Site Works

by Robert Davidson

  18

  It’s the Clearances all over again

  Last to go would be the towering batching plant with its mounds of aggregate and sand and bags of cement. An industrial relic it overlooked the men’s hut like a strange Gothic watchtower. Ikey saw it as having religious significance, the great mixer and maker, an alchemical device that turned loose materials into unyielding concrete. Standing by the plant contractor’s van he observed its outline against the blue sky and then lowered his gaze to the wooden cludge that would be the last structure to be moved up the road.

  Willie Quinn was also outlined against the sky. Balanced on the men’s hut, last to descend, he kicked at the roofing felt where it had come loose at the crest.

  ‘What’s it like?’ Cammy shouted up.

  ‘It’s a hundred years old, bullet riddled and torn. This must be the hut Custer hid in when the Apaches were closing in.’

  ‘Sioux!’ Ikey shouted up. ‘They were Lakota Sioux, Mr Quinn, and it was the other way round. Custer attacked them.’

  Willie pointed at him with his hammer.

  ‘Did you read that in a book? You’re spending too much time in that cludge.’

  ‘Lakota,’ Ikey repeated.

  ‘I wouldn’t argue with Willie,’ Jimmy Gillies said, exiting the hut.

  ‘I was a farrier in the 7th back then,’ Willie said. ‘They busted me after the massacre, said the whole thing turned on a loose horseshoe, but they were covering up for Reno. He was one of them in ways I could never be.’

  ‘Is it usable,’ Jimmy asked, impatient, ‘the felt?’

  ‘Nope, it’s had it,’ Willie said. ‘No wonder the hut lets in.’

  Willie crouched on his hunkers and took the claw of his hammer to the roof nails, drawing and releasing them and letting them slide down and fall to the ground, pulling the felt away from the crest like a blanket, dropping it also to the ground.

  Stores had been the first hut down. Too far gone to be repaired and reused Cammy had broken it up and started a fire with the rotted roof joists. He dragged the first sheet of felt over and threw it on to blacken and curl and take light. As it shrivelled he pushed the edges into the fire’s heart with his boot.

  ‘More costs for Swannie,’ he said. ‘He won’t like it.’

  ‘And he’d avoid replacing it if he could,’ Willie said. ‘We’re doing the Lochdon troops a favour.’

  ‘Whoever they are,’ Cammy said.

  Squatting precariously at the end of the roof Willie leaned over and prised at the nails that kept the remaining felt in place. ‘Who is staying and who is going, that is the question.’

  ‘Everybody’s staying,’ Jimmy said. ‘Lochdon is a bigger job, more pipelines, three Pumping Stations, four Tanks. I’m seeing Swannie about rates when the light goes. We’ll get the work if we’re not too greedy. Start maybe next week.’

  ‘The sooner the better,’ Willie said, ‘because there’s no money in this.’

  ‘Perzackly!’

  A flat lorry bounced in off the A9 with Derek the Steelfixer at the wheel. By now the joiners had the mess hut, the last hut, down and stacked. It remained to get the panels of all three huts onto the back of the lorry, tied safely down and carried up the road to Lochdon. Two journeys Jimmy reckoned.

  Willie shielded his eyes with his hand and made a great play of peering under the lorry.

  ‘Where’s Trots, Derek? Shouldn’t he be driving this thing?’

  ‘He says it’s not his job and won’t be until he’s paid the rate.’

  ‘So it’s yours?’

  ‘There’s no money in Lochdon till this is done. The best thing I can do is move the job along and take whatever rate Swannie will pay. Give me a hand with these panels.’

  Willie and Cammy each took a corner of the first wall panel and powerful Derek took the other side by himself. When Jimmy moved across to help he shook his head. The three men threw the panels one by one on the back of the lorry.

  Where the huts had stood the ground was marked with the rectangle of their floor shapes. The compound fence hung from its posts and the gate swung on its hinges. Where Stores had been was littered with oil drums and loose bolts and spilled gravel. It was a place where life had once been but was no more.

  Jimmy came over and stood beside Ikey.

