He placed the Street View icon – an orange figure – on the Underground station and moments later a picture filled the screen. The sky in the scene was grey, the street shrouded in a premature dusk. As Jack mouse-clicked along the road to the station, the sun came out, heightening the colour of an orange windscreen-repair van – the model identical to the Clean Slate fleet – being tailed by a red lorry which blocked his view of the station. He clicked on down Ballards Road, hoping to see around it, which of course he could not as this was not real life. His street atlas was dated 1995, but on Street View he found office units and streets that in the atlas were depicted as blank space. The A13, which in his book had an estimated completion date of 1996, was finished; his A–Z charted the past. When he walked its designated routes he walked in the past; or as far back as 1995. He took scant comfort that sprawling car compounds were still there sixteen years after his map was published. He brought up the satellite version – from the air, the metallic hinterlands of cars and coaches appeared as ploughed fields where once, long before his A–Z, there had been marshes.
Sparrows skittered on the sill behind him. Jack told himself that he could lean out and crush them in his fist. The drone of a car engine did not distract him as he clicked the cursor behind a black estate car up Rainham Road. In the next click the car vanished and he had the road to himself. He spotted a police car parked on a grass verge almost concealed by bushes and glimpsed the wrist watch of a phantom officer in the passenger seat raising raised an arm to his face. Tomorrow he must look out for the car and skirt this part of road. He clicked back to the station, the sun disappeared and once more black cloud descended. Outside Dagenham East station, the red lorry was still there. Jack shut the machine and slipped it back in his bag.
Stella Darnell had let Jack work for her; he had jumped the biggest hurdle but it meant he could not justify staying with Ellen and Michael any longer and must prepare his next move. This was sad: he had enjoyed his days here. He had grown to know their habits, their likes and dislikes. When the couple were at work he and the spiteful Burmese cat had the house to themselves.
At night Ellen shut the curtains in the garden room to keep the next day’s light off the piano. Unless Jack was already upstairs, he had to freeze on the patio until they had gone to sleep and he could creep in. Tonight after finishing at the dentist he slipped in only minutes before Michael.
The couple had been together for twenty-two years and their dynamic was set fast; Michael wielded absolute supremacy, forcing Ellen to sneak around the edges for slivers of freedom. Like many couples they could have married, if only to cement the emptiness, yet neither of them had the heart even to do this.
Jack swung open a louvred door and retrieved the tin he kept hidden behind their photograph albums – Michael’s proof of a good life led – and a tower of shoeboxes bulging with tape cassettes rendered defunct as audio technology outpaced them. The other door had jammed shut, which was Jack’s first clue that the house was in limbo. Like Isabel Ramsay’s, the soffits were peeling and cracked; loose drainpipes shivered on gusty days and clogged gutters groaned with the weight of mouldy leaves.
His tin held his trophies: cut-out figures from newspapers, magazines and clothing catalogues, purloined plastic solders, foreign coins, pressed flowers and a spirit level – apparently innocent boyhood treasures. He had added curling passport pictures and photographs prised from albums bound with an elastic band. Some evenings, feeling despondent, he would deal them out in a game of Happy Families. Their faces populated his dreams like the faces on platforms before he took his train into a tunnel and they were snuffed out.
Even a detective would have difficulty drawing a conclusion about Jack from his biscuit-tin collection. A teaspoon – borrowed, he never stole – from a woman who had poisoned her cat. She used it to stir her bedtime cocoa, a ritual she followed regardless of events. She no longer needed it. Nestling in the bowl of the spoon was a springy bundle of hair gathered from a brush. One morning each year he sniffed the brittle clump to strengthen his resolve. He did so now as his courage waned; it was painful to leave his Hosts. He lifted the top from a miniature oak box and counted three milk teeth; relics from a childhood not his own. Jack was their guardian. Every object held a snatch of life. He tilted the box to the light. At the bottom of the tin lay two postcards, one showed Hammersmith Bridge from the Barnes end and the other was a longer shot of the bridge with pontoons and a sailing yacht in the foreground. The address side of the cards were blank; on the left of each, scrawled in swift turquoise italics, were the words ‘11 a.m.’
