Seeing the Wires

by Patrick Thompson

  II

  Back in the days when I worked on the building sites there were lots of things to remember. Trenches had to be no wider than they were deep. You weren’t to stand in front of diggers or ’dozers. You weren’t to shout at young ladies. The number of cigarette breaks in the day was limited to the number of available cigarettes. If inspectors came and asked you anything, you said you didn’t know and the man who did know was at another site.

  I remembered all of that. Mr Link praised my powers of recollection.

  ‘You’re a credit,’ he said. ‘Most students we get here have taken so many drugs that they have trouble saying “trench”, never mind digging one. But you have a terrific memory. And that’s fine. You’ve got a full set of arms and legs. That’s fine too. I’m not an equal opportunities employer. The government says I have to be, and I say I didn’t vote for them and they can piss off. If Stevie Wonder asked for a job here I’d show him the door and he’d bump into it. So I’m happy that you have all the necessary faculties, relating to unskilled manual labour.’ He said that before Darren and I got our wires crossed. After that, Mr Link stopped praising my powers of recollection. Instead he dissed me at length.

  It wasn’t my fault, not altogether. We were working on a site outside Oldbury, one of those towns you get where you can’t find the town centre. You get to a suburb, an outskirt, with a small shop that’s equal parts off-licence, tobacconist, and porno merchant. There’s a pedestrian crossing and pedestrians crossing it, interrupting the traffic. There’s a bingo hall with an enormous billboard, and an edge-of-town supermarket. There are roundabouts and ringroads and traffic islands scattered about as though someone had been selling them off cheap. You drive around a few, searching for the rest of the town, and find yourself at a motorway junction. The signs say Oldbury is behind you. You go around the next island, which is huge and insane and dotted with traffic lights, none of them in sync with the others. You head back to where Oldbury must be and somehow miss it again, ending up on the road to Birmingham with nowhere to turn round and a bus overtaking you so that it can block your way at the next stop. You turn round in someone’s drive and head back, through the elaborate system of islands, heading this way and that, but wherever you go, signs say Oldbury is behind you, where you’ve just come from. Eventually it dawns on you, as you pass the edge-of-town supermarket and the small shop and the pedestrian crossing, that this is Oldbury. It’s a town without a centre. The rest of it isn’t there, and there’s no point looking for it. This is Oldbury. It really is behind you. It’s behind everywhere, because it stopped ten years ago and no one thought to build a middle.

  We were putting up an office building on the east side of town. As the van passed through the outskirt that turned out to be the town, a bus pulled up in front of us and we had to wait while it unloaded. Darren and I were in the front, being by now the old hands. In the back, jostled by the picks and shovels, were two new lads, both ex-students. Darren looked at the passengers alighting from the bus.

  ‘Bloody hell, Sam,’ he said, ‘check this out. None of them is normal.’

  He was right. Everyone clambering slowly from the rumbling bus had some sort of defect. To a man they were blind, or had club feet, or walked with an unusual gait, or had withered arms, or swore repeatedly at the air, or all of the above. They emerged from the bus and wandered randomly, into the shops, into the bushes, into the road, into each other.

  ‘Must be a special bus,’ I said.

  ‘Sunshine bus,’ agreed Darren.

  It wasn’t sunny, as it happens. It wasn’t a special bus, either. It was an ordinary bus, and they were ordinary Oldbury residents. Oldbury residents were inbred in a way that would make Alabamans feel queasy. The gene pool was stagnant and polluted. Darren and I learned to send the other ex-students – Damien and Marcus – to the local shop for supplies, i.e. cigarettes.

  The first day there, after a hard morning of deciding where to put the trenches, Darren and I went to the shop. Until that job, going to the shop had been a perk. It got you out of the way of any work. There was a chance that while you were at the shop, someone else would do the work. We went to the shop. There was a counter with no one behind it, and the usual stock, smoking supplies, magazines, sweets. I looked over the magazines. The selection was strange. The top shelf was what you’d expect. What I didn’t expect was that the next three shelves would be the same. I hadn’t seen so much pornography in one place before. I looked at the remaining shelf, and found that it held true crime magazines. Other than the titles, they looked exactly like the porn. Darren leafed through a magazine and, in the interests of research, I looked over his shoulder.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said.

