‘Eleven thousand,’ Blades said. ‘Here.’ He handed me the camera. ‘Film this.’ Then he grinned, got up onto the safety barrier at the side of the cradle, swung his legs over and sat on the edge holding a metal cable with one hand. He pulled out a sandwich, dangling his legs over the edge. ‘You know what they used to call the guys who clean skyscrapers?’ he asked the camera. ‘Sparrows. We’re city birds, and we don’t mind being perched up high. Lovely morning for it, eh?’ He took a bite and chewed smugly. He always sounded a little bit mockney when there was a camera pointed at him.
‘Will you just clip yourself on, please?’ I snapped, closing the camera. It was bloody heavy. I thought cameras were supposed to be light these days.
Eventually we had to actually get the windows clean, so we got out the cleaning sprays and the new lab spray and set to work.
‘So Günter, you speak German?’
‘Nope.’
‘Great shame, great shame. Beautiful language. I know some people can’t get on with all the Krüppels and Fidschis but it’s a good, solid language. Has a lot in common with English actually, more than you’d think. You know, Hitler was actually quite fond of the English.’
I gritted my teeth and carried on squeegeeing, trying to maintain my concentration. Find the corners. Top left, right, down, left, down, bottom right, flick. Wax on, wax off.
‘Your dad’s era was made to feel guilty,’ he continued. ‘Not that they had anything to be sorry about. That was part of putting them down the second time, people were afraid to identify with the losers. Afraid to be patriots. It’s the same thing you get over here, red-blooded Englishmen running scared, afraid to say anything in case the PC brigade have them thrown in jail. You know what the two of us have in common?’ he said, looking sidelong at me.
‘I honestly have no idea.’
‘We’re afraid of our own flag. No one wants to see it. But the thing is, you Germans had a chance at national unity and you blew it. Now England needs a shot, I reckon. We’ve got to band together, send the foreigners all a message. It’s all a question of finding the right moment, and making an event happen, something that will unite the nation. You know, the 9/11 attacks were a tragedy, but there’s nothing like feeling vulnerable to make a people unite. Can’t help feeling we’d benefit from a bit of Blitz spirit.’
I felt another wave of dizziness.
‘Sometimes,’ he continued, putting down his squeegee and levelling the spray at me like a gun, ‘I wonder if a bit of direct action might be in order. I mean, after 9/11, they had every reason they would ever need. They had carte blanche to really fuck the Arabs.’ Still pointing the spray at me, he closed one eye like a sharpshooter and quickly spun to face the window, the momentum causing the cradle to shudder. And then he seemed to snap out of it, sprayed evenly and methodically, working his way down the pane. We fell silent.
At the end of the day, my arms and legs were shaking with the long effort of soaping and wiping. The activity might look Zen, but try doing it without touching any of the glass with your hands, spraying and subsequently wiping the whole pane in under eight seconds so that the fluid doesn’t dry and stain, and then repeating it a hundred times with your crazy boss watching you.
I unlocked the second front door to find Dad in the kitchen frying three big steaks in beer. He seemed positively energetic compared to the last time I’d seen him. Maybe it was all that sleep. And, notably, he was cooking. At least there was nothing flammable left in the flat.
‘All right, Dad?’ I asked.
‘All right, son. The worker returns,’ he chuckled.
‘You’re a bit drunk, aren’t you?’
‘Oh, lay off, will you. I’ve only had a couple of beers. I had to open one for the steaks.’
‘They look good. What’s it going with?’
‘I dunno. We’ve got some bread in the cupboard, steak sandwich?’
The bread was mouldy.
‘That’s okay, I’ll have it on its own.’
‘We’ve got some ketchup in the fridge.’
‘Ketchup doesn’t need to be kept in the fridge.’
I wanted to give him a hug, but he’d only burn himself on the pan. Best wait until he was done. He was wearing boxer shorts and I noticed a great purple welt all over the outside of his knee. My coccyx flipped.
‘How’d you get that?’
‘Oh, it’s just a graze.’ He didn’t seem too bothered, though it looked painful.
