Glass (4 page)

7

Then I'm Cleaning Windows

Dad was sat at the kitchen table wearing my mother's apron, his face wrinkled and red around the eyes where he'd been rubbing them. He had broken into the novelty gift on the wall to get to the minibar bottle of whisky. God only knew what the sell-by date had been. It was probably vintage by now. I sat down at the other end of the table.

‘How are things?' I asked.

‘Had a gap in the diary so I started early today.'

‘Why are you wearing the apron? You didn't try to cook, did you?'

He scratched his cheek and I could hear the bristles. Back when he was working, he used to shave every morning and some evenings. He looked over at the oven, in case, at this late stage, it might reveal its mysteries to him.

‘Why don't I make you a fish finger sandwich?' I suggested.

He closed his bloodshot eyes and nodded slowly. I made one for each of us while Dad dragged last week's newspaper over. He stared at the front page as if each line read ‘you have cancer.'

After eating, I went to my bedroom and switched on the computer. I looked up aircraft-warning lights. Then I wondered if Salisbury Cathedral was one of the tallest buildings in England. Turned out it wasn't. The tallest building was a skyscraper called The Shard that was just being completed in London.

On a whim, I googled ‘glass'. It gave me some news results – one John Blades had been given an OBE for his services to the Queen, as her appointed window cleaner and sculptor of a life-sized glass statue of Churchill for the palace. He ran the country's largest window-cleaning business, as well as a thriving glassblowing and sculpting workshop.

I found an article which explained that the time it would take for glass to flow down a thick window would be many times longer than the existence of the universe. Flowing over thousands of billions of years like a tear down the face of God, dripping and splashing into the end of our world and through the beginning of the next. That was one of the reassuring things about glass, I supposed: its permanence.

I thought back to the glass museum, to the strange realities of bending light, the way that, when it was perfectly clean, it looked almost like a solid slice of air. It seemed odd, otherworldly, even noble, that there were people who spent whole careers making sure that glass was clean and clear. Their life's work was to preserve the ideal state of a unique material, a tribute to its timeless utility. Perhaps that's what I could do. There was nothing stopping me, I supposed. I didn't need GCSEs or work experience. If I bought the equipment, and cleaned people's windows, and said I was a window cleaner, then that's what I would be.

I quickly discovered that there are an unusually large variety of products in the window cleaning profession, including different kinds of holster. There were many ladders, belts, karabiners, suction cups, cloths, wipes, sprays, gels and squeegees – enough to satisfy even an obsessive compulsive.

There was only one person I knew who could wade through lists of consumer products with the galoshes of a practising Capitalist, and unfortunately it was my brother. Max brought meaning to his life through objects. They were his ‘raisin of being', as the French might say.
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If Capitalism was a fungus feeding off the Western world, Max was a truffle pig. I sent him a message asking for his thoughts, and within the hour he'd picked his definitive arsenal, with alternatives to each product rated one to ten.

A little of his excitement rubbed off on me, and in hindsight I ordered too much. I got a double-pouch holster and a ‘sidekick' holster, which I decided to strap to my calf with a tiny squeegee, in case my primary squeegee somehow got disarmed. I ordered a scraper and various kinds of cleaning fluid. I resolved at some point to try them out on different panes round the house, and see which was the best. Because good wasn't good enough – for once in my life, I wanted to be flawless.

The ladder we had in the garage was not fit for purpose. It had three wooden steps, one of which was split, and a total height of about 1.2 metres. On Max's advice, I opted for an Extension Ladder with Integral Stabiliser, Overlapping Rubber Feet and Non-Slip Rungs. If I couldn't blame my tools, perhaps I wouldn't be a bad workman.

For two days I waited for my things to arrive. On the third day, nothing arrived either. I milled about, showed Dad how to peel potatoes, ended up doing them for him, and waited for the day to pass.

