“Not if he does it at night.”
“Look a bit funny, won’t it, having a bonfire in the middle of the night?”
“Why don’t you all wait till Guy Fawkes day and then get Sid to stand on the fire instead of a guy?” I say. “By God, I’ve never heard such a load of cobblers in my life. Can’t you see that Sid is having you on? There’s nothing under my bed except fluff. I wouldn’t have believed you could have thought so little of me.”
I knock back my tea and push the chair away from the table. They’re all a bit quiet now and Mum and Rosie are definitely looking guilty. I decide to blow my nose to show them how affected I have been by their unkindness and remove my handkerchief with a flourish. Trouble is that in my hurry that morning I have grabbed a hanky down from the clothes line in the kitchen and – yes, that’s right – it’s not a hanky, it’s a pair of Rosie’s drawers. I notice the expressions on their faces first, and honestly, I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. Even Sid looks at me as if I’ve got blood running down my chin. A glance shows me what I am raising to my nose. Light blue, with a touch of grey lace round the bottom. I start to say something but it’s no good. Everybody is still staring at the knickers like they’ve started ticking. I throw them on the table and Rosie shrinks back in her chair. None of them will say a word. I start to speak again and their eyes slowly swing up to my face marvelling that they could have lived with me so long without suspecting. There’s no point in going on so I stumble out.
I don’t know what they say when I’ve gone but I do know that to this day the subject of underwear makes my mother wince and you don’t see any bras or panties hanging up in our back garden.
As the next few weeks go by I realise that there are quite a few Dorothys about, and I begin to be able to recognise the kind of bird who will be asking you to help her move the dressing table from one side of the bedroom to the other, five minutes after she’s opened the front door. She’s usually been married about seven years – take it from me, the seven year itch is no fairy story – and the last of the children has just begun school, so she’s suddenly got a bit of free time on her hands. Her old man is a dead end nine to fiver, and she’s as bored with him as she is with having nothing to do. She’s read all the stuff in the Sundays about wife-swapping and troilism and she reckons that not only must it be alright to do it but that she is the only bird in the world who isn’t. She’s also unlikely to have thrown it around much before she got married so she reckons she missed out there too, and is dead keen to make up for it. Her trouble is that until she’s done it a few times she’s liable to confuse her natural desire for a bit on the side with love, which can stir up all kinds of problems. Once a customer starts baking cakes for you, or slipping bottles of after-shave lotion in your pocket, you’re better off giving it a miss, believe me.
I remember poor Sid going through a very embarrassing period with this bird who started coming round the house and asking if he could do her windows. She was round there about once a fortnight which was bleeding ridiculous. Added to that, she’s always be walking past dressed up as if she was going to her old man’s funeral. Sid was scared to go out of the house and Mum was giving him the old dead eye. She had a bloody good idea what was going on. Luckily, Rosie had this job in the supermarket so she never twigged. God knows what she would have done if she had. How Sid got rid of that piece I don’t know, because he never talked to me about it, but one day I suddenly think I haven’t seen her for a while and that’s the end of it. Since the business with Viv, Sid has kept his activities very quiet and I think he regrets having opened his mouth that first time up at the Highwayman.
One of the most interesting things about the job is the opportunity it gives you to have a shufty at how other people live. Everybody likes having a poke round somebody else’s place to see what they’ve got. My old Mum for instance. Every time there’s a house in the street for sale she goes round there. She’s no intention of moving, it’s just that she wants to see what kind of wallpaper they’ve got and whether there’s an indoor kasi. She’s also potty on going round the nobs’ houses in the country and coming back and rabbiting on about their stuff as if it’s a dead ringer of hers.
“Little fireplace in the kiddies’ room,” she’ll say, “it had exactly the same tiles as our front room. Very similar, anyway.”
I’m a bit like Mum in a smaller way and there was one job about that time that really sticks in my mind. It was up by the common and one day I’m cycling along when this old bird comes running out holding a wide-brimmed straw hat on her head and waving a walking stick.
“Young man, young man,” she calls out. “Are you a window cleaner?”
I feel like saying no, I always cycle around with a ladder in case I forget my front door key, but I don’t, and she says she has a job for me. As I look at her, I notice that what I first thought was a flower pattern on her hat is in fact bird droppings but I imagine she has just been unlucky and follow her into the semi-circular drive of this bloody great house. There’s newspapers and rubbish strewn everywhere and though I’ve been past the place before, I never thought anybody lived there. By the look of the windows, they can’t do, unless they’ve got bleeding good eyesight because they don’t look as if they’ve been cleaned since they were put in.
“It’s gonna cost you a few bob to clean that lot,” I say, because frankly I don’t fancy the job.
“Only the downstairs windows,” she says. “We’re all downstairs.”
That strikes me as being a bit funny because I can’t imagine a lot of people living there. Maybe they are the survivors of a Victorian hippie commune who can’t stand heights. Anyway, we haggle a bit and I agree to do the downstairs windows for a couple of quid. I’m following her up the front steps when I take a butchers through one of the bay windows. I can hardly see anything they’re so dirty, but there seems to be a lot of movement at floor level which puzzles me. I start to take a closer look but the old bird – “My name is Mrs. Chorlwood” – sends me round the back sharpish. “I’ll open the back door for you,” she says. “I don’t want you frightening them.”
Them? What has she got in there? I move round the house very careful-like, and something knocks against one of the windows from the inside which gives me a start, but I can’t see anything. The garden must have been very nice once, but now it’s all overgrown and there are weeds pushing through the concrete in the bottom of the dried up ornamental pond. I’m surprised they haven’t torn the whole place down and built a block of flats there.
When I get round the back, Mrs. Chorlwood is waiting for me and that’s not all. There’s a pile of empty catfood tins large enough to have fed half Brixton. They pong a bit, too, but that’s nothing to what I find in the kitchen. A large saucepan is bubbling away on a filthy greasy stove and the stink attacks you. There are tins of cat food and packets of birdseed everywhere and a slice of horsemeat from something that must have been running before the war – the Boer war. The sink is blocked up and you can’t see the pattern on the lino for all the muck that has been trodden into it.
Mrs. Chorlwood picks up a carving knife and for a moment I’m getting ready to bash her over the head if she tries anything.
“Din dins time,” she says with a sigh. “It’s hard work cooking when you have a family my size. Now, don’t open any of the windows whatever you do, we don’t want anyone getting out.”
By this time I’ve got a good idea what I’ve let myself in for, but I don’t know half of it. Mrs. Chorlwood opens the kitchen door and the pong hits me like a kick in the stomach. Cats. Gawd strewth it’s diabolical! The hall and stairs are crawling with bloody cats which make a great rush for us the moment they see Mrs. C. You can’t put your foot down without standing on one of their turds and the carpets are soggy with piss.
“Naughty, naughty,” says Mrs. C. “Oh, you naughty Jezebel. Not time for din dins yet. Now come on, Pansy, don’t scratch, dear.” She presses forward and I see that the place isn’t only full of cats. Up above, there’s a flutter of wings and we’re being dive-bombed