‘Oh wow,’ he said. ‘That’s bright. Reminds me of when Apollo Eleven took off.’
Only Cammy took the bait. ‘You were at Cape Kennedy?’
‘They asked me to stand by in case the scaffolding bolts needed an extra turn.’
‘Shoosh,’ said Jimmy Gillies below, impatient, tossing up a spacer to fit between the shutters. ‘Get these in and we’ll tighten this lot. Jinkie!’
‘Yo!’
‘Go tell Paul we’ll want a level in half an hour – no, say twenty minutes.’
‘Ho!’
‘Cammy, hold this nut steady with the spanner while I turn the bolt.’
‘Okay,’ said Cammy whose thoughts, as ever, roamed elsewhere.
‘Trots!’
Trots looked over the top of the generator. ‘What?’
‘Bring the props across.’
Trots dropped into the tank and wandered slowly to the far side. He took one of the heavy props on his shoulder, carried it across the concrete base and dropped it at Jimmy’s feet.
‘Not there,’ said Jimmy. ‘There.’
Trots dragged the prop to the other end of the formwork.
‘And the rest,’ said Jimmy. ‘There’s another seven.’
‘Out in the open air like this,’ said Willie, inhaling noisily, ‘it’s good for your health. The sea breeze! The ozone! The sting of the lash across your back! Why, it’s better than a wank with a velvet glove.’
He pointed at the horizon with his hammer. ‘Look at this vast expanse of water and how the light flickers on the waves. Why, it’s finer than the view from the top of the Sydney Opera House when I drove in the last nail. This is the best job I’ve ever been on, I reckon.’
Trots grumbled from the tank floor.
‘And you know they pay us to be here.’ Willie shook his head and dropped to his knees to push a spacer between the two shutters. ‘They must be mad.’
Derek’s steel tying was a full shutter length ahead of the pour, closing the circle. Harry checked each bar and each bar’s centre spacing from the drawing. He noted they would have to be brushed free of rust before the shutters were moved and, looking over his shoulder, peered between the shutters that were going up now. Yes, those bars had been brushed. He looked down at his feet and noted that the concrete surface that would take the new wall had still to be scabbled and made rough.
He made some notes in his book and took out his camera and made sure the date and time were switched on for the site records. He stood back and snapped the steelwork, snapped the props being nailed in place and the formwork as it was tightened. For his personal collection he turned date and time off and snapped the men as they worked.
‘What’s your best job, Trots?’ Willie asked.
‘The first after the People take control,’ Trots said. ‘It’s the profit motive that takes the cream out of the job. If the government did it all there’d be no profit motive which is to say no profit margin which is to say it would cost less. There’d be no heat to finish and no sackings. You should think more.’
‘And no work done at all,’ Jimmy Gillies interrupted.
Trots glowered at him. ‘Anybody here know if they’ll be on the job after tomorrow? No! We shouldn’t have to burst our guts this way. Everyone should have what they need without this, this,’ Trots struggled for the right word, ‘this indignity.’
Harry snapped Jimmy as the corners of his mouth turned down.
‘What’s the best job you’ve been on, Harry?’ Willie asked. ‘Was it that big pyramid job in Egypt?’
‘If he’d been on that,’ said Jimmy, ‘your feet wouldn’t have touched the ground.’
Harry placed his hand on the vertical mat of steel bars and took some of the weight off his sore back. Best job I was ever on? That’s easy, he thought.
It was West Africa where the tropical moon was huge and bright red when it touched the ocean, unforgettable. The sun with strands of cloud stretched across its face. He remembered a young engineer standing against corruption and serving the people, yes Trots’ People although illiterate and their skin the colour of washed coal, by making Holy Writ of the contract, an unswerving devotion to the detailed and signed agreement as the only acceptable definition of truth and what is right and, ultimately, goodness. He remembered GR bringing a few young blacks on by pointing at the drawings and pointing at the land and watching them get the ideas in place. He remembered their women carrying machinery in baskets on their heads, rough overland journeys in a bouncing Land Rover, gin and tonic nights in the forest and the sadness of parting.
