High Visibility

"Nobody learns the architecture of hiding places without first needing somewhere to hide."

The men's bathroom near Gate 14 had three cubicles, four urinals, and a row of five basins with motion-sensor taps that activated at slightly different thresholds. The far-left tap required almost nothing — a hand passing within six inches would trigger it. The middle tap needed direct proximity, palm flat beneath the spout. The far-right one was temperamental, sometimes firing at a shadow and sometimes ignoring you entirely even when you were standing right in front of it waving like an idiot.

I knew this because I'd cleaned those basins approximately four hundred and seventy times. Twice a day, five days a week, for nearly two years. Give or take sick days and the fortnight I'd swapped to nights last November when Linda needed someone to cover for Raj.

The maths was automatic. I did it with everything — shifts, supply usage, the interval between restocking the paper towel dispensers in the high-traffic bathrooms versus the ones near the quieter gates. Numbers were honest. They didn't require interpretation or performance. A roll of industrial toilet paper lasted approximately two hundred and eighty tears under normal passenger load. The hand soap dispensers near the food court needed refilling every thirty-six hours. The bin in the third cubicle — the accessible one, the one people used for everything except its intended purpose — filled twice as fast as the others because travellers treated it as a general dumping ground for coffee cups, sandwich wrappers, and the occasional abandoned paperback.

I also knew which cubicle in this bathroom had a lock you could slide shut silently, and which one had a gap beneath the partition wide enough to see shoes in the next stall. I knew that the ventilation fan in the ceiling was loud enough to cover most sounds if you kept them below a certain threshold. I knew that the foot traffic pattern dropped to almost nothing for a twenty-minute window between the first wave of morning arrivals and the second, and that the baby change room next door provided an early-warning system because you could hear the corridor door swing open through the shared wall.

I knew these things the way I knew the soap refill schedule. Through repetition. Through use.

I pulled on my gloves and started with the basins, working left to right, the spray bottle of disinfectant in one hand and the cloth in the other. The rhythm was mechanical, the movements so deeply inscribed into my muscles that I could do it while thinking about absolutely anything. Which was, depending on the day, either a mercy or a punishment.

Adelaide winter, though you'd barely know it inside the terminal, where the climate control maintained the same regulated blandness regardless of what the sky was doing. Outside, the morning had been clear and sharp — I'd felt it walking from the car park before my shift, the cold catching in my throat in that particular Adelaide way that was nothing like Melbourne's damp or Sydney's wind. Just dry, still, clean cold under a pale sky that would warm to nothing special by afternoon.

The terminal had been quiet when I'd clocked in. It always was at that hour. The first interstate departures hadn't started boarding yet, and the international gates wouldn't come alive for hours. I liked the early stretch — the building still half-asleep, the corridors carrying sound differently when they were empty, my footsteps and the squeak of the cart's front-left wheel the only things moving through the space. Fewer people meant fewer variables. Fewer eyes to track, fewer movements to account for in the constant background calculus I ran whether I wanted to or not.

The building had woken up since then. Passengers moved through the terminal in waves that corresponded to the arrival and departure boards, their patterns as predictable as tides. The Sydney flight dumped its load into arrivals first, the Melbourne passengers following shortly after. The terminal hummed with the particular energy of people in transit — purposeful, distracted, moving through a space they would forget the moment they left it.

They didn't see me. That was the point. That was, if I was being honest with myself — which I tried to avoid, because honesty and I had a complicated arrangement — the reason I was still here, two years into a job I'd taken as a stopgap.

The hi-vis vest was a kind of invisibility cloak. I'd understood this within the first week. People's eyes skated over the high-visibility yellow the same way they skated over the fire extinguisher housings and the emergency exit signs — registering the category without ever processing the individual. Cleaner. The word landed in their minds and their gaze moved on, seeking whatever they were actually looking for: a gate number, a café, the person collecting them from arrivals. I existed in the same visual register as the furniture. As the floor tiles. As the overhead signage they'd glanced at once and would never read again.

Which suited me perfectly. Being invisible in a building full of strangers was the closest thing I had to a natural habitat.

I wrung the cloth out over the basin and moved to the next one. A man entered the bathroom — business shirt, laptop bag slung across his chest, the slightly manic look of someone who'd just landed and was already behind schedule. He went straight for the urinals without glancing at me. I heard the splash, the flush, then the brief mandatory pause at the basin where the middle tap obliged him with a thin stream he barely touched before reaching for the paper towel dispenser.

