THE BLIND MEN'S BUILDERS AND DECORATORS
It was last Wednesday morning. I was striding purposefully up the road to the shops as I usually do; a man with a mission to track down all relevant 'buy one and get one free' offers in the local supermarket. Hopefully, some of these will involve tinned food. I like tins. Frozen food is good, too. I think it's all that preservative they put in, it makes you live longer. People say food was fresh and healthy years ago but they all caught typhoid and cholera and died at forty-five. Now we eat frozen food with E numbers and live to be ninety.
Anyway, what was I saying? Oh yes, I like tins. If the electricity goes off and you've a freezer full of frozen meals, you're stuffed. But tins last forever. They've dug up First World War tins in the old battlefields. Ninety years old and covered in mud for all that time and still edible.
As I often tell my wife, I think people should be buried in tins. Why have wooden coffins that go all mouldy? And, if you are of a religious persuasion that believes in resurrection of the actual body, then how better to preserve it in the meantime than in a tin? Of course, there would need to be a lot of angels with tin openers on judgement day but I expect that could be arranged.
Anyway, these thoughts were idly passing through my head and distracting me so I passed my usual turning. I had to go down a side street I don't normally use and I saw then that the old garage site had been developed at last.
The rotten petrol pumps and decaying buildings had been removed, the weeds cleared and in their place was a builder's yard with a chain-link fence on concrete posts, the usual scatter of sacks and planks in the yard, some covered storage with what looked like paint tins and a couple of Portacabins on stilts above with steel steps leading to the offices.
I remembered that I had been meaning to get a quote for repainting some windows and this seemed like a good opportunity. Then I noticed the sign. Amazingly badly written, letters all over the place, it said 'Blind Men's Builders and Decorators'.
How odd! I couldn't understand it at all. Did it mean they only did work for blind people? Surely not. Perhaps 'Blind Men' was just the name of some tradesmen's guild or club. It need not mean literally what it said. After all, we had a Rotary Club but its members didn't actually rotate, so far as I knew. The Lions' Club did not hunt in a pride down the high street and I knew Freemasons who had never held a chisel, let alone carved a stone. Then there were the Oddfellows; well, perhaps we shouldn't go into that.
Whatever, I needed a quotation and here was as good a place to start as any. I saw another very badly written sign saying 'Reception' and pointing up the steel stairs with a very shaky arrow. I clanged up them and, opening the door at the top, found who I assumed must be the receptionist. I could see she was wearing ear-pieces plugged into some sort of dictation machine and was pounding away at a keyboard as if it had done her some personal harm. Incongruously, for indoors on such a dull day, she was wearing oversized sunglasses.
She didn't seem aware of me until I coughed loudly and then she looked up with a start and smiled vaguely at someone apparently six inches above my left shoulder.
"Can I help you?" she said.
"I wanted to get a quote for some work on my house."
"Ah," she said, now peering directly at me, "Mr Pettifour deals with all that. He's on the phone but he'll be out in a minute. Please take a seat."
She waved her hand in a wide arc in front of her desk and sent a vase of flowers crashing to the floor, but I could spot no chair.
Finally I found one in a corner and dragged it in front of her desk. She remained sitting and staring with a fixed smile at the door I had come in by so, to make conversation, I said, "That's an odd name for a firm, isn't it? 'Blind Men's', etc."
"Oh no, not at all. We are, after all, blind here so it describes us well."
I felt so embarrassed. How could I have missed the clues?
"Oh, uh, don't you find that's a problem with typing and so on?"
"No, it's fine. Mr Pettifour dictates his work and I touch type. Sometimes there is an odd problem I must admit. Last week a customer rang, all irate he was, wanting to know why he had been charged £2700 to change a tap washer. I had to explain I must have let my fingers linger on the keyboard and it should only have been £270. He still didn't seem too pleased, I can't think why."
"I expect Mr Pettifour, is that right, checks the letters and so on anyway."
"Oh no. He can't see either."
"Well, how does he know what he's signing?"
"He doesn't really but he trusts me and anyway no-one expects builders to produce the complete works of William Shakespeare. Just an estimate and then a bill that's nothing like it." She laughed.
There was a thud from the other end of the room like someone walking into a closed door and then the door indeed did fly open and a large, ruddy faced man entered, carrying some files and swinging a white stick in the manner of a jungle explorer clearing undergrowth with a machete.
He, too, wore the obligatory oversized dark glasses.
"Here's Mr Pettifour now," murmured the receptionist somewhat unnecessarily.
"Ah, Miss Plush, just file these would you," and Mr Pettifour dropped the files more or less on her desktop sending her mug down on the floor to join the vase and flowers.
"Mr Pettifour," said Miss Plush, "we have a visitor. A gentleman who wants an estimate."
"Oh," said Mr Pettifour, "how do you do?" And he advanced to try and shake hands with the filing cabinet.
"Your receptionist was just telling me a little about your firm, Mr Pettifour," I said to try to reorientate him.
"Ah, yes, I'm glad to explain," and Mr Pettifour seated himself on the edge of Miss Plush's desk, in the plastic in-tray which immediately smashed into a dozen pieces. Mr Pettifour carried on anyway.