  ‘The place is like a battlefield,’ he said.

  ‘The Little Big Horn,’ said Willie.

  ‘No,’ Ikey said, ‘the Clearances. It’s like the Highland Clearances all over again.’

  ‘Did you know it was Jimmy burned out Strathnaver?’ Willie said. ‘He’s changed since then. The love of a good woman saved him.’

  Cammy’s fire crackled and sparked and grew as he scoured the area for odd pieces of scrap timber and threw them on.

  ‘Good women,’ Willie sighed. ‘Whatever happened to them?’

  Panels secured on the back of the lorry Derek fired the engine and drove out, heading back north to Lochdon. Jimmy climbed into his car and followed leaving Willie and Cammy to tend the fire, to make sure everything that could burn was consumed. Later in the day, maybe tomorrow, Conn would dig a hole and doze in the waste and bury it.

  Ikey superstitiously tapped the wooden side of his pride and joy, the cludge, as if it contained the spirit of the work, the Great Manitou of Civil Engineering, as some said all cludgies did, and took a walk to the Settlement Tanks where Conn’s jib stood tall above Tank Two.

  The double chain hung taut with the load of an aluminium scum trap that he swung in slow instalments closer to the tank wall. Below him on the concrete base the Plant Contractor’s foreman opened and clenched his fist slowly and slower still as the dead weight drew closer to the wall. Abruptly he raised both arms and brought the movement to a halt.

  Conn locked the jib, opened his cabin door and spat out the remains of his roll-up.

  ‘Yo ho, Ikey.’

  With the scum trap hovering gravity neutral by the wall two fitters moved in to sit by either side. They pushed and eased it into exact position and shoved the holding bolts through and into the pockets that had been boxed out before the pour. As they tightened with their spanners the weight of the trap was transferred and the chains became slack.

  ‘You moving up the road to Lochdon?’ Conn asked.

  ‘Mr Lammerton has yet to decide, sir.’

  ‘Or if he’s decided he hasn’t said. That’s how these people work.’

  ‘Nil carborundum, Mr Conn.’

  ‘Bullseye, wee man, I hope they take you along. You deserve it.’

  ‘Thinking of movement, Mr Conn.’

  ‘That’s Conn, just Conn.’

  Ikey struggled against saying to Conn what he wanted to say to Willie but eventually it came out.

  ‘Did you know there were Highlanders at the Little Big Horn?’

  Conn eyed him warily.

  ‘I didn’t. Which side?’

  ‘With the Long Knives.’

  ‘Joined up? Joined the Long Knives, the White Eyes, Roundeyes, Yellow Legs, Red Coats? Playing the pipes as the arrows came thudding in? Gathering in a circle at the end and singing their Gaelic psalms?’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘We were the same in Kerry with the Roundheads, on the wrong side as ever. In the end they always win. Did you know?’

  ‘I did, sir, and for better or worse we join them. They would have been cleared from up by. Strathnaver, sir, or the likes.’

  Ikey stood talking to Conn and the plant operatives as the light of day began its departure and Conn switched on the crane’s one headlight, watched while the troops leaned dangerously over the Tank to tighten the bolts, as they levelled the spill-over rim to ‘near enough’.

  Feeling the call of nature he wandered back to where the compound had been. Inside the cludge he hung up his jacket, took The Brothers Karamazov from his pocket and sat to ease himself through the last bowel movement of the Ness and Struie Drainage Project with the last sustained read.

  The boys had kill
ed their father. Well, he understood, although the reading of C G Jung and the living of his life had taught him all he needed to know about the slaying of the father and its futility.

  When he came out the sun was gone. All was dark and there was barely a star in the sky. Willie and Cammy had been joined by Derek the Steelfixer, returned for the cludge when they had broken it down. The three were silhouetted against the fire that overtopped them by twice their own height and might have been made for the burning of a witch or some other unredeemed soul bound for hell.

  In the darkness the temperature dropped and a sparkling frost formed on the ground and on the site’s detritus and there hardened. Ikey joined the three others by the fire and felt its heat and its call to the primitive and wondered about guilt, revenge, justice and what they were. Damned little, he thought, against the great round of history’s repetitions and humanity perpetually breaking up and moving on.

