[With thanks to R.]

In the course of my interviews with janitors, a surprising number of them let slip that, in the buildings for which they were janitorially responsible, they maintained, in addition to the appointed kitchen, a second, decoy, kitchen. For what purpose might a janitor do such a thing? That is the question I asked of all the janitors I interviewed, whether they kept decoy kitchens or not, for I intuited that the replies of those who kept just the one, actual, kitchen would be as enlightening as those of the janitors who kept two, a real and a decoy.

Not for the first time, my intuition proved to be wrong. I would not easily forget, for example, how I was caught napping by the Tet Offensive. And just as I wholly misjudged, on an intuitive level, the course of the Vietnam War, so now with my interviews with janitors. When I posed the question about decoy kitchens to those janitors, the majority, who did not keep decoy kitchens, they looked at me as if I had taken leave of my senses. Their replies were not in the least enlightening. The general thread of their responses was to aver that the maintenance of even a single kitchen was not properly the province of a janitor at all, but ought in any sane and just universe be devolved upon a scullerymaid. As for the idea that a janitor might keep a decoy kitchen, that beggared belief. The most likely explanation, I was informed, was that those janitors who claimed to have decoy kitchens were pulling the wool over my eyes, playing a jape on me, engaging in waggery, or some such mischief.

It grieved me to think I might be the object of mockery or trickery by several janitors. After all, I had embarked upon my interviews with a good honest heart, I would go so far as to say a pure heart, such as one might find nestling within a pious Victorian infant slowly perishing from tuberculosis. I did not wish to believe that some among the janitors would give anything but candid and heartfelt answers to my questions. So I determined to reinterview a statistically sound sample of those among the janitors who claimed to keep additional kitchens as decoys. This would necessitate a revision of my schedule and put me in grave danger of missing my deadline. I comforted myself with the reminder that I had set the deadline myself, the entire project, to interview thousands of janitors, being wholly within my own remit, for the simple reason that not one among the many publishers I approached showed even a smidgen of interest in it. Quite the opposite, in fact. I could not count the number of times I was physically thrown out into the street while great imposing doors were slammed shut behind me. I bear no grudges and will not copy out the list of those publishers I have written in my own blood in a little black notebook with a skull and crossbones emblem emblazoned on its cover.

So I rejigged my schedule, adding a year or two to my time frame, and made appointments to visit, once again, some of the janitors who said that they had established, in their buildings, decoy kitchens in addition to the real kitchens. I devised a new and separate set of questions I wished to ask them. I did not give any of my subjects sight of this questionnaire in advance, as I thought the element of surprise would serve me well. Tied to a chair in a dark dank cellar, a Klieg light blazing in his face, even the steeliest and most self-possessed janitor in Christendom would quail and confess all when I put my queries to them in a blood-curdling screech. I practised this screech on a hamster or two, with chilling but satisfactory results.

It was my misfortune, however, that every single one of the janitors I arranged to reinterview sent me to decoy cellars in decoy buildings where I was met by decoy janitors. My project was in ruins. I intuited that the best idea was to slump in a gutter and let sweet rain fall upon my head. Alas, my intuition proved wrong, for the rain turned to hail, and then to snow, and I would have been buried beneath it had I not stood up, and dusted myself down, and pranced along the street, my head held high, my smile beatific, like that of a pious Victorian infant slowly perishing of tuberculosis who sees, dimly, through failing eyes, the ethereal glow of an angel of the Lord at his bedside, come to carry him to a better place.

Few subjects have received as little attention as the relationship between a janitor and his spirit guide. All janitors have one, though many janitors do not acknowledge its existence, while others, both janitors and observers of janitors, confuse the spirit guide with the janitor’s dog. Of course, not all janitors have dogs, which rather proves the point and should serve to clarify the matter. We shall examine the janitor-dog nexus in a future essay, if nexus is the word I am looking for.

The spirit guides of janitors are clad, invariably, in raincoats, though being as ethereal as the guides themselves the raincoats are not visible to the mundane eye. This makes them no less effective as raincoats. Janitors’ spirit guides do not get wet in rainstorms. Were they so to do, in all likelihood they would dissolve and form a puddle of ectoplasmic sludge, a puddle which the janitor would be duty bound to mop up with his decidedly unethereal mop, a duty made all the more onerous because he would no longer have his spirit guide to guide the mopping, a sure recipe for janitorial catastrophe. Let me repeat that. Were they [the spirit guides] so to do [become rain-soaked], in all likelihood they would dissolve and form a puddle of ectoplasmic sludge, a puddle which the janitor would be duty bound to mop up with his decidedly unethereal mop, a duty made all the more onerous because he would no longer have his spirit guide to guide the mopping, a sure recipe for janitorial catastrophe. There is more wisdom packed into that single sentence than in anything else I have ever written.

The averting of catastrophe is the most important contribution his spirit guide makes to any janitor’s day. But it is not the only one. In the course of my interviews with thousands of janitors, those who were prepared to admit the existence of their spirit guides mentioned a huge variety of ways in which these spectral raincoated beings from realms unseen give a helping hand to their allotted janitor. Many of the testimonies I heard were incomprehensible, if not exactly gibberish. My lack of comprehension was due to the fact that, not being a janitor myself, and thus not in possession of a spirit guide, my puny brain could not make any sense of what I was being told. An example will give you some idea of my difficulty. This is from Interview Transcript No. 849:

Me : Can you tell me something of earth-shattering excitement about your spirit guide and the way it aids you in the course of a typical janitorial day? Speak clearly into the microphone.

Janitor No. 849 : Hectic donkeys and the clicking of panic buttons or picnic buttons with unalloyed gusto pop ix pop vug then squelchy invasions usually hence hinged.