"It's all because of European Union legislation and human rights law. I expect you know that it is now illegal to discriminate in employment on the grounds of gender, sexual orientation, race, colour, religion and, shortly, age as well. Meanwhile, the EU has decided that not enough is being done to help the disabled so now all jobs must be open to all disabled people regardless and, indeed, there must be positive discrimination in their favour.
"To back this up, the EU has some generous grant money, well actually it makes the British Government give out generous grants of tax payers' money, to firms who take part in the initiative. I saw the opportunity and started the Blind Men's builders."
"But how can blind men do painting and decorating?"
"Easily, my dear fellow, easily," and Mr Pettifour beamed vaguely in my direction. "Have you ever had builders and decorators in your house?"
"Yes, sometimes. No more than I could help,"
"Exactly! Did they drop paint on your carpets, your wallpaper and your furniture? Did they get paint all over the glass of windows and only coincidentally on the wooden frames?"
"Yes, I'm afraid they did.."
"Well, so do we! That's exactly what the blind builders and painters do! So you see, they are absolutely no worse than normal painters and it's giving disabled people a means of earning a living."
I was having trouble getting my head round this.
"But surely, you can't mean that ALL your staff are blind, surely?"
"Oh yes, they are," said Mr Pettifour triumphantly.
"Not quite all," Miss Plush came to life. "The guide dogs can see."
"Ah yes, of course. Bless them, they can see."
"But, but, surely you have someone to drive your men to their jobs?"
"Not at all. You drive in cities sometimes, I expect?"
"Yes," I admitted.
"Have you ever been cut-up by a white van, had one tailgate you, seen one drive the wrong way up a one-way street, jump a red light or go on the wrong side of the road to get past a traffic jam?"
"Frequently."
"Well, then our blind drivers are no worse than that so you could never tell the difference. Besides, they have their guide dogs to help them."
"I know, don't tell me. The guide dogs drive the vans." At this point, I think I would have believed anything.
"Goodness no," Mr Pettifour beamed again. "How silly. Their little paws couldn't reach the controls. No, they tell our blind drivers which way to go. Not just seeing eye dogs, as the Americans call them, but driving eye dogs as well. An invention of my own and I trained them."
Mr Pettifour sat back looking proud.
"But how...?"
"Easy. Have you ever seen a commercial vehicle with a dog sitting alongside the driver in the cab with his head out of the window?"
"Yes."
"Could have been one of ours. The dog was navigating. We train them. One bark for turn left, two for turn right, a growl meaning speed-up, a series of sharp yelps to slow down or stop. Easy!"
As if to emphasise this absurd statement, I suddenly heard what sounded like a commercial diesel engine being violently over-revved and coming towards the yard. I got up and looked out of the window.
A white van with gouges and dents all down the side was barrelling towards the yard up the side street. Smoke poured from the exhaust, a ladder swayed ominously from a roof rack and a large Alsatian dog had his head out of the passenger side window and was barking hysterically.
Just as it reached the entrance, the driver must have wrenched the wheel round suddenly and the van, now teetering on its offside two wheels, abruptly changed direction and flung itself through the yard gates. It almost cleared the entrance except that the driver's side door mirror was torn off by the concrete gate support, whereupon it flew through the air and struck a passing child a glancing blow.
I saw the van's wheels lock as the driver must have braked hard. Smoke now issued from the tyres instead of the exhaust as the van continued apparently no slower until it dived, nose first, into a stack of cement sacks. A huge cloud of dust promptly covered the scene.
"Ah," said Mr Pettifour. "That must be James. He is due back about now."
As the dust cleared, I saw the driver's door open and a figure slowly climbed out. He was carrying a white stick and wore, yes I just knew it, the obligatory oversized dark glasses.
As he tapped his way towards the stairs, the Alsatian dog appeared from the far side of the van. With his head held high and his tail raised perkily, he had the air of a dog with a useful job well done. What was particularly striking, though, was that he was covered in paint. Even from this distance, I could see he had one white gloss ear and one black matt one. His back was cobalt blue, silk finish I think, and his hindquarters were emerald green emulsion.
I wondered if the dog was encouraged to do some painting, too.
Just as this thought crossed my mind, the dog, in a delirium of happiness at being back, ran straight in front of James who, unable to see him, immediately went sprawling. He fell into a pile of paint tins which crashed around him.
As James' muffled oaths and curses reached the window, I turned away.
"Well," said Mr Pettifour. "Now you know all about us, what can we quote you for?"
"Err, I think I'll leave it for now, if you don't mind," I played for time. "I'll need to see how my finances go first."
"Quite understood," said Mr Pettifour, turning away. He seemed unsurprised at my reaction.
"Oh, before you go," he turned back vaguely in my direction. "I'm thinking of expanding into window cleaning by the disabled. It would go well with building; it's all ladders and access to the outside of people's houses, after all. Then I could claim a further new business start-up grant from the Government.
"You don't know any one-legged, trans-gendered window cleaners, do you?"
THE END