The idea of affecting a bond on these shafts is a joke to many builders. The strength required of the shafts when they are off the road like these is not so great. Harry doesn’t agree. He says a vehicle could come off the road at any time and pass across it and, anyway, English Bond is what it shows on the drawing, right there at the side in the notes, and that’s what the Client is paying for. Okay, the Client’s wallet, but I’m still kind of stuck on that guy from the future finding the ladder with his foot and lowering himself and his breathing apparatus down into the chamber and his eyes running across the bricks just naturally as he descends. He’s a skilled man too, must be. He would notice if it was crap. Success is that he notices nothing. He is to be supported in his assumption that the job is sound. Maybe not even born yet, he is my brother.
Mortar is a mixture of sand, cement and water and, because we have to dot about the site to the different chambers, we carry the sand and cement in the van. The shafts being small don’t take such great quantities. Malky gets the water locally. At Struie he knocks doors and what, you might wonder, do douce middle-class incomers from the English Home Counties make of the man from Govan via the BarL and his single syllable grunts. Do they understand a word or just respond to the empty bucket? At Ness he goes into the hotel where, of course, they know us, but here we take it from the burn. Harry wouldn’t like that but it saves Malky from carrying it up from the Works and the culture clash with the easy-lifers.
The mortar is what holds the bricks together, along with the bond, and gravity. As far as I can see all that holds the workers together is money. Maybe there are invisible bonds. Malky and I are good pals but I’d shag Sandra if she’d let me. Naturally she won’t, so Malky and I get closer. We need each other. Come to think of it he’s all I’ve got now the teacher is out of it. It was only ever worker’s playtime anyway, and I didn’t wander in the Land of Illusion for long. She got what she wanted, which was plenty of dick, then let it slip to her man. Going on six months without his hole he had the idea something might be up anyway, because it sure wasn’t him. Ho!
Office workers, teachers, doctors, social workers, all the serried ranks of the respectable, all hypocrites and liars, they’re all useless showers and no different from Malky and me when the chips are down. He skelped her a few times and she thought she’d made her big mistake in telling him. She came away with the usual ‘we have to talk’ number. If only we’d talked before it would never have happened, she told him. What this boils down to is that the whole thing, her getting off with me, six months of lies and double life, was really his fault. She wasn’t responsible. How many times have I heard this one? He believed her. I would have straightened him out if he’d given me a chance. Instead he came straight at me with his mitts and that was only going to have one result. I guess he’d rather take a kicking than face the truth. The truth being that he doesn’t even have the dignity of being responsible. How do I know for sure about the things I couldn’t see? She told me in bed when she came round afterwards for that ‘one last time’ they always do.
So now I’ve been without for three weeks. I’m missing it but not worried. What I have noted through the years is that for some guys there is always a woman. Even when things are straight there are other women looking on from the sidelines and they are biding their time. You can never tell who they are but you can be sure they will appear at a time of their own choosing. This is how it is now for me.
It’s not Sandra though, and there’s part of me sad but maybe that’s just a case of what you can’t have is what you want. The other sides to this are, firstly, I could not do without Malky, not now, and secondly, he is one of only two guys I would admit could take me apart and fill me in if they wanted, the other being Derek the Steelfixer.
This one is Donna, wife of Dave who owns the pub I sometimes drink in. No longer that young although younger than I, she has large, well-shaped breasts and a broad arse such as my always-fit, too skinny teacher did not. She was angular and hard and uncomfortable to lie on. Donna will be otherwise. She will be like a double divan and if she gets on top she will be like one of those four poster beds with the roof thing that comes down and smothers you while you sleep. I can’t wait. Sometimes I order one of those high-shelf single malts all true vodka drinkers hate just for the pleasure of watching her stretch.
When you come out of a relationship, which I should be expert in by now, you give out all kinds of availability signs without ever knowing it and the interested pick them up. The interested have sensitive receivers. They are ever alert, as is Donna who has the reputation of being hot. She replies with looks that are different and a hand that lingers and she leaves open seams in conversation that will sound innocent to the unaware. Whether Dave is unaware, or just used to it and comfortable enough within their accommodation, time will tell, but it is written in the stars that I will shag that woman.
Harry’s receivers are also sensitive, but only to matters of quality in the work and to the strange politics that go on slightly above his head and far above mine. Swannie continues to hold a special place in his bile duct but Harry knows the beast is here to stay, or at least until he battles his way upwards onto the Board and, no doubt, back to England. The first parts of the Great Swannie Mission, says Harry, are now in place.