‘You should have it looked at,’ I said.
‘Oh, leave off,’ he replied.
Let thorns be thorns, I thought absent-mindedly. Stood next to him now, I could see his cheeks sagging like a bloodhound’s, a stoop shaping him like an old lamppost, the light at the top friendly but dimming. His remaining hair wisped up like a dust devil at the top of his head. Old age was catching up with him: a tragedy without a hero.
‘Glass the Younger returns!’ cried the Steppenwolf, stepping through from his room. ‘Come, we have much to celebrate.’
He poured me a whisky, which I took reluctantly. As I took a sip, I could feel it killing my cells, poisoning me, corrupting. I looked at how it had ravaged my dad. His skin hung from him like clothes on a washing line, draped as if it might slip to the ground in a stiff wind. Still, the whisky was calming my nerves.
A few minutes later, we sat together round the paint-stricken kitchen table, steaks on plates, all medium rare with a little frozen bit in the middle, which the Steppenwolf and I ate round, but which Dad didn’t seem to notice.
‘Dad?’
‘Yes, son.’
‘You know when you were clearing out the back garden, when I was a kid, and I knocked all the thorns off the rose bushes so you wouldn’t hurt yourself?’
‘What?’
‘You remember. In the summer. Mum was sunbathing and you cut your hand and I spent hours knocking all the other thorns off with a hammer to make the branches safe. And Mum said sometimes you have to let thorns be thorns.’
Dad shrugged. ‘No idea.’
‘Oh.’ I had always thought of it as an important chapter in our family history. It had never occurred to me that it could be otherwise.
‘She was probably just saying that so you wouldn’t cry,’ Dad said. ‘You were very sensitive, you know? Everything had to have a reason. You wouldn’t watch films where bad things happened. Your mum would always sit there covering your eyes and ears. I said to her, It’s the world we live in, it’s not like he’s never going to find out.’ He wiped at an eye with the ball of his thumb.
Oh. That’s all I could think. Oh. Now that he put it like that. Because … If you really believed the world could be a better place, and you could make it so, you wouldn’t just let thorns be thorns. You would only be afraid to go near them if you secretly believed in their power to hurt you. If your decisions were hemmed in by that belief. If the best you could hope for in life was to keep the boat from rocking. Oh.
‘I have started the first of my new projects,’ said the Steppenwolf, failing to recognise my seldom worn utterly crushed face. ‘Enough with the days of contact. My job now is to be in contact always. First I will write a polemical defence of feminism. Then I shall embark on my great opus, a work on mass psychology. It will explain why we are all automata, and why we are doomed to act as if we were not. I am also working on a book of aphorisms. Listen to this.’
Dad seemed grateful for the interruption. We had picked at the scab, and now he wanted to stick it back on. The Steppenwolf took out a leather notebook which looked like it had survived both world wars, and opened it at a random page. ‘War is an autoimmune disease, and we shall destroy our host through misplaced efficiency.’
‘That’s why I like you,’ said my dad. ‘You’re a mad bastard and you don’t care who knows it.’
‘I feel so liberated by truths, and it was you, Günter, who did it. Nothing is on solid ground. Truth is context. Glass is neither solid nor liquid. Neither and both.’
�
��If you can knock someone out with it, it’s a solid,’ said Dad, punctuating his own aphorism with a frothy burp.
‘I am always right because I am always writing only with what knowledge I possess, and I do not intentionally tell untruths. Only liars are wrong.’
‘Well, you can’t always be right …’ I began.
‘Yes! We are all right! Facts do not exist, only interpretations.’
‘That wasn’t really what I was—’
‘Yes! It was what you were saying, only you didn’t know it. I have thought on this for a long time. All truth is relative. Apart from that last sentence. Which is. Ah …’
He paused, perplexed. He got up, walked over to the charred remains of the bookcase and trailed his fingers along the crumbling spines.
‘We’ve lost him,’ said Dad.
‘He sometimes does this,’ I explained.
