Witness account · 3 min read · Set in Meridian Tower ·
The Window Cleaner of the Fifth Floor
An invoice clerk pays a quarterly round priced for five floors on a tower whose approved plans have never carried a fifth.
- reliability: disputed
- witness: "Norah Beckett, invoice clerk"
I settle the works invoices on the housing side, and Meridian Tower comes to my desk four times a year on a code nobody has altered since 1978: window cleaning, cradle and pole, per round, floors one to five. I have paid that line twenty-six times. I work against it the way you learn to work against any docket that arrives already priced: tot the bands, tick the round, initial the voucher, and let the cheque go out the same afternoon.
Meridian is a council slab of 1968. A service level below, four letting floors over it, plant on top. The lift panel has buttons for ground and one to four, and no scraped hole where a fifth was taken out. The approved plans — microfiche card 47, kept in my drawer — draw four bands of windows and a parapet above them like a lid. Four is what the block is. The docket, stapled to the invoice, is priced per floor. It is priced for five.
My first quarter, in 1978, I did the thing a clerk is for: I raised a query. It came back from the warden, Bernard Tolson, in ballpoint on a slip. Four floors. Count them from the yard. B.T. I counted them from the yard. Four bands, plain, and the parapet over them, and the docket still saying five, and the money still saying five, and the senior clerk asking whether I meant to hold up the whole batch over a floor, and I did not, and it has gone through without query every quarter since.
Bernard Tolson is not a liar; I would say it to his face. The plans are not wrong; the drawing office certifies them approved and sealed. And the contractor is not a liar either. Ernest Payne has had the round since the slab went up, Payne & Son, cradle men. Twice I have laid the docket in front of him. Both times he said the same in the same words: it is five on the round, it has always been five. When I asked what the cradle rests against at the fifth, he looked at the docket rather than at me and said: the same as it rests against at four. It lets me down easy. He charges by the descent. He has never once charged for a stop or a hold, whatever those cost.
I also did the count myself, and I report it because the file keeps it anyway. With the hand tally from the stock drawer, standing across the road, I counted the bands twice. On a dull morning, before the light was full, the tally clicked five. The next week, in clear weather, it clicked four. Both counts were mine; I pressed the clicker myself. The difference is the weather, I expect, because the other difference is arithmetic, and arithmetic was my good subject at school, and it has never once let me be wrong twice with my own thumb.
So it stands disputed, which is the worst shape a paper thing can take: the plans say four and are approved; the docket says five and is priced, signed and countersigned; the warden says four from the yard; Payne says five and takes his cheque; and the district pays for the fifth without one query in twenty-six quarters, three of us initialling the voucher in turn like a rota none of us remembers joining. Last March I met Payne at the foot of the tower, the cradle already up and gone quiet above us, wringing out a cloth for a fifth window.
If the block is four floors under a lid, there is no fifth glass in the district for that cloth. If there is a fifth floor, it is not on our plans, does not answer the lift, and has had its windows washed quarterly at the district's expense since 1978. Both sides of the dispute are held, and held properly, on their papers. What nobody on either side of it will sign is the question I carry up the stairs past the fourth button every quarter: whose glass has the district been keeping clean up there, and facing which way?