by Lisa Blower
I shook my head at her. I’d no idea.
‘Doesn’t even need a ladder,’ she sniffs. ‘Privacy you see, Arnold. Professional privacy.’
‘I see,’ I stutter out. ‘So what’s next? Bloody skyscrapers?’
She smirks so hard it cracks her lipstick. ‘You should ask him come do yours,’ she says. ‘Because you might’ve been a window cleaner once, Arnold Bunter, but you can’t clean your own for bloody toffee.’ And she struts out of my house and into the day as buoyant as you like.
I go and dream of our wedding day again that night. Wilf goes to me, ‘I’ve forgotten the rings on purpose, lad.’ And my hands are shaking and I’m fiddling with the lilacs in his buttonhole and that’s when I whisper in his ear: ‘I promise.’ Because Wilf only came home from the war because of me. He’d been that terrified he’d actually lost his sight and then a fair bit of his mind. So, I made him the sort of promise that only exists between men who’ve seen war.
But then the trumpets start up and there’s Petal, all on her own at the back of the church in her homemade frock and breaking her heart. I’ve never forgiven Petal for arriving like that. That sort of sympathy takes over your heart. When I turn about Wilf’s gone. I shout his name but I’ve no voice and I’m rooted to the spot and the vicar puts his hand on my forehead like he’s blessing me and goes, ‘You know what you are son? The boy who cried Wilf.’ I wake up soon after, sweating cobs I am. Pillow’s drenched.
I was still mithering about that dream when I drew the front curtains the next morning; I almost missed it:
BUNTER’S WINDOWS
clean, transparent & smear-free
In big yellow capital letters it was, slapped across the side of that navy blue van. We had a ladder and a bucket in my day. Kind hearts who’d give you a cup of tea and a squirt of Fairy Liquid to sweeten you up for a bit of gossip about the new folk at number twelve who were either a pound short or never in when you wanted paying.
I sank into the armchair and wondered what to do. Though perhaps what I should do is put a few things straight:
Window cleaners aren’t just window cleaners. They’re neighbourhood watch. Age concern. We see everything. We know what you’ve got. And we’ve got a bit of time of day too. So if we see something we shouldn’t or think you’ve not got what you thought you had, then that time of day is what we give the Old Bill. Solved many a crime have us window cleaners. I even caught a bloke with his pants down before his second stroke. He’s ninety-nine now. Tells me if he gets a telegram from the Queen he’s going shove it up my arse.
But I didn’t choose to be a window cleaner. I was going be a plumber. After the National Service, of course. That was my father’s trade. Plumbing. And drains. Was partial to a bit of guttering as well in the winter. Some men won’t climb a ladder, you see, and leaves, when there’s a lot of them, can stop a train in its tracks. No. It’s was Wilf’s old dear who gave me the idea. ‘I’ll never know what my husband sees in you, Arnold, but I see straight through you like a bloody dirty window,’ she once said. I never liked the woman, she only ever saw everything for what it was, but I’m decent enough to thank her for that.
Of course, she’s not the only one to think like she does. The quacks will tell you different. And the quack that was sent round after Wilf took his last breath had me housebound and tagged which, he says, is cheaper for society than being locked up. Though I’ve never owned a computer. You can think what you like, but I can promise you that I wouldn’t even know how to switch one on.
I chose April Fool’s Day to go round next door in the end.
‘I know I promised but I need a word’—and how I got those words out I don’t know for my hands were shaking like a hedgehog in a log-pile. ‘Can I come in or you come in to mine? I’ve got some things I’d like to say.’
He’s aged not so well close up, our Joe, bit too whiskered for my liking, hazelnut eyes, biscuit skin, the spit of his father back in the day, when I could still turn a few heads, and he’s put a lot of weight on around his middle. He just stands there leaning against the doorframe and shoves his hands in his pockets. Defiant little bugger. He should’ve felt the back of my hand there and then.
‘You really want to do this on the doorstep with all these nets twitching?’ I says.
He thinks on. He weren’t ever the cleverest stick in the bundle, hardly going to set the world alight, but he steps out of his house and shakes his shoulders as if he’s limbering up for a box. Blimey, I think, as I back away. What’s this to be? A punch-up in the street? And he’s a much bigger man when he’s stood outside the house, looks as heavyweight as a dead pig.
