Glass

by Alex Christofi

  ‘I thought you were just being nice.’

  ‘No, no,’ she said, waving at an invisible fly. ‘It wasn’t anything so trivial as niceness. I had a purpose to deliver, and you were searching for one. “That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been; and God requireth that which is past.”’30

  ‘I’m not sure I follow.’

  ‘There is a right time for everything, Günter, and I believe that you came here for a reason. Whatever you were looking for, I believe you’ll find it up there.’ I looked back up. It really was very high. Four hundred feet, Wikipedia said.

  ‘I suppose I wouldn’t mind doing it, but all I have is a fifteen-foot ladder.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure we can sort all that out. And you’ll be remunerated, of course. We used to pay Mr Giddings a hundred and fifty pounds, I hope that sounds reasonable.’

  I thought of Dad.

  ‘I’ll do it.’

  ‘Sterling,’ she said. ‘Let’s go and get the harness.’

  She set off towards the cathedral, taking me by the arm. We walked through the back office and into a sort of broom cupboard, where she bent from the hips and started rummaging around in an old Asda carrier bag on a low shelf.

  ‘Now what you must do, when you get outside – I was sure I had left it here – there should be two ropes, you see, one for – oh no, here it is, I could have sworn I’d put it – it’s crucially important to make sure that you – and here’s the other.’ Flushed and triumphant, she handed me two sets of ropes and a harness. Her part of the task was over. I wasn’t sure I had understood her instructions, or even whether she had given any.31 We went to the bottom of the spire, and walked upstairs in a spiral so uniform that it made me wonder whether I was travelling at all, or whether I was stuck in a nightmare by Escher.

  After some time, we reached the bell tower.

  ‘The world’s oldest working clock,’ she said. ‘The day this bell stops chiming I’ll be listening for the sound of sixteen hooves.’32

  There was another staircase leading off from this main platform, with a black metal chain on which hung the sign, DANGER OF DEATH: DO NOT CROSS. Dean Winterbottom cheerfully unclipped it and waved me through.

  ‘Good luck my dear, and remember what I said about the ropes. Oh – and do come down if it’s too windy, won’t you.’ She handed me a screwdriver and a red bulb that she’d been carrying, almost like a bicycle light, but much larger. On the back it said AIRCRAFT WARNING LIGHT. I stepped into the harness, tied the bulb to my belt and pulled as hard as I could on anything that looked like it might break or come loose. Matters had progressed more rapidly than I had anticipated. My palms began to sweat. I wiped them on the thighs of my jeans, walking up the remaining stairs, which creaked and grumbled, until I came to a little door, about the right size for a hobbit. I opened it onto the cool evening air. All of Salisbury was laid out before me. Shaftesbury, too. Hardy country, I’m told. Stonehenge and rape fields. It was too high for mosquitoes. If I fell, I would have time to worry on the way down.

  Except that I wasn’t worried. As if for the first time, I felt alive. Of course, you always know you’re alive – rationally you know, you can feel your pulse and think and move and all that – but now, up here, I really felt alive. I could feel my skin buzzing and the sharp geometries of my surroundings hung in the air before me like they were the only real things I had ever seen.

  I looked down at the green, where tourists were swirling like dust. A sharp gust tore at my hair as I located a little metal loop, onto which I clipped my first safety rope. I put my hands on the frame of the door, then got a foot up, turning myself around to face the spire. I looked up at the climb, and tested my weight on the black metal structural ladder. I felt I knew how to do this instinctively, almost as if it was coded in ancestral genes. Another gust wrapped itself around me, and I shifted the second rope on my shoulder. I went one rung at a time, slow and steady, methodically, tantalising myself with furtive thoughts of the drop below. I got to the top of the ladder and took a breather. My fingers were tingling. I wondered how long it had been since I had last eaten, and wiped my palms again, one by one, on my jeans. Here was the spire. I gulped down air. I was at the highest point between the horizons. Beside me in all directions was sky, and beyond that, space.

