Blue Collar

by Danny King

  ‘When?’

  ‘When? I don’t know. When I was a kid. At school. It was horrible,’ I told her triumphantly, resting my case.

  ‘And you haven’t had it since?’

  ‘Of course I ain’t. Why would I? Not if it’s horrible.’

  Charley wasn’t sure where to start, so we both put down our menus and waited for a few seconds while she ordered her thoughts. Not that I could see how she was going to talk her way round me on this one. I mean seriously, if something’s horrible, it’s horrible. Full stop. End of story. Get it away from me and bring me some chips. Falling into a ditch full of stinging nettles hurts like fuck no matter how many times you do it. This was an open-and-shut drawbridge.

  ‘Have you ever drunk beer?’ Charley finally asked.

  ‘Well, it’s a bit early for me, to be honest, love,’ I said, checking my watch. ‘I’ll stick with the bacon and eggs for now if you don’t mind, but we can go for a cheeky one around lunchtime if you want.’

  ‘When you first tried beer, and I mean your very first sip, what did you think of it?’ Charley asked. I cast my taste buds back to my twelfth birthday and sucked my mouth.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I reflected. ‘I didn’t really like it, to tell the truth, but that’s got nothing to do with this,’ I cut in, before she could pop the cork and celebrate her monumental cleverness.

  ‘It has everything to do with this. Your taste buds change, they refine as you get older. Just because you didn’t like spinach as much as you liked Wotsits when you were a child, it doesn’t mean you’re not going to like it now, does it? It’s very good for you,’ she underlined.

  ‘So’s jogging. At least, that’s what they say, but you won’t catch me running around the park like a berk on Saturday mornings when I could be in the café having bacon and eggs,’ I said, expecting full agreement on all the points I’d just made. But Charley just dropped her eyes and let me in on something that should’ve probably occurred to me already.

  ‘I sometimes go jogging on Saturday mornings.’

  ‘Oh,’ I ohhed, then started backtracking so frantically that Charley almost caught a couple of shoes in the face. ‘No, I didn’t mean it like that. There’s nothing wrong with jogging. I think jogging’s great and I really admire…’

  ‘Let’s just drop it,’ Charley cut me off, using the worst four words a girl can use on an early date short of saying, ‘I’m telling my dad’ or ‘I’m really a geezer’.

  ‘I just… I… sorry. Really, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Shall we order, then?’

  ‘Good idea,’ I readily agreed, then spent the next three minutes working myself into yet another one as I waved my menu about in an effort to attract the attention of the Zebra’s ovulating waitress and drag her away from the long-haired herbert with half a ton of scrap metal in his face and the scuffed guitar case he’d decided to come to breakfast with.

  ‘Oi, for fuck’s sake!’ I finally had to yell across the café, winning me dirty looks all round and a roll of the eyes from Charley. ‘Sorry, I was just trying to get the waitress,’ I explained, and the sullen young cow duly waddled over with a scowl slapped all over her puss. I looked down at her feet to see why she was walking the way she was and saw that her full-length skirt was actually just a big long tube which never gave an inch and which made her look like one of those ex-fatty weight-watchers you see in the papers who pose for the cameras standing in one leg of their old trousers. As hip and trendy as her skirt undoubtedly was, I couldn’t help but wonder if she’d chosen the wrong outfit for a job in the catering industry and was sorely tempted to suggest she saved it for school sports days or rolling down hills in.

  ‘Yeah?’ she yeahed, doing her best to swivel about on one leg inside her confines to show me how little she cared about me, my breakfast or this stupid crappy waitressing job.

  Call me Sherlock Holmes if you like, but to me she smacked of someone trying a little too hard to give off an aura of total disinterest. Why? I couldn’t tell you. Maybe she was just working here for a bit of cash until her real career took off and that really she was a poet or an artist or a musician or a designer or something. Something cool. Something creative. Something amazing. I hoped so for her sake as one thing was clear, she sure weren’t no fucking waitress.

  ‘What d’you want?’ she asked, finding a pencil behind her ear and giving one end a chew.

