by M. T Hill
‘Another reason we start early,’ the engineer calls over. When Shep turns, she’s pointing into open sky. Soft pink cloud filling slots between Clemens’ hard lines. ‘It’ll be a sunny one today,’ she says. ‘You creamed up?’
Shep pushes in his radio earpiece and sticks the freckle mic to his cheek. He steps into his harness and lugs it up to his hips. With the main belt secure, the biggest clip comes over his head, fastens across the sternum. Then he double-knots his safety rope for luck. He grips the first rung of the ladder, feels the cold alloy bite back. A kind of symbiosis: the ladder rails coursing up through Shep’s hands, airstream-silver and clean as wire. Above him, the early light glowing red on the steel.
‘Good to go,’ Shep says. And he clips on to the safety line and starts his ascent.
* * *
Apprentice steeplejacks get the worst equipment by tradition. So while Shep is generally seen as gifted, he’s still treated by the crew as a green – and the gear reflects it. Aside from the harness and helmet (new by law), his overalls hang baggy, his boots give him blisters, and through his earpiece he receives static-shot cuts from the crew on the flying stage and about every third word of the groundsman’s updates as he fills the supplies cradle.
‘I’m on my way,’ Shep tells them.
‘Ten men!’ someone shouts back through his earpiece. ‘About fucking time and all!’ From nowhere, something pings off the concrete by Shep’s boot. Shep squints. A puff of dust reveals a zinc fastener, still spinning.
‘Ten men!’ the voice cries. ‘It’s raining nuts and fucking bolts!’
The engineer starts screaming bloody murder at the crew.
‘Shepherd!’ the jack’s voice comes again. ‘If you don’t have that Thermos on you, you’re going straight down the shit-chute.’
Shep shakes his head and continues, mindful not to overgrip. Gloves or not, the cold will quickly work into your tendons, make a start on your bones.
‘He ignoring us?’ the jack says. ‘He’s ignoring us! This fucking space cadet.’
‘I’m not ignoring you,’ Shep says.
‘I’m looking down the shitter right now,’ the jack says. ‘Proper minging in there, pal, absolutely hanging. It’ll fit you nicely.’
Shep looks past his toes. The engineer is already thirty feet away, the wind starting to whistle. He goes dizzy momentarily, and his insides tighten. The hangover is kicking in.
‘Get on with it, squeaker,’ the engineer urges. ‘And you gorillas best stop chucking stuff, or the lot of you are off my site by noon.’
So Shep shins on. With no laddering required, it’s more like an easy route at the climbing gym. In his sinew, he knows he could solo this height without breaking a sweat. He’d only need his chalk bag, a pair of lightweight shorts. The air on his back, the satisfying smell of his body in motion. Soon he’ll be high enough to see the North Sea horizon.
‘Late bastards get washed!’ the jack shouts. And Shep hasn’t time to respond before it begins to rain – a warm and heavy rain that gets under his harness and spreads down his back.
Shep gasps for breath. Then he retches. It isn’t rain at all – the jack has just tipped the crew’s piss bottle down the ladder.
‘What happens when you dick us about!’ the jack laughs in his ear.
Shep removes his helmet and wipes his face down his sleeve. The smell. The tepid heat on his skin. He takes it, though – takes it because he has to. What else can he do, dangling there? Another glance down. Wind-reddened hands. Liquid falling away from his helmet. He’s two hundred feet up now, and the ladder’s lower rungs are no longer visible. The surrounding containers, massive from the ground, are bucket rims. Crew cabins and toilets like matchboxes and dice, casting shadows at right angles. Systems of process line, so intricate and precise you could believe they were lifted from a circuit board. And even at this height, that mingling of gases – eggy hydrogen sulphide, sharp hydrogen peroxide – with a whiff of bitumen, rich and meaty, from the gravy lines. Then to the wider refinery, immense and city-like: its glittering tips, steaming apertures, spider-silk trelliswork. Perimeter mesh already patterned with caramel rust, immense sheets of clean, implacable concrete. Contractors whose hi-vis jackets strobe as they move. Lastly, Shep gazes at the semi-circle of tarp around the stack’s base, on which the groundsman is prepping their next load.
‘Come on, pal,’ a different jack says in his ear. ‘We’re on our arses waiting.’
