Site Works

by Robert Davidson

  In the Agent’s hut he found not only Trevor and Eamon but the tunnellers standing round the four walls and Swannie seated behind the desk. The men were all holding cups and holding them not by the handle as with hot tea but round the body as with a glass tumbler. Deek had a bottle of whisky, half empty, in his hand. He pressed a cup on Paul which he three quarters filled and shuffled on, pouring into the outheld cups. It looked like an everyday normality of no more importance than tea.

  Paul looked down into the cup and when he looked up saw that the bottle had rounded and almost returned. He swallowed his whisky down and took his refill.

  ‘We’re topping out the first half,’ Gerry told him.

  Paul looked at the men with a new eye. They were cleaned up, spruced. They had managed it more quickly than he.

  ‘Brora is waiting for us,’ Mike added. ‘The fleshpots, Paul, will you come?’

  ‘Ah no,’ interrupted Eamon. ‘This lad’s to go home. He’s a mother waiting for him and you lot and Mister Swann have been pressing on her patience. You driving, Paul?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Not any more.’

  ‘Are you telling my staff how to behave?’ Swannie asked provocatively.

  He had a cup of whisky in front of him that he never touched.

  ‘I’ll give such guidance I think is right.’

  Swannie looked at Trevor and nodded towards the filing cabinet. Another bottle of whisky went round and Paul only barely noticed that, aside from Deek, the others had slowed down. Like Swannie, Eamon held a cup but never took it to his mouth. Paul drank another off and another before the first had properly found its way to his head.

  ‘You’ll have the traffic switched in the morning?’ Eamon asked Trevor.

  ‘I will.’

  ‘We can start at 9:00.’

  ‘Say 10:00,’ Swannie said. ‘We want the police on our side.’

  ‘Look at that night,’ said Mike at the window.

  Together they gazed out and up at the sky. The clouds were gone and the stars were out. The moon was full and shining.

  ‘Jeez, cold though,’ said Gerry. ‘You’d die sleeping out.’

  While all their attention was at the window Paul slipped through the door. Eamon didn’t want him to drive, but he was fine. Yes, he was fine. His head was clear and filled with great thoughts about men and work and the ways of the world. On the drive home he intended to bring them forth and go through them and be wise but when he reached his battered old hatchback the notion that he should return to what had been the tunnel overwhelmed him. He walked on across the hardening mud to the cofferdam and checked the temperature on the thermometer. It was eight below and falling.

  He climbed down the scaffolding and onto the concrete base. The last pipe protruded from the cofferdam wall like a stubby phallus. He put his hand on it, ran his hand lovingly over the concrete and thought how good it was, how well done, how bloody fucking well done. He touched the concrete surround and wondered that the beautiful tunnel that was laboured for so hard could be so quickly gone, its purpose served. When he looked up Orion hung in the sky directly over his head and it too was beautiful. He stared up at it and almost toppled over. Yes, it was beautiful all right, but he had realised at last that everything was beautiful, all we do, all we see, all we are part of, and he hummed the words over and over under his breath.

  Everything is beautiful.

  Everything is beautiful.

  Wasn’t there a tune to go with it? Gone, but no matter, everything returns in time. The stars themselves go round.

  Topside he headed for the compound and the car but changed his mind again as he approached the lighted hut. He wanted to see the beautiful sea with the beautiful stars reflected in it. He continued downhill to the shore and the North Sea where the wind blew chill across Europe from the Russian Steppe. There he kept walking into water that was so cold it would be ice were it not salt and perpetually moving. Yes, it was beautiful. Ankles, knees, up to his thighs and now the cold was biting into his very heart but he kept going until he felt strong arms under his own arms and around his chest and himself being drawn backwards and out into the dry.

  ‘Back you come, Paul,’ said Eamon in his ear. ‘Out of this and home.’

  Paul insisted on walking unsupported to the huts but didn’t resist as Eamon helped him change out of his wet jeans back into his working trousers.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘S’okay.’

