When the entrance to a theatre in London’s West End was discovered to be smeared with blood and faeces one day in March, a distress call went out to the headquarters of Ben Giles, a 49-year-old veteran of the extreme clean, who is based in Cardigan in Wales. Decades earlier, as a young know-nothing, hired by police to clean vehicles, Giles laboured for hours to remove fingerprint dust from the interior of a stolen car – work that now, with the experience of innumerable litter-dashed, liquid-sodden, gunge-roped scenes, would take him about 30 minutes. Job by job, he figured out when to scrape or sand, soak or fog, preserve or dispose. Boilersuited and plastic booted, Giles learned how to eliminate most evidence of spillages, collisions, protests, haemorrhages, severings, explosions, fires and floods, becoming a self-taught stain savant, a walking database of remedies. When you have lifted a layered lasagne of toilet paper and semen from the floor of a submarine yard in Barrow-in-Furness, there’s not much left in the world that can scare you.
What exactly was the problem in the West End? Details were explained to one of Giles’s operators at the Cardigan HQ. About 4 o’clock that afternoon in March, a person had defecated in front of the Dominion theatre. Ticket-holders were due to arrive, very soon, for an evening performance of The Devil Wears Prada. When emergencies like this come in, Giles’s staff are meant to log whatever information is available on the office network. “Human waste at the front of the Dominion,” an operator wrote at 4.32pm, then, at 4.53pm: “Someone has splattered it on doors now.” A queue was expected to form any time after 6pm.