‘No particular job,’ he said. ‘They’re all the same. It gets to be your life.’
They agreed that Harry would do his final inspection first thing in the morning, 7:30am. This meant the grip squad and Paul must be out earlier still to turn on the generator and make any final adjustments. Healey’s men could make their usual start and the pour could begin around 9:00am.
Harry felt himself relax. His working day was done. Or at least, the day of beck and call was over although he still had his own work. He pocketed the camera and his notes and drove back to his caravan at the Struie caravan site.
The season being early he had the place to himself but for a few permanent units that stood empty. The contract covered the cost of the owner putting electricity on and making the toilet block available. He entered the site in darkness with the rain falling more heavily. He locked the van for the night and climbed inside, the caravan tilting as he entered. There was very little space, just a bunk, a microwave, a kettle, a table, a built-in wardrobe, a small television, no decoration. On a shelf by the bed were the three books that travelled with him everywhere, The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, Children of the Dead End, The Complete Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, all three broken backed and dog-eared.
Home, he thought, putting his mobile phone on charge and taking off his donkey jacket. The jacket was dry enough to go in the wardrobe. No need for the site’s drying room tonight. Not a great place, he thought, but warm and dry and his own and better than his real home. Three more years at most and he would retire. They would have to come to terms with that, he and Alice.
Could they face it? Could they face each other in the mornings?
He took off his boiler suit and shirt, put on a pair of cords and a cotton shirt. He rubbed at the bristle on his chin remembering that he hadn’t shaved this morning, usual reason.
The phone pinged as he opened a tin of soup. A text had arrived from his son. He should call when he could.
He heated the soup in the microwave and ate it watching the News. He dumped a tin of stew into the same bowl and heated it as well and, when he was finished eating, rinsed the bowl and put it away and put the kettle on. The secret of his housekeeping was to stay on top of it, one bowl, one spoon, one fork, one cup, all clean and in their places all the time. The kettle boiled he made tea.
From beneath the bunk he took his laptop that the company had supplied and connected it to a small printer he kept filled with photographic paper. He connected the camera and downloaded the day’s pictures, separating those he wanted for the official site record and those he wanted for his own. One by one he printed them out and then put the laptop away again. He had no other use for it. His notes he wrote out by hand. He did not do emails or internet. The one great thing the laptop did for him was make his pictures.
From a shelf above the bunk he took down two albums. The first was titled in his own block capitals, ‘Ness and Struie – Progress’. This was the official record of the contract. The second was titled, ‘Ness and Struie – History’. This was for himself and it focussed on the men and their methods, and the machines they used. He had albums like it for every job he had worked on since his apprenticeship ended. Jobs he had served as a working builder, as a trade foreman, a general foreman, as a clerk of works. There were albums from Highland Scotland, the Central Belt, all over England and Wales, and West Africa.
Painstakingly, almost lo
vingly, he fixed the pictures of the troops in place and titled them. When his working life was done it would be a record not only of achievement but of changing faces and working methods and machinery. Most of all though, it would be people, some repeating the same old patterns of grievance and greed, some unrepeatable, inimitable, unique personalities and unforgettable. Some were sloppy useless tossers like John Kelly, others were craftsmen, Harry’s highest accolade for the working man. A few were thinkers.
The phone rang. Harry picked it up and lay back on his bunk.
‘Dad?’
‘Peter.’
‘You’re in the caravan?’
‘Yes.’
‘I can see you there, leaning on the table, reading one of your books.’
‘No, I’m lying on the bed waiting for whatever is coming next. Is it the usual?’
‘You could be kinder, Dad.’
‘I’d say I’m kind enough. How are the kids?’