  ‘Can I have the haddock and eggs Florentine, please?’ Charley asked, prompting our one-legged waitress to scribble H e F down on her pad then stare at me.

  ‘And I’ll have the… er, the…’ I read the expression on Charley’s face and finally gave in. Oh, bollocks, go on then. ‘…the eggs Benedict, please.’

  ‘You want Tabasco on that?’ Zebedee asked me.

  ‘What? Urgh, no! Jesus, people put Tabasco on it?’ I gasped.

  What sort of a breakfast was this anyway?

  ‘Actually, scratch that last order,’ Charley suddenly cut in.

  ‘He’ll have the full English.’

  Our waitress started scribbling it down before getting confirmation off me and I had to kick up a stink to get my eggs Benedict reinstated.

  ‘No no no, don’t listen to her. I’ll have eggs Benedict.’

  ‘Look, Terry, just have your full English, it’s what you want to have anyway,’ Charley said, but I couldn’t, not now, things had gone too far.

  ‘No, I want the eggs Benedict. I want to see what it’s like,’ I insisted.

  ‘No you don’t, you want the full English.’

  ‘No, I want the eggs Benedict.’

  ‘You don’t.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘You don’t.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Can you make up your minds, please, as we’ve got other customers waiting?’ our waitress pointed out, though this hadn’t seemed to be a factor when she’d been sniffing around Frankenstein over yonder.

  ‘Terry, honestly, I don’t care what you have, so just have whatever you want,’ Charley pressed home.

  ‘Good, then I’ll have the eggs Benedict,’ I told the waitress, handing her my menu to signal that my breakfast think tank had turned in its results.

  Charley just frowned and shook her head, but if you think about it I’d been backed into such a corner that there really wasn’t anything else I could do. Fucking eggs Benedict! I didn’t want it, Charley was now dead set against it and our waitress probably wouldn’t get two yards from the kitchen without tripping face first into it, but suddenly I had to have it. And what’s more, I had to like it.

  ‘Drinks?’

  I looked to Charley and simply asked for ‘the same’ when she chose a suitably stupid coffee.

  ‘OK, that’ll be with you in a minute,’ our waitress lied, before hopping away.

  ‘Seriously, Terry, you should’ve just had what you wanted to have,’ Charley continued, and I could see that this one was likely to rumble on all day so I did what I could to take the wind out of Charley’s sails by telling her that I could have a full English any day of the week and that it was good to try something new for a change and a load of other old codswallop that I thought she wanted to hear until our breakfasts arrived a mere half-hour later.

  Jesus, I decided simply to think this time around. So that’s what eggs Benedict looks like, is it?

  I don’t know if you’ve ever had eggs Benedict but here’s the deal.

  It looks just like half a Bacon & Egg McMuffin with custard and dead insects dumped all over it. And what the hell were they?

  ‘Asparagus,’ Charley informed me, when she saw my confusion.

  ‘Have you never had asparagus before either? Try it, it’s lovely.’

  So I did and found it tasted exactly how it looked, only it was cold and therefore even more revolting.

  I poked my McMuffin about with my knife and fork, trying to scrape all the dead insects (or chives) off the top in order to get a clean bite of it, and finally looked up to see Charley watching me
like I was doing card tricks.

  ‘Nice this, isn’t it?’ I reassured her, and you know what, I genuinely meant that, albeit only in the face of what she’d got for breakfast. Oh yes, I’d got off lightly all right and no mistake.

  I tucked into my breakfast using the old one-mouthful-of-food-quickly-followed-by-a-gulp-of-coffee-to-wash-away-the-taste technique and managed to get halfway through it before I’d done all my coffee.

  ‘Shame we haven’t got any Rocket Man Sauce. I could do with a squirt of it around about now,’ I told Charley. ‘What’s yours like?’

  ‘It’s lovely. Here, try a little,’ she said, loading up her fork like she meant it.

  ‘Er, no, I won’t actually,’ I panicked, making my chair squeak as I backed away from a load of oncoming haddock. ‘I’m pretty stuffed already and I won’t be able to get through mine if I’ve got to have some of yours too.’ Especially not without something to wash it down with, I didn’t add.

