No Rest for the Wicked

I take things literally. Always. Well, nearly always, to be literal.
Like the time Vanessa was chivvying me along and said ‘This isn’t getting the baby bathed’. I stood stock still and looked at her with incredulity. ‘What the hell are you talking about’, I demanded, ‘we don’t even have a bloody baby’.
Vanessa had to explain that it was a saying (meaning that we needed to hurry) and was not meant to be taken literally. I still thought it was a ridiculous thing to say. She has not repeated it.
It reminded me of a time when I was young and my mother hired a cleaner for a few hours a week. Goodness knows why, as my mother didn’t work and was quite capable (well, physically) of cleaning the house herself.
We’ll call the cleaner Mrs Kettle, although that’s not her name in a literal sense (see, I’m catching on).
Mrs Kettle came cheap. That meant she wasn’t the most dextrous cleaner in the world. In fact, in the few years she cleaned for us, she broke almost every possession I owned.
As a child, I liked to collect things and, whilst I accept that the items may have been financially inconsequential (OK – sheer rubbish), they were still mine and I liked them better when they were entire rather than in little pieces. Mrs Kettle had other ideas.
I hated anyone in my room, let alone touching my things, so it was traumatic having Mrs Kettle in there anyway. But returning afterwards to replace all my stuff into exactly the position it was in before her visit was made considerably worse by the inevitable discovery than yet another item had been reduced to rubble through her ministrations.
When I finally left home I used a shoe-box for my packing. From the days of my childhood, I now have only two possessions. One is a bear made of Welsh slate with both ears glued back on and a chipped nose, and the other is a small model of a bull from Crete. The latter is made from cast bronze and even Mrs Kettle found that difficult to disintegrate. All she managed was a dent in its side.
In the end, to avoid the stress of hearing my belongings bouncing off the floor, I took to locking myself away. I claimed that I was busy with homework and it never crossed my mind that there was anything suspicious about being constantly busy with homework, even throughout the school holidays. To be fair, this didn’t bother Mrs Kettle unduly as I wasn’t the most communicative child to begin with. I think the most active she ever saw me was when I vomited over a newly cleaned carpet (long story) but, to my undying admiration, that just got vacuumed up along with everything else.
One day, as I was furtively darting past Mrs Kettle to shut myself in a room that wasn’t on the cleaning roster that day, she asked if I was still busy with homework. Maybe she was making a joke; I wouldn’t have known. I responded with, what I hoped, was a pained grunt that I was. She then said (and I remember her words to this day): ‘Well, there’s no rest for the wicked’.
Wicked. Me? I was deeply offended by this. Admittedly, I had vomited on the carpet that time but this was on account of my mother’s cooking and everyone understood that this was a habitual risk of dining at our house. But it hardly deserved the epithet wicked. I didn’t think I’d ever done anything in my life that anyone could honestly say was wicked. What the hell was Mrs Kettle thinking?
From then on, I avoided Mrs Kettle, even more than I had before. And I don’t think I ever really forgave her for that comment until the day she died. Which is a shame really, as she had a huge impact on my childhood. After all, she single-handily managed to destroy most traces of it.