Graham Swift: England and Other Stories

He said, ‘Aren’t you glad, Bren?’

‘Glad what?’

‘Glad I’m not on an oil rig.’

But it wasn’t fair to her, he knew, the prospect of his going off every day indefinitely to walk in the sky. He said that when he’d stashed enough away he’d fix something else up. He hadn’t a clue what. He’d come back down to earth.

At some point he twigged that those towers weren’t just built with risk, they were built for it. It was risk inside and out. They were built, most of them, to be full of people dealing in their own mysterious kind of danger money. Well, that was their business. He took his money and took the risk that one day, though he never did, he might step off into space.

But one day he took another kind of risk. He followed another lifetime hunch.

It was obvious too, once you saw it, like all the big things perhaps are. It was so obvious that his immediate second thought was: If it was so obvious, how many others might already be in on the act? But it was still early days. More and more towers. And what were those towers made of — or what did it look as though they were made of? What was it that sometimes you didn’t see even when it was staring you in the face?

He went to see Don, who was then — well, what was Don Abbot in those days? He was a wheeler-dealer, he was a bit of this and that. You might say he was going places, you might say he was all talk. They had a drink in the Queen Victoria. Don listened. He looked his little friend up and down. Then he spoke as if he hadn’t really been listening, but that was Don’s way.

‘So what are you suggesting, Charlie? That you and me should become a pair of window cleaners?’

‘No, Don. Don’t muck me about.’

Then they’d talked some more.

It became the standard story anyway, the standard line. In golf club bars. In hotel bars, by the blue pools, all around the world.

‘I’m Don, this is Charlie. We’re window cleaners.’

He looks at the towers. He’d helped to build them. And then for twenty years or so he and Don had helped to keep them sparkling.

Don had said, ‘One thing you have to understand, Charlie, I’m never getting in one of those — contraptions, I’m never even going up there. I’m not the kind of guvnor who likes to show everybody he can actually do the job.’

‘Well you can leave that to me. I’ll be the one who won’t have to bullshit. But don’t get me wrong, Don. I’m planning on the same as you. And I’ve promised Brenda.’

Abbot and Yates. No arguing about the alphabetical order. We clean windows, not just any old windows. It took a while to get it off the ground, so to speak, but then. . All that glittering glass.

Now they live with the gentry in Blackheath. And now it isn’t just him and Bren and Don and Marion, but their kids, a boy and a girl each. Who aren’t even kids any more. They’d grown up in Blackheath and gone to school there, and then they’d all gone, with one exception, to university. University! It had been a good move, to cross the river.

The one exception was Don and Marion’s Sebastian. Sebastian! How did Don and Marion come up with a name like that? Thank God he was known as Seb. Seb had gone straight from being sixteen, or so it seemed, to working in one of those towers. For a New York bank. At twenty-three Seb was making serious money, or crazy money — take your pick — money that made Don and him look pretty silly. That made getting A levels and going to university look pretty silly too. Or as Don put it, and Charlie was never quite sure how Don meant it, Seb was one of the barrow boys, wasn’t he? One of the barrow boys who’d moved on and moved in. Moved on and moved up.

Charlie looks at the towers. His own son Ian is studying in Southampton to be a marine biologist, which makes Charlie feel — in a different way from how Don must feel about Seb — out of his depth. Ha. There was a joke there. And when Charlie had first told Don about Ian’s leanings in life Don had said, ‘My Uncle Eddy was in the marines in the war. I never knew they had their own biologists.’

Charlie and Don could say, ‘My old man was a docker.’ What else could they say? What would their kids say? ‘My old man was a window cleaner’? They wouldn’t even say ‘my old man’. Except maybe Seb. Seb might say it, and laugh.

Down in Southampton, Ian wouldn’t be able to think: My city, my London. He wouldn’t be able to point and say, ‘See — over there.’ When Charlie and Brenda drive down to Southampton Charlie humbles himself and listens while his son talks. Maybe that thing about the Maldives came from Ian. Of course it did. But it’s not difficult to be humble. Perhaps it isn’t even humility. Sometimes while Ian talks Charlie feels a little quick whoosh inside. It’s like the whoosh he feels when with Don on a Sunday morning he hits a really good drive. ‘That one’s shifting, Charlie.’ It’s like the whoosh he once felt years ago, after a fight, when the ref’s arm would go up, lifting his.

My son Ian. A marine biologist.

He sits on the bench in his tracksuit, feeling the circulation in his veins, feeling, as he’s always done, good in his own skin. Charlie is a businessman (a word he can find strange) and a successful one, yet he would still say that the most important thing is your own body. It’s what you have, what you come with, and to be glad of it and trust in it is simply life’s greatest gift.

So it was funny how it was the urge and aim of most people — almost a sort of law of the world — to go up into their heads, into the topmost part of themselves and live there, live in and by their heads, when most people (he was the exception proving the rule) were afraid of heights.

He looks at the towers, a hand screening his eyes from the dazzle, and smiles. Or it looks like a smile. Only Brenda would know that it’s not a smile. Only Brenda would see the two little extra pinches at the corners of Charlie’s mouth and understand this contradiction in his face. He has no repertoire of frowns. When Charlie’s worried or puzzled he smiles, but smiles differently.

He’s worried, and has been now for some time, about his friend Don, about how he’s putting on weight. Don has always been a big man, but big of frame, not flabby or cumbersome or slow. Now he’s spreading, he’s simply expanding. It’s a sort of joke — that he’s putting on pounds — a joke that even Don likes to tell against himself, but it isn’t really a joke at all, and when Charlie plays golf with Don now he knows it’s not just for fun, but it’s important for keeping Don moving. They should play every Sunday. They should play the other nine holes, not just spend them in the bar.

He knows there’s no point, there’s never been, in asking Don to come jogging with him. And how would it look now, how could it possibly work: Don lumbering and sweating beside him while he, Charlie, just hovered on his toes? It has even come to seem a little wrong to Charlie that he should go jogging by himself while Don has this weight problem — which is completely illogical, even vaguely superstitious. Like thinking you shouldn’t go to the Maldives because the Maldives might one day disappear.

But Charlie worries about Don. It’s as if all the money is at last turning to fat. Fifty years ago and more, Charlie had thought that he was just a little scrap of nothing and this bigger kid might take him under his wing. And so it was. Though now you could also say it was Don who should be for ever grateful to Charlie. But Charlie feels the strange worrying need, like some unpaid debt, to take his ever bulkier friend under his wing. How?

And now he has the other worry too, this new worry that could knock the first one aside. He’s going to talk to Don about it soon. Don will tell him what else he knows, when they play their round in just a couple of hours. By the sound of it, there won’t be much concentrating on Don’s weight problem or even on the golf. Crisp bright morning though it is.