‘Look, Mum: police!’ Tim would say almost every evening, pointing through the window at the flashing blue lights and the angry commotion just across the road.
‘Finish your supper,’ she would tell him, but he would keep on watching through the big dirty rectangle of glass. He couldn’t really do anything else. The blinds were never drawn on the front window, because as soon as you blocked off the view, ugly though it was, you immediately noticed what a poky little shoebox the sitting room was. Better to see out, Jeanette had decided, even if what you were seeing was Rusborough South’s substance abusers arguing with the law.
‘What are police for, Mum?’ Tim had asked her once.
‘They keep us nice and safe, pet,’ she’d replied automatically. But deep down, she had no faith in the boys in blue, or in the zealous busybodies who tried to get her interested in Neighbourhood Watch schemes. It was all just an excuse for coffee mornings where other powerless people just like herself complained about their awful neighbours and then got shirty about who was paying for the biscuits.
Positive action, they called it. Jeanette much preferred to buy lottery scratchcards, which might at least get her out of Rusborough South if she was lucky.
The one thing that pissed her off more than anything else was window companies. They would ring her up about once a week, telling her they were doing a special promotion on windows just now, and could they maybe send someone round for a free quote. ‘I don’t know,’ she said the first time. ‘Can you just tell me how much you’d charge to replace my front window when kids throw a rock through it?’ But the window companies didn’t do that sort of thing. They wanted to do the whole house up with security windows, double glazing: serious money. Jeanette didn’t have serious money. The window companies kept phoning regardless.
‘Look, I’ve told you before,’ she would snap at them. ‘I’m not interested.’
‘Not a problem, not a problem,’ they’d assure her. ‘We shan’t trouble you again.’ But a week later, someone else would call, asking her if she’d given any thought to her windows.
Then one day somebody called in person. A woman with an expensive haircut, dressed like a politician or a weather girl on the telly. She stood in Jeanette’s doorway, clutching a leatherbound folder and what looked like a video remote control. Parked against the kerb behind her was a bright green van with a burly, shaven-headed man at the wheel. The side of the van was decorated with the words OUTLOOK INNOVATIONS and a stylised picture of a window looking out onto a landscape of trees and mountains.
‘You’re not a window company, are you?’ said Jeanette.
The woman hesitated a moment, seemed a bit nervous. ‘No, not really,’ she said. ‘We offer people an alternative to windows.’
‘You’re a window company,’ affirmed Jeanette irritably, and shut the door in the woman’s face. She hated to do this to another human being, but when she’d first moved to Rusborough, a bunch of red-faced, panting little kids had come to the door asking if they could please have a drink of water. She’d considered shutting the door in their faces, but let them into the kitchen to have a drink instead. Next day, her house was burgled.
Shutting the door in people’s faces had got a little easier after that.
But the lady with the leatherbound folder popped up at the window and looked awfully embarrassed.
‘I’m honestly not selling windows,’ she pleaded, her voice muffled by the grubby pane of glass between her and Jeanette. ‘Not what you’d think of as a window, anyway. Couldn’t I please have five minutes of your time? I can actually show you what we’re offering right here and now.’
Jeanette wavered on the spot, trapped. She should have drawn the blinds, but it was too late for that. Her eyes and the eyes of the other woman were locked, and all sorts of humdrum intimacies seemed to be flowing between them, like I’m a woman, you’re a woman, and I’m a mother, are you a mother too?
Her shoulders slumping in defeat, Jeanette walked back to the door and opened it.
Once allowed into the living room, the saleswoman didn’t waste any time.
‘What do you think of the view through your window?’ she said.
‘It’s shite,’ said Jeanette.
The saleswoman smiled again, and tipped her head slightly to the side, as if to say, I’d have to agree with you there, but I’m too polite to say so.
‘Well,’ she purred, ‘If you had a choice, what would you be seeing out there?’
‘Anything but Rusborough South,’ replied Jeanette without hesitation.
‘Mountains? Valleys? The sea?’ persisted the saleswoman.
