Glass Read online

  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.

  ‘This’, came her ecstatic tremolo, ‘is the master bedroom.’ I surveyed the room: a bay window, double glazed, ten panes. East-facing, so the sun might slip in each morning across the heavily frilled king-size duvet. (You’d be surprised how few people close their curtains of an evening.) On the bed, there were more pillows and cushions than one could comfortably rest a head on, and a mirror was stuck to the ceiling. The politics of this marriage were, I ascertained, conducted in the bedroom.

  ‘Very nice aspect,’ I said, in what I hoped was a noncommittal tone. I tried to sense exactly how close she was behind me.

  ‘Now make sure you give these windows an extra polish,’ she breathed. ‘I want them so clean you can’t even tell they’re there.’ Something stirred in my Y-fronts. It was the perfect bay window, overlooking the lush garden and jacuzzi, and I would look forward to cleaning them thoroughly, but still I felt uneasy. I looked across at her and, just for a moment, I glimpsed something vulnerable in those squashed little eyes. Then her face hardened and she left the room. I was a little taken aback, but altogether pleased not to have been bundled onto the bed.

  Downstairs, she asked me where I would start, and I explained that you have to do the top floor first, because the suds drip down to the lower windows. I would do the outside first, start round the back and work my way forward. I could do the inside if absolutely necessary. We agreed I’d start on the bay window. Then she asked me, very specifically, to come at twenty minutes past one the following Thursday. I happened to be available, but the specificity baffled me. She said that she wouldn’t be around, but she’d leave my money and house key under the pot of sweet peas round the back of the house.

  In the days leading up to Thurs
day, I did other houses, but something kept niggling at me about the Dorman job. I didn’t know what it was, but our conversation had put me on edge. I had heard about exhibitionists before, and I was aware that there were any number of fantasies which might require the participation of a window cleaner. We are one of those few professions who, like doctors or teachers, must break social barriers as a matter of course in our daily work, and as such the humble window cleaner seems to occupy a disproportionately large space in the consciousness of the depraved.28

  Thursday arrived on schedule, and the morning passed without event. At the appointed hour I unlatched the side gate and manœuvred my ladder across the side of the house. I thought I could hear noises within, but I couldn’t be sure. I looked at my watch as nineteen flicked to twenty. Right on time.

  I propped the ladder against the wall beneath the first floor bay window, steadying the bottom against the side of their jacuzzi. I took a deep breath, and steeled myself.

  I had two options. I could treat the window as if it were opaque, setting my face and pretending that whatever was happening inside wasn’t visible because of something unlikely such as glare. The second approach, and the one which I generally employed, was to smile, wave cheerfully, pretend to wobble on my ladder, and generally spread good cheer. The way I see it, there isn’t really much choice but to admit that glass is designed to be transparent. To pretend otherwise is like being a mime: degrading to both viewer and participant.

  But as I put my foot on the first rung of the ladder, I resolved that, whatever I was going to witness through that bay window, I was going to marshal my admittedly undeveloped acting ability and pretend that I couldn’t see it.

  As I climbed the ladder, the noise became more defined and I began to make out individual words. There was a pounding beat like a kick drum, and a man’s voice, shouting hoarsely, ‘You’re fired bitch! You’re fucking fired!’ over and over again. As I raised my eyes to the level of the window, I couldn’t help but peer in to see the man I presumed to be Mr Dorman jackhammering away at a helpless woman who, for all her peroxide hair, was certainly not Mrs Dorman.29 Maybe a small part of me was grateful to be learning first-hand about sexual technique, but I gathered myself and remembered that I was here to do a job, come rain or shine. So I grabbed my cleaning fluid and sprayed a liberal quantity on the top left window, before watching my squeegee zigzag down the pane. It squeaked a little, and I heard a scream. Everything went quiet, and I watched Mr Dorman dismount and cross the room, preternaturally quickly for such a large man, penis pointing up at me like the lance of a mounted knight. I heard a muffled shout of ‘Pervert!’ as he struggled to unlock the window, and then he opened it wide, and pushed me.

  My ladder swung out into the air and for a moment I hung there, balanced between the house and the cool beyond. Then, as the angle of the ladder battled against the strength of Mr Dorman’s push, and won, the ladder changed direction and came slamming back into the wall of the house. I lost my footing and fell twelve feet into the jacuzzi.

  The next thing I knew, Paula was dabbing at my face with a cloth from my belt, her face a Pangaea of blotches.

  ‘I’m so sorry Günter, I never meant for this to happen, I’m so so sorry.’

  Back on my rounds a couple of weeks later, I mentioned the incident, if not the frightful specifics, to a neighbour. The neighbour revealed that, since Mr Dorman managed the finances for the both of them, Paula couldn’t have hired a private investigator without arousing suspicion. But she had known that something was going on, since she always came back from her Pilates class on Thursdays to a badly made bed, and she might be a lot of things, but she wasn’t a slattern. So when she had seen me walking along with my ladder, it had seemed the perfect opportunity to ‘smoke the rabbit out of the hole’, as the neighbour put it.