All the Strath Construction guys are gone. Alex Matheson went with the merger. Mac got more and more sidelined and eventually couldn’t take it any more. He’s in Saudi now. John Kelly won’t be back from losing three fingers and a broken hip, not at his age. John was a slob in his work. He deserved what he got. Harry also tells me that Health and Safety have pinned responsibility on Kelly and Mac. That’s how it should be, agent and foreman, the men on site, but it takes no account of the pressure Swannie put on them. It takes no account of his intent to rid himself of them and put his own guys in their place. It takes no account of their natural resistance and their striving to survive.
All the staff joiners are gone. They went on the grip and couldn’t cut it. I would have told them, don’t give up on security, not if it’s in your nature to live within systems. Everyone hears the call of the wild. Not everyone can live this way though, and those of us who do can’t manage for ever.
So now Swannie has Trevor as Agent on the new job, Trevor that came north with him and is young and single and energetic and will be working for half of Mac’s money. Trevor will eventually be remade in Swannie’s image. Decent bloke still, he won’t be for long. Paul comes along after him and with Paul Harry is in two minds. Deeply committed in the main discipline of getting it right first time he can’t be arsed with the College. He’s going to fail, says Harry. That will be correct, but Swannie will use him to the limit first. My guess is he will end up on the tools like me, and that makes sense for what are all too obvious reasons to me and to his mother. I should care?
Lammerton has taken the place of Kelly, of course. Healey’s men from the Black Isle job are gone because Harry made enough of a fuss about the quality of their work, sure but, more to the point, applied the letter of the spec to the crap they turned out. This cost Swannie money in the lifting and relaying and endless testing of pipes. The new Healey’s men are half way decent on the job but they will pass also because the turnover of men is relentless. The industry eats them and it has a wide and gaping mouth and a bottomless gut.
What does the watch say? 11:45am. Too much thinking doesn’t do. The work has slowed and Malky has been giving me the occasional questioning look. Everything good needs rhythm. Lift the brick and heft it, reach into the mortar with the trowel, spread it on the brick, edge and arse, knock it into place. This won’t take long. Then we can get the cover on and concreted. That will be about 1:00pm and we’ll go to the Ness Hotel and maybe we’ll see Ikey hanging about there. Trevor didn’t keep him on for Lochdon so, now the Works are built, he’s back to cleaning glasses and doing what he can. They won’t have him in the bar for much longer, he tells me. The tourists will be back soon, taking big breaths
of the newly fresh ozone, and they don’t like to see handicap. It would break your heart. Ikey played his part. He’s damaged? Okay, he’s damaged. He arrived that way. The rest of us achieve it.
Already I am thinking of those big Whitbreads and perhaps, when it’s getting on for back-to-work time, a wee voddy. I am eating less just now. I’ve noticed that. There has been a loss of weight. Hopefully this is not a sign of some underlying horror more than the usual. Right now, life has spiralled down to building, Malky, and drink. I’ll pull out. It goes with the round of the work. As soon as we get back onto a decent housing job I’ll be okay. The fine bricks and the colour mixes, the demand for real skill, I’ll respond. I always do.
Meantime though, it’s just continuation. Spread the mortar and lay the bricks; labour. Oh yes, I’ll pick up a shovel if I have to. I’ll earn. I’m worth my bread. So is Malky. So is Ikey. So is Paul. So are all those other names I went through earlier. We are worth our bread even if the rest of the world drives past without looking and likes to pretend we don’t exist. So is Swannie who refines the whole thing down to its sharpest economic edge, the edge that cuts us to the quick.
We are the hard-handed ones but we are not necessarily the foul-mouthed. We are the less educated but we are not the stupid. We are the temporary and the used. If we are wise we learn not to feel. In the full depth of winter Derek’s first move in the morning is to grasp a frost bound reinforcement bar in his two hands and hold it tight.
This is the way we must be. We must confront the resolute and the inanimate and turn it into the structures and systems that encourage, allow and contain that thing I have heard called civilisation. Not that I know what civilisation really is. Whatever it is though, that thing that is not for us. Without this deep numbness we could not go on and nothing would be built. We are the slabs you walk on and the water you drink. This is the working life; toil, exposure, frustration and injury are all built in and, as far as I can see, can’t be built out, nothing can.
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