Confessions of a Window Cleaner (18 page)

“Oh, yes. Did I? Well, if I did, I did.”

“You asked me in the pub, last Saturday.’

“I’m not disputing it,” her voice is sharp, “I just didn’t recognise your face, that’s all.”

Her tone implies that all window cleaners look the same, like coons or chinks.

“You’d better get on with it. There’s a tap round the back of the house by the kitchen door. Careful with the flower beds, they’re full of bulbs that haven’t come up yet and mind the climbing roses. Don’t lean your ladder against them.”

Big deal. I don’t know why I bothered. Mrs. E. is obviously intent on cutting me right down to size, if she remembers me at all.

It’s a pity, because she’s wearing dark glasses and smelling like a pouf’s birthday party, and her tits are practically sitting up and begging.

Something about the old twin set and pearls always gets me going. I feel as if I’m part of England’s heritage: “Remember, Ambrose, the Duke must never know, but since his accident I have realised that he cannot give me the heir the line so desperately needs. So I have decided that, for the sake of the de Pommefrites, I must take you, who exemplify all that is finest in the English male, to my bed. Come, put on this blindfold and take my hand—”

I can just see it, can’t you? No? Oh well then. Neither can Mrs. E. so I wouldn’t worry about it too much.

I flug round the back of the house and start bashing the windows as if I intended to set a new world record. They’re all cleaner than a mermaid’s tit anyway, so I’m wasting my time in all directions. However, I can’t very well burst into tears and buzz off. I’m effectively hoisted with my own pederast as Sid would say.

In this situation I become careless, and from there it is a short step to becoming injured. I lean too far, the ladder slips and my hand goes clean through the bathroom window. It’s not a deep cut but there’s a lot of blood and it obviously needs binding up. There’s nothing for it but to report to Mrs. Evans. I shin down and rap on the back door which is opened almost before my hand has touched it. Mrs. E. is standing there with her purse in her hand and an expression not unlike that worn by the Duchess of Bloodshot when the first charabanc of the season arrives.

“How much—” she is starting to say when she notices my hand. “Don’t drip all over the mat,” she squeaks, “hold it over the flowerbed. Oh, dear, you haven’t been leaving a trail of blood round the side of the house, have you?”

“I didn’t bother to look,” I say. “If you can give me a rag I’ll go and wipe it up.”

“I’m sorry. But you know how I like to have everything just right.” So she does remember. “Blood is so terribly messy, isn’t it?”

“Yes it is, and I’m afraid there may be a bit more upstairs. I put my hand through the bathroom window.”

You can see that the news really distresses her and she can hardly wait to wrap a bandage round my wrist, before scooting off to see what the damage is. When she returns it is with one of the bathroom curtains over her arm.

“I’ll put this into soak,” she says, “It should be alright. Oh, dear,” she is looking down at my feet, “you should have taken your shoes off. You’ve left mud everywhere.”

There is a bit of exaggeration but on her highly bulled surfaces a gnat’s heavy breathing would show up. The whole place looks like a new set of doll’s house furniture. It’s so clean it’s unreal. When I think of Mrs. Chorlwood and her cats, my mind boggles.

“How is that bandage holding up, it’s not going to start leaking again is it?”

“No, I don’t think so.” She’s only worried about the floor, of course. “You’d better have a cup of tea, and then I can think about finding someone to mend that window. My husband is hopeless at that kind of thing.”

I tell her not to worry because I will do it and we have a cup of coffee because that is what she really wants and she is obviously a lady who is used to getting what she really wants.

I then take my shoes off and put on a pair of George’s slippers and go upstairs to measure the window. I’m not allowed to clean anything up because Mrs. E. knows I wouldn’t do it properly. The rest of the house is just like the kitchen. Everything spotlessly clean and nothing left lying about to break up the straight lines and smooth surfaces. In the bathroom even the shower hose is neatly coiled and there are no bars of soap or toothbrushes beside the wash basin. You feel it would upset everything if you had a piss.

Mrs. E. is down on her hands and knees winkling out bits of glass and just for a second our eyes brush against each other. Her breasts swell forward and I can feel Percy making an ugly rush in the same direction. Luckily I can control myself and scribble down the window dimensions on a sheet of newspaper before scooting off to get another piece of glass and some putty.