The next day, the doorbell rang. I opened the door to discover that a lorry had jammed its way onto our small residential road. A man lifted up the shutters, and pulled out a very long, very shiny ladder. Then he got a couple of boxes out and made me sign for it all. So this was it, I had my equipment and I was all set. All I needed to do now was learn how to clean windows. I picked up the ladder and turned towards the house. I heard a clang and stopped. I turned back round. As I turned the second time, I heard another small clang and watched the tip of my ladder bump into the helmet of one of my neighbours, who was sitting stationary on his moped, eyes screwed shut, helmet slightly scratched.

‘Whoops,' I said.

‘I didn't think people like you existed,' he replied quietly.

‘I'm really sorry. You don't make that mistake twice, do you?'

‘Apparently you do.'

‘Well – sorry.' And as I turned round I lifted the ladder so it was more vertical, and he ducked just in case. At least I'd got that lesson out the way. Otherwise, it could have been very embarrassing.

I took everything out of the boxes and cellophane and laid it all out on the bed. Then I applied my belt, holstered the scrapers and put on my old walking boots. I looked in the mirror and saw something more than myself. At a glance I may have looked like a slightly overweight twenty-two-year-old with glasses. I may have borrowed my sense of personal armoury from a childhood love of spaghetti Westerns – and now that I looked at it, the leg holster might have to go – but for the first time since my mother died, I was a man with a purpose. I felt taller, my muscles taut, hand poised over the trigger of a cleaning-fluid bottle. I had a staring contest with my reflection. I squinted slightly, as if I was looking into the sun, and set my jaw like Clint Eastwood. Waiting, waiting. Who was going to make the first move? My left index finger twitched imperceptibly over the cleaning fluid.

Bam! I drew the bottle, sprayed my reflection, right-hand-pulled a squeegee and I was off at the top of the mirror, snaking left down right down left chasing the fluid as it trickled inexorably floorwards – but I got there first and overtook it. Now I had time to slow down, to take my time on the corners and holster the fluid, pull out a J-cloth, still crisply folded from the packet, and wipe the fluid from the frame. The outdoor windows wouldn't need such care, but this one wasn't just a quick cleaning job. This was me sticking my flag in my moon. I wasn't going to be a salesman or even a Silica-Based Window Panel Hygiene and Care Co-Ordinator. I was a window cleaner. I would make houses new again, let the sun flow freely into the corners of forgotten rooms. One day, I might even clean one of those giant glass erections
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in the big city. I wiped the last smudge on the window and looked back at my shimmering face. Canary Wharf, or Manhattan. The Big Smoke and the Big Apple. I imagined people on their lunch breaks in America, biting into ripe, chunky apples, and then I thought of London – people huddled on doorsteps smoking. Perhaps London wasn't a city you lived in, so much as survived. But on the up side, it was only a couple of hours up the M3.

I decided to go round the neighbourhood and clean everyone's windows for free, and then drop my card through the letterbox. I didn't have any cards, and the printer was broken, so I got a notepad and wrote my name and number out hundreds of times, as if I was being punished for forgetting them. I folded them carefully and put them in a spare pouch. I walked round the side of the house and got the ladder from where I had left it. Then I started out on the figure of eight I used to do as a milkman.

At the first house I reached, the owners weren't in. I wasn't sure about letting myself in the side gate. I crept round to try and hear if anyone was out in the back garden. Something malevolent barked at me from behind the fence. I made an executive decision to skip this house, and to start ringing doorbells.

At the next house, a pleasant-looking man opened the door, and I recognised him as the owner of the shop at the end of the road. I asked him if he had a window cleaner already, as the last thing I wanted was a turf war.

‘To be honest,' said the shop owner under his breath, ‘we don't really like our window cleaner. He's foreign, you know.' I looked into the shop owner's big brown Indian eyes. ‘One of those Poles. Coming over here, taking our jobs, the lazy bastards. Half of them are on benefits.'

‘Hang on, do they have jobs or are they on benefits?'

‘Whatever they can get their hands on. Both, probably. Worst ones are the asylum seekers. You'll never convince them to go back where they came from.'