In a matchbox, a cabbage-white butterfly rested on a bed of cotton wool. Jack had borrowed the butterfly from Nat, the set designer, whose flat had hung with crucifixes, masks woven of small-boned creatures and the heads of animals hunted by irrepressible Victorians. The man’s collection of medical monstrosities in their stoppered jars had given Jack hope. He had gazed at the cirrhotic liver, the tiny amputated limbs and the pallid foetuses floating in formaldehyde and been sure this was the man with the mind like his own. The flat was kept dark and cold to preserve his Host’s artefacts; his flirtations with mortality a celebration of life.
One night after Nat had gone out – Jack did not like it when his Hosts abandoned him – he found an ornamental cage on the dining-room table. Within its delicate structure were a hundred cabbage whites on white branches or clinging to the bars, their wings folded. Many lay dead on the floor of the cage, a carpet of soft petals. Nat had procured them for an interior scene with no colour meant to depict a lost past. Jack had since seen the film in the cinema. In the film the butterflies were still alive and he had wanted to snatch at the screen – as he had seen old Isabel Ramsay catch dust particles – and save them. He could not tell which butterfly was the one now in his box of trophies.
He had been certain of success when he’d spotted Nat on the Goldhawk Road at two in the morning retrieving a dead cat from the gutter and dropping it into a bag. A few days later Jack came across a poster like a Wild West bill stuck to a lamp-post that appealed for the safe return of a much-loved pet,dead or alive. Jack grew excited about Nat and supposed the feeling – his senses heightened to appreciate beauty in all he saw – was like being in love. He had found a like mind; happily he accepted Nat’s unknowing hospitality.
But, brushing the butterfly’s wing, Jack recalled how after a week he had struck up conversation with Nat in the basement bar he frequented after work. Like himself, Nat had few friends. He ordered the same drink as Nat – people are at ease with those like themselves – and sat nearby. It was Nat who spoke first and soon he was rabbiting on about himself, never noticing that Jack offered nothing in return. Nat had been born in Chiswick, he knew the area well; everything fitted. Jack ordered them both a second glass and raised a toast. When the barman snapped up the empties Jack nodded him a thanks, but Nat ignored him. Jack frowned. Despite it fitting the profile, he disliked impoliteness.
The bar was filling up and they had to shout to be heard. An hour and four drinks later Jack received a blow. Nat had moved to Sydney the day John Lennon was shot in December 1980. The Australian film industry was taking off and he got constant work, only returning to Chiswick when his mother died in 1991. Jack’s mouth filled with sand, and the room spun. Nat had wasted his time. With the flip of a coin, what had passed for love switched to hate and blindly he made his way to the flat and packed up his things. When he shut the front door and set off to look for a new Host Jack’s tin of trophies included the white butterfly.
He regretted that their parting was so abrupt he never said a proper goodbye to his Hosts.
This was three months ago and now Nat’s flat – free of effigies and corpses – was occupied by a new tenant. Jack still had a key, but it was no longer home.
He would despair that the rest of his life might be constructed of blind alleys and false alarms; of treachery and disappointment. Ellen’s piano music drifting up from downstairs had brought h
im solace and so he had stayed.
He lifted out his latest acquisition: a rounded lump of green glass an inch in diameter, its flawless surface twinkled like a jewel. Minute droplets of air suspended in its centre completed its perfection. Isabel Ramsay had passed it on to him. It was a shame that their time together had been cut short.
The wardrobe contained Ellen’s summer clothes. Stale perfume pricked his nostrils. Maintaining the illusion of one life while leading another was onerous and Ellen was lying to her lover as well as to Michael, citing traffic jams and complex clients as causes of delay; she was a solicitor, so truth was there to be managed not upheld.
Michael had only to cook, clean and garden, book holidays and pour wine to bind Ellen into domestic expectations and stipulations as a spider wraps up a fly. Theirs was a charnel house whose lines and shapes Ellen tried to blur with glasses of red wine and clouds of cigarette smoke before sinking into numbed sleep strictly on her side of the bed. Michael was a shell in which the sound of the sea was revealed as the thud of blood pounding which will one day stop.
