The bucket shines bright and red in the utility room. When she picks it up to fill it with ecological soapsuds, it turns out to have gained an inhabitant. A long-legged spider scurries across the bottom.

She has no time for heroic deeds today. Crush it with her thumb or drown it? A soft splat she can blot out by humming, or a silent death. His fist against her cheekbone, the back of her head against the kitchen door, a bone cracking – there was no humming to cover that. She closes her eyes, pushes the images back to the darkest part of her mind, a tiny space that can at least be shut off for a while with a closed door. Unlike the doors that never stayed locked, not even the bathroom door, and her forehead against the edge of the sink that time.

Drown it then. The way they lifted Sheila out of the water, the way her arms dangled, her neck that didn't yet know that it could be encircled by hands.

How much time does it take to save a life? She opens the utility room door with her elbow. She cups her hand, puts it in the bucket and waits impatiently. The spider is left to its own devices on the white outside wall.

It took longer to bring Sheila back to life next to the swimming pool, longer for the screeching ambulance to arrive, even longer to find the door to hide it all behind. She polishes the sink until it shines – as if she were scrubbing the horror and thrill from the bystanders’ faces.

“Sheila can swim now,” she says firmly to the tap. Then she cleans it too.

She is an experienced cleaner, but today she hesitates. First the window frames and skirting boards, or the bedside tables and curtains? Front room or back room? Everywhere she sees layers of dust and signs of long vacancy.

The bedroom overlooks a part of the garden. Gravel paths curl out of sight, spring rustles through the trees as she opens the doors to the patio. She leaves the windows spotless, removing cobwebs and dirt, her eyes narrowed against the sun's rays that bounce off the windows and walls.

Back inside she is overwhelmed by the silence. No footsteps on the gravel, no cars honking, no music playing in a bedroom. She takes the pillows – four for a double bed – one by one into the springtime. She shakes them like Old Mother Frost and gives them another hard slap. A rhythm starts up in her, a song. She polishes shelves, cupboard doors and handles until they shine. Her face mask has been turned into a headband. She hums away. Until you kissed me. Sheila with bright red cheeks just outside her field of vision. What harm could a stolen kiss do? Sheila had been fifteen and that lad was her boyfriend. Fourteen she had been herself. Fourteen – her uncle took a harder punch than she had ever received; not something she told Sheila's father when he let fly. She has no memory of their first kiss. She hasn’t forgotten the first blow.

‘A blue belt at least, or a black eye, or worse. Which would you prefer?’ Sheila had learned from an early age that sometimes you don’t have a choice, she needed no prompting. Yellow. Green. Blue. Brown. Like a reverse bruise. It was hard sewing on the patches with her coarse hands. Fiddly little stitches, when she pricked her finger yet again, she felt a grim pride. After the patches, the belts. By blue, she was a single mother. By brown, she earned enough to put a little aside. Now her daughter has a black belt, she is even off to uni, now everything seems easier.

A phone rings somewhere. Sheila dissolves. She piles up clothes with renewed concentration, folding sweaters and t-shirts as though they need to be returned to the shop’s shelves. She fetches a wooden stool for the higher cupboards. The microfibres do their work: her cloth comes back grey.

She empties out the dirty water and sets to work with the vacuum cleaner. The net curtains, the soft chair that emerged from under a pile of clothes. How many clothes does a student need? Seven days in a week, you can wear trousers for two days, a sweater too, just air them a bit. And there Sheila is again, small this time, with pigtails and dirty fingers. A snotty nose. She smiles her little girl’s smile, and casually wipes her fingers on her sweater.

She is still smiling as she gets down on her knees for a routine check. The bed is the size of an island, the pillows resemble snowy mountain peaks. She can still feel the traces of guilt in her stomach from that time she hoovered something up, after which the greedy vacuum cleaner coughed, then almost choked, like Sheila on a piece of apple. Trying to clear the blockage, teetering on the edge of panic. Sheila gagging and the apple came loose. Her clawing fingers prising an ovulation test from the vacuum cleaner's innards.

Now she knows better and lies stretched out, ear flat on the ground, reaching as far as she can. She stirs up dust bunnies before her fingers touch what her eyes, squinting with exertion, can just make out. The edge of the bed pushes unforgivingly against her shoulder, fluff from the deep-pile carpet clogs her nose, the smell of too-long-left-uncleaned is overwhelming. Then she finds something. She pulls a blackish-brown banana peel and a pink thong from the darkness.

After a moment’s hesitation, she throws the peel into the toilet bowl. She flushes with her elbow. She puts the pink thong with its discoloured edges in the laundry basket. Underwear, she thinks as she cleans the dust from her own clothes as best she can with the vacuum’s net curtain setting. Sheila needs more underwear if she doesn't do a weekly wash.

'Is everything all right?'