  The wind changed direction twice in short succession. I held the spire itself and stood upright on the topmost rung of the ladder, trying to get myself steady. I couldn’t see anywhere to clip my second rope – the spire and the rungs were too wide. I unscrewed the first of four attachments on the warning light and caught the screw in the same hand as it fell – a moment of unwonted grace. I did the second and third without trouble, stowing the screws in one of my marsupia, but as I started to unscrew the fourth, with the plastic casing now hanging off, a new gust caught me front on and I lost my footing. I grabbed the spire as the wind took me and, for one fraction of a second, hung in perfect balance, supported almost horizontally by the wind. Then the air under me went still, and I fell through it.

  I caught a rung on my second attempt, hitting the ladder with various extremities as I jerked myself short of oblivion. I didn’t trust that rope to hold a normal adult, let alone someone of my dimensions, so it was a relief to find myself clinging hard to the ladder, held fast, breathing heavily, alive. I had nearly conquered the spire. I would conquer it.

  I climbed the ladder again, removed the shell, replaced the light and, triumphant, took the old spent bulb in my hand. I heard a cheer as from a far-off stadium, and looked down at the tourists, who had converged in the middle of the green. Little pinpricks of xenon flashed out in the murky light, and I lifted the old lamp to show them. If I could do this, I could do anything. I could clean skyscrapers. I was breathing hard. Here a man could really breathe.

  I was in the local paper the next morning.33 There was a photo of me outstretched in the air, one hand gripping the spire, the other wielding the screwdriver as if I were a British Superman, flying in to attack the warning light at speed. Say what you like about Japanese tourists, they know how to take a good picture. I even had a suspicion that my safety rope had been photoshopped out.

  The article itself seemed to suggest that I could be likened to Jesus, because we both had facial hair. This didn’t seem like a fair comparison, although I can’t pretend I wasn’t flattered. And when they had phoned me up about it, I had asked them to mention my window cleaning, so the phone had been ringing all morning. I ended up enlisting Dad as my secretary, because otherwise I wouldn’t have had time to attend any of my appointments.

  When I came home after a long day of cleaning, I was tired. My knees and elbows hurt from the fall, and I’d hurt one of my fingers catching the ladder. To Dad’s dismay, I cancelled everything for the next day and went straight up to bed, taking a mug of herbal tea and a long list of missed calls with me.

  A lot of the people who had phoned were too far away for me to reach by foot, so I had to reject them out of hand. But I did fill up my potted schedule for the week ahead, and confirmed what I already knew: this neighbourhood was mine. If I carried on like this for a few months, I might start making enough to pay the mortgage, and if he found some work too, we could start eating into the debt.

  This had all of the characteristics of a good, solid plan, the kind of plan that a man could live by. Prudent. Except that I didn’t want to be prudent. I wanted to be way up there in the sky, close to the sun.

  As I scanned down the list, one name stuck out from the rest (possibly because my father had written it in capital letters and underlined it urgently. JOHN BLADES. I felt a searing heat run through me. John Blades had called me. John Blades OBE, the man who cleaned half the skyscrapers in London, had called me, Günter Glass, of Glass Cleaning, Salisbury. I should have whooped or punched the air, but as it was, I tiptoed across the hall and went to the bathroom. Those herbal teas go right through me.

  9

  The Spinnaker Project

&nbs
p; The next morning, I ate some Dutch waffles and had a pot of coffee. Then I put on a pot of camomile to calm myself down. I cleared my throat and tested out various professional phrases before my dad could wake up and start goading me. Then, just as I picked up my phone to call Blades, it rang.

  I picked up. A silky voice said, ‘Open your curtains.’ Stunned, I walked across to the kitchen window and pulled a curtain aside. The window was blacked out as if the house were buried under earth. I walked through to the lounge and opened the patio curtains. The patio window was caked with thick mud. Someone had tried to seal the whole house from sunlight.

  ‘You have eight minutes,’ said the voice, ‘to clean those windows. If you can do it, you’ve got the job.’

  ‘What job? Who are you?’

  ‘You know who I am, Günter. Your time starts now.’

