No Smear Too Small, by Lee Varney

An original novel extract set in the twentieth century.

Gerry talked to windows. I want that on record before anything else. He talked to them the way other men talk to horses, low and coaxing, ‘Come on, my lovely, come on,’ while he worked the squeegee down in long clean strokes, and the glass, as far as I could tell, did what it was told.

We had been partners for three years by the summer of 1994. Clear View, it said on the van, and underneath, in smaller letters that Gerry had added himself without asking me, No Smear Too Small. I did the books, because Gerry thought books were something you put under a short table leg. He did the talking, because I could not do it at all. On paper it worked. On paper most things do.

The round on a Thursday was Purley and the Brighton Road, forty-two houses, eighty pounds if everyone paid. Not everyone paid. By half past twelve I was sitting in the cab adding up a column that would not add up, and Gerry was on the doorstep at Number 9 with old Mrs Achterberg, holding her cat.

He had been there twenty minutes. I could see him through the windscreen, nodding, his ladder forgotten against the hedge, his face arranged into an expression of enormous seriousness. Mrs Achterberg was crying a little. Gerry produced a handkerchief, a clean one, from somewhere I did not know he had pockets, and when she tried to give him her purse he folded her hand closed around it and patted it twice.

He came back whistling.

‘That’s four pounds,’ I said.

‘Her husband’s gone into the home,’ said Gerry. He swung up into the cab and wiped his hands on his knees. ‘Fifty-one years. She can’t get the bathroom window open any more and she didn’t like to ask.’

‘So you did the bathroom window.’

‘And the cat flap. It was sticking.’

‘For nothing.’

‘For a cup of tea.’ He looked at me sideways, the way he did when he knew he was in trouble and intended to enjoy it. ‘Two cups. And a garibaldi.’

I put the pencil down. I had a speech ready about overheads and van insurance and the fact that we were three weeks behind on the rent for the lock-up, and I had rehearsed it in the cab so many times that the words had gone smooth. I opened my mouth to make it.

Gerry was not listening. He was looking back at Number 9, where Mrs Achterberg stood at her clean bathroom window with the cat in her arms, and he lifted one hand to her, and she lifted one back.

‘Lovely,’ he murmured. Whether he meant her or the glass I could not tell.

That evening, when I emptied the cash tin, there was an extra four pounds in it, in coins, warm, as if somebody had been carrying them about all afternoon.

What impressions does the writer create of Gerry? How does the writer create these impressions?

You must refer to the language and structure used in the text to support your answer, using relevant subject terminology where appropriate.