  I didn’t know what he’d found a picture of. It looked like liver gone wild.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think a doctor would know. I don’t think its owner would know. It looks like a kidney.’

  ‘I thought liver.’

  ‘Well that’s unanimous then. It’s something internal. What is this, Surgeon’s Monthly?’

  It wasn’t Surgeon’s Monthly, if there is such a thing. It was called Pure Dirt Fantazia and it would have made a surgeon throw his hands to his face and call for help. Darren replaced the magazine between Big Women and Asian Secrets.

  ‘Just ciggies then,’ he said, approaching the counter. It was still deserted. He leaned over it. There was a till, one of the old ones with buttons that had to be pushed about a foot to make anything happen.

  ‘Hello?’ he said, quietly. From behind a door behind the counter came the sounds of someone approaching. The door opened and a young woman came through. She looked as normal as anyone in Oldbury, which is to say that she had the right number of eyes and fingers. The eyes were slightly crossed and the fingers were partially webbed, but at least they were all there.

  ‘Is it waiting?’ she asked with a strong but unidentifiable accent.

  ‘Sorry?’ said Darren.

  ‘No, not,’ she said. ‘Cigarettes? Is it them?’

  ‘Camel,’ said Darren. ‘Forty, cheers.’

  The girl looked at him.

  ‘Is it cigarettes? Not. Not cigarettes today. Tuesday, Wednesday, cigarettes. Not today please.’

  ‘They’re there,’ said Darren, pointing to the shelves behind her. She looked at his finger as though she was considering biting it.

  ‘Tuesday, Wednesday, cigarettes. Not today. No cigarettes today.’

  ‘Is there anyone else here?’ Darren asked.

  ‘Him also,’ she said, pointing at me with her batrachian hand.

  ‘Him also want cigarette, today, not Tuesday please,’ tried Darren. She gave him twenty Embassy.

  ‘Take them,’ I whispered.

  ‘How much?’ he asked.

  There was a definite gleam in the girl’s eyes as she said:

  ‘Prices to be found in listing in drawer. Also codes for greetings cards.’

  By the time we got back to the building site, Damien and Marcus had marked out the lines of the trenches with wooden staves.

  ‘Nice job,’ said Darren. ‘Tell you what, lads, next time we need some fags getting in, you can go. Be a bonus, seeing as how you’ve done so well.’

  ‘Cool,’ said Marcus, not knowing what we were letting him in for. Damien nodded. Darren and I looked over the lines they’d laid. They looked fine, good and straight, meeting at right-angles, no curls or jiggles or anything else that would give Mr Link a headache. We forgot one of the things you have to remember on a building site, which is: don’t take anyone else’s word for it.

  That afternoon Marcus and Damien went for cigarettes and Darren and I started to dig. We started at a corner – we always started at a corner because you could judge the position from there – and slowly moved away from one another. By the time Marcus and Damien returned, in strange moods and with the wrong number of packets of the wrong brands of cigarettes, we’d dug a long way. Darren was doing an
end trench, which was shorter than the one I was doing, and he’d almost got to the next corner. I was lagging slightly but I wasn’t worried. Mr Link would be pleased with the progress. Usually, on the first day at a new site, we didn’t do anything. The weather would be wrong or there would be confusion about the land or there would be a field of cows where the building was supposed to go, and none of us felt comfortable with cows. They were big and bulky and made strange noises.

  Things seemed to be going well. We packed up early and drove past the small shop and the edge-of-town supermarket that wasn’t on the edge of town.

  ‘There’s nothing but porn in that shop,’ said Damien. ‘Filthy.’

  ‘The way the people here look, they need porn,’ said Marcus.

  ‘They need more genes,’ said Damien. ‘Are you volunteering?’

  ‘Not fucking likely. They’d probably get them by eating you alive.’

  ‘Better than having sex with them,’ said Darren. A bus arrived and disgorged another cluster of misshapes and Darren swung the van around them.