  Charley withdrew her fork from my face and I breathed a sigh of relief as she defused it herself. That said, I was still all dried up on the drinks front so I called Zebedee over again and asked her for two teas and a can of Fanta if she found a moment before she clocked off tonight.

  ‘What, are you getting a fizzy drink?’ Charley asked, and my shoulders sagged when I realised I’d done something else wrong.

  ‘I’m just thirsty,’ I tried. ‘I always have a can of drink when I’m at the café. It’s just a bit salty if I don’t.’

  The bacon or ham or whatever it was they’d hidden under my custard and eggs was that really smoky type of bacon that Jason liked and it was making me the thirstiest man in the world. A can of Fanta was just what the doctor would’ve ordered, had he been here and as thirsty as me.

  ‘I don’t drink sugary drinks, just water. Sugary drinks just make you more thirsty and are loaded with calories.’

  I looked on the side of my can when it arrived and saw that she was right, at least about the calories. It didn’t seem to say anything about making me more thirsty, though. I suddenly felt all self-conscious and childlike about my Fanta and didn’t drink more than three sips, just enough to finish my eggs Benedict and show Charley an empty plate.

  ‘Is that what you drink on the building site, then, fizzy drinks?’

  ‘No, I just have a flask of tea or drink from the standpipe, which is just screwed into the mains,’ I said. ‘Mind you, I’ve seen some of the hoddies drink from the water butts before, and Robbie even drinks from them after he’s added the Feb mix.’

  ‘What’s Feb mix?’

  ‘It’s chemical. A plasticising agent that makes the muck more manageable on the trowel. The hoddies add it to the water butts when they’re knocking up. It smells a bit like diet cola when it’s mixed with water which is presumably why Robbie likes to drink it, though he reckons it don’t half give him gut rot.’

  Charley gave this some thought.

  ‘I think Robbie’s going to die at an early age.’

  ‘Well, we all know that. Even Robbie. But like he’s always saying, he’d rather live in his twenties than his sixties, live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse, the silly bastard.’

  ‘And what about you? Do you want to be like Robbie too?

  Live fast, die young…’ Charley asked.

  ‘… and drink Feb mix from water butts,’ I finished for her.

  ‘No thanks. I’d probably like to live a bit faster than our waitress here but I’m too old to be thinking about dying young these days.

  I’ll just have to make the best of it and see if I can’t leave a nice-looking old man for my widow to cry over.’

  ‘So you’re planning on getting married, then, are you?’

  Charley teased, making me go red. Boy, these were rocky waters I was navigating.

  ‘Maybe,’ I finally replied. ‘One day. If I find the right lady.’

  I figured this was a nice safe stock answer and Charley nodded like she understood perfectly. This wasn’t really a conversation to be exploring on our second date (or was this our third?). No good could come of me declaring that Charley was that selfsame right lady and if she just bided her time a few more dates and stopped trying to make me eat haddock Florentine then nothing would give me greater pleasure than to get down on one knee, take her hand in mine and ask her if she’d mind awfully spending the rest of her life with me. Does that sound a bit impulsive?

  Apologies if it does but what can I say? I liked her.

  Big John once told me that he knew he was going to marry his Glenda the moment he met her. Knew it in his bones, he did, and sure enough, twenty-five years and four kids later they finally tied the knot last year. And a lovely do it was too.

  And that was how I felt about Charley. I liked her from the very first moment we met (or woke up together) and I felt it in my bones. She was the one for me.

  ‘Shall we get the bill, then?’ I suggested.

  ‘Halves?’ Charley offered.

  ‘Not a bit of it, my treat,’ I insisted, though I kind of wished I hadn’t when I saw how much it all came too. And that was for half a custard-covered Egg McMuffin?

  Probably a good job I didn’t get the full English after all.

  9 The waiting game

  The thing that surprises most people when they see bricklayers work is just how fast a house goes up. You look at your average house, look at all the bricks and blocks it takes to build one, and then at the team of handsome devils whose job it is to put it all together, and I couldn’t blame you for thinking it might take anything up to a month to finish the job.