‘Okay, as far as I can tell. Karen still uses them against me. She pages me at awkward times, demands I call when she knows I’ve something on. She arranges visits so they’re difficult. She’s a bitch, Dad. She’s just a bitch.’
‘Don’t call her names. I’ve told you before, you’ll get used to it and blurt one of them out when it can do you damage. Don’t mess up now. Eventually the divorce will come through and it will settle.’
His son had not called for advice.
‘I’ve told you I’m parting with no more money.’
‘I’m in need, Dad. Rent.’
‘Horse still running? Okay. Okay. What does your mother say?’
‘That I should call you. She says I’m your son too.’
And her husband, Harry reflected. She’s not stupid. She knows I’ll be home for good soon. She knows we’ll have to settle. She’s testing her power. Everything she does is clandestine. Everything has another purpose. She’s never understood how she doesn’t measure up, couldn’t.
A wee, home-bound Glasgow lassie she had come into his life when he needed stability. Five years after the goodbyes at Kano Airport his head had still been in a West African forest. He had needed to bring his feet back down onto solid ground and she had appeared and was just what he thought he needed. Except that, now, on his own in Struie Caravan Park, he understood what he really needed back then was a return flight to Lagos and then on.
Although the Russells were home by then as well.
‘How much this time?’
Peter told him.
‘It’s a month’s rent, Dad. Buy me that time and I’ll find a job.’
‘You won’t put it on a horse?’
‘No.’
‘Or any part of it?’
‘Definitely not.’
‘Straight and narrow?’
‘Straight and narrow.’
‘Peter, is there anyone else in your life?’
‘There was a long silence.
‘Peter?’
‘Yes, there is.’
‘Does Karen know?’
‘Maybe she guesses.’
‘When the dust settles, can you move in with her?’
‘We’re not sure yet. The dust has to settle first.’
‘Okay, I understand. Meantime it’s a secret. Does your mother know?’
Of course Alice knew. Why did he ask? She was in control, or seeking control, of everything in her small world.
As long as other people are in your life freedom is a myth. There was no end to it this side of the grave. Responsibility. Sympathy. Money. Peter thought his Dad wouldn’t approve of divorce. He didn’t realise Harry’s lifestyle was a form of separation for those who want it that way. He and Alice couldn’t have formally divorced any more than their parents could. The mistake was in marrying in the first place, but it wasn’t a mistake that was all that unusual. Or to understand what and who had been right for him long after the opportunity was gone. He and Alice were locked in an unsatisfactory relationship that wasn’t that bad.
Situation normal, Harry thought, for half the world.
Peter and Karen could divorce though. Different times prevailed and Harry was glad of it. There was every chance their boys would never marry. They could learn their trade and be lone wolves prowling the world. Make babies wherever they went, and leave them because moving on was the working man’s lot.
A gust of wind rattled hail like pebbles against the caravan wall.
Harry drew a curtain back and looked out. There was no light above, cloud cover was a solid black mass. The trees that had been planted by the toilet block were bending in the wind. There was no sign of any let up and he was still unwashed. He put on an anorak and shrugged the hood over his head, tucked his toilet bag under his arm and, when he was out of the caravan, ran for it.
The door to the toilet block battered shut behind him. Inside he stripped and showered and towelled off quickly against the cold and turned to the mirror. He rubbed his hand round and across his chin and squeezed shaving gel onto his fingers and smeared it across his cheeks, working it round and round until it turned into a meagre foam.
He held his hand under the running tap until the gel was gone. When the running water was unbearably hot he scalded his razor and ran it across his cheek, feeling the bristles cut easily and leaving a clean line of pink across the blue white of the foam. He looked at his body in the mirror, its grey hair and distended belly. The skin on his upper arms was slack and loose where once, not so long ago, the muscle mass inside had stretched it tight. Finishing the shave he washed his face, rinsed the razor and put it away.
