Free Confessions of a Window Cleaner by Timothy Lea

it in my life. The pong must be scarring the inside of my nostrils and every time I get a window clean, some bloody bird comes and shits all over it. After a while I let them get on with it. I just want to get out. It takes me all of ‘Watch with Mother’ to clean six panes of glass.
    Suddenly there’s the sound of Mrs. C. rattling some tins and the room clears faster than Glasgow on a flag day. Then she comes in with my mug of tea. At least, I suppose it’s a mug. There’s what looks like bird seed floating on top of it and I don’t know quite what it’s been standing in – I can guess though. Poor old Mrs. C. She really is a case. Her hands are raw and scratched and there’s muck all over her clothes which she either hasn’t noticed or doesn’t care about. I pretend to drink the tea and when she goes out I pour it into one of the geranium pots. As I suspected there’s some more bird seed stuck together at the bottom.
    When I get in the fresh air I feel like I’ve just come out of the nick again. I sweep my rubber across the windows and it’s like looking into one of those cages at the zoo. All the cats milling around her legs and Mrs. Chorlwood chattering away to them like kids. She sits down in front of the telly – just knocks a few turds off a wing-back chair and sits down – and they’re all trying to get up on her lap the minute her arse has touched the chair. Trouble is they don’t look like cats to me. They seem more like rats. A living blanket of rats.
    “Come back in a couple of months,” she says when she pays me. “I expect we’ll need you again then.”
    But I don’t go back. I think about it sometimes and I can imagine her in that chair one afternoon, dropping off and not waking up again. And the cats and the birds waiting for their food; and no way of getting out and, after a while, nothing to eat. The telly going on the blink and being the only living thing in the house, flickering and chattering away. That’s the time the rats would hear the telly and nothing else and start sticking their noses out of their holes, and maybe that picture I saw through the window would be right. Mrs. Chorlwood with that living, twitching blanket on her lap … You can see why I didn’t go back, can’t you?
    Earlier on I said that Dorothy was a pretty average sample of the kind of bird you have it away with on this caper. She wants a bit of company, a bit of a change and a bit of the other. Now that doesn’t mean there aren’t other kinds – any number of them – but at least once you’ve got to the point with them your problems are usually over. I mean, if it was any other way, there wouldn’t be any point would there? – or would there? You’d have to ask Mrs. Armstrong that because I was never able to. I could never ask her anything.
    Mrs. Armstrong lived in one of those large detached houses in Nightingale Lane with a flight of steps going up to two Samson-size pillars which supported a balcony so they didn’t feel starved of a purpose in life. She is what my mother would call a handsome woman and definitely upper class in a way that puts the mockers on you. I mean, though she’s attractive you’d never think of trying it on with. her. It would be like wolf-whistling at the Queen Mother. She has an aristocratic hooter with a bend in it, piercing grey eyes and a very good figure for a woman of forty-plus, which is what I imagine she is. She’s a bit of a twinset and pearls type but her stuff always fits beautifully and she smells nice. I say all this but at the time I hardly noticed it, if you know what I mean. She was just the woman who opened the door and stepped to one side as I went through. As I remember, nothing at all happened the first time but when I next go round it’s in the afternoon and she asks me if I’d like some tea when I’ve finished. I say yes, thinking she means a cuppa, but when I come down she takes me into the front room where there is a trolley loaded with