  The line went dead, and my heart sprang to life. I hurdled the stairs three at a time and grabbed my belt from the back of my door, fairly jumped back down the whole flight and ran out to the garage, where I picked up a spray I hadn’t used before. The label was filled with orange and black warnings, skulls and crosses, and a tag line (‘wipe filth away for good’). The front said simply, GOMORRAH. I holstered it and ran out to the ladder, which I mounted faster than I’ve ever mounted anything. I took a scraper and chipped at the mud on my bedroom window, which wasn’t yet dry enough to crumble off, flicking it into the flowerbed below. Then I pulled out the GOMORRAH and sprayed it onto the mud in the top left corner. My eyes streamed at the acidity as I worked the panel snaking left down right down left. The mud was dispersing under the assault of the spray and I cleared the window in just over a minute. I almost slid back down the ladder and did the bottom window nearby to save running time, all the while making a mental calculation and deciding that I would have to work quicker. I ran round the bottom windows spraying GOMORRAH, hoping it would start to break up the dirt while I worked the top windows. I checked my watch and it had been four minutes. I was working quickly but it felt like my face was being stung by hornets – it didn’t matter, though, I’d finished the top floor. With one minute to go I raced round the bottom windows scraping with my right hand while I squeegeed with the left. I got to the last window with twenty seconds to spare and finished it just in time to answer my ringing phone.

  ‘How did you do?’

  ‘I finished.’ I looked up at the crystalline glint of the young sun in the windows and wiped my brow with my sleeve.

  ‘You finished?’

  ‘Yep.’ I looked at my ghostly reflection in the pane in front of me, savoured the feeling of steam rising from my cheeks as my glasses misted up.

  ‘Oh.’ There was a short pause. ‘Hang on, I’ll come round.’

  A minute or so later, I heard someone unlatching the side gate. A man appeared wearing tight trousers, a blue silk shirt and a watch that looked as tacky as a market-stall counterfeit. Both his eyebrows and his designer stubble had very defined edges. In fact, they were almost exactly the same length, as if he had trimmed them to match. He gazed at me appreciatively.

  ‘You know Günter, I set you an impossible task to see how you’d work under pressure. No one ever finishes the job. I just wanted to see how you’d cope – whether you’d argue or get on with it.’ He looked around my feet. ‘Where’s your bucket?’

  ‘I don’t really use one. I use an array of fluids.’

  He laughed good-naturedly. He had long canines.

  ‘A revolutionary. Well, you won’t be allowed a bucket with what I’ve got planned.’

  ‘Do you like camomile? I’ve just put a pot on. It’ll be getting on the strong side, by now. It’s been brewing for a little over eight minutes.’

  He set his face and handed me an envelope, then half-nodded, half-bowed, making prayer hands, and disappeared round the side of the house. I ran after him.

  ‘Wait,’ I said.

  He stopped on the driveway. A heavyset man was getting out of a black car.

  ‘People don’t normally follow me,’ he said irritably.

  ‘What is this?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s an envelope,’ he said simply. ‘I’ve got another one of these to do this morning, so I’m in a bit of a hurry, okay? See you there.’ He got in the car, which sped off with a brief shriek of burnt rubber.

  I turned the envelope over in my hands. Dad came out holding his dressing gown closed, badly.

  ‘What in God’s name are you doing? It’s eleven in the morning! How am I supposed to sleep with you banging around the house?’

  ‘You should be up by now anyway.’

  ‘What’s the point? I’m old and I’m tired. What have I got to get up for? And who was that man? What are you holding?’

  Dad was always confused when he first woke up. Explaining would only confuse him further. I opened the envelope. I was being invited, in copperplate,

  To undertake the proud task of cleaning

  The Spinnaker Tower

  on behalf of the City of Portsmouth

  this May 29th, 12 midday

  RSVP spinnaker@johnblades.co.uk

  There were no further details, but I knew I would do it. This delicate gilt lettering was the sign of my ascendancy.

  I went in and drank the camomile, thinking about Blades and listening to my dad’s constant questions about the job, the money involved, whether there was more work coming, and what was for breakfast. When he drew breath I escaped to my room and discovered eleven new emails from Max, who seemed to have been compiling revenue-projection graphs and finding new equipment all night. One of them was a list of his top ten grappling hooks. When on earth would I ever need a grappling hook? The last email read, ‘Just say no. Between emails I’ve been cleaning the house and I’ve rubbed away all the skin on my hands. Coming down now. Typing hurts.’ I knew there had to be a reason why he was being helpful. I wondered briefly about staging one of those quaint American ‘interventions’, but on reflection I decided not to validate him. It was probably just a cry for attention.

