5. THE DIRTY WINDOW

Now he's a window cleaner...

The shock of finding himself at the top of a ladder with a window leather in one hand and staring at a nearly naked woman on the other side of a glass window was almost (but thankfully not quite) enough to send Albert Tench, via the gift of gravity, down to the waiting world below him.

Then came his second shock, bigger than the leather and the ladder and the woman. As he stared at her (and he couldn’t really help it, he’d barely seen a naked woman in his life even though he’d spent ten years being a woman who was occasionally naked), as he stared at her he caught sight of his own reflection in her dressing table mirror just behind her.

He knew it was him when he waved his free hand, the one holding the leather, and waved, because the reflection waved back.

And that reflection was of a youngish man, possibly somewhere in his twenties, a handsome man too, but with a decidedly dusky appearance. No, not dusky, that wasn’t dark enough: he was black. Handsome, sultry-eyed and black. For a moment he thought he looked rather like what a black James Bond would look like. James Bond, that is, when he’s cleaning windows, like he might be whilst spying on the Kremlin and wiping smears from its windows or cavorting on some exotic island with a femme fatale.

By the time he’d come to some sort of terms with his own very altered appearance the woman had removed her nightie and was standing facing him, thrusting her bosom towards him as she yawned.

Her naked bosom.

Her practically perfect naked bosom.

“Miranda,” he whispered to himself. Yes, Miranda, but not the elderly woman on the coach that he’d crashed into a French hedgerow thicket mere moments ago but the Miranda in her twenties, the one he’d never seen before but recognised in exactly the same way as a British patriot would recognise the monarch, be that monarch twenty or ninety or somewhere in between.

Then Miranda, he knew it was she, moved towards the window and opened the one next to where his ladder was perched, taking care not to dislodge him from where he stood almost open-mouthed

She was still naked, at least from the waist up. He couldn’t see the rest of her.

“A cup of tea when you’ve finished, Casey?” she asked as if it was something she said every time he cleaned the windows of her house, and he rather suspected it was. Somewhere he had the memory of another Casey who hadn’t just crashed a coach but who cleaned these windows ever week or so. It was an odd sensation, and not pleasant.

“Smashing,” he replied with the sort of automatic response which sounded as natural as anything could sound and which came from him, or from a different him but one occupying the same physical shape.

It was confusing.

“Miranda,” he added.

She opened her eyes wide. “So you’ve found out my name at last,” she said with a tinkling laugh. “See you downstairs when I’m dressed.”

“Smashing,” he repeated, and winked.

He, Albert Tench, had winked at the almost perfect top half of the most perfect woman he could imagine existing anywhere in the Universe, and he’d done it as naturally and automatically as breathing.

He continued cleaning the windows. He was surprised what care he took of them even after she’d gone from the room and all he had left to stare at was his own reflection in that dressing table mirror.

So this was where Miranda Tinkle lived. The girl he’d known as a teenager, the girl who’d gone riding her bike with him, the girl who’d noticed him crashing off it and being tossed under the wheels of a tractor.

And the girl he’d given birth to.

The girl he’d crashed his coach for on the motorways of France when he knew he was having a heart attack and would probably die. The girl who was haunting him, and he was dead, wasn’t he? Surely it should be him doing the haunting, though he didn’t feel very dead and he was certain he was no ghost.

He climbed down the ladder, gave a brisk extra wipe to the front door frosted window and then knocked on the back door when he got there.

She opened it, and stood in front of him, smiling that warm smile of hers.

“Good to see you, Casey,” she said.

And, “it makes my day to see you, Miranda,” he said, winking.

“So you fund out my name at last! All these weeks you’ve been trying to guess it, and finally you hit the right one,” she laughed. “Come in, I need your advice while you wet your whistle.”

He entered the kitchen directly from the back door and sat in the seat he knew was the one he always sat in when he cleaned Miranda’s windows.

How did he know that?

And he was Casey, was he? Casey what?

“Now Mr Pritchard,” said Miranda, neatly answering his unspoken question, “I want to know what you think. There’s this fellow, he’s got money and a good position with the bank and will probably give me everything I need for the rest of my days. And he wants me to marry him. The thing is, I don’t love him, don’t even like his sort and squirm at the very idea of him touching me...”

“You mean he hasn’t?” asked Albert.

“He hasn’t what?”

“Touched you? You said...”

“He tries to, but I’m not a give-away girl,” she said lightly, “and those clammy fingers of his haven't gone nearly as far as he’d like them to! Oh dear me no! What would your good lady advise if I were to ask her, do you think?”

“Rosie? Oh, she’d see a thousand reasons for you to go nowhere near him. You know Rosie. There’s nobody straighter than her!” How did he know that? He’d never met Rosie, what was his surname, Pritchard? He’d never even heard of her before this minute and there he was going on about how straight she was.

“She’s so sweet,” sighed Miranda.

“And special,” agreed Casey. And it was Casey agreeing with her and not Albert, because he hadn’t a clue what Rosie was like.

“The thing is, he proposed to me,” sighed Miranda, “the other night when I was at a dinner with him. He dragged me along there, a bankers do, it was, and you can’t imagine how boring a room of bankers and their wives can be. And when I was busy trying to stay awake he got down on one knee, one knee mark you, and he asked me if I’d consent to be his wife!”

“Out of the blue, like that?”

“Exactly, with no warning or anything. He had one of those little cases you put rings in and told me it was empty but he would soon fill it when he knew what size my fingers were. And he pushed it into my hands and swore he’d love me for ever.”

“Sounds like you’ve made a particularly odd catch, Miranda,” he said, a sense of jealousy rising up inside him. Jealousy, because he wanted Miranda for himself. He hadn't realised it yesterday when he’d been thirteen, but he did now. She was meant for him. It was obvious. And what’s more, she’d shown him her breasts in that brazen way of hers, just now when he’d been doing her windows up stairs. The same brazen way she’d had as a young teen when she’d flashed her knickers at him that Christmas day … yesterday, wasn’t it? The same brazen way she’d had when she’d told him about her bra, and let him see a corner of it, let him feel how lacy it was, before she’d run off giggling.

“Then what should I do?” she asked.

“You’ve got to make your own mind up,” he told her, “and if you’ve any doubts, any doubts at all, you’ve got to try and understand what for ever means.”

“Because a person’s married for ever?” she asked.

He nodded. “And, you know, there might be someone else who loves you,” he said, trying not to make it sound pointed, though it did. “Someone special,” he added.

“There was. Once. A long time ago,” she replied dreamily, “and I think I loved him too.”

© Peter Rogerson 05.05.19