It is raining when I come back and I take great care to leave my shoes at the back door before padding upstairs. A few minutes with Mrs. Evans and you’ve got the message. There is no sign of her so I chip out the splinters of glass from the window frame and set to laying a bed of putty. I am so engrossed that the sound of water pouring into the bath sparks me off like an alarm clock ringing. I turn round and find Mrs. Evans standing there wearing a wide-sleeved, silk dressing gown and a pair of slippers. For a moment I think she’s going to hop into the bath but before I can get my pulse back to normal she’s dropped the blood stained curtain into soak and gone out. What a funny woman! She must be highly strung, or bonkers or something. Why the hell has she taken her clothes off?

I replace the window pane and go downstairs. Mrs. E. is finishing the washing up and I notice she even empties the sugar bowl back into the tin marked – wait for it – sugar, and then washes the bowl. How finniky can you get? I should think that if she ever has it away with her old man she must make him wear a surgical mask and put his cock in with a pair of forceps. I can see that she will be able to supply her own rubber gloves.

“Well, that’s that,” I say, “Sorry to cause you so much trouble, but it’s alright now. I don’t think I left any blood anywhere.” She ignores that and pulls her gloves off so that they make a loud smacking noise. Her index fingers flex like long, thin insects.

“Before you go, there is something I would like you to do for me. Can you fix light bulbs?”

“I can screw them into sockets.”

“Good. There’s one gone in the coal cellar and I can’t replace it. If you can put a new one in I’ll hold the torch.”

“O.K.”

So we trip down some stairs beside the kitchen door and Mrs. E. bustles along in front of me her dressing gown brushing against the bannister. She’s got a good body on her, I have to admit that. Too much sand in the bottom half of the hour glass but you can’t be too choosey, except now perhaps, when it’s not on anyway.

She opens a door at the end of the passage and I can see coal glinting in the darkness.

“Dirty.” she says, but it seems to me that there’s more relish in her voice than distaste. Must be my imagination. She switches on the torch and I can see the light socket hanging down like a piece of black fur. The ceiling is low and its no problem reaching it but some joker has left the remains of the last bulb in the socket so I’m struggling again. Suddenly the torch starts to waver and I hear the rustle of clothing. I turn round to see what the trouble is and – there is Mrs. E. silhouetted in the doorway, stark bollock naked. It’s no accident either, because she advances towards me and I can see areas of soft flesh picked out in the back glow of the torch.

Funnily enough, my first reaction is one of fear because I’ve never felt the same about cellars since I saw ‘Pyscho’. My state of mind is not improved by Mrs. E. dropping to her knees and gripping one of my thighs with something like the intensity she showed when scratching me in the boozer. Maybe she’s got a carving knife concealed behind her back. Just to be on the safe side I sink down beside her and run my hands lightly over her body but all I come up with is a light bulb.

“Put it in,” she moans. This request opens so many possibilities that I’m at a bit of a loss as to what to do. Surely she doesn’t want to have it away here? Not the very clean Mrs. E. But maybe that’s it. Maybe, hygienically sealed away from the world, a very dirty lady has been trying to get out.

Her breath smells of toothpaste and there’s no better indication of a woman’s plans for you. I take the heavy fruit of her breasts in my hands and even in the darkness I can see she looks as if she’s been lying in black sand. Her nipples come up like champagne corks and she sinks back into the coal dust and starts unpopping my jeans.

I’m about to chuck the bulb away but she makes it clear she wants some light on the subject and when I’ve fixed things I find that red must be her favourite colour. The bulb gives off a soft pink glow so the cellar looks more like Father Christmas’s grotto than the remains of last years’ coal supply.

By now I reckon I must be dreaming the whole thing, and when she starts writhing in the coal dust I know I am.

“Come down here, come down here,” she begs. Some might refuse but Percy has become a bit of a handful and I know that in this mood it is pointless to try to control him. So, off with my jeans and down I go, and – oh! what fun takes place. Mrs. E. is a very selfish lover but you don’t mind when she is obviously enjoying herself so much. I mean, for a man, the pleasure has got to be in making someone else happy, hasn’t it? Otherwise we’d all get the problem off our tiny minds immediately and have a nice kip.

By the time we’re finished, we’re blacker than a bus conductor’s finger nails. If Al Jolson saw us he’d be on to his lawyers within seconds.