  The rest of the morning passed slowly. When I had been unemployed, days had drifted past like clouds or mobility scooters, but now that I was in the habit of being useful, doing nothing was just annoying.

  I went downstairs to get my dad but I couldn’t find him anywhere. I retraced my steps, like Mum would have told me to. I’d put him down in the kitchen in front of some pancakes, but he wasn’t there now. What did I normally do with him?

  I found him curled up back in bed.

  ‘Get up.’

  ‘No!’ he moaned.

  ‘You can’t waste a whole day in bed. What do you normally do?’

  ‘Sleep and watch telly.’

  ‘Well today we’re going outside. Come on, it’ll do you good.’

  ‘Don’t want to.’

  ‘If you get dressed I’ll buy you a pint.’

  ‘Fine,’ he scowled, jumping up.

  ‘I’ll be waiting downstairs.’

  When we got to the pub, we sat for a while in the manner of locals, silent with our thoughts, occasionally scraping the head off our top lips with our bottom lips, or saying, ‘Mm.’ Eventually, Dad rested his palms on his thighs, elbows out. His ‘man to man’ pose.

  ‘Günter, we still need to talk about our home.’

  ‘What’s there to talk about?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m getting red letters. Unless we come up with eight grand in the next few weeks, we’re going to be spending our evenings fighting over Special Brew.’

  ‘Come on, Dad, don’t be so melodramatic. It can’t be that bad.’

  ‘It is that bad.’

  ‘But Mum had savings. She wouldn’t just let us—’

  ‘No, Günter. She had a few hundred pounds.’

  It shocked me that she had not left us provided for. The day I had lost my job to that cruel slump in dairy, she had stopped me at the bottom of the stairs, and stroked me pacifically on my upper arm.

  ‘You will always have a home here,’ she h
ad said. ‘No matter what happens.’

  But here we were. How could I blame her, if she had no way of knowing that she was lying?

  Dad slammed his fist down on the table.

  ‘She didn’t deserve it.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your mother. She didn’t deserve to go like that.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘She didn’t deserve to … we could have—’

  ‘It was no one’s fault,’ I said soothingly.

  ‘But what if—’

  ‘No.’ I put down my pint. ‘Just try not to think about it.’

  He threw back his beer, staring into the bottom with desolate eyes.

  The remainder of my day of rest was spent buying us more beer and playing Scrabble until our stomachs were full and my father finally accepted that gumshoe wasn’t a word. I know he was depressed, but I wasn’t about to give him a triple-word score.

  Over breakfast the next day, I pondered the unique ability of Dutch waffles to get a heart racing so soon after sleep. They were so heavy and sugary that, in all likelihood, my heart was pumping harder just to get the syrupy blood around my body. But just as exercise made me feel unwell, doing things which surely brought me closer to death made me feel truly alive. Perhaps that was why I was genuinely beginning to like the idea of dangling up high.

  I checked and cleaned my gear, hitched it all onto my person, and set out for the train station before dawn. Heading out for work like this reminded me of my days as a milkman, and I felt a warm nostalgia for the job. The depot’s fleet of diesel and electric floats had been a useful and environmentally sound mode of transport, and one I wouldn’t easily replace. It was so hard to act in the world without indirectly harming someone else, or contributing to the net misery brought about wherever humanity flourished. One couldn’t buy from fast-food shops, because they were cruel to their chickens, exploited their workers and deforested the Amazon to farm cows, which in turn contributed to global warming with their imperfect digestion. One couldn’t buy cheap clothes because they would have been made in a sweatshop, but expensive clothes played into the hands of the fashion world, which peddled insecurity as their stock in trade. Besides, cotton was too often grown and wasted on T-shirts that were never bought, and fair trade only served to elevate a few lucky landowners. And if you were rich enough to be buying everything fair trade, you probably had one of those jobs that creates inequality in the first place. Thinking my way through the world’s complex web of injustices as I trudged along Fisherton Street, I realised that the best I could hope for would be to break even on the moral scales. If it was true that people were reincarnated according to their karma, most people must end up as ants. That would at least explain why there were so many ants everywhere.