  ‘What now?’

  ‘You gonna be sick?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Now into my car and I’ll get you home. Stay awake long enough to give me directions.’

  Paul fell asleep in the car but was awake enough by Dingwall to give directions. He accepted Eamon’s arm that took him to the door and there saw his mother’s face again. Strangely, strangely, she was not looking at him so much as Eamon who was holding him up. They went inside and Paul could remember little after that, only Eamon assuring her that ‘it could happen to anyone’ and that it happened to most although this she certainly knew. The last thing he heard was Eamon telling her that she should please go easy on him in the morning and that there was no need for him to come in to work at all since he, Paul, was likely to be more dead than alive by that time. He remembered later how his mother looked very carefully at this Eamon she had heard about and nodded and nodded and thought behind her eyes. She was a woman of harsh judgements when it came to men.

  He fell asleep in a chair and wakened in bed with the light on and, it was true, felt more dead than alive. There was a pungency in the room and with a shudder of horror that almost took his head off he realised he had been sick. He sat up and looked around. The first flush was across the duvet and the rest had flooded the carpet. How could his body have held so much stuff? Outside the window it was still dark. Through eyes shuttered by pain he watched the dawn slowly break.

  That morning on site Eamon had Mike and Tony move all the small plant across the A9. Moving the crane and the mixer and the lights and generator required a police presence and would be carried out later in the day. He had Brian and Gerry cut sleepers since the supply was by now low. Deek and Patsy he ordered down the cofferdam to tidy up. It was 9:45am, almost time for tea. He was leaning against the piles, looking at Paul’s hatchback rusting in the salt coastal air, looking at Trevor’s company saloon and Swannie’s beamer beside it when a newer hatchback turned in off the road and into the compound.

  From the passenger side there emerged the remorseful Paul. Whiter than a glass of milk, thought Eamon, he looked 100 years of age. Without speaking or gesturing or acknowledging any other presence he made his way into his own hut to his donkey jacket and level book. The hatchback’s engine gunned as it turned and advanced to the compound gate and there halted as though it had the power of thought and knew doubt.

  ‘Well,’ Eamon said. ‘We’ll just watch what happens now.’

  A moment later it reversed back into position outside the Agent’s hut and Paul’s mother emerged and knocked at the door, entering without a pause.

  ‘What is that?’ Mike asked.

  ‘A handsome woman in her forties,’ Eamon told him, not taking his eyes from the door of the hut. ‘Her name is Mrs Eileen Williamson.’

  Patsy had already brought the gas bottle and ring out of the cofferdam and set it up topsides near where Brian and Gerry were sawing. Eamon put a match to the ring and the kettle to the flame.

  ‘I would have guessed something of the sort,’ Eamon went on.

  As the kettle came to the boil Trevor emerged from the Agent’s hut, pulling on his jacket and shaking his head. Eamon dropped four tea bags into the kettle and gave Brian and Gerry a shout. All three watched the hut as they drank. All three were silent, all waiting for something without knowing what until Paul’s mother emerged grim in her dignity and, as all men could see, her beauty.

  ‘Now he knows,’ he said to the others. ‘Now Big Swannie knows and my guess is he’s slumped over that des
k of his and the wall behind is running with whatever cold fluid does the work of blood in the Swann veins.’

  ‘That’ll be right,’ said Deek.

  ‘Oh, that’ll be right all right.’

  Eamon caught Mrs Eileen Williamson’s eye as her hand grasped the handle of her car door.

  ‘And Paul is at his work right on time, even if half dead and good for nowt. As I guessed he would be. As I knew.’

  When Paul’s mother took on his eye he raised his helmet in her direction and received a shy smile in return and at that moment Paul came out of his hut and saw both his mother and Eamon with their eyes locked and for him the world of men and women could never be quite the same again. Mrs Eileen Williamson in her hatchback bumped out of the site and on to the road and was gone and not before then did Eamon allow his helmet to return to his head.

  ‘Did you stay long?’ Deek asked.

