I'd be up a ladder most of the week. It was a lugging job to get it off the roof of the van, extend it and then walk up and down it, loaded with cans, heavy overalls and tools.
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Up there it was just me, solitary, with a tin of paint and yet another window in front of me. I'd have a paint splattered radio with me, cackling out the most popular tunes of the month, with the direly jolly banter of a DJ or two. I never really listened to it - it was part of the silence. There were the seagulls screeching nearby too, but again they made zero impact on my mind. When you listen to certain sounds all the time, they become silence - part of the same, mulled noisy emptiness - your soundtrack - the sounds which define your existence.
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At each rounded, odd-numbered hour we'd have a break, or a thirty-minute lunch - eleven am, one pm, three pm - went home at five pm. Each stop in the hugely mundane work was the grand clock of the week. On a Monday, the first break, we were only five percent through it. At this stage we still had that grim, hardened determination - too early yet to let the woe of the whole debacle take over our moods. This early stage in the week needed gritted teeth - the weekend was far in the future - the previous one already buried by the alarm which had cracked our heads and eyes open in the morning.
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Wednesday morning was the worst - just a few minor steps from being over the halfway point. Time seldom slowed down more than it did on a Wednesday morning. It's like time goes to the zoo at this point - and spends a few hours staring, with contented malice, at the working classes - time at its most sadistic- and time is a fucking sadist. We were all a spectacle at this time. The convicts of our mass destiny. It still amazes me to think how much we hated each other at this time of week. The only thing which kept us from killing each other was the need to avoid all capacity for decision and the greater hate of everything else.
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On Friday afternoons we were itching. The weekend of fucking and drinking (so seldom in that order) was within completing a window and dousing our hands in turpentine. We'd roll up our overalls, stuff them in a plastic bag, get in the back of the van and be dropped off at home.
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I guess we all kept some more turpentine at home. You could never get all the paint off at work. Sometimes it was on my cock. Not so strange if you've been painting a window and needed to go for a piss.
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So, Friday night I'd prep my penis with some toilet paper dabbed in turpentine. Wiping off the hard white gloss, careful not to rub it red. Some of it was five days old because water wouldn't do it and turps on the softer cock skin every day would give it a rash. It was one of the first steps in erasing the week.
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Within a few hours of this I'd be drunk, steaming drunk - because I had to be for so many reasons. One of them to see if someone would have my turps-cleaned cock inside them that night. A further step to redemption.