‘Come on now, son,’ I say. ‘It’s been thirty odd years. You and me need to leave this past behind.’
‘No, you come on,’ he snaps, and he goes to the van and unlocks its doors.
It doesn’t take him long to get going. Starts on about all this newfangled window-cleaning equipment. This pipe here is what gets rids of all the impurities and this part here absorbs all the dirt from the air, while this filters the water, over and over, up to four times until this siphons off all that’s contaminated: the stuff we want rid of and can never clean up. It was like looking at a chemistry set. ‘Shame we couldn’t have filtered you four times back then,’ he chides. ‘Might’ve kept my dad a man then.’
Now here’s where I might have a bit of explaining to do. I’ll start by saying that he wasn’t well was Wilf. Cancer had got him by the throat. His wallet was in the back of his trousers on the bedroom chair and his Mrs had gone see her mother. So I went upstairs and sat on the bed, asked him if he needed owt fetching from the chemist or the ale shop and he pulls me towards him and says, ‘You promised me, Arnold Bunter. You made me a promise in a house of God that you’d stop all of this.’
I said, ‘I know, lad. But I’ve a disease with no cure too.’
He says, ‘Then kick the bucket, Arnold. Like I am.’ And he reminds me: ‘We always said we’d go together.’
‘That was in war, lad,’ me now reminding him. ‘We was seventeen then and shit bloody scared. And don’t let us forget that if it wasn’t for my pair of keen eyes, me and they wouldn’t have made it this far.’
He pulled us in for a hug then. He well remembered that bit and I’d saved his life a good many times. So much so, he patted my back with the last of his strength.
But outside, our Joe had climbed up my ladder. Little nipper thought he was helping his old man out. Christ knows what he thinks he saw because he says to me that night, ‘When it’s my round, Dad, I’ll be cleverer: have a bigger ladder than anyone. Then I can see everything that’s going on, what everyone’s up to, what everyone thinks they’ve got. Just like God.’
Never spoke a word to me after that. Told everyone what he thought he saw and never stopped. You’d hear this, you’d hear that: Petal believed it all, Joe wouldn’t even look me in the eye, and that was that. No more cleaning windows.
‘I’d rather have dirty bloody windows than be able to see what you really are, Arnold Bunter,’ some said. But there were no open minds back then.
Then, as it happened, next door went and came up for sale. I thought to myself—if that’s not God telling me to stay put then I don’t know what is. I was able watch my lad grow up from the bedroom window. I couldn’t ask for any more than that.
At least that’s my version of it, but as Wilf’s Mrs was always keen on reminding me: ‘Remember Arnold, you can see through a window both ways.’
It was no use me trying to make sense of all this new equipment. I didn’t really care what our Joe did and how he did it. I was just chuffed he was back. So I says, ‘The thing is lad, what you think you saw that day, between me and Wilf, was a promise between men who’ve seen war.’
He comes towards me. So close I can smell the Fairy Liquid on him. ‘I know what I saw,’ he says. ‘What sort of man you are and what you’ve seen since.’
‘Son,’ I says. ‘What I like to see isn’t what I like
to do.’
But I could tell he was still convinced it was more than that. So I pointed at the hose system in the back of his van.
‘Get this up and running then,’ I says. ‘Go on, son. Finally get it out of your system and see if it works.’
He never even asked if I was joking. He just started up that equipment, unleashed that hose and blasted me to kingdom come with God knows how many gallons of that purified water. But I’ll tell you this for nothing. However hard that water came at me and knocked me down, four times filtered or not, I still got up on my own two feet and faced him.
I couldn’t tell you for how long he did it. It was over thirty years’ worth of pent-up rage and a fart of wind that’d blown Wilf’s bedroom curtains aside for Joe to see what he thinks he saw. Like I told my son then as I tell him again now: ‘I was a window cleaner for a reason, son. Better that than going down any of those other roads you can go down. But you carry on thinking what you like. Just come down from that ladder one day if you can. Be nice for me and you to have a pint.’