“Now what?” I say and it’s a fair question. Unless she’s got a shower in the coal cellar her lovely clean house is going to look like her old man is a chimney sweep who brings his work home with him.

“Over there,” she snaps, and it’s obvious she’s reverting to type faster than most. “In the corner you’ll find some plastic clothes bags. Put one on and hop up to the bathroom.”

So help me, she says it just like that. As if she’s telling you where to empty the waste bin. I think she’s joking but when I get over there it’s just as she says. A pile of bags with a sash round them saying ‘One dozen suit or costume containers. Keep away from children’ etc., etc. Feeling like a right Charlie I put one on and start shuffling upstairs. Something inside me makes me almost wish George would come in as I’m hopping past the front door. I think maybe it’s that there are only four bags left in the pile and I’m wondering who the other four blokes were.

When I left Mrs. Evans’ place I was still feeling dirty. Not physically, you understand, because Mrs. E. had taken great care to see that there wasn’t a smidgeon of coal dust on me. There was a shower in the bathroom, a proper one with a frosted glass door and Mrs. E. had taken me inside it with a bottle of shampoo and – Well, you can imagine, can’t you? The lather; the warm, wet bodies rubbing against each other; the slippery fingers gliding everywhere. I was putty in her hands – no, not putty. I do myself a disservice when I say that. What I mean is, she had me again, just as she presumably had all the other blokes. I had played my part in her kinky games and when it was over I was patted on the head and sent on my way.

It began to dawn on me that I wasn’t screwing anybody. All these birds were screwing me. When I thought about it, most of the birds I’d been with had made me fit in with their plans. Their fantasies, or whatever, never changed; only the man who took part in them, and he could have been anyone.

Nothing wrong with that except that it was getting more and more complicated and I was never doing things my way. Having it away in the coal cellar was the last straw. A few more like Mrs. E. and I’d probably only be able to do it standing in a bowl of custard with a rose behind my ear. I could see it affecting my relationship with Elizabeth. Nice, simple girl like that, it would break her heart if she knew what I was getting up to. Imagine, on your wedding night having to say, ‘I’m sorry, love, but you’ll have to hang upside down from the lamp bracket before I can do anything – oh, and don’t forget to put on your riding boots.’ I mean, it would put the mockers on everything, wouldn’t it?

I think that was the moment I made my resolve to give up all the frigging about and settle down.

“It’s got to stop.” I can remember saying the words out loud so that an old lady at the bus stop almost jumped out of her skin and I got embarrassed and tried to cycle on and cracked the back window of the van in front with my ladder. The bloke was very nasty about it and I was still thinking about some of the things he had called me when I got home.

When I arrive, Mum is rolling out pastry in the kitchen, and she looks at me with that ‘I’ve-got-something-to-tell-you’ expression on her face.

“Lady left a note for you,” she says.

“Who was it?”

“I don’t know. She didn’t stop. I just saw her walking away.” Nobody in the world is faster off the mark than Mum when she hears somebody near the front door, and she has eyes that can see through curtains two inches thick.

“She looked like one of those hippies to me. Got some kind of leather cowgirl costume on and a ton of beads.”

“Well, I’d better read the note, hadn’t I?”

“She went off with a black man on a motor bike.” Mum speaks the words as if she expects to be struck down for blasphemy. She doesn’t go and see a lot of Sidney Poitier movies, does Mum.

“I reckon it must be Sandy. My friend Miss Rachel Devroon to you. She has a lot of time for Spades. She says they are much more exciting lovers than white men.”

“Oh! Timmy!”

I have said that strictly for Mum’s benefit and the reaction is exactly as anticipated.

“How can you say such a thing? I hope you aren’t being silly, are you? You don’t want to get into bad company again. Remember what happened last time.”

“No. O.K. Mum, you’ve made your point. Now where is this letter?” Eventually I get it off her and, as I expected, it is from Sandy. ‘Superthrash. Tonite. Ten till then. Now is the time for all good pokes to come to the aid of the party. So please do. Luv, Sandy.’ Of course it’s typical, isn’t it? I’ve no sooner decided to give it all up and live happily ever after than a bloody great load of temptation lands in my lap. I haven’t seen Sandy for weeks and now she comes bouncing back into my life. I hold the letter up to my nostrils and breathe in memories. Mum looks worried.