Sky-scraping angels a soap opera for one
Your job has no glass ceiling and so many windows on the world
As I sat on a lengthy phone call, my eyes drifted out the window in search of some form of stimulation to stop my grey matter from turning into brown matter.
I live in an apartment block: a giant black tombstone erected to acknowledge the death of the landscape. A big gleaming glass test tube in the experiment of how many people you can fit into the smallest area possible. The streets below turn cadaver grey and fester as the landscape decays, and happy families clamber over the corpse with wide grins and shopping bags and plans for the rest of the day together. I miss West Melton.
But as I looked out upon a skyline which might as well be my building in a mirror maze, a few silver bullets of liquid flew past the window.
They did so in haphazard directions and with contrast against the blue sky which ruled them out as being of a rain shower.
It also wasn’t vomit. I could say this with great certainty because I have seen someone vomit from a balcony before. I haven’t seen them do it, but I’ve seen it fly past my window, approaching terminal velocity in a surprisingly cohesive mass, before landing in the pool area to coat teenaged friends with a fine spray of mist which, based on its alcohol content, could be classified as a cleaning product. And it did not look like this.
The vomit story was during a notorious week of end-of-school debauchery, where capable students
of school become bumbling, stumbling, staggering students of life, in both a literal and metaphorical sense, and complete a holy pilgrimage upon the conclusion of which they find themselves on my doorstep to play silly buggers.
The day prior to this experiment in vomit physics (which I’m sure would have made the boy’s old science teacher proud), I had also seen a man urinate from a balcony. Again, it was above me, and I didn’t actually see it.
So how do I know it was urine? The hollering and whooping were both sure signs of this. The sheer volume of the torrent from above was the final confirmation, as if it was needed, that this was alcoholassisted.
And as to how I know it was a man, there seems to be an in-built desire in one gender to “mark”, that does not exist in the other. The damage report from the body corporate the following week confirmed that not one, but two people had been caught urinating on the sauna rocks, and I would be impressed if they were female.
But whatever was falling from outside my window wasn’t vomit, or any bodily fluid I didn’t think, and nor was it rain. So with great curiosity and little forethought, I stuck my head out over the balcony, backwards, like an ostrich stargazing, to look up at the source of this mystery liquid.
And naturally, it dropped right between my eyes, which somehow still startled me despite the inevitability of it. If I was ever convinced of the science behind men of my age lacking the ability to connect cause and effect, it was in
Is each new apartment you rappel down to like a child opening another flap of an advent calendar?
that moment as I hurriedly wiped my face.
Upon a second, more cautious look, floating in the air about a floor above me, I found an angel. It wore high-vis, and had a beard, and said “G’day mate” when it noticed me gawping up at it from half off, half on my balcony.
It was a window cleaning angel, my favourite type of angel.
I ogled silently and with little regard for social etiquette, as it worked with robotic precision, panelby-panel, across the sky above me, firing off pellets of soapy grey water in all directions as it did so.
Childlike fascination clashed with adult reasoning in my head. A day at the office, dangling on spaghetti 60 storeys above the ground. Surely that can’t be fun.
Or could it be? Was it fun on the first day and then little more than routine after that? Was it terrifying on the first day and then did it became fun?
But far more importantly than that, oh work-boot angel, how often do you see naked people through the window? Nose-pickers who have retreated into their safe domain of hobby only to be busted by someone defying logic and physics, just to ridicule them at smoko break?
Do you even share these stories at smoko, or are they all so mundane by now that only a rookie would be so naive as to share a tale which had tickled his fancy, and in the process expose himself as being green for thinking he was of the first thousand window cleaners to have seen it?
Are these occurrences of invaded privacy perks or horrors of the job? Is each new apartment you rappel down to like a child opening another flap of an advent calendar, or is it like opening the fridge door after returning from a two-week holiday when you’re not sure if you got rid of all the perishables before you left?
As these questions built inside me to the point where I felt I may have needed to actually vocalise them, the angel pushed off down a floor and spilled over into someone else’s personal space, like a large man on a plane. Eventually he soared back to earth to have his pie for lunch, leaving nothing more than sparkling windows in his trail. No wonder Robbie was loving angels instead.