‘Listen, when I win the lottery I’ll let you know where I move to, how’s that?’
The saleswoman seemed to sense she was annoying Jeanette. Cradling her folder against her immaculate breast, she pointed her remote control thingy towards the window, straight at the man in the van. There was a soft neep. The man got the message, and the van door swung open.
‘At Outlook Innovations we like to say, windows are the eyes of the soul,’ said the saleswoman, reverently, almost dreamily.
Jeanette considered, for the first time, the possibility that she had let some sort of religious loony into her home.
‘That’s very deep,’ she said. ‘Look, my son’s going to be home from school soon … ‘
‘This won’t take a minute,’ the saleswoman assured her.
The man had flipped open the hatches of the van, and was leaning inside. His overalls were bright green, to match the vehicle, and had OI emblazoned on them. Jeanette thought of skinheads.
Out of the back of the vehicle and into the arms of the man slid a large dull-grey screen. It looked like an oversized central heating radiator, but was apparently not as heavy, as the man lifted it by himself without much effort. He carried it across Jeanette’s horrible little ‘lawn’ and lifted it up to the window of her horrible little house. He manoeuvred it onto the windowsill, grunting with the effort of not getting his fingers squashed. Then he shoved the screen right up tight against the window, with a scrape of metal on prefab some-thing-or-other. It blocked the entire view snugly, with no more than a millimetre to spare on all sides.
Jeanette laughed uneasily. ‘You’ve had me measured, have you?’ she said.
‘We would never take such a liberty,’ demurred the sales-woman. ‘I think you’ll find that almost every front window on the estate is absolutely identical.’
‘I’d wondered about that, actually,’ said Jeanette.
Slid so securely into place, the screen sealed the room with claustrophobic efficiency, making the electric light seem harsher and yet at the same time more feeble, like the mournful glow inside a chicken coop.
Jeanette tried to be well-behaved about the way it made her feel, not wanting to make a scene in front of a stranger. But to her surprise the saleswoman said,
‘Awful, isn’t it?’
‘Pardon?’
‘Feels like a prison, yes?’
‘Yeah,’ said Jeanette. There were scrabblings going on outside the house, which must be the technician making adjustments. He wasn’t screwing the bloody thing in, was he?
‘If this particular Outlook were installed permanently, the seal would be soundproof, too.’
‘Yeah?’ said Jeanette. Being boxed in was already driving her mental, so the thought of being shut off from all sound as well wasn’t exactly the thing to cheer her up. That cowboy out there had better take his damn panel off her window and put it back in his van ASAP. Jeanette wondered if it was going to be difficult to get these people to leave.
‘Now,’ said the saleswoman. ‘I’ll hand you the control, and you can switch it on.’
‘Switch it on?’ echoed Jeanette.
‘Yes,’ said the saleswoman, nodding encouragingly as if to a small child. ‘Do go ahead. Feel free.’
Jeanette squinted at the remote, and pressed her thumb on the button marked ON/OFF.
Suddenly the screen seemed to va
nish from her window, as if it had been whipped away by a gust of wind. Light beamed in again through the glass, making Jeanette blink.
But it was not the light of Rusborough South. Where the hell was Rusborough South? The shop across the road was gone. The dismal streets the colour of used kitty litter were gone. The bus shelter with the poster about saying no to domestic violence was gone.
Instead, the world outside had changed to a scene of startling beauty. The house had seemingly relocated itself right in the middle of a spacious country garden, the sort you might see in a TV documentary about Beatrix Potter or somebody like that. There were trellises with tomatoes growing on them, and rusty watering cans, and little stone paths leading into rosebushes, and rickety sheds half-lost in thicket. Much love had obviously been poured into the design and the tending of this place, but nature was getting the best of it now, gently but insistently spilling over the borders with lush weeds and wildflowers. At its wildest peripheries the garden merged (just about at the point where the Rusborough shop ought to be) into a vast sloping meadow that stretched endlessly into the distance. The tall grass of that meadow rippled like great feathery waves in the breeze. In the sky above, an undulating V-formation of white geese was floating along, golden in the sunlight.