  19

  All those tiny men working in the distance

  Jimmy Gillies straightened from the gabion basket he was filling with stones on the beach. Out at sea, close to the limit of his vision, one of the rigs was flaring off gas. The sea was iron grey, more or less calm, although small waves threw themselves onto the shingle to hush and draw themselves back into the water. His eye followed the arc of the sea’s edge southwards to the rocky escarpment of the County of Ross and to Cammy who had wandered off, who was picking stones off the beach and throwing them into the sea.

  As dictated by the state of the tide over the next two days they would put down another two baskets below where the shingle broke into sand, presently under water, and fill them with carefully but pointlessly graded stones. A single pipe length per day would do, in fact would be all they had time for. When this first gabion was filled, in another half hour, they would tie on the top mat and extend the outfall on top of it by another length of pipe. They would fix the shuttering and place the concrete before the tide turned and came back in. A can-do operation he had told Trevor, with the right labourers, meaning JB and Tammas, but Lammerton had learned their worth and taken them up the coast.

  Jimmy’s eye travelled back to where the outfall pipe came out of the long spiky marram grass that waved in the breeze and onto the shore, to the two leather aprons that were draped over it, Willie Quinn’s and his own. When the pipe had been laid the marram had been in dieback but now, with spring at last on the way, it had shot up and the line of the pipe was lost to the eye except for Paul’s centre line peg. The grass was shoulder high and thick and the land between shore and Works now reminded him of the veldt he had travelled in his early years, when he was still single. Here was a salty veldt.

  By the end of the week at the latest, the outfall would be complete and they would follow the troops north to the next site, but it was more time away from home and he missed the wife. He also missed his daughter but she was going anyway, as was only right, as was time. She was a woman now, no longer an apprentice, and her boy friends had turned into men friends. He was better away and letting them get on with it. A cool breeze across his cheek returned him to the present.

  Almost lost among the marram Paul stood behind his theodolite. The line for the gabion could be less than perfectly accurate because eventually the whole arrangement would be sandblown, pebble covered and more or less invisible. Only the concrete surround to the pipe would be seen and soon it would be coated with moss and stuck with weed and seashell and no one would care about line and level beyond the troops who put it in, but that was the standard Jimmy set, that he would always set. Placement was to be as accurate as Paul’s theodolite could make it provided duration didn’t go into funnytime. So, he looked at Paul who had the telescope turned upwards from the gabion and out to sea and the nearest of the rigs.

  Willie shoogled the stones in the mattress with his two hands and also straightened.

  ‘Look at this shore,’ he said. ‘From the sand to the marram it’s all stones exactly like the ones we’re putting in the basket. Why are we running them a hundred miles from the quarry? Why aren’t we just picking them up and sorting them and shoving them in the basket?’

  ‘Because the designer never thought of doing it the easy way and the Engineer won’t admit a mistake,’ Paul called down.

  ‘Hst! Take a look at Cammy.’

  Cammy was standing at the waves’ limit, watching them roll to his boots and then stepping back.

  ‘He’s a dreamer,’ Willie said, ‘but you know that. How long has he been with us?’

  ‘Two years,’ said Jimmy. ‘He’s getting tired, maybe pining for something. You and I have been working together long enough to read each other’s minds.’

  ‘He’ll leave us soon.’

  ‘Think so?’

  ‘We need to be three. Two won’t do. Would you want him?’ Willie jerked his thumb at Paul.

  ‘Nope. He’s to stick in at College and make something of himself. He told me he’d do his best and I won’t give him a way out.’

  Willie swept off his woolly hat and ran his fingers abruptly through his hair and jammed it back on.

  ‘Why the funny look?’

  ‘You deal in facts, Jimmy. All the time I’ve known you you’ve worked in facts, measurements and plywood and concrete and money. Don’t go trading on that hope stuff this late in the day. Ten years from now he’s going to have a saw in his hand, or a shovel.’

  ‘No. He’ll make it.’

