor, through the ribbed rubber, through the soles of the Cleaner’s heavy boots and the thin leather of the Stylist’s sandals. The fluorescent lights flicker once, violently, and then blaze back with a steadiness they have not previously managed. From the ventilation grilles above: a single, thin exhalation. Warm. But moving. Air.
A crackle of static from the tannoy. Then a recorded voice, faintly distorted:
TANNOY We apologise for the delay to your journey. This train will be proceeding to Bank station shortly. We should be moving in approximately –
The announcement dissolves back into static before it completes itself.
THE STYLIST lets out a long, slow breath. She looks at the mood boards scattered across the floor. She reaches down and begins to gather them carefully, aligning the edges, returning them to the portfolio. THE CLEANER watches her.
THE STYLIST (Straightening. Portfolio back in her arms.) I never asked your name.
THE CLEANER No.
THE STYLIST It matters.
THE CLEANER looks at her steadily. A pause. Then, the very faintest movement at the corner of her mouth.
THE CLEANER Jean.
THE STYLIST I’m Caroline.
THE CLEANER I know.
THE STYLIST (Puzzled.) How?
THE CLEANER (A slight inclination of the head toward the portfolio.) It’s on the tag.
CAROLINE looks down at the portfolio tag. CAROLINE MARSH, PROPS & EDITORIAL, in the neat graphic lettering of the magazine world. She laughs: quiet, brief, and entirely unperformed. Surprised out of her. The first real laugh of the afternoon.
A silence. A good one.
The train lurches forward. One long shudder, and then a gathering, uncertain momentum. At the far end of the tunnel, the station lights of Bank begin to seep into the black glass of the windows: a thin smear of yellow gold on the dark, growing.
JEAN turns to the window and watches the light come. CAROLINE does not look at the window. She looks at the floor, at the portfolio, at the space between herself and the other woman, at the raw linen swatch still lying near Jean’s boots. She does not reach for it.
The ventilation grilles breathe. The lights burn without flicker. The carriage moves forward through the dark, toward the light.
Blackout.
Bob Lynn | © 2026 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.
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