Entranced, Jeanette moved closer to the window, right up to the windowsill. The smudges on the glass were just as they had been for weeks, years maybe. Beyond them, the world really was what it appeared to be, radiant and tranquil. The perspective changed subtly just the way it should, when she turned her head or looked down. Just underneath the window, a discarded slipper had moss growing on it, and flower petals were being scattered across the ground by a tiny sparrow. Jeanette pressed her nose against the glass and tried to peek sideways, to see the joins. All she could see was some kind of ivy she didn’t have a name for, nuzzling at the edges of the window, dark green with a spot of russet red at the heart of each leaf. Her ear, so close now to the glass, heard the little beak of that sparrow quite clearly, the infinitely subtle rustle of the leaves, the distant honking of the geese.
‘It’s a video, right?’ she said shakily. To keep her awe at bay, she closed her eyes and tried to see the view through her window objectively. She imagined it as a sort of endless rerun of the same film of a country garden, with the same birds flying the same circuit at intervals like in those shop window displays at Christmas, those mechanical tableaux in which Santa Claus lowered a sack of presents into a chimney endlessly without ever letting it go.
‘No, it’s not a video,’ murmured the saleswoman.
‘Well, some sort of film anyway,’ said Jeanette, opening her eyes again. The geese were out of sight now, but the golden light was deepening. ‘How long does it go for?’
The saleswoman chuckled indulgently, as though a small child had just asked her when the sun would fall back to the ground.
‘It goes forever,’ she said. ‘It’s not any kind of film. It’s a real place, and this is what it’s like there, right now, at this very moment.’
Jeanette struggled with the idea. The sparrow had jumped onto the windowsill. It was utterly, vividly real. It opened its minuscule mouth and chirped, then shivered its wings, shedding a couple of fluffs.
‘You mean … I’m looking into somebody else’s back garden?’ asked Jeanette.
‘In a way,’ said the saleswoman, opening her leather-bound folder and leafing through its waterproofed pages. ‘This is a satellite broadcast of … let me see … the grounds of the Old Priory, in Northward Hill, Rochester. This is what is happening there right now.’
Jeanette became suddenly aware that she was gaping like an idiot. She closed her mouth and frowned, trying to look cynical and unimpressed.
‘Well,’ she said, staring out across the meadows. ‘There’s not a great deal happening there, is there?’
‘That’s a matter of opinion, of course,’ conceded the saleswoman. ‘We do have Outlooks which view onto more … eventful landscapes. There is the Blue Surge Outlook, which broadcasts the view through the lighthouse at Curlew Point, Cruidlossie, the third-stormiest beach in the British Isles. For those who like trains, we have the Great Valley Crossing Outlook, which has three major railways running services past it. For animal lovers, we have the Room To Roam Outlook, viewing onto an organic sheep farm in Wales … ‘
Jeanette was watching her little sparrow hop away across the garden, and the saleswoman’s voice was a twitter in the background.
‘Mm?’ she said. ‘Oh well actually, this is … fine.’
‘It’s particularly lovely at night,’ added the saleswoman in a soft, beguiling tone. ‘Owls come out. They catch mice in the garden.’
‘Owls?’ echoed Jeanette. She had never seen an owl. She had seen a lot of things. She’d seen kids sniffing glue, she’d once stumbled onto an attempted rape, she’d had to pick bits of hypodermic syringe out of the rubber soles of her son’s trainers. About a fortnight ago, sitting at this same windowsill late at night, she’d watched a drunken, bloodied boy larking about on the roof of the shop, pissing over the edge, while his mates whooped and ran around below, dodging the stream. Now I’ve seen everything, she’d murmured to herself. But she’d never seen an owl.
‘How … how much does this cost?’ she breathed.
There was a pause while the wind blew a few leaves trembling against the window.