Drop a tool from up here and it’ll bounce a fair way back up. But if you’re not clipped in properly, or the ladder somehow fails, you’re only one mistake away from the ground yourself – and your head won’t bounce at all.
* * *
Mallory Limited – Shep’s employer – is northern England’s most respected firm for high-access jobs. A professional outfit compared to the cowboys and undercutters, the showboaters like Heighter. In digs, trying to sleep, Shep often hears the older jacks fretting about the robots emerging from Heighter’s R&D labs. Gear that might eventually score the bigger contracts. But so what if the competition goes fully automatic? Mallory stands loyal to its affordable but highly skilled steeplejacks, who don’t ask for much in the way of upkeep. Give your Mallory crew a problem to solve and that’s more or less that. Get your engineer to shout them a pint or six afterwards, and they’ll be good for the next day, too.
Besides, no site engineer Shep ever met will ever want a machine doing the work Mallory’s jacks specialise in. Most are too nostalgic, caring more about strong hands and beastly thighs. And so on that ladder, three-quarters towards the chimney lip, the rising sun in his eyes, soaked in the piss of several men, Shep isn’t worried about robots taking his job. Far better to believe there’ll always be thankless people climbing gantries behind the scenes, sliding under surfaces, toiling in the gaps – the phobic spaces between. Far easier to think he’ll retire someday and see his broadness go to fat or, if he works in a certain kind of place, on a certain type of contract, develop cancer and bow out early with a nice pile of compensation to blow.
Shep’s earpiece crackles. ‘Caught you daydreaming again?’
Shep cranes his neck. The corona of a hardhat above. He hauls himself up the last few rungs to meet the old jack waiting there. Gunny. Of all the crew here on Clemens, Shep likes Gunny the most; mid-fifties, sallow, but warm and honest. He says to Gunny, ‘Got the LEDs. They’re all wired, ready to go.’
‘Top man,’ Gunny says, and he attaches a quickdraw to Shep’s harness and brings him onto the platform, where Shep clips out and back in to the railings.
On the staging, grimacing against the wind, three of the crew are playing cards, carefully weighting those on the deck with carabiners. Two of them are smoking. The third must be winning. A fourth jack – jangling a handful of fasteners – leers at Shep from his perch on the far side. He’s the one. Bolt-dropper, piss-pourer. The arsehole whose name he never caught.
‘All right?’ Shep says, letting on. ‘I’ve got the lights.’
The arsehole leans across the cathead beam and holds out an empty hand. ‘Where’s my brew?’ he asks, dipping his head towards the waste-chute opening. ‘Telling you. This hole’s hungry for youth.’
‘Leave him be,’ another jack called Red mutters from the card game. ‘He’s decent.’
‘He still has to learn,’ the arsehole says. He spits straight off the chimney’s side. ‘These greens, man. They have to learn.’
Shep tips the LED units into the bowl of his hand. ‘Should be good to go,’ he tells Gunny. ‘Soldered them last night.’
‘In the back of your van?’ the arsehole says.
‘Yeah.’
Gunny clears his throat. ‘Weren’t you in the boozer past last orders?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Aye, and you look like dogshit,’ the arsehole says. ‘How’s this gonna be a clean job? Why aren’t you kipping with us in digs, anyway?’
‘Leave him be,’ Red says again.
The a
rsehole smirks. ‘You better than us? Is that it? That why you reckon you’re ten men?’
Gunny sighs. ‘Pack it in.’
‘I wouldn’t trust this muppet to change a light bulb,’ the arsehole goes on. ‘Or wipe his own backside, come to that. You don’t sleep with the lads, you can’t be trusted. End of.’
Gunny looks at Shep. He nods at the LEDs. ‘Did you test them?’
‘Yeah,’ Shep lies. ‘All good.’
‘Telling you,’ the arsehole goes on. ‘He’s a lazy bleeder. Needs a good slapping about, same as the old days.’
‘Did you oversleep?’ Gunny asks. ‘Honest? You’d had a fair few when I turned in…’
Shep shakes his head. ‘Safety had me going over the method statement. Ran my bloods.’
The arsehole huffs.
‘Clean, I hope,’ Gunny says.