‘Oh, by the way, I had an email from Max today about—’
‘I didn’t know you had an email address,’ I said.
‘Well, Max likes to send me website links every now and then. Oh, don’t look at me like that. You never asked, Günter.’
Dad slouched up – being the only man I know who can slouch in any direction – and got out my laptop.
‘What could Max possibly have sent you that’s of interest? You never do anything except sleep and get pissed.’
‘The bloody cheek!’
Furious, he took a swing at me. He had grown old, but I had grown fat, so I couldn’t avoid the blow, but it didn’t hurt, either. His bony fist was simply quilted by my face.
‘There’s more where that came from. Bloody nerve.’
Then he picked up the dregs of the bottle of whisky and his phone and stumbled out.
The front doors slammed and the Steppenwolf awoke from his reverie.
‘I have reached a logical cul-de-sac.’
I was standing, holding my cheek, my whisky glass knocked to the floor. My dad had never hit me, not even when I was a child.
‘Where is your father?’ he asked.
‘Gone.’
‘Where?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘And you are not accompanying him?’
I thought about this. ‘No …’ I said eventually. ‘I think I’m going to stay here.’
We sat down side by side, and I picked up my laptop. I thought I might check whether Blades had uploaded any of the day’s footage. I typed in ‘Northwoods’. First result was Northwoods Property. Just below it was a Wikipedia article: Operation Northwoods. The preview contained the words ‘false flag’. Oh dear. I clicked.
It was a declassified CIA plan from 1962, to hijack planes, crash them into a US landmark and blame it on Cuba, so that they could start a war on the basis of a credible threat. Luckily, JFK told them they were nuts, and vetoed the plans, and everything was fine again. Not for him, obviously.
‘You look worried,’ said the Steppenwolf.
‘Yes … I think my boss might be trying to blow up the Shard.’
The Steppenwolf bared his yellow teeth, and shook his head sadly.
‘To build an edifice is human: it is difficult, it takes thought and care. To tear it down again is easy: childish, godlike. The power will always be in the hands of those who refuse to create, those who scatter us across the earth.’70
I was used to the Steppenwolf shouting. What I did not like was the eerie calm that had descended on him now. It was a kind of beatific resignation.
‘Do you want to come with me tomorrow? Help stop him?’
But he just shook his head. ‘It has been too long.’
‘You’ll have to go outside some time. You know that.’
‘No.’
‘Maybe I can find someone who you can talk to about your agoraphobia. Figure out how things got like this? I think it would be good for you.’
The Steppenwolf put his hand lightly on my shoulder. ‘Günter. It is thoughtful. I know some people like to draw from their wells very often and keep the water fresh. But I prefer to throw in rubble. I am hoping that, if I wait long enough, I may strike oil.’
Dad trudged in penitently later that night, and we apologised to each other. ‘Do you want the good news first, or the bad news?’ he asked.
‘Bad first,’ I said. Better to sugar a pill than ruin a perfectly good sweet.
‘Well, the bailiffs have already sold some of our things, your mum’s included.’ I put my hand on his shoulder and led him over to the sofa. ‘Max went down to sort things out with them and it seems they’ve been a bit overeager.’
‘Right. Dare I ask what the good news is? Let me guess. Max happened to be going to the foreclosure auction anyway?’
‘Well, there were certain things they couldn’t sell, and in among your stamps and keyrings and all that useless junk were our life insurance certificates.’
‘I didn’t know I had life insurance.’
‘Neither did I. It seems that your mother must have set them up for us, God rest her soul. It’s not a nice way to get hold of it, not a nice way at all, but it turns out we’ve come into a lot of money. We can hopefully get the house back eventually … and, uh …’ He looked back at the door nervously. ‘Well, good news. So I’d probably better …’
‘Where are you going at this time of night?’
‘Max is waiting in the car. He was going to take me back to Salisbury. Didn’t want me to tell you he was here.’
‘What? Max is outside? Oh, for goodness sake. Tell him to come in and stop being such a child.’
Dad looked down.
