Glass (19 page)

I ticked ‘Other' and wrote ‘German-Welsh with a British passport.' If I could slip one of these in my pocket, I could definitely build some kind of legal case. The blond man came round and collected them all, snatching mine from me before I could complete the thought.

‘You'll now be handed a spray with a karabiner which you need to attach to your belt in case it falls. It's a new fluid we've developed in the lab especially for this building. Titanium dioxide in this one,' said Blades. ‘It's hydrophilic so it washes itself. Then we've got another bottle for the inside, to regulate the heat passing in and out.'

‘Sounds like hairy bollocks to me,' said Pete.

‘Why don't I explain a little more simply. Once we're done with the windows, they're going to look nice and clean and shiny. So keep the bottles safe.' Blades gave Pete his biggest, smarmiest grin.

Next we all put on our regulation gear (I was still wearing my sidekick holster, naturally) and stood together in a circle, singing the national anthem. We were given little sheets to sing from because Blades was adamant that we sing all five verses. I had to bite my lip, though no one else seemed to find it funny. One moment we were singing about everyone in the world being brothers, and the next we were singing about scattering our enemies.

I sidled over to Pete and asked if he wanted to form a pair.

‘Sorry guys,' cut in Blades. ‘Can't have two from the dominions pairing off; you might try and revolt. Pete, you go with Albie. Glass, you're with me.'

Each pair was given zones or echelons, each echelon covering the same surface area, but since the building was thinnest at the top, these zones were longer, and the zones near the bottom were short and wide. Blades and I were at the very top, not because it was harder – if anything, it was easier, as we didn't have much horizontal ground to cover – but because Blades was the boss and we were going to record the whole event. It suited his ego to place himself above the others, and for my part I was thrilled to be at the summit. Once we had clipped ourselves onto the cradle and climbed out into the cold morning air for our first drop, I caught my breath. The sun had risen high enough to fling shadows across the ground, and the Thames glowed orange, like a lava flow. To my west, I could see the shadow of our building draped across the plaza, other offices, roads, parked cars. My shadow was thousands of feet away, and I was here, perched on a taciturn sundial. In the sunlight, in the air.

‘So Günter,' said Blades. I turned and he was holding the camera to my face. ‘How does it feel to be a thousand feet up?'

I smiled. ‘It feels good. It feels really good.'

Blades panned across to show the whole view as it spread itself out before us in every direction.

‘Just being up here makes you feel successful,' he whispered to the camera. ‘I feel like a god, and down there' – here I followed the camera downwards and felt a dizzying rush of vertigo – ‘that's where all the little office workers do their little jobs. Look at them, running about like ants.'

From on high, it all looked utterly insignificant. Blades put his thumb and forefinger in front of the viewfinder and squashed one. I just managed to pick out Frank's car, but had a sudden urge to sit on the floor of the cradle, to cling to it with my hands. A horrible feeling was spreading across the back of my skull and my testicles lurched up into my body. I tried to breathe. My palms began to sweat. Blades was still smiling and muttering sweet nothings to the camera as he turned and I felt a wave of nausea when I realised that he wasn't clipped on. I was stuck up here on a platform six inches thick with a psychopath and not even the birds could hear me scream.

I had to master myself. I looked at the very tip of the building, and then at the horizon. They were my anchors. It was all a matter of perspective. I tugged on my safety rope for assurance, and it took the strain. I tried not to think about whether I did, in fact, weigh more than a hundred kilos. Below me, I could see an endless field of clear blue glass, glistening like a Mediterranean sea, and I let it calm me. Little windows of simplicity, multiplied along a grid so that each was as the others, following a pattern, knowable always. I looked across at Blades and realised he had been filming me.

‘Takes your breath away, doesn't it?' he said, showing a bit of canine. His teeth were a little too white. I wondered if he'd had them whitened. Was there such a thing as artificial purity?

It was beginning to dawn on me quite how big the job was. We'd get it done in a couple of days, because there were so many of us, but there were tens of thousands of square feet to cover.

‘How many windows are there?'

‘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.