As he buttoned his shirt he looked at his face. Steady, solitary drinking through the years had turned his nose into a bulb. It looked like you could grow a tulip out of it.
Oh, he could joke with himself, but you have to.
His forehead was seamed and his cheeks were jowly and under his left eye was a flat patch that hung limp where the tiny muscles had given up. He put his hand to it tenderly, as though it gave him pain, which in a sense it did. It was mere chance, though, that had put it in just that spot.
Okay, he had made mistakes but he could live with the results. He didn’t like what he had become, but he could live with himself. He could live with himself in his own space. The question was could he share? This late in the day could he share with Alice?
The rain was heavier now. He put on his anorak and ran through it, big drops spattering on his hood, almost slipping on the wet grass but catching himself, hurting his back to remain upright.
Back in the caravan he turned on the television, reached into the cupboard over the sink and produced the bottle of whisky Ikey had bought for him in Brora. Long experience had taught him just how much of this stuff he could take and be all right in the morning. Tonight he would take a drop more. He would have to be up earlier than usual for the wall pour but would trust his stamina.
Watching the News he reflected that his options were reduced to what was real in the here and now. The dream realities had run out of time, those seductive might-have-beens from the otherworld. He could no longer live there. Soon there would be him and Alice and Peter’s life of disasters and sponging. Alice couldn’t see past the man who, for her, would always be a boy. As long as the three of them were alive Harry’s money would pass out of his system through Alice to Peter. He knew this as he knew rain would always be wet.
Poor Alice couldn’t compare with what might have been, but then she wasn’t poor Alice. In Peter’s dependency and his own she had all she wanted. It was poor Harry. His hand strayed once again to the limp area below his eye that, yes, chance had put in just that spot although it seemed like so much more.
His mind wandered and, when it wandered, went always to the same place. Whisky drinking in big gulps he reached for his books and his hand inevitably went to his Complete Burns. Beside ‘Epistle to a Young Man’ he found his copy of the letter he had sent. His mistake had been to obviously put those ‘might-have-beens’ between the lines. Too obviously, no
w that he read it again. He should have let his memories lie. Absence had only made her more beautiful in his illusion, more dynamic, more sensitive, wiser and still more perfect. He put his own letter back and turned to, what else but, ‘Ae Fond Kiss’ and the reply he had tucked away where Alice’s hand would never wander.
She was Diana Worthington now, and she lived in Surrey. It had taken him weeks to track her down after he decided to write. Could there be, after all this time, a future? He didn’t phrase the question in so many words but it was there and she hadn’t missed it.
Still no children, she had written back. Two marriages but no children, it must have been meant. It was too late now, of course. In that sense she was free. The second marriage was comfortable. Not like the first with its adventures, but what could in any way compare to the way things had been back then?
Nothing, Harry mouthed silently on his bunk. Nothing could be like the days of youth and accomplishment and love. He eased his body across his bunk until it was resting against the cold wall. No, but life could always have its own joys and comforts, especially if they arrived at the beginning of another phase.
Alice could never at any time compare with this woman and at every turn in their life together, unspoken by Harry, unnamed, was the comparison. What would she have done? How would she have handled this? And Peter could never compare with the children they would have had, he and Diana. Every inadequacy, every failure, every muffed attempt at something worthwhile was compared to the perfect lives of the perfect children who had never been.
Again he read the letter through. The surface message was as expected; the catching up after so many years, the provision of bland, banal information, but her letter was as carefully composed as his. He had been prepared for ‘between-the-lines’ messages such as ‘might-have-been’ and ‘too-late’ and ‘the children’ but reading over and over, here and, again, there, was the same unmistakable ‘never-was’.
It never was, although he had believed so completely. It never was, for all that his cunning mind had slotted remembered words and glances into place. But finally, absolutely, truthfully, the love that had nurtured him through the years had never been. He put her letter again beside Robert Burns’ great lyric and lay down and sang it quietly under his breath.
Site Works Page 19