Jack sang softly to himself:
A time to be born and a time to die…
The piano music had stopped; Ellen would come upstairs to check for texts. He clambered into the wardrobe. The change was fractional; someone had added the tartan anorak with frayed elasticated cuffs and a rip in the hood that should be on a hook in the porch. Who had brought it here? He examined the anorak’s stiffened fabric and found Ellen’s flip phone was in the pocket. She kept her phone on her so there must have been a development for her to have hidden it here. Any minute she would come in. He shifted until he was concealed amongst the clothes.
The message icon was flashing.
‘Miss u. Can we mt Snsbrys CrPk. Usual time. For 5min?
The text had just been sent. Ellen had put the phone on silent; he had yet to see her make a mistake. For the first time it occurred to him that only a particular kind of mind could retain such varying levels of being. But he was looking for a man.
A time to kill and a time to heal…
The phone’s Inbox was empty. Ellen left nothing that might implicate her and had dubbed the man ‘Dentist’. Michael knew the name of their dentist and could check the number in her address book and see it did not match. In one of the coincidences that made life so good Jack had seen that their dentist was Ivan Challoner.
So far Michael had not got hold of Ellen’s phone, but it was a matter of time. Placid and patient Michael Hamilton would one day wield the claw hammer he stored in the toolbox under the stairs. Unless Jack could stop him. Most of the time he liked to blend into his Hosts’ households; sometimes, like now, he must intervene and bring matters to a head.
Jack could not play the piano, but his texting was dexterous and swift. I’m going to leave. Ring on main line in 5. Ellen xxxxxxx. Jack pressed ‘reply’.
He dropped the handset back into the anorak pocket as the bathroom pipes swished. Right on cue, the main-line telephone clanged throughout the house. Ellen burst into the room, making for the cupboard. Jack hugged his knees. If she pushed aside her anorak and looked behind the boxes it would be over.
She gasped. She had seen that the text had been opened.
Jack nearly cried out. Michael was standing in the doorway. He had not heard him come up the stairs and Ellen had not heard him either. She jumped when he spoke.
‘Phone call for you.’ His voice grated; he was holding out the receiver.
He knew.
‘Say I’ll call back.’ Ellen slammed the wardrobe door, stuffing her phone into her back pocket.
‘Why?’ Michael allowed himself a tinge of irony.
‘Oh, OK, pass it.’
Through the coats Jack could see Michael’s fish stare and his cheeks pink and puffy from wine. He handed Ellen the phone and moved aside for her. He was looking at the louvred cupboard doors.
He knew Jack was there.
‘Hello? What? What are you doing ringing… no, I don’t need any. I don’t take sales calls.’
Silence.
‘Who was that?’
Ellen elbowed past him. ‘Double-glazing.’
‘He asked for you by name.’ Michael spoke softy, remaining where he was.
‘I must be on a list.’
‘We have the telephone preference service. You should report it.’ For some reason tonight Michael was pushing it. Jack felt sick.
The piano resumed.
Michael walked over and shut the cupboard door properly, slipping the catch into place. Jack could see him, looking about the room, before he too returned downstairs.
Jack felt his own phone vibrating. He did not recognize the number.
‘Hello?’ He cupped his hand over the mouthpiece.
‘Stella Darnell.’
Stella Darnell. Her voice was tremulous; she must be on her way somewhere; working even when she was walking. She would hate dead time.
‘Can I call you back?’ he whispered. ‘I’m on a train.’
‘That’s better, I can hear you now.’ She was irritable, as if it was Jack’s responsibility to be audible. ‘It’s just to say you’ve passed the probation.’ She was pausing for him to be pleased. Jack had to work out how to lift the catch on the cupboard door from the inside before Michael returned.
‘Mr Challoner wants you to clean every week. Come into the office tomorrow to sign a contract and collect your schedule.’ Stella did not ask if he was free. Jack liked that about her.