  The Dorman Affair was perhaps my first inkling that I’d make a good private detective, although if anyone ever wanted to compile a comprehensive survey of the masturbation habits of teenage boys, I’m sorry to say I could do that too.

  Around the time I was called as a witness for the Dorman divorce hearing, I got a phone call from an unknown number.

  ‘Glass Cleaning, how can I help?’

  ‘Günter?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Oh good. Dean Winterbottom here. I was wondering if you might like to come over for a cup of tea? We have some wonderful loose-leaf Darjeeling in at the moment. Best served without milk.’

  ‘I’m all booked up this week,’ I said, looking at my diary.

  ‘I quite understand. However, it is rather pressing. I don’t mean to put pressure on you, but we don’t want to have to close the cathedral.’

  I thought about telling her I’d already found a job, but a part of me was still intrigued.

  ‘Are you free this evening?’ I asked.

  ‘Always free, my dear, always free. God is a freelance.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll pop over around six.’

  I went downstairs to make an early dinner for Dad, and found him sitting at the kitchen table with a bottle of whisky.

  ‘Fish fingers again, I’m afraid,’ I said, opening the freezer.

  ‘I can’t eat now.’

  ‘You’ve got to eat something.’

  ‘Sit down and have a whisky.’

  I went and sat with him. He filled up his glass and nodded to himself.

  ‘You’re a real man now, with your job. You’re independent. You must be making some proper money now, eh? You’ll probably move out soon. No use in worrying.’

  ‘Look, Dad, if it’s about my cooking, I can learn. We both can.’

  He drew his hand down over his face, like he was wiping an Etch-a-sketch.

  ‘Look, if you want to stay here, I might have to start charging rent. I can’t keep supporting you. All I’ve got’s my pension, and it’s smaller than the mortgage. So the longer I live, the more I owe.’

  ‘That’s okay, I can help to clear it,’ I said. ‘The window cleaning is going well, and I have a couple of hundred pounds left from my redundancy.’

  ‘We’re talking about thousands of pounds of debt, Günter. The bank won’t give me any more money.’

  ‘Oh. What about Max?’

  ‘Tight as a bunny’s arse.’

  I looked up at the wall clock. It was quarter to six.

  ‘I’ve got to run, but we’ll talk about this later. Eat something.’

  ‘Thanks for your concern,’ he said, eyeing the whisky bottle, ‘but I’ll start what I’ve finished.’

  8

  Miracle Worker

  I arrived at the cathedral a little late. The sun was hitting one side of the building, casting a long shadow which pointed out east like a giant sundial. I walked in through the main entrance, where tourists were milling around, some of them dragging children or dogs.

  I went through to the back where the little office was, and knocked on the door. There was no answer, so I opened the door to find a young reverend goggling at a computer screen. Statistically, it was likely to be either a video of a cute animal or pornography.

  ‘Evensong was at half five,’ he said without looking up.

  ‘I’m looking for Dean Winterbottom,’ I said.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

  ‘Günter Glass.’

  ‘Anne!’ he shouted, still staring at the screen. I very much wanted to see what was on the screen.

  Dean Winterbottom came through from the kitchenette, looking quite radiant.

  ‘Sorry I didn’t hear you come in, my dear, I was just feeding Moses.’ I must have looked bemused, because she explained, ‘Our cat. I found him a few months back wandering around outside. He looked lost, and the vet said he needed lots of tablets, so I called him Moses. We are stewards of all God’s creatures, are we not?’

  She directed this last question at the young reverend, who carried on staring. The cat strutted through and rubbed itself along his leg. He gave it a little kick and it decided to lick itself i
nstead. It probably wasn’t a cat video.

  ‘Come on, let’s take a walk outside. The quality of light this time of year is quite spectacular.’

  Outside, the sun had gilded the tops of the trees.

  ‘Just look at it,’ she said, squinting up at the cathedral. ‘Still beautiful, no matter how many times you see it. You always notice something different.’

  ‘Why has the light stopped flashing?’ I asked.

  She beamed at me and clasped her hands.

  ‘You did say you paid close attention to detail, didn’t you? And you’re good with heights. It’s all worked out splendidly.’

  There was an ominous rumbling in my bowels.

  ‘This job that you mentioned—’ I began.

  ‘We had a very good chap who used to replace the light. It normally lasts a year or two. He’d come every May. But he is almost as old as me now, and he had a little scare last time. It does get windy up there, but karabiners so rarely fail …’ She trailed off.

  ‘I see.’

  ‘It’s not exactly a common job, so I’ve been having a little trouble knowing where to find a replacement. But when I saw you standing there looking up at the spire for so long, I thought I might lean tentatively on God’s Providence. Of course, one mustn’t test the Lord, but I thought I might see whether or not you were one of his little jokes. So I invited you in for tea.’