Stellar story: ‘Part-Time Superheroes: Brisbane’s hospital window cleaners’, October 2016
A feature story for Stellar, published in the October 30 2016 issue. Excerpt below.
Meet the window cleaners who drop by to brighten the days of patients at a children’s hospital
A 10-year-old boy named Griffith Comrie is waiting by a window on the sixth floor of the Lady Cilento Children’s Hospital in inner-city Brisbane. He’s been doing a lot of waiting lately since having a stroke in his hometown of Gladstone nine weeks earlier, after which he was airlifted 520 kilometres south for treatment, rest and rehabilitation. He’s missed a lot of school and has had to learn how to walk and talk again. His short-term memory has suffered; he jokes to his grandmother, Dorn, that there’s not much point in watching movies lately, as by the time he gets to the end, he can’t remember what happened at the beginning. Sometimes, he thinks he’s on an extended holiday from his usual life back home.
As he sits beside seven-year-old girls Thea Rendle and Millie Allen, an unexpected visitor drops into his line of sight. On the other side of the glass, Superman descends with a thick rope and harness around his waist, white sneakers on his feet and a yellow hard hat on his head. The bright blue outfit, complete with “S” chest insignia and red cape, are unmistakeable, even for a memory-affected boy like Griffith. The youngsters are mesmerised. Why, they wonder, is Superman visiting them?
Suddenly, another rope drops down. “It’s Batman!” yells Thea, before Millie – who’s wearing her school uniform, having had a morning appointment with her therapist – corrects her: “No, it’s Spider-Man!” She’s right: hanging in front of them is the web-slinger himself, wearing black-and-orange sneakers and a dark hard hat, while his shoulders and pectorals bulge with well-sculpted muscles, presumably earned from swinging between tall buildings such as this one.
Spider-Man delights his young audience by turning somersaults and showing off his aerial dexterity, yet his facial expression remains impassive behind the dark red mask. Superman, however, can’t stop grinning, and the pair of them ham it up together while dangling from the ropes that hold them in place, dozens of metres above the busy street below. For any pedestrians who happen to look up, the sight of the two superheroes together must be as disorienting as it is grin-inducing.
What the kids don’t know is that underneath the superheroes’ outfits, they wear bright yellow high-visibility shirts bearing the name of their employer, Queensland Water Blasting. Nor are the youngsters aware that, rather than stopping criminals and saving the city from imminent destruction, their purpose here – when they’re not engaged in midair gymnastic trickery – is to wash the hospital’s hundreds of external windows. It’s a big job, requiring them to be on-site every weekday for about three weeks, doing their best to avoid sunburn by following the building’s shade as the earth turns.
To read the full story, visit Stellar. Above photo credit: Claudia Baxter.