Shep nods, and Gunny claps him on the shoulder. ‘You only missed me marking up, anyway. Now we can whack these buggers in.’
Shep follows Gunny to the railings. N for north chalked on the first LED boss. He looks out to the Scarborough coastline, the dragging sea, the castle ruins on the hill, then a long way down. Seagulls hunting thermals. The dizziness returns, and Shep’s legs nearly go. It tells you something, working above the birds. A reminder this isn’t your place.
‘Pass’em here, then,’ Gunny says.
Shep gives him one of the LEDs. Holds the wires apart to try and help.
‘So,’ Gunny says, straightening the wires, ‘this is your male and that’s your female, and they make sweet love. Like this—’
Shep follows the LED unit into its boss. When it’s partway in, Gunny hesitates. ‘Oh,’ he says, surprised, like there’s a small amount of resistance. Like there’s muck on the wires. When he goes to speak again, there’s a sickly purple flash. A hideous, hot smell fills Shep’s nose.
Shep rubs his eyes and can’t work out why he’s suddenly sitting on the staging, or why Gunny is doubled over, mewling, clutching his right arm at the wrist. Like Shep, Gunny is now half a metre back from the chimney’s rim, and it looks like he’s trying to put on a red mitten.
Shep’s ears ring off. Thick, thick ozone. Red and the arsehole have their arms around Gunny’s chest, dragging him further away from the edge. Gunny seems afraid. The jacks’ playing cards are fluttering over the edge.
Shep swallows. The air rushes in.
‘What did you do?’ the arsehole shouts.
Shep gets to his feet, thoughts clotting.
‘The LED,’ the arsehole says. ‘What did you do?’
Shep blinks. A small green flame is burning at the north cardinal point. He looks again to Gunny, who’s slumped against the cathead’s upright, helmet wonky, face drained. A rope of bright saliva hanging from the corner of his mouth. He has his arm limply over one knee, and a parody of a hand dangles from his sleeve.
The arsehole scowls at Shep. Red and the other jacks, who are holding their faces or leaning on their knees, ashen. Shep sees only the mess before him: bright bone, seared flesh. Gunny’s hollow stare.
As the other jacks call it in, the arsehole gives Shep a headshake. ‘The state of this,’ he says in a quiet, stifled voice. ‘The state of it. Poor bastard’s got kids to feed – what did you do? What did you do?’
But Shep, with bile in his mouth, doesn’t respond. He can’t remember how to speak.
The Journalist
Freya Medlock tails the driverless hearse through the town and right up to the church. Somehow she’s ended up sixth in the funeral convoy, just two vehicles back from the parents. It’s pouring down with rain, and owing to her nerves she’s grateful her car is driving itself.
The church stands on the jut of a hill overlooking the Manchester basin. It’s a cold hill, harrowed and bald, and the church blends right in. Local gritstone gives it an imposing, almost prehistoric profile. A fitting place to bury someone.
Freya’s car parks itself uncomfortably close to the hearse, so Freya waits for the relatives to disperse before getting out herself. She throws up her umbrella, sets her Dictaphone recording in her pocket, and heads for the church entrance. The pallbearers stand off to one side, working out who’ll take which corner of the coffin.
A middle-aged woman emerges to greet Freya at the church doors. ‘Thank you so much for coming,’ she says, stoic in the crosswind. ‘Stephen’s aunt. Are you here alone?’
‘A friend from uni,’ Freya tells her.
The woman’s eyes flash. She smirks.
‘Really,’ Freya says. ‘Just a friend.’
‘Well, thank you for coming. Get yourself inside and take your pick. It’ll be a sad sight from wherever you’re sitting.’
Freya leaves the woman with a tight smile. Round a pillar, and the congregation fills both sides of the nave. Black cloth and blank faces. Freya grabs a space at one end of a pew and doesn’t look at the person beside her. The vicar steps forward and clears his throat. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he starts. ‘Please stand.’
They do, and between them comes the coffin, glistening with rain. The pallbearers’ shoes are saturated, the floor is uneven, and it’s easy to foresee a slip. But as the pallbearers reach the vicar and lower the coffin to its bier, only quiet prevails. On the vicar’s word, the congregation settles again, skin grey by the morning’s thin light. Nobody quite sure what to do, or where to look, or how they’ve ended up here.