  A day later Spin joined us. He’d been on holiday, but Darren couldn’t tell us where. The mime was uncertain.

  ‘Portugal?’ he guessed. ‘Istanbul? Miami? Saundersfoot?’

  We finished the trenches, and they were long and deep. Mr Link was due to visit, soon. He knew we were in good hands with Darren and Spin.

  I should have realized something was wrong when Damien and Marcus marked out two more trenches. They were inside each end of the rectangle we’d already dug out and stretched right across it. I was surprised, at first. Mr Link didn’t approve of interior walls. He didn’t disapprove of them as much as he disapproved of doors and windows, but he was wary of them. Looking at the foundations, we were going to have a long building, with side walls and end walls, and then a few feet inside the end walls another pair of end walls.

  ‘Are you sure this is what we’re supposed to be doing?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s on the plans,’ said Marcus. ‘We’ve checked them.’

  I asked Spin about it and he gesticulated an answer.

  ‘Spin reckons Mr Link is moving into new areas, architecturally,’ Darren translated. ‘This is similar to his previous theme, that of massive empty cuboids, but now he’s working with joined massive empty cuboids. It’s by way of being an extension to his oeuvre, Spin reckons.’

  ‘How can you tell all that from him waving his hands about?’ asked Marcus, who wasn’t used to Spin.

  ‘It’s easy, really,’ said Darren.

  ‘Why don’t you know where he went on holiday, then?’

  ‘Proper names are a different thing. You can do gestures for holiday, or travel, or cat, or anything really, but names are abstract. I haven’t worked out the way he does names.’

  ‘How do we know what he’s called then?’

  ‘Who says we do? Does Spin sound like a proper name to you?’

  Spin nodded, alone.

  ‘He did a spinning thing with his hands, so I called him Spin, and he liked it. So he’s Spin.’

  Spin nodded again. Marcus looked back at the trench, unconvinced. We began to dig out the two new sections Damien and Marcus had marked out.

  Mr Link arrived an hour later. It became apparent that there was something wrong.

  ‘What the buttery fuck do you think you’re up to?’ he asked us all, looking at what we’d done. ‘What the fuck have you done?’

  ‘We’ve nearly got the foundations done,’ said Darren. ‘If it’s going to make things difficult, being this far ahead of schedule, we can slow it down with the scaffolding.’

  Spin shook his head when scaffolding was mentioned, and either crossed himself or told us something. Marcus, who had gained his degree in psychology, moved smartly away, putting on a limp and mingling with the people of Oldbury.

  ‘Oh, I think we can cope with being ahead of schedule,’ said Mr Link. ‘Seeing as how you’ve made a complete pig’s ear of it. Now, how do we like our buildings?’

  ‘Square,’ three of us said and Spin mimed; ‘Square, flat, straight and empty.’

  ‘So what are those other trenches for?’

  ‘Cavity walls?’

  ‘No. Those trenches are in the wrong places. But also in the right places. Who marked it out?’

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ said Damien. ‘I’ve only been doing this a week. I was out getting the cigarettes, and let me tell you, that’s a job and a half in this town.’

  ‘Is it a town?’ asked Mr Link, momentarily distracted. ‘I thought it was funny that they’d given a name to a traffic island. Not as funny as building two buildings in the same space, though. Now, how am I going to put up two warehouse-style office complexes when I have enough end trenches but half the number of side ones?’

  I looked at the foundations and realized what we’d done. We’d set two sets of foundations overlapping one another. They weren’t overlapping by a small amount, either. They were overlapping for about a hundred metres.

  ‘Ah,’ said Darren. ‘I don’t suppose you drew them on top of each other on the plans?’

  ‘Well of course I did, what am I? W H bloody Smith? How much paper do you think I have? I drew them in different colours. Two rectangles. How difficult can that be to follow?’

  ‘Erm,’ said Darren.

  ‘We can put one of them there,’ I said, ‘and set another one over here.’

  ‘Over here? Next to the road? In the road? In a bottle on the roof? Where were you thinking of, exactly? Because the one we do have foundations for has its foundations – and some of another building’s foundations, well done there, that’s the sort of extra touch that always cheers me up – right in the middle of the plot. So, how will we sort that one out then?’