I clocked him without meaning to. Late thirties. Wedding ring. Good shoulders but carrying weight around the middle that the shirt was working hard to disguise. The appraisal took less than a second and I hated that I did it — this reflexive inventory of every man who entered a room I was in, the rapid, practised assessment that sorted them into categories I'd never asked my brain to create. Not interested. Not possible. Not worth the risk. The sorting happened before I could stop it, the same way flinching happened before you could decide not to flinch, and it had been happening since I was thirteen years old.

The door swung shut behind him. I hadn't looked up. He hadn't registered that I had a face. Both of these things were exactly as they should be.

This was what I'd built. Not deliberately — I wasn't strategic enough for that, not in the way that would imply I'd made some kind of considered decision. It was more that I'd spent thirty years learning to disappear, and the airport had simply provided the ideal conditions for it. A uniform that said don't bother. A role that moved me through every part of the building without anyone questioning my presence. A schedule that kept me occupied without requiring me to be present in any way that mattered. And underneath all of it, like a second set of blueprints drawn on tracing paper over the first, a private map of the building that served a completely different purpose — one that the uniform and the role and the schedule made possible precisely because no one was paying attention.

I was not a good person. I'd stopped pretending otherwise somewhere around twenty-five, when the gap between who I was at Sunday lunch and who I was on my knees in a car park in Semaphore had grown too wide for even the most creative self-deception to bridge. The pretending continued, of course — the pretending would continue until I was dead or until the world rearranged itself into something that didn't require it — but the belief in my own performance had quietly expired, and what remained was just the mechanics. The smile at the right moment. The deflection. The lies that were so practised they'd worn grooves in my tongue.

Mum would have called the job a waste. She had, actually, on the three occasions I'd made the mistake of being honest about it. Marco, you have a degree. You could be doing something with your life. The emphasis always on something — a word that stood in for the entire catalogue of expectations I'd been failing to meet since I was old enough to understand what expectations were. A career. A wife. A house in the suburbs with a backyard where Enzo Ferraro's grandchildren could play while their grandfather pointed out the quality of the paving he'd laid himself. What Mum didn't understand — what Mum couldn't understand, because understanding it would require knowing things about me that would break her — was that the cleaning job wasn't the waste. The cleaning job was the only honest thing I did. I cleaned. The bathrooms got cleaner. The transaction was straightforward and the results were verifiable and nobody got lied to in the process.

Everything else in my life was the waste.

I sprayed the mirror and wiped it in overlapping arcs, watching my own reflection appear and disappear behind the chemical streak. Dark eyes, the jaw that was Dad's, the grey coming in at the temples that I hadn't bothered addressing because vanity required caring and caring required energy I'd allocated elsewhere. I looked older than thirty. I looked like a man who'd been running a double shift for fifteen years, which was accurate if you understood what the double shift actually was.

I moved to the cubicles.

Cubicle one: standard. Seat wiped, bowl scrubbed, floor mopped where someone had missed. Cubicle two: someone had left a wad of toilet paper on the floor beside the bowl — the particular laziness of people who considered their trajectory toward the target sufficient evidence of effort. I picked it up with my gloved hand and dropped it where it belonged. Cubicle three: the accessible cubicle, which required more time because the bin was full again and the handrail needed disinfecting and there was a coffee cup balanced on the cistern that I added to my rubbish bag without comment or surprise.

Cubicle three was also the one I'd fucked the Qantas ground crew bloke in, about five weeks ago. Against the handrail I'd just disinfected. I sprayed it again, not because it needed it but because my hands were already moving, and thought about how I'd cleaned this same cubicle the morning after and felt nothing except a dull awareness that I'd have to avoid eye contact with him for a while. Which I had. Which had been easy, because avoiding things was what I did best.

I worked through the remaining tasks in the order I always worked through them, the order that Linda had shown me during my first week and that I'd since optimised through small adjustments — swapping the basin sequence so I finished nearest the door, doing the floor last so I wasn't tracking over wet tiles, keeping the rubbish bag on the left side of the cart where it was easier to reach without twisting. Tiny efficiencies. The kind of improvements no one noticed or cared about, but which shaved minutes off the route and gave me something to think about that wasn't myself.