‘But that’s just it, Dad,’ he says. ‘I don’t need a bloody ladder.’
And he turned his back on me, coiled up the hose, turned everything off, closed the van doors and walked back into his house.
Pick Up Your Socks
From the Bride to the Groom
WHEN I THINK ABOUT love, I am picking up your socks. This is not the only pair that I’ve found. They are here, on the stairs, and there behind the chair. There’s a pair stuffed in your boots. I trace a smell to a purple pair, inside out, and there’s a hole, in the sole, so I throw those ones away. I find a sock in the washing that has no other, and it’s this one I think about. It must’ve been part of a pair: you or I will have bought a pair of socks to wear as a pair. So where did it go?
I emptied the sock drawer in case the odd sock was there. But there was no one sock. Just pairs. Twelve years of our socks, actually. Socks we wore here and took there. Black socks. Striped socks. Ankle socks and tights (those are mine, at least, I hope they are mine).
I realise that we wear each other’s socks now. We no longer care for which are yours and which are mine. We share everything else. And now even our socks. My left to your right. My right is your left. But we no longer need those sorts of directions. Socks are always one and the same. And yours are more comfortable anyway.
Then a little voice asks for her socks—‘A blue one,’ she says. ‘And an orange one. Just like Daddy.’ And she’s putting on a sock of yours over one of hers, though perhaps it’s one of mine. No. It’s one of ours, and it’s definitely the one I thought we couldn’t find. It’s far too big for her, but we let her wear it, pulled right up above her knee. It makes us laugh. She laughs too.
‘We’re a three-sock family,’ she says.
And I realise that’s what odd socks are for. When a pair becomes three. None of this yours and mine. But our sock drawer.
The Land of Make Believe
YOU TRACE IT ALL back to £5 worth of Woolworth’s vouchers you don’t spend for a year.
You eventually get Bucks Fizz on cassette because Look-in gave it 10/10. You sing along with the wooden end of the skipping rope in front of the full-length mirror in your mum’s bedroom. Stars in your eyes. Little one. Where do you go to dream? To a place, we all know. The land of make believe. You are Cheryl Baker. You only learn the words to her parts. You paint your nails the colour of a goldfish, just like Cheryl Baker. Oonagh Macnamara, who’s as fat as her name, says it looks like you’ve been smoking. Dirty fagger, she says and gets everyone to chant—Dirty fagger, dirty fagger—and no one will sit next to you because you stink of fags. So you sit on a desk that juts out on a table for four like the fifth member. ‘Everyone knows that the best groups are always a four,’ says Oonagh. The Fab Four. Abba. Bucks Fizz. ‘You’re just the groupie,’ she says. ‘And everyone knows why they’re with the band.’ And those are her mother’s words as you’ll come to know that this is what girls do.
Mum says you can use her nail varnish remover but don’t use all the cotton wool. Both cost money. Everything, you remember, costs money. Even Mum. Her nail varnish remover smells like pear drops and stings at where you’ve chewed at the skin around your thumbs. You sing ‘My Camera Never Lies’ with the wooden end of the skipping rope in front of the full-length mirror in your mum’s bedroom until your mum flicks the trip and plunges the house into quiet. Your tea is on the table. You never do as you’re told and you’re the oldest, Dee. Set an example because I’ve got to go to work. And as she puts on her lipstick like she’s chewing a wasp she tells you again: You’re too clever for your own good and you’re wasting it already because Cheryl Baker isn’t even Cheryl Baker. Her real name’s Rita Crudgington and don’t ever forget who you are.
You are nine years old. You have a birthday party and invite all the girls from your class. Pass the parcel. Pin the tail on the donkey. Musical bumps, because the house is too small for musical chairs. And you don’t have enough chairs anyway. Oonagh Macnamara gives you a birthday card and no present. Inside the card it says I do not like you and I do not like your house, it smells. Love Oonagh. She watches your cheeks burn as you read it. The picture on the front is of Victoria Plum. She tells you it’s a card for babies and you think she’s so cool and wish you could be best friends. She sits on the edge of your settee with her arms folded. Pass the parcel is for babies. Musical bumps is for babies, and why haven’t you invited any boys? Then she flounces towards the stereo and demands: What’s this crap? You tell her it’s Bucks Fizz and sing: If you can’t stand the heat, keep out of the kitchen. If you can’t stand the cold, don’t sleep on the floor. She wants to see your bedroom so you show her.