  ‘For some small measure of time.’

  ‘Get anything?’

  ‘Beyond a digestive biscuit do you mean?’

  ‘Aye.’

  Eamon made a great show of looking at his watch. ‘Tea’s over,’ he said, ‘back to work now. Honest toil never hurt no man.’

  Mid afternoon, when the A9 traffic was lightest, they laid rubber mats on the road and tracked Conn’s machine across with the police standing by. In the course of the day they moved the saw, the sleepers and all the appurtenances of tunnelling. Brian and Gerry slept in the caravan from 4:00pm to start digging at 10:00. In that time the others made the set up and Paul and Eamon marked the cofferdam wall.

  Under a lowering night sky, with the temperature plummeting, the welder blew a hole in the cofferdam and found the ground was dry back there. He cut the piles as he had done on the downstream side and Conn lifted them clear. Brian was first at the Face, gunning the breaker and hitting the till. The going was harder this side but they made their one metre over the first twenty-four hours.

  When Trevor asked him Paul moved back on to twelve-hour night shifts and it never occurred to him, not even then, what the strange happiness he felt could mean. College, home, old friends, these were other worlds he grew less attached to. He lived within the cofferdams and the tunnel and the diggers were his brothers. Eamon was what he supposed a father should be. They completed the ten metres in eleven days.

  ‘Not bad,’ Eamon said, ‘but now the pipes, the concrete.’

  They organised as before, same man, Mike, in the tunnel, same men on the mixer, but this time with Patsy clearing up. Eamon wanted it all quick now. Speed without haste, but speed. They had to be away as quick as they could when they were done.

  ‘Away?’ Paul asked.

  ‘To Oxford,’ Eamon told him.

  Paul looked around the cofferdam, at the scaffolding, at the shovels. Why this hole inside?

  Mike and Tony pummelled the drymix in around the last pipe at 3:00 in the afternoon and cleared the base of the cofferdam for the bricklayers. Paul watched them climb the scaffolding ladder, watched them with the grey clouds flying above them and ached with the knowledge of their soon parting. He turned to look at the pipe sticking out from the Face into the cofferdam and touched it and crouched on his hunkers and looked through.

  The far end was a perfect circle that perspective had centred within the near end circle. Inside it was white and smooth. Between the two ends twenty-three pipe joints each made its concentric ring and the line of them was perfect. This was the only word, perfect. His own early setting-out and care, Eamon’s precision with piano wires and eye, the troops’ brute labour, all were justified by a perfection of line and joints that was built for the sole purpose of carrying human waste.

  He went topsides and crossed the road to the compound, knocking on the Agent’s door and entering as he had been instructed first thing. Swannie was sitting at the desk with Trevor busying himself at the filing cabinet looking very young and oppressed.

  ‘In,’ Swannie instructed.

  ‘You wanted me?’

  ‘I’m paying these guys off now. You might as well learn.’

  ‘I’m learning.’

  ‘I hope I didn’t hear any kind of tone just now. Don’t forget you’re one of us, or at least you’re shaping up so you might be.’

  ‘Eamon …’

  ‘I told you before. He’s a thick mick.’

  Swannie didn’t look at Eamon when he eventually came in, not at first. He went on with his notes, forcing the head of the tunnel gang to stand in attentive silence. When he was ready he put his notes away and instructed the gang leader that he should sit.

  Eamon sat opposite Swannie at the desk. Trevor leaned on the filing cabinet behind. Paul stood to the side, half way between the two and watched Swannie go into his brief case and take out a brown A4 envelope.

  He opened it to Eamon Bowles to show it was stuffed with notes.

  ‘Want to count?’

  Eamon shook his head.

  ‘You’ll have to sign for it.’

  ‘I’ll do that.’

  From a desk drawer Swannie took a sheet of paper and put it on the desk between them so Trevor and Paul could both see. He turned it round to Eamon and pushed it forward, holding the top down with one finger. Trevor placed a pen on the desk close by.