Through the receiver came the chimes of bells; he would know them anywhere. There was background chatter: a pub, he guessed; there were three near St Peter’s Church.
He knew where Stella was and why she was there. Jack pushed at the wardrobe door and it gave way with a crack. He had broken the lock.
‘Thank you for having me,’ he whispered to his Hosts, stowing his trophy tin in his bag.
He was almost disappointed not to find Michael on the landing.
The piano filled the gaps between speech blaring from the television. Both doors were shut; light bleeding beneath them allowed him to creep to the understairs cupboard. He opened the flap on the concertina tool box. The claw hammer was heavy and split a couple of stitches in his coat when he crammed it into his pocket.
The front door made no sound – he had oiled the hinges – and he stepped outside. It was snowing and he kept to the edge of the path although flakes were falling fast and soon all sign of him would be erased. On the street, he paused to look back at the house that had been a home, its windows gold squares of welcoming light then strode away humming:
A time to plant and a time to uproot what is planted.
Jack disliked goodbyes.
18
Thursday, 13 January 2011
They were alone. The chilly receptionist, a woman in her late fifties, had gone for the night and in a casual tone Ivan Challoner invited Stella up to his flat for a drink. They were, he said, both off-duty.
That afternoon Stella had hired a recruit without vetting him to clean a space she had not seen; it would be sensible, she told herself, to inspect Jack Harmon’s work, so she broke the handbook rule of not socializing with clients, and accepted.
She would not call him ‘Ivan’, despite his invitation to do so; she did not forget that clients were not friends however well she got on with them. If Terry had taught her anything it was to keep her distance. Mrs Ramsay had been no exception, she had assured Jackie.
As they mounted polished wood stairs, Stella tried again to identify Challoner’s aftershave but could not. While he fetched drinks, she dabbed the surface and underside of a coffee table, traced her forefinger along the picture and dado rails, the skirtings and the rim of the door. Quickly she inspected behind the sofa: there was not a fibre, crumb or hair. With short dog-like sniffs she detected beeswax and tea tree. She did not imagine Ivan Challoner allowed dirt to accumulate. It was obvious that every object had its place: the gilt-framed mirror replicated a jade figurine
of a winged horse set on the centre of the tall boy and on the walls paintings and etchings were positioned beneath discreet down-lights. Jack Harmon’s skill had been to maintain this elegant precision.
Jack was the best cleaner Stella had ever hired and she reminded herself not to tell him this.
An unlit chandelier hung from a rose plaster moulding, droplets of glass trembling in the light of two Chinese table lamps. Stella disliked dim lighting: it hid bacteria and stains; however, tonight she was soothed by the crimson velvet curtains pooling to the carpet eliminating the hum of the South Circular. As in Challoner’s surgery, the world beyond was far away. She sank among silk cushions on a sumptuous sofa and forgot about Paul. Her gaze took in dark green walls, plump plaster cherubs plucking mandolins or clasping single blooms emerging from the shadows. She forgot Terry too.
Rousing herself she got up and peered at a painting of fuzzy blocks. A label on the frame named the artist as a Mark Rothko, which meant nothing to Stella for whom art was a trap for grime and germs. The rectangles of mauves and black did not justify the beautifully polished frame although the indistinct shapes found echo in her throbbing jaw as the painkiller loosened its grip. As she retreated to the sofa once more she knew she would avoid offering comment on anything in the room. She was wise enough not to pretend expertise, and anyway, Clean Slate’s handbook forbade staff to remark on a client’s premises beyond a non-committal: ‘This is nice’. Cleaners are, it instructed, Agents of Change. A client does not want Clean Slate operatives to apply judgement, taste or prejudice while in their home or office. Cleaners are visitors. Do not forget that clients are our Hosts.
No client wanted his or her life filtered through the wielder of a steam cleaner or carpet sweeper. Stella confined her assessment to how much a place cost to clean. Estimating the complexity of the work required to keep Ivan Challoner’s plush sitting room intact, she fretted she had undercharged.
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