Glass by Alex Christofi Read Free Book Online Page A

you a fish finger sandwich?’ I suggested.
    He closed his bloodshot eyes and nodded slowly. I made one for each of us while Dad dragged last week’s newspaper over. He stared at the front page as if each line read ‘you have cancer.’
    After eating, I went to my bedroom and switched on the computer. I looked up aircraft-warning lights. Then I wondered if Salisbury Cathedral was one of the tallest buildings in England. Turned out it wasn’t. The tallest building was a skyscraper called The Shard that was just being completed in London.
    On a whim, I googled ‘glass’. It gave me some news results – one John Blades had been given an OBE for his services to the Queen, as her appointed window cleaner and sculptor of a life-sized glass statue of Churchill for the palace. He ran the country’s largest window-cleaning business, as well as a thriving glassblowing and sculpting workshop.
    I found an article which explained that the time it would take for glass to flow down a thick window would be many times longer than the existence of the universe. Flowing over thousands of billions of years like a tear down the face of God, dripping and splashing into the end of our world and through the beginning of the next. That was one of the reassuring things about glass, I supposed: its permanence.
    I thought back to the glass museum, to the strange realities of bending light, the way that, when it was perfectly clean, it looked almost like a solid slice of air. It seemed odd, otherworldly, even noble, that there were people who spent whole careers making sure that glass was clean and clear. Their life’s work was to preserve the ideal state of a unique material, a tribute to its timeless utility. Perhaps that’s what I could do. There was nothing stopping me, I supposed. I didn’t need GCSEs or work experience. If I bought the equipment, and cleaned people’s windows, and said I was a window cleaner, then that’s what I would be.
    I quickly discovered that there are an unusually large variety of products in the window cleaning profession, including different kinds of holster. There were many ladders, belts, karabiners, suction cups, cloths, wipes, sprays, gels and squeegees – enough to satisfy even an obsessive compulsive.
    There was only one person I knew who could wade through lists of consumer products with the galoshes of a practising Capitalist, and unfortunately it was my brother. Max brought meaning to his life through objects. They were his ‘raisin of being’, as the French might say. 26 If Capitalism was a fungus feeding off the Western world, Max was a truffle pig. I sent him a message asking for his thoughts, and within the hour he’d picked his definitive arsenal, with alternatives to each product rated one to ten.
    A little of his excitement rubbed off on me, and in hindsight I ordered too much. I got a double-pouch holster and a ‘sidekick’ holster, which I decided to strap to my calf with a tiny squeegee, in case my primary squeegee somehow got disarmed. I ordered a scraper and various kinds of cleaning fluid. I resolved at some point to try them out on different panes round the house, and see which was the best. Because good wasn’t good enough – for once in my life, I wanted to be flawless.
    The ladder we had in the garage was not fit for purpose. It had three wooden steps, one of which was split, and a total height of about 1.2 metres. On Max’s advice, I opted for an Extension Ladder with Integral Stabiliser, Overlapping Rubber Feet and Non-Slip Rungs. If I couldn’t blame my tools, perhaps I wouldn’t be a bad workman.
    For two days I waited for my things to arrive. On the third day, nothing arrived either. I milled about, showed Dad how to peel potatoes, ended up doing them for him, and waited for the day to pass.
    The next day, the doorbell rang. I opened the door to discover that a lorry had jammed its way onto our