  Willie waved his hands in the air. ‘Paul, back from dreamland! Where’s Trots and Jinkie?’

  Paul pulled away from the eyepiece and looked back at where the compound used to be.

  ‘On their way with the last load. The lorry’s going out the gate so that’s that.’

  The dumper crested the marram and bounced on to the shingle and skidded to a halt, Trots’ head bouncing on his shoulders, Jinkie in his Celtic jersey jumping down behind, smiling and happy to be free of the bosses for three whole days. Graded stones spilled over the edge of the skip.

  In the way he sometimes did when they had to wait, or when the work was least intense, Cammy wandered on his own. The shoreline, a narrow strand, was a few metres of shingle that changed to grit and then to sand where the tide went back and forth, the spiky marram grass that hid them from the new Works and made it a world apart. Here all things changed, dry became wet and wet became dry and nature graded rock from coarse to fine more evenly than the quarry could possibly manage. Here Life first crawled from the sea, cast its shell and continued inland.

  He could imagine, or try to imagine, how it was when the world was settling, inanimate and senseless and, that done, try to accept that these same elements had somehow assembled without outside aid to take both form and life, developing first consciousness and then self-consciousness, inventiveness and creativity. All this was scarcely more credible than the breath of God, but nonetheless fact.

  Bypassing thought as it should his heart sent an arrowshot prayer upwards to the stars. Not repentance this time, for the wavering Christian’s diminishing faith that now questioned everything, nor pleading, nor explaining, nor gratitude, nor seeking, this time only acknowledgement of the way things are and of how they fit. Not even thanks, it was appreciation, but now his mind was back in play and Mind ruined everything.

  Like the tiny crabs and the bubble-weed he was in an in-between condition, between fact and faith, and the knowledge afforded him a comfort he could not quite explain. No point speaking to Willie or even Jimmy about such things, they lived in the most practical of worlds. Work was their religion and joinery their nation. Their ideology was written in the space between value and independence. That meant though, there could be no discussion of the spiritual.

  He looked to his feet. The pebbles which from the outfall pipe had looked so uniform in size and colour in fact were wildly varied. He took in the multi-forms and multi-colours through his eyes, the salt smell through his nose, the cold breeze through his skin and knew beyond all doubt that he was part of it,
not merely among it. How could he explain to Jimmy, whose only watchword was survival, that he would be content to join this inanimate world now? He could turn to stone now but knowing the day would come he was content to wait. He had abandoned the search for purpose.

  One pebble called up to be selected and he did so, raising it between thumb and forefinger and tossing it into his palm, hefting its weight there, moving his thumb against its one flat face and feeling its roughness. The light caught its many embedded specks of quartz and made them sparkle and he focussed on it, the whole pebble, all its facets and colours and mass, trying to understand if it had purpose and, if so, was it of less importance than he because he was sentient.

  From the corner of his eye he saw Trots and Jinkie arrive with the final dumper of stone for the gabion mattress. Trots had manoeuvred the dumper against the gabion’s edge and tipped the stones in. As Cammy watched he reversed the dumper and drove it back into the marram and stopped and climbed down. Willie and Jinkie fumbled at the stones to make their top surface even and started tying on the top mat. Soon they would be ready for the pipe.

  The iron grey surface of the sea lay before him with all its depths. Leaning back on his rear foot he stretched still further behind with his arm, twisting at the waist until he could reach no further. Shifting his weight onto the front foot, uncoiling from the waist, swinging his arm forward as quickly as he could, he spun the stone low and flat across the water, watching until it made contact and skipped across the surface and sank. The nearest oil rig lay beyond and when his eyes refocused he could see tiny men on its work platform, far away in the distance and lost in the carrying of tools and loads and the turning of valves. All of them were wrestling with the inanimate, all of them on the side of change whether they knew it or not. The real art, he reflected, the truly fine art, was in a becoming that still eluded him.

  Suddenly Paul was at his side. ‘The batcher’s broken down again.’

  ‘That means we have to call in concrete from Alness as well as get the pipe in and the shutters up and the stuff poured and vibrated. There’s not time.’