I backed the cart out of the bathroom and into the corridor, checking both directions before swinging it around. The corridor ran parallel to the main terminal, connecting the bathroom facilities and baby change rooms to the broader passenger flow. A woman with a pram passed me heading toward the baby change. An elderly man shuffled toward the bathroom I'd just finished, and I held the door open for him without thinking, receiving a nod that was more acknowledgement than most people managed.

I pushed the cart left, away from the main terminal, toward the service corridor that led to the back of house. The floor tiles changed at the boundary — same colour, different wear pattern. Passengers rarely came past this point. The lighting shifted from the warm, retail-grade ambiance that the terminal designers had chosen to flat fluorescent tubes that cast everything in the same institutional pallor. The walls went from smooth painted plaster to bare concrete block. The air smelled different too — less of coffee and perfume and the recycled staleness of pressurised cabins, more of the building itself. Concrete dust. Electrical warmth from the junction boxes. The faint chemical undertone that never quite left these corridors, no matter how recently they'd been cleaned, because the cleaning products themselves were the source.

This was my territory. Not officially — I shared the route with Raj and sometimes with Angela when the roster shuffled — but in practice, I knew this network of corridors better than anyone. I knew which doors were kept locked and which ones had latches that didn't quite catch. I knew where the security cameras were positioned — two in the main service corridor, one covering the junction near the admin offices, none in the short spur that led to the cleaning supply closet by the T-junction. I knew which sections of corridor had foot traffic from airport staff heading to the break room or the admin wing, and which ones went hours without a single person passing through.

I knew all of this for two reasons. The first was that I was good at my job, in the limited way that being good at cleaning an airport could be considered an achievement. The second was that I'd been mapping the sexual geography of every space I'd occupied since I was fifteen years old, and the airport was no different — just larger, more complex, and with better infrastructure for the kind of encounters that required walls, locked doors, and the confidence that no one was watching.

The awareness was so automatic now that I barely registered it as a distinct thought. It was just how I experienced space. The airport was a building to everyone else — terminal, gates, shops, bathrooms, the ordinary architecture of travel. To me, it was also a grid of risk and opportunity, every corner and corridor assessed for what it could conceal as much as what it contained. I couldn't switch it off. I'd tried, the way I'd tried to switch off everything else — the wanting, the looking, the endless catalogue of men's bodies that my brain compiled without permission. None of it responded to willpower. None of it ever had.

The cart squeaked along the corridor — that front-left wheel, the one that had been catching since March and that I'd reported twice and that maintenance had failed to fix because cleaning carts were not, it turned out, a priority in any maintenance schedule ever written. The sound was familiar enough to be almost comforting. A metronome for the work. Squeak, step, squeak, step, the rhythm carrying me through the back corridors toward the supply closet where I'd restock before starting the next circuit.

I passed the staff-only door that led toward the admin offices — closed, as usual. Passed the junction where the corridor split, one branch curving back toward the terminal, the other continuing toward the T-junction. The fluorescent tube above the junction was flickering again, the kind of intermittent stutter that could go on for weeks before anyone replaced it. I made a mental note to log it, knowing the note would join the queue of other notes that sat in the maintenance request system, unanswered, slowly composting.

I was halfway to the supply closet when my phone buzzed in my pocket.

The vibration was small, barely perceptible through the fabric of my work trousers, but my body registered it the way a dog registers a whistle pitched beyond human hearing — not in the mind but in the blood, the spine, the back of the throat. A full-body twitch of recognition that had nothing to do with thought and everything to do with training. Fifteen years of Pavlovian conditioning, the buzz-and-response pattern worn so deep into my nervous system that my cock twitched before my brain had even identified the sensation as a phone notification.

I didn't reach for it. Not yet. Not here, where the corridor had a camera twelve metres behind me and anyone from admin could come around the corner. I kept walking, kept pushing the cart, kept my face arranged in the expression of a man thinking about nothing more interesting than paper towel inventory.

But my body had already made its own assessment, issued its own instructions, begun redirecting blood supply to departments that had no business being operational during a cleaning shift. The wanting didn't ask. It never asked. It just arrived, fully formed, and waited for me to catch up.

I kept walking.