  The answer to that turned out to be, by working all night. I thought about all that two years later, while I was waiting for my hangover to leave me alone. It seemed to fit. What if we’d gone ahead and built two structures into the same plot? Would it have worked? Could two structures coexist?

  Could both Jack and I be right, at the same time? His truth and my truth, in the same space? Could he be remembering some of the truth, and I forgetting it? These thoughts swirled in my head, gradually settling.

  I realized that I’d been thinking nonsense. Jack was off his head. The days on the building sites were safely in the past, and the past was over with. None of that could touch me now. None of that was still around.

  III

  My hangover diminished. By midmorning it had become a slight queasiness and a hint of a headache. I felt well enough to talk to my team. I remembered that Steve had left, and Jane from the agency had turned out to be bright.

  My team inhabits a set of desks at one end of an open-plan office. It’s open-plan so that everyone else in the office can see how badly my team is doing. From time to time Ted Wiggins would drift by on his way to or from a meeting, and look at them with evident disappointment. I wasn’t worried that my team never produced anything – this was the council – but a bad team might seem to mean a bad team leader. I didn’t want to get in any trouble. I looked over what they were doing. Melanie was busy playing Minesweeper, which we allowed on the computers as it was less interesting than a spreadsheet. Theresa was sitting next to Melanie and looking perplexed. Theresa was of the generation before computers. She might have been from one of the generations before that. She would forget her password, or how to switch the computer on, or what to do with it once it was switched on. She couldn’t do anything with computers except delete files she didn’t want to delete. The more important they were, the more likely she was to delete them. She deleted system files, hardware drivers, spreadsheets, whole screenfuls of EXEs and LOGs and INIs. There would often be someone from IT standing close to her desk, looking weary. Today it was Nigel, a lanky gawky boy who looked about fifteen. He blinked in the glare of the office lights, eager to get back to the IT cubbyhole so that he could browse porn sites and look up the schematics of Klingon battlecrui
sers.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘there’s no need to do that. Don’t press the delete key. That’s the one that deletes things. That’s why it has “delete” on it. It means, this is the key for deleting things.’

  ‘What, this one?’ asked Theresa, pressing it. A list of things, highlighted blue, rapidly shrank.

  ‘Yes, that one. That’s the one not to press,’ said Nigel, with heavy emphasis.

  ‘I see,’ said Theresa, tapping it. Each time she tapped, Nigel flinched.

  ‘So if you could not tap it, that might help. Leave it alone. Pretend it isn’t there. Now, your password. It’s Theresa, like it was yesterday. Like it always is. It’s your name. Shall I write it down for you?’

  Theresa didn’t recognize sarcasm, which was just as well. I left them to it and checked the other desks. Three were vacant. That couldn’t be right. There were two spare, and Jane should have been at the other.

  ‘Where’s Jane?’ I asked.

  ‘Jane who?’ asked Melanie.

  ‘Jane who was here yesterday. The girl who knew how to do something.’

  ‘Gone.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘New team leader at the end asked to borrow her and she went over there. She’s staying there now. Team at the end, behind Contracts and HR.’

  ‘She was all right,’ said Nigel.

  What did he know about women? He was a computer freak. The only women he saw were kissing Captain Kirk with their faces painted blue. I wasn’t going to let Jane go to another team. This was all down to Jack. If he didn’t keep saying that we used to murder people, I wouldn’t need to get drunk, and then I wouldn’t have had the hangover, and then I’d have been watching my team instead of waiting for God to kill me and end the suffering.

  ‘Which team?’ I asked, looking over the ranks of desks.

  ‘At the end,’ said Melanie.

  I made my way along the office. I wanted to stride, but it doesn’t suit me. I think it’s my knees. They aren’t striding knees. I passed the other teams and arrived at the end set of desks. I could see Jane, hunched over a keyboard, copying data from nowhere to nowhere else. A man stood over her with his back to me. He was wide and it wasn’t fat. He looked solid. He had a solid neck. He had very black hair. I didn’t know how to catch his attention. I’m not the sort of person who can just butt into a conversation.