Glass (6 page)

9

The Spinnaker Project

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
[email protected]

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 had 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.

I passed a man who was asleep in the front seat of his car, the bonnet propped up to reveal the innards. I had a quick look at it, topped the radiator up from my water bottle and checked the oil. All seemed fine to me, so I knocked on the window. He woke up a little startled as I had expected, and thrust the door open hard into my kneecap.

‘Ow! Why did you do that?' I asked.

‘Get the fuck away from me! I haven't got any money. Get away from me now or I'll kill you, I swear!' He brandished a car jack at me.

‘What are you going to do with that? Give me a quote on my undercarriage?'

‘I told you to step away.'

‘I'm only trying to help. What's the matter?'

He studied my boiler suit. ‘Are you AA?'

‘No, I'm … helpful. What's the matter?'

‘I ran out of petrol.'

‘Oh.' I rubbed my knee. ‘There's a petrol station just up by Waitrose, you know.'

‘Is there? Nothing came up on my satnav.'

‘I'm going that way. I can show you.'

‘No that's okay. I need to, ah …' he cast around.

I smiled to prove I wasn't a murderer. ‘Well, have a nice day,' I added as an afterthought. I limped off. One good deed in the bank and the day had barely begun.

I reached the station, found a bench and watched the sun climb steadily. The sun must have made a good god. It had a constancy not often achieved in the average deity, and one experienced its benefit and absence daily. The odd eclipse probably provided a decent unknown variable to ensure worship.

By the time I arrived at Gunwharf Quays, the day was bright and I was hungry. I had the second half of my breakfast in a mock-French café (a buttery, stale croissant), and caught up on some news from an old newspaper. Nick Griffin had been invited to the royal palace as a Member of the European Parliament, and apparently the billionairess owner of L'Oréal, whose father had been a right-wing extremist, had illegally funded Sarkozy's campaign trail. I abandoned the paper on the grounds that it was depressing.

There was patriotic bunting strewn everywhere in preparation for the Jubilee. It looked a bit much to me. I'd always thought one of the nicest things about being English was how quietly we held our pride, as if flag-waving and shouting the anthem were faintly embarrassing and, old and wise as our country was, we'd got that kind of adolescent demonstration out of our system two hundred years ago.

I watched the people of Portsmouth go by. They were a good-looking bunch. I have often thought that people are more attractive outside of one's home town – it's like you're on holiday, and you get that spontaneous, carefree sense that you might never meet again. Either that or I come from an ugly town.

After a time the heavyset man appeared and motioned silently toward the others. We walked the few hundred metres down the quay, with seagulls hurling abuse above our heads and a ferry honking out to sea. The Spinnaker Tower loomed up ahead of us, a giant white spear dominating the quay, twisting up like DNA into the sky. It looked like a lighthouse from the future.

I had thought that there would be a whole team of us, but as it turned out, we were just three including Blades. Dressed in a yellow hard-hat and a boiler suit done up to the waist, he had the spry build of a rock climber, and I felt not a little ashamed at the hairy gut peeking out between my buttons.