yourself. I’ll see you alright. It’ll be a sort of tit for tat won’t it?”
She looks at me a bit hard but I give her my brotherly smile and I don’t think she suspects anything.
A few minutes later she goes to bed and I have my Ovaltine with Mum. It makes me think how I could have used all that malt, milk and eggs and added vitamins earlier in the evening. I can never understand how the stuff is supposed to give you more energy than you know what to do with and yet help you to sleep at the same time. Mum pushes off and I take a quick shufty in the hall stand where Dad keeps all the dirty books he’s ashamed to bring into the house. Things must be bad down at the lost property office where he works because there’s not so much as a censored copy of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ let alone the hard core porn he thrives on. Dad and his mates down at the L.P.O. are on to a good thing because, knowing that no one is ever going to come round and confess to having lost a fully illustrated copy of ‘Spanking through the ages’ they nick everything juicy they can lay their hands on.
My room is at the top of the house; in fact if it was any higher my head would be sticking out of the chimney, and I have to go past Sid and Rosie’s room to get there. Normally, at this time, I would be treated to the sound of creaking springs, but tonight I can hear Rosie rabbiting away and Sid making occasional muffled grunts that sound as if he’s got a pillow over his head. I hope she is getting stuck in on my behalf.
I lie in my bed, naked, and listen to somebody’s wireless playing a few houses away. Or maybe they’re having a party. Now that I don’t need it I’ve got a bloody great hard on and when I think of Silk Blouse, or even Aunty Lil, or any of the millions of birds who must be lying alone in bed and feeling like a bit of the other, I’m bloody near bursting into tears.
When I come down the next morning Sid is sitting there with his hands wrapped round a cup of tea and he’s giving me an old fashioned expression that tells me Rosie has been getting at him.
“Morning” I say agreeably. Sid doesn’t answer.
“You going down the Labour today?” says Mum.
“I went yesterday” I say. “I don’t want to look as if I’m begging.”
“Well, don’t leave it too long, dear, you know what your father is like.”
I help myself to a cup of tea and ask Sid for the sugar. He slides it across very slowly without taking his hand off the bowl. I think Paul Newman did it in ‘Hud’ but I can’t be certain.
“I had a talk with your sister last night,” he says.
“Oh, really.”
“Yes, I thought you’d be surprised.”
“Well, I didn’t know you talked to each other as well.”
“Don’t be cheeky” says Mum.
“Don’t suppose you’ve any idea what we were talking about?” says Sid.
“No.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Well it was about what we were talking about yesterday.”
“Really? Oh, interesting.”
“Yeah. And to stop us poodling on like this any longer I might as well tell you that I’ve agreed to give it a go.”
“Great!” I say. “Ta very much. You won’t regret it.”
“Um, we’ll see.”
“What you on about?” says Mum.
“Sid and I are going into business” I say. “I’m going to be a window cleaner, Mum.”
“That’s nice, dear. Do you think he’ll be alright, Sid?”
“No” says Sid bitterly, “but you don’t expect much from a brother-in-law do you?”
“Now Sid,” says Mum, all reproachful, “that’s not very nice. That’s not the right spirit to work together in.”
“It’s alright, Mum,” I say, “he’s only joking, aren’t you, Sid?” Sid can’t bring himself to say ‘yes’ but he nods slowly.
“Today, you can do your Mum’s windows” he says, “It’ll be good practice for you. Tomorrow we’ll be out on the road.” He makes it sound like we’re driving ten thousand head of prime beef down to Texas.
“That’s a good idea” says Mum, “I was wondering when someone was going to get round to my windows.”
Sid gives me a quick demo and it looks dead simple. There’s a squeegee, or a bit of rubber on a handle, that you sweep backwards and forwards over a wet window and that seems to do the trick in no time. With that you use the classical chamois and finish off with a piece of rough cotton cloth that won’t fluff up called a scrim. It seems like money for old rope and I can’t wait to get down to it. Sid pushes off to keep his customers satisfied and I attack Mum’s windows. Attack is the right word. In no time at all I’ve put my arm through one of them and I’m soaked from head to foot. The squeegee is a sight more difficult to use than it looks. Whatever I do I end up with dirty lines going either up or down the window and it gets very de-chuffing rearranging them like some bloody kid’s toy. When I get inside it’s even worse because the whole of the outside of the windows look as if I’ve been trying to grow hair on them. That’s what comes of wearing the woolly cardigan Rosie knitted for me last Christmas. I get out and give the windows a shave and then I find that there are bits that are still dirty which you can only see from the inside. I’m popping in and out like a bleeding cuckoo in a clock that’s stuck at midnight. Inside at last and I drop my dirty chamois in the goldfish tank and stand on Mum’s favourite ashtray which she brought back the year they went to the Costa Brava. By the time I’ve cleaned up and replaced the broken window-pane – twice – it’s dinner time and I’m dead knackered.
Sid drops in to see how I’m getting on and you can tell that he’s not very impressed.
“At this rate,” he says, “you might do three a day – with overtime.”
“Don’t worry,” I say. “It’s a knack. It’ll come.”
Sid shakes his head. “What with that and your lousy sense of direction” he says. “I’ll be surprised if you last the first day.”
But he’s wrong. It doesn’t go badly at all. Sid starts me off at the end of a street and gives me a few addresses and though I’m dead nervous, I soon begin to get the hang of it. I drop my scrim down the basement a couple of times but there are no major cock-ups and nobody says anything. A few of them ask where Sid is but on the whole it’s all very quiet. In fact, if I wasn’t so busy trying to concentrate on the job I’d be a bit choked. After what Sid has led me to believe, these dead-eyed old bags look about as sexed up as Mum’s Tom after he had his operation. Curlers, hairnets, turbans, carpet slippers, housecoats like puke-stained eiderdowns – I was expecting Gina Lollamathingymebobs to pull me on to her dumplings the minute I pressed the front door bell. Perhaps Sid was having me on or perhaps, and this is much more likely, its some crafty scheme to con me into the business for next to nothing. Sid hasn’t been over-talkative about the money