You share a bedroom with your two sisters Sasha, who’s five, and Colette, who’s not yet four. You have three beds all in row with Care Bear duvet covers that you are too old for. It goes Funshine, Daydream and Love-a-lot bear. You sleep with your duvet cover inside out and tell your sisters stories about a bluebird called Bryony who’s Welsh and slightly deaf. You can’t remember if you told those stories with a Welsh accent, just that when it got to the parts when Bryony misheard something—‘Trump, sir? Bluebirds don’t trump! Oh dump! Yes, I agree. It’s a right dump round here’—both your sisters would kill themselves laughing because according to them you are the funniest person in the world.
According to Oonagh you’re the filthiest person in the world. ‘And you’ve had the same trainers for ages,’ she says, slamming the door on her way out.
Later, Mum asks why your trainers are in the bin. You blame Sasha and Sasha blames Colette. Sasha gets shouted at and bawls. So does Colette. You lock yourself in the bathroom and clean your teeth until your gums bleed and your toothbrush looks like you’ve been scrubbing drains.
Mrs Chew, your teacher, introduces you to the Reverend Chew, her husband, who gives you a copy of the Holy Bible. The cover is made of white satin wallpaper and the words ‘Holy Bible’ are stitched in silver. Inside, on the front page, someone has written ‘I shall never question who I am’. It’s only now that you realise what a grand percentage of your life you have wasted in doing exactly that, but turn that house upside down and you will never find that bible. That is gone too.
When you are ten you are still the eldest of three. It goes Mum, you, Sasha and Colette. You are doing your maths homework. Your mum says: if one man has two apples and another has three, and as your mum counts the apples you count the men. Then she tells you that you’re getting a new baby for Christmas which will make you five. You yell, ‘How? Why?’ but that’s another thing your mum says you’re too young to understand.
So you tell her that you do understand because Oonagh Macnamara has drawn you a picture in your maths book: a stick-man with a line between his legs that pokes at a stick-lady’s tuppence. You’ve told Oonagh that everyone knows that babies come out of your bellybutton which unravels and opens up like a flower, but Oonagh pointed to the stick and said, ‘A million of
them have poked your mum.’ She also tells you that there’s no Santa and no tooth fairy and that’s why you’ve got such disgusting yellow teeth, ‘Hooker spawn,’ is what she said.
The new baby arrives on Christmas Eve so Christmas gets all forgotten. You only eat Quality Street because Santa got to your house last and had run out of wrapping paper and new tellies. You get Bucks Fizz Greatest Hits which you play on repeat. Side 1. Side 2. Side 1 again. Your mum calls the new baby Iona without asking any of you if that’s OK. You never get told who her dad is, though Iona asks and asks and all through her life until she and Mum stop speaking completely and she doesn’t even come to the funeral. But you know it’s not your dad or Sasha’s dad because you’ll never meet them, and it can’t be Colette’s because he’ll be in prison soon for robbing your old telly. So it goes Mum, you, Sasha, Colette and Iona, and you do not get that battery-operated toothbrush for Christmas even though it was the only thing on your list.
You’re leaving school for the next one. You have to go and see the headmaster, Mr Aliss, and your mum is sat in his office wearing a man’s overcoat and you hope that she’s got more than underwear on underneath. You instantly think your nan’s died. She’s in a home called Cheddleton that you tell no one about because it’s the funny farm. When you go she tells you that you should care for nothing but boys and petticoats and calls you our Ruthie which you’re not. She squeezes your hand so tight all your knuckles go white and says, ‘They’re robbing me, Ruthie. They think I don’t know. But I do. They’re robbing me blind.’ And even though you’re not our Ruthie, because that’s your mum, and your nan has nothing to rob because her room is bare and just white, you tell her that you’ll take her home where she can squeeze in with you and one of the nurses has to come and prise your fingers from hers.