The congregation have this coffin in common, of course. It carries a friend, relative, lover. Freya has done this enough times now to know they’ll each be churning with indignation, fear, stinging disappointment. Nothing will have lessened their confusion so far. No words will have rationalised the suddenness of their loss, or stayed its steady, ceaseless reverberations. They all want closure, believe this day will offer that, but no amount of ‘soul-searching’ or ‘looking out for each other’ will have worked to balm the shock. Then there’s the resignation, the maxims and the clichés: life is too short; live each day as though it’s your last. Regarding a stranger’s coffin, stark and still, Freya always pictures her own funeral, lapsing into negative space. Isn’t a healthy, young person’s death about as wasteful as it comes? The mourners here are massed in a kind of group freefall. They share this air as they visit private memories of the dead man, all plotted on a life that bears his name: Stephen Parsons.
All of the mourners, that is, except Freya.
Freya never knew Stephen Parsons, never met him. But owing to the manner of his death, the arrests of two men despite the coroner having already ruled misadventure, Freya’s editor thinks there might be a story here worth attracting the nationals, and has despatched her to the church to pretend she did. So as a fresh hymn begins to rise, swells against the old stone with unaccountable weight, Freya wills herself to concentrate. If the Dictaphone’s battery lasts the service – if she steals the eulogies her editor wants her to steal – it’ll be easier to win a byline. But if the battery doesn’t, she’ll need to be alert. Otherwise, tomorrow could mean writing another cheap story for a dribble of ad revenue. Shuffling another five-hundred-word, keyword-rich article closer to obscurity.
The vicar gazes among the pews as the congregation sings. Freya fidgets as he loiters on her a beat too long, even if she’s surely anonymous. Her scalp tingles at the idea he might understand her place in all this – that she’s a parasite, an ambulance-chaser. Like he’ll be hovering over her shoulder when she writes up the story tonight.
Stephen Parsons, 29, a data recovery technician and amateur rock climber from Oldham, Greater Manchester, died on a night out in Leeds after falling from the scaffolding of a city centre redevelopment project—
Freya tries to straighten her back. Her bra’s too tight, and when she assumes a better posture her blouse just gapes. She’s convinced the person on her right is watching her.
If you look back, your eyes will give you away.
So Freya twists left, looks across the aisle. The adjacent pew is stacked with lean-looki
ng men and women. Stephen’s climber friends. The way they stand, the stepping of muscles through their clothes, makes her think about the climbing photos she’d scraped from Stephen’s social feeds that morning. In every shot, Stephen was a ballet of limbs caught mid-transition. Committed but grinning, regardless of the route – the problem, climbers call them. A grin so at odds with his casket. Shouldn’t he be here with these mates, or out there in some blissful wilderness? ‘Doing what he loved’? Were some of these climbers caught in Stephen’s pictures – obscured by a crop, or just out of focus? Did one of them take those photos of him?
Hundreds of mourners, including many of Stephen’s rock-climbing friends, gathered yesterday at the Parsons’ family church to pay their respects to a popular man whose death is now being probed by—
The hymn ends. The organ’s final note hangs heavy. The congregation sways.
‘Please sit down,’ the vicar says.
And as the congregation does, a woman in the group of climbers notices Freya and returns a flat stare.
Reverend Falkirk led an intimate service that celebrated Stephen’s life—
‘To start our service,’ the vicar says, ‘I want to invite Stephen’s brother Toby to share a few words.’
Freya swallows – this could be useful. Toby staggers up to the pulpit. His hands are clumsy as he adjusts the microphone, unfolds a piece of paper. His suit, too large, tumbles away from him. His face is bright with sweat. When he goes to speak – ‘My brother…’ – a knot tightens in his throat.
The church stills. Freya studies her feet, her dull patent heels. A vein pulsing over the leftmost metatarsal. What does Stephen’s body look like now? Waxy and blue? Still grinning? She gets the horrible urge to giggle and coughs for cover. How obscene can she be? As Toby struggles to start again, Freya’s conscience needles her. She shouldn’t be here, hearing this. Let alone recording it. Her face gets hotter and hotter, and she starts to worry the stranger next to her will feel her heat through the bits of them that touch.
But you need to do this. You need it.