  Paul looked on, understanding this tableau had been created at least partially for him.

  Eamon looked down for a long moment before picking up the pen.

  The paper had a title, Ness and Struie Drainage Project, and a sub-title, A9 Tunnel. It had a paragraph of words and below that a listing of the troops’ names; Michael Clark, Brian Fairlie, Patrick Gallacher, Anthony MacMahon, Gerard O’Brien, Derek Watson. Below the names there was a blank space and then the words ‘for the above and myself, Eamon Bowles’.

  Eamon took the pen and put his hand to the paper. Both Swannie’s hand and his own hand were on the paper. He turned his head as though he would somehow see the blank space more clearly that way and, with two sweeping strokes, there he placed his mark.

  12

  It’s all about survival

  Harry donned his hard hat and duffel coat to make the walk up the hill from Struie and over towards the works at Ness. This way he could look over the surface reinstatement, give the fence posts a shake and himself time to think.

  Mostly the slope was holding and the flatter surface along the top, when he got there, was well nigh perfect. It hadn’t gone totally to pot while he was in Newtonmore. This was what a driver such as Conn could achieve, a man who could roll an egg with the bucket of his excavator not so much as cracking the shell, who had the whole thing down to a fine art.

  A spattering of rain rattled on his hard hat. He drew his collar up, walked quickly across the top and looked over. This was much, much worse. In the centre of the wayleave a stream had formed, running down to find the road drainage below and disappear in a whirling pool into a drainage chamber at the foot of the hill. Rain quickened topsoil, already turned to mud, dropped in from the side and was carried with it. Half the area’s topsoil was already gone.

  Allan Crawford was sitting on a boulder about half way down, leaning on his elbows. Descending cautiously because of his bad back and painful knees Harry made his way to join him. Left foot first, right to follow, always leading with the left.

  ‘Yo ho!’

  ‘Hoo!’ Allan jumped to his feet. ‘You startled me.’

  ‘Thinking time? You can have too much of that.’

  ‘Look at this,’ Allan said.

  At the side of the A9 the Roads Department had parked one of its cleansing wagons. Two men in bright yellow waterproofs stood holding the vehicle’s hose, steadying it in the drainage chamber. Close by, Paul and Trevor were deep in discussion at the nearside cofferdam.

  ‘The drains blocked again yesterday.’ Allan nodded at the shifting topsoil. ‘That’s the third time since you’ve been away and it’s getting worse.’

  ‘Contractor’s responsibility, not ours.’

  ‘Think so? T
hey say this angle of slope couldn’t hold the soil, that it was bound to run. They say we should have allowed for this in the document and given them the chance to price.’

  ‘The slope was there to see when they flaming well priced.’

  ‘The Area Roads Engineer goes off like a gun every second day. He calls first of all Mr Swann then the Glasgow office. I get it here from both sides.’ He pointed at his ear.

  ‘Nothing is going to keep this material on the hill. It’s too steep this side and it’s too mixed. In addition, Healey’s men made a pig’s ear of it, as per prediction.’

  ‘Roads send their bill to the Contractor and Trevor puts it on the monthly valuation with an additional service charge. I strike it off but it comes back. They’re very insistent. Trevor says they have principle on their side.’

  ‘Just keep striking it off.’

  ‘Trevor says eventually some kind of compromise will be made. I suggested a 50/50 compromise but GR didn’t like it. He says the Contract is a pure moral thing and absolute amounts don’t come into it but he didn’t like the idea of additional spend on the unforeseen.’

  ‘This is how it’s been since the beginning of time.’

  ‘Since that big pyramid job in Egypt?

  ‘And the Hanging Gardens before that.’

  ‘What’s to be said for this game, Harry? It’s cold, miserable, rewards are low and stress is high. There’s never enough money and no one wins.’

  ‘It’s all about survival,’ said Harry. ‘You love it or you don’t. Mac loved it, and I’d say he did his best, but he didn’t survive. Look down.’