‘You can buy,’ said the saleswoman. ‘Or you can rent.’ Her eyes twinkled kindly, offering her customer the choice that was no choice at all.
‘How … how much per … um …’
‘It works out to a smidgen over fourteen pounds a week,’ said the saleswoman. Observing Jeanette swallowing hard, she went on: ‘Some people would spend that much on scratch cards, or cigarettes.’
Jeanette cleared her throat.
‘Yeah,’ she said.
Then, desperate for a reason to resist the pull of the beautiful world out there, Jeanette narrowed her eyes and demanded,
‘What if some kid throws a brick through it?’
Again the saleswoman opened her leatherbound folder, and held a particular page out for Jeanette’s perusal.
‘All our Outlooks,’ she declared, ‘are designed and guaranteed to withstand the impact of any residential missile.’
‘Full beer cans?’ challenged Jeanette.
‘Beer cans. Footballs. Rocks. Gunfire at point-blank range, if necessary.’
Jeanette looked at the saleswoman in alarm, wondering if she knew something about the Rusborough gangs that Jeanette didn’t.
‘We do a lot of business in America,’ the saleswoman explained hastily.
Jeanette imagined movie stars and celebrities like Oprah gazing through these wonderful windows. The saleswoman let her imagine, keeping to herself her own more accurate vision of the urban slums of Baltimore and Michigan, where rows and rows of windows – twenty, thirty, fifty a day – were being plugged up with the grey screens of Outlook Innovations.
‘Of course, they’re the ideal security, too,’ she pointed out. ‘Nothing in the world can get through.’
Jeanette knew deep down she was already sold, but she made one last attempt to appear hard-headed.
‘People could still get in through the other windows,’ she remarked.
The saleswoman accepted this gracefully with another little tilt of the head.
‘Well … ’ she said, hugging her folder-full of Outlooks to her breast with unostentatious pride. ‘One thing at a time.’
Jeanette looked back at the garden, the fields. They were still there. The sky, the horizon, the overgrown paths, the tomato-vines: none of it had gone away. She felt like crying.
Minutes later, while the man outside laboured to fix the screen permanently into place, Jeanette signed a contract, pledging £60 per month to Outlook Innovations Incorporated. She knew she was making the right decision, too, because while the screen was being bolted onto her house, it had to be switched off briefly, and Jeanette missed her garde
n with a craving so intense it was almost unendurable. There was no doubt in her mind that this was an addiction she would gladly give up smoking for.
An hour later, long after the saleswoman and the green van had driven away, Jeanette was still kneeling at the windowsill, gazing out at Northward Hill. Some of the geese were returning, flying closer to her house this time. They beat their wings lazily, trumpeting their alien contentment.
Suddenly Tim burst into the house, safe and sound after another long day at his sink school. He came to a halt on the living room carpet, goggling in amazement at the view through the window. He pointed, unable to speak. Finally, all he could manage was:
‘Mum, what are those birds doing there?’
Jeanette laughed, wiping her eyes with her nicotine-stained fingers. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘They’re just … they just live here.’
SERIOUS SWIMMERS
There were a couple of hiccups between Gail and Ant before they even got to the swimming pool.
For a start, ‘My name’s not Ant,’ the child said. ‘It’s Anthony.’ Now why did he have to say that, with the social worker right there in the car with them, listening to everything? For a few moments (none of Gail’s emotions lasted very long) she hated her little boy so much she couldn’t breathe, and she hated the social worker even more, for being there to hear Ant’s complaint. She wished the social worker could die somehow and take the knowledge of Gail’s humiliation with him; he deserved to die anyway, the parasite. But the social worker remained alive and at the wheel, noting Gail’s come-uppance in his little black book of a brain, and then – Jesus Christ! – Ant went and did it again when they were almost there, by asking Gail, ‘What was that little drink you had back there?’
‘What little drink?’
‘The little drink you had at the chemist. In the little plastic cup.’
‘Medicine, cutie.’
‘My name’s not cutie,’ stated the child. ‘It’s Anthony.’