‘You are both my sons, Günter. Which, incidentally, means you are brothers. It wouldn’t kill either of you to act like it every now and then. I’m not saying he can’t be a bit of a nob sometimes, but let’s be honest, so can you. You need to cut each other some slack, because one day I’m not going to be around and I don’t want the two of you to end up communicating solely through the small claims court. Now,’ he risked a sidelong glance at me. ‘If I bring him up, I don’t want any squabbling. I will ask him not to act like a bloody lout, and I am asking you now not to be …’ He tilted his head in lieu of a sensitive wording.
‘What?’ I said. ‘What did I do?’
‘Just … Tone down that whole eco-warrior, know-it-all, lord-on-high thing you do.’ He went down to get Max and I heard nothing at all while they argued. Then car doors, and two sets of footsteps. The Steppenwolf raised his eyebrows at me. I supposed this was probably a house-party, by his standards.
Dad and Max were installed on the sofa, and I sat on an empty crate.
Tea? I signed (in the universal language: miming the act of tipping a cup all over my front). Max sighed.
I don’t expect an apology, he signed.
What for? I asked.
For anything.
I haven’t done anything, I protested.
That’s why I don’t ever expect an apology. I think you honestly don’t believe you’ve ever done anything wrong, ever. You know, puppies only remember their behaviour for about three seconds, so you can’t punish them when you come home and find out they’ve shat all over the house. They won’t make any link at all, they’ll just get upset. That’s basically you.
I looked at Dad, but he hadn’t been keeping up.
I’m an incontinent puppy? I signed.
See, even now you’re getting upset. You’re just not very good at taking criticism on board, and that’s okay. He gave me his Counsellor Max smile and held my hands. He might have meant it in a comforting way, but it felt more like he’d put his hand over my mouth. No response required. He broke away.
I took care of everything with the house. I looked through all the paperwork trying to find something that we might have missed and I found the life insurance certificates. They were difficult at first, asking why we didn’t claim straight away, but I’m sorting it out, and I’ve made sure that no more of our stuff will be auctioned off until we can clear the debt and get things back to normal.<
br />
He held his hands palm out. This was his magician’s punchline.
Okay, I signed. Glad that it’s cleared up. His eyes went wide. What? I asked. Do you want a round of applause? What else am I supposed to say?
First he started trembling, then he jumped up and drummed on my chest with the blade of his fists as if he were a wind-blown traveller beating upon the door of a forbidding castle.
Just once in your whole life, I wish you would say, well done, you did the right thing. No, not that. That’s not the problem. I wish that you would pay me your full attention. I can’t just swan around meeting people everywhere I go, no one ever speaks sign so I have to vocalise and they look at me as if I’m diseased. There were three people in the whole world that I cared about, and now there are only two. One of them is always asleep, and the other one will only deign to look at me if I challenge him to a battle of wits, or if I tell him something interesting. Do you know how exhausting it is to have to try and be interesting all the time, just to hold your attention?
I didn’t say anything for a little while. Mostly because I was surprised. It hadn’t even occurred to me that our fights had had an emotional impact on Max.
Say you’re sorry, signed Max. It will be good for you.
I lifted my hands.
Sorry, I signed.
Good.
I am, I signed.
Good.
Thank you for finding out what was going on. You are a good brother, I signed. I’m glad to have you as my family.
You wouldn’t be saying that if Mum was still alive, Max replied, so don’t start now.
I got up, nodded. It’s late.
I should go, he signed, standing.
I didn’t mean that. Stay, I signed. Please. We can talk more tomorrow.
I got Max a blanket for the sofa and said goodnight to the Steppenwolf, who had been regaling Dad with the colourful history of the urinal in the corner of the room.
As I undressed and brushed my teeth, I tried to picture what my life would be like if my mother had lived. Dad would be sober. I might never have visited the Cathedral. Perhaps I wouldn’t have met Dean Winterbottom, Blades, or the Steppenwolf, or Lieve. I wouldn’t be approaching fatherhood, or climbing the tallest building in the country. I would be a different person. Happier, perhaps. Or perhaps just different.
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