It is possible, if one studied that reply for several years, with the aid of glossaries and reference books and an atlas of the Other Side, that some sense could be wrung from it. But even in the absence of understanding it demonstrates, I think, that the ways of spirit guides are not our ways, and we can form only a partial, blurred, and vague conception of those ways. Is the same true of the janitors themselves? Do they have a clearer understanding of their spirit guides?

It is instructive, in this connection, to do as I have done, and to observe a janitor in the throes of his janitordom, all the while making notes in a notebook with a propelling pencil. When reviewed at leisure, at the end of the day, sitting in an armchair and sipping an egg nog, such notes can reveal startling insights. Of course one has to ensure that one notes what is noteworthy and not what is not noteworthy. I confess that on my first few exercises in this regard I made a complete ballocks of the whole business. I did not know what I ought to be looking for. I would, for example, scribble down my observations of a janitor’s mopping demeanour, while failing to make a single note about his pail (or bucket) frenzy. Such frenzies, I learned, are, or can be, the key to the janitor-spirit guide nexus. I am still not sure if that is the word I want.

Of course not all janitorial frenzies are related to their spirit guides. Let us not be silly. Let us, instead, sink deeper into our armchair, drain our cup of egg nog, and drift into a doze, in the hope that we may be granted a visit from a shimmering benevolent being from worlds beyond sense, clad in a raincoat, a raincoat, a rainc…..

The relationship between a janitor and his pail is a matter well worth our attention. Some janitors will call their pail a bucket, but it is much of a muchness. It may well be that, for the pernickety, a pail and a bucket are not quite the same thing, but we are not pernickety, at least not today. Today we are having one of our non-pernickety days. Good heavens, we did not even time the boiling of our breakfast egg to the second, as we do on our pernickety days. No, today, we plopped the egg into the pan and set the burners roaring beneath it and we wandered away, picked up the post from the doormat, kicked the wainscot, kicked it again, God knows why, chucked the post into the wastepaper basket – it was all flyers, flyers – put the kettle on, extracted from our majestic bouffant a small beetle which had taken up residence, Peason-like, and placed it on the windowsill, opened the window, adjusted the position of the vase of hollyhock cuttings, turning them towards the light, though Lord knows there was little enough light, so early was the hour, and pottered and puttered in other dithery ways before returning to the kitchen to set the burners unroaring beneath the pan, without checking the time on our wristwatch, rather judging that a sufficiency had passed for the egg in the pan to be toothsome when shelled. On a pernickety day, on the other hand, we would not leave our post, by the cooker, but count the minutes and the seconds, gazing from wristwatch to pan and back again, and as the second hand on the watch tocked to its appointed spot we would immediately lift the pan from the roaring burners, extinguish them, hoist the egg from the seething waters and transfer it to its egg-cup – a souvenir egg-cup from an ill-starred seaside resort – sure in the knowledge that it had been boiled for a very specific and particular length of time as recommended in Blötzmann’s Manual of Egg-Boiling (second edition, lilac series). Thus the variation between our pernickety and our non-pernickety days, a variation designed to crack us from the bonds of rut.

What does all that have to do with janitors and pails or, if you prefer, janitors and buckets? Little or nothing, like the littleness of the light as we tuck into our early morning boiled egg, like the nothingness at the core of our all too mortal soul.

Few relationships are as close, and as intense, as that between a janitor and his mop. He may sense an attachment to his bunch of keys and his pail and his dog, but he cherishes his mop more than anything.

I have spent several years interviewing janitors, and invariably they volunteer the information that their mop is their most treasured possession. They will say this, loudly and with vehemence, even when their dog is sitting obediently at their feet, gazing up at them in adoration. I am sure there is a monograph to be written, one day, upon janitors and their dogs, but I shall leave that joy to another scribbler. It is not that I am averse to dogs, well, I am, but it is not my aversion that dissuades me from writing about them. Were a janitor to spout effusive folderol on the subject of his dog, during one of my interviews, I would note it down accordingly and include it in my finished piece. I do not provide verbatim transcripts, preferring instead to give the reader an impressionistic or expressionistic or borderline hysterical portrait of the janitor through gorgeous words. Not all of these words will have been spoken by the janitor, nor by me, but they seem to hover in the aether in the janitor’s vicinity. That is what I try, as best I am able, to communicate.

It remains a remarkable fact that the thousands of janitors I have interviewed over the years have expressed boundless love for their mops. Often they are moved to tears, or, contrarily, to gales of unbridled glee, or sometimes both, turn and turn about. It is an emotionally wrenching experience, for them to be interviewed, and also for me, as the interviewer, broaching the topic of the mop and not knowing whether I will need to provide a napkin for them to dab at their tear-stained cheeks, or a similar napkin for myself to wipe off the flecks of spittle sprayed over me by janitors in the extremes of happiness. It occasionally happens that the dog, if it is frisky, will try to catch the napkin, either of the napkins, in its jaws, and scamper away with it, as if it were a bone. They are mysterious creatures, dogs, and often quite stupid. The mop, being inanimate, is much more predictable, and much less bother.

For reasons I have not yet been able to fathom, no publisher has expressed an interest in my book of janitorial interviews. It thus remains in manuscript, hand-written, with a butcher’s pencil, in a series of exercise books, some lined, some unlined. For the past several months I have had these books stored in a cupboard on the ground floor of a large building in a central location, near a bank, into the vaults of which I wish to transfer them for greater security, when I can afford the fee to do so. In the meantime, the cupboard is kept locked and watched over by a janitor, one of the few I have not taken time to interview. He prowls the corridors, rattling his bunch of keys, deploying his beloved mop, and followed everywhere by his dog. Insert apt Latin phrase to conclude this piece with a freight of significance.