Startled, she turns around. The lady of the house is standing in the doorway, arms casually folded, her face mask has the same checked pattern as the breast pocket of her polo shirt. It is hard to read her facial expression. “Yes sure,” she bends down to turn off the vacuum cleaner, which she normally would have done with her foot. She hesitates – touching it with her hand might not be good either – and then uses her elbow to do so. “A lot of dust,” she says.

The woman is only half listening. ‘I heard the toilet flush, and I heard it a moment ago too, that’s why. I thought, maybe you were not feeling well, and that's why you had to use our toilet.’

Although it didn’t sound like a question, she knew better by now. ‘No ma'am, I rinsed once after scrubbing and again for the bleach.’

Sheila wasn’t allowed to lie – who is – and certainly not to her, but she soon understood the exceptions. ‘Have you been playing with these dogs downstairs again?’ – ‘No daddy, not at all.’ ‘How did you get those bruises?’ – ‘I fell off my bike, miss.’ ‘Are you getting enough to eat at home?’ – ‘Yes, Doctor Meyer.’

After the divorce she’d never lie again, she whispered into Sheila’s hair. They’d both received blows, Sheila hadn’t got her blue belt yet and had been foolish enough to push away her father when it had gone on for a very long time. Now they were both lying in Sheila’s single bed. Sheila with a bruised shoulder, she with a torn lip and an eye swollen shut. ‘Never again.’

This had been a lie. The world was held together with lies. It was a lie that the woman and man who lived there had cleaned the house themselves when everyone had been forced to stay home. Everyone staying home was also a lie. Some people didn’t have enough money to stay home. Others had too much.

‘Have you finished in here? Did you also do the…. bedroom next door?’

The woman had once called it the nursery with the same hesitation.

She’d often cleaned it, hoovered dirt from the pale wooden floor, cleaned the white window seat, dusted the skirting boards at the bottom of the cream walls. In those years the nursery had been filled with desire, who knows, maybe she filled it with it herself. All the times she’d cleaned the ceiling with the feather duster, her muscles tensed, amazed that a room like this could maybe one day serve as a bedroom for a child.  Now it was just a large empty room. Tidy and clean.

‘Yes ma’am, only the downstairs to go now.’

She eats a sandwich as she cleans each of the guitars in turn. She and Sheila had once looked up how you were supposed to do this on the internet – clean guitars – sitting side by side, their backs against the bare wall of the only bedroom in their new apartment. They’d had to move to a smaller place. The new neighbour had still had an unsecured Wi-Fi connection, she and Sheila shared a smart phone.

The day is at its hottest. The silence follows her around accusingly. Past the low sofas, floating around the lampshades, the oval coffee tables and the bird of paradise plant that points up to the high ceiling. It’s a mystery to her how two people can live in a house this big.

‘You'll have room to spare when I leave!’ Sheila's voice has acquired a freedom and lightness that she is proud of and secretly envies. She wanted to hold her daughter when she said that, plant a kiss on the parting in her hair, grab her by the shoulders and look through her dark eyes into that undulating soul where Sheila’s colours blend. But she was already in the kitchen, grabbing something to eat maybe, she wears her hair pulled back nowadays and she's more than a head taller. When they eat together at the table, one tired, the other upright, in the silences between sentences she has to listen to what really is going on inside Sheila’s mind.

The living room looks clean. They’ve hoovered it a few times. (Who would have done this: him or her?). From the light switches and lamp you can see that the couple aren’t used to keeping their house clean themselves. Sheila can. There she is again – almost tangible – with a bucket over her arm, her hair in a bun. She hums a song she doesn’t know the words to.

Sheila cleans her bedroom quickly and efficiently– her mother sleeps on the sofa now so that Sheila can have the one bedroom, some privacy, her own space, with a little desk to do her homework on and a mirror on the wall. Swimming certificates and medals above the head of the bed.

She sees stripes in the dust on the plant where water has run. As if the plant has been crying. Of loneliness then, surely. She wipes her forehead with the sleeve, her mask is hanging from one ear, and she bends down to dust off the white pot. Sweat stings her eyes. All the tears she’s cried since she was born, so long ago now, because of the bruises – the aches and pains, major and minor, that followed.

But life certainly wasn’t only a vale of tears. There was a lot of laughter too. And she’s been there for her too. For her first experience of unrequited love, her the first failed test, her last failed exam. Doors open, some quietly, others squeaking, a few with a big bang. She bends, polishes, bends, wipes, rubs and closes them one by one.

As she reaches the last stretch of the endless floor, Sheila packs her last bag at home. Their home is no longer the same and will never be the same again. She wouldn’t know what to do with the extra space.

She rinses the red bucket. The lady of the house looks on with satisfaction and puts down an extra twenty on the corner of the kitchen counter.

Translated by Michele Hutchison.