‘No, I suppose not. I tell you what, I've got all my stuff with me, so I'll give the house a once-over for free, and then just let me know if you want me to come back in a couple of weeks. This', I tore off a strip of paper, ‘is my number.'

I cleaned the ground-floor windows, then got the ladder up and did the top ones. After that, I realised that the cleaning fluid had dripped down to the bottom ones, so I did all those again. Lesson two.

I worked my way round the neighbourhood until I'd run out of fluid, and then I walked home happy. I felt that I had accomplished something. My good work would be undone by the natural chaos of things, but I would be back again to sort it out. It would be a comfortable ebb and flow, a leisurely game of table tennis between the world and me.

As luck would have it, my home turf was unchallenged – the aforementioned Pole turned out to be an odd-jobs man who had been renovating their staircase – so I tended to pick up business just by walking around. People would stop me and I'd slow cautiously to a halt, making sure my ladder was parallel to the road. I'd take out a handwritten business card and offer it. Sometimes they'd laugh, often they'd look at me maternally as if I'd just done something incredibly sweet. Sometimes they'd survey my tool belt area with hungry eyes and tell me that I should come round for a cup of tea and talk things over. If they started staring at my lips I'd generally just keep walking. I think they wanted something I was loath to provide.[citation needed]

You really only clean a window for two purposes: to see out of, or to see into. ‘Glasshouse' or ‘fish tank', if you will. And the only way to tell whether you've done a good job on a window is to look through it. So I quickly discovered that, as a window cleaner, you tend to witness every joke in the human comedy. I very much enjoyed spotting a situation I hadn't seen before, although my soul withered a little every time I caught a teenage boy masturbating.

One of the women who stopped me in the street was called Paula Dorman, and by giving her my number, I instigated what would become known to me as The Dorman Affair. She had given me the normal spiel, about how her husband was always busy doing other things, and how she had too much to do with the washing and the shopping, and she didn't want to get up a ladder or the whole neighbourhood would see her big old backside (here she had paused, and I later realised that she had been waiting for me to contradict her). I had said I would gladly clean her windows for my standard ten pounds. She had written her address on my arm in lipstick.

I turned up at the appointed time, two days later, and Mrs Dorman invited me in.

‘Please, call me Paula.' I had discovered by this point that I didn't enjoy doing the inside of houses. It made me feel like a burglar. She made me take my shoes off too; needless to say that I was truly uncomfortable. No one else was expected to get their work done without shoes on, with the exception of karate teachers.

I went through to her kitchen. There was a small TV on a bracket in the top corner of the room, and a counter with stools. Not a comfortable chair in sight. We sat down on the stools and she poured us orange juice from concentrate. Her eyes were sunken and her peroxide-blonde hair only served as a contrast to the blotchy pink map of her face. She gnawed her lip as she poured the juice.

‘So this is the kitchen,' she said.

‘Yes,' I said. ‘It is.'

‘In a moment I'll show you everything else.'

I hoped her husband didn't teach karate.

‘So what does your husband do?'

She waved her hand vaguely.

‘He's some sort of consultant. He goes into businesses and tells them who they should fire.'

‘He fires people for a living?'

‘No. He just tells them who to fire. And then they give him a few grand. It's the perfect job if you're a coward as well as an arsehole.' I looked across at her patchwork face and, before I could wonder if she'd been crying, she knocked back the rest of her juice.

‘Come on then, I'll show you the house.'

I stood up, knocked back my own and rested my other hand on my holster.

She showed me the lounge, replete with leopardskin cushions; the bathroom and its woollen toilet roll cover; the little utility room where she kept the shiatsu. It yapped at me and I wanted to growl back.

‘Quiet, Napoleon.'

Small man syndrome, I thought.

She had left the bedroom until last. The tension was palpable. She walked up the narrow staircase ahead of me, bottom rustling gently in synthetic trousers. A long, manicured nail reached back to free some material which was trapped in her underwear.

At the top of the landing, she pushed open a door and waited for me to go in first. I tightened my grip on my squeegee. She followed me in and closed the door.