Early Monday morning on Willowy Lane, a long residential road in Suburbiaville, a new town on the Essex/North-East London border. There was the British Rail station with a snack-bar in the waiting room at one end of the lane, and the town park at the other. This meant that on a hot day, if you bought an ice-cream from the kiosk at the station, it would melt long before you could get to the park and enjoy it while sat on a bench, unless you had a cool-box. There was, too, a little hardware outlet that sold cool-boxes next to the station.
Suburbiaville Newtown was idyllic, the home of doctors, lawyers, court judges, stockbrokers and television celebrities. Oh yes, and rumour has it that a Hollywood movie star used it as a holiday home. Only those who could afford to lived in Suburbiaville. Of course it had its less desirable areas, like most places, but the residents of Willowy Lane refused to recognise those areas as part of Suburbiaville. To live anywhere near Willowy Lane you needed to be very successful indeed and have a face that fitted – oh, and an air of snobbishness didn’t go amiss.
Malcolm was a street cleaner from the other,less desirable, side of town. He cleaned Willowy Lane and the other streets nearby. He was hard working, dedicated and so clean and tidy it was untrue. Street cleaners who cleaned other, less desirable parts of Suburbiaville Newtown would turn up for work in a tatty old donkey jacket or jeans and stained shirt, creased and crumpled from the day before, but not Malcolm.
Malcolm wore a donkey jacket like the others but his always looked smart, clean and well looked after. And the “Suburbiaville Council Street Cleaning Services” logo on the “Hi-Way Vest” he wore was written in the same Day-Glo fiery-orange paint that coloured his barrow – smartness, visibility and safety was one of his mottoes. Every Friday after work he would call in at the dry cleaners just outside the town centre to have the jacket cleaned, pressed and any scuffs or tears invisibly mended. He got on very well with Mister Patel, a cockney from Bangladesh, who owned “Pat’s Perfect Drycleaners” and because Malcolm would, sometimes, clean outside his shop front on hi