  But it doesn’t. In actual fact, with a gang the size of ours, seven brickies (when Gordon’s out of the pub) and three hoddies, it actually only takes a bit under a week to build a house. And that’s from the first blocks laid in the footings to the muck smoothed over around the chimney pot. Not that it stays smooth for long, mind, because in practice the bricky who smooths it over almost always writes his name in the soft muck for posterity. It doesn’t really do any harm. Not if it’s small. I mean, who’s going to see it up there facing the sky as it is, other than birds and eagle-eyed 747 pilots? Brickies have been signing off their work as far back as the pyramids and I’ll stick my neck out here and bet that if you were to take your house apart, brick by brick, somewhere in there you’d find a man’s signature and a date. Something like, ‘Albert Cooper, Aug 4th, 1923’, which is nice if you think about it, though before you start getting too dewy eyed about this fine old bygone craftsman, just bear in mind that besides building your house, old Albert and all his mates also probably pissed in every room as they were slapping it together. Another fine tradition that I think you’ll find dates back to the pyramids.

  Well, it is a long old walk to the Portaloo and we have got work to do, you know.

  Naturally, you don’t build each individual house in one go, as other trades have to have their say as it’s going up. The groundworkers have to backfill and concrete the footings, the chippies have to add the joists, and then the roofing trusses, and the scaffolders have to come along and raise the scaffolding as we complete each section, so in reality, we’re actually probably working on a dozen different houses at different stages of development at any one time.

  OK, there are six basic bricklaying stages to building a house. The first are the footings, the parts of your house that are underground and laid on the solid concrete foundations, which stop your house from sinking into the mud and getting subsidence, that’s assuming the Paddies have dug down far enough, and that largely depends how close in the calendar we are to the Derby.

  When these are done, the lot is backfilled and concreted over to form a solid base. This is the ground floor of your house and it’s called an oversite. We build up as far as we can reach, almost to the tops of the doors and windows, and then do all the internal downstairs walls as well, and then the scaffolders come along and lift the scaffolding. This next stage is called a joist lift, and we continue on up for
just a few courses of bricks and put in lintels and RSJs where they’re needed, then the chippies come along and lay the joists for the first floor. The whole thing then becomes known as a band lift, because it’s usually a solid band of brickwork with no windows from here on up until we reach the bottom of the first-floor windows, at which point our good friends and esteemed colleagues, the scaffolders, once again come to our assistance. The next stage is called the murder lift, and we build up around the first-floor windows and again add lintels and RSJs where we feel they’re warranted, then the scaffolders lift the whole thing up to roof level and all of a sudden the chippies get interested again. ‘Blimey,’ they think. ‘We’ve got some roofing trusses that would look great up there,’ and up they scamper to make a lot of noise with their hammers and saws until the house has the skeleton of a roof in place. Our role is almost at an end at this point. We brick up the gable ends, then seal the cavities with slates and flat tiles, then the scaffolding gets raised one final time and some lucky young fella gets to finish off the chimney, smooth over the muck around the pot, which is called the flaunching, and sign off the entire job with the tip of his trowel.

  In this particular case, the lucky young fella in question was me, and I wrote in the soft green muck ‘Terry Charley, 2008’, then looked out across the horizon when I was finished. It was a perfect autumn day. Fluffy white clouds hung in the sky and drifted slowly by, pushed on by a gentle breeze to pass shadows across the hustle and bustle below. It was actually a very beautiful sight. The skies often can be, particularly if you’re able to admire them from a position of elevation, but they were wasted on me this particular day. I might’ve been up on the roof but my spirits were way down in the footings with the rest of the gang. And you know why?

  Because Charley hadn’t phoned.

  It was Thursday afternoon, four whole days since I’d last seen her. We’d parted amorously enough, with hugs and kisses and promises to speak to each other as soon as, but then Charley hadn’t lived up to her end. I know it was only a day afterwards, but I texted her on the Monday evening anyway just to see how she was, and then again on the Tuesday when I didn’t get any sort of response, but still Charley hadn’t replied. It was then that the paranoia started creeping in and by a quarter past four on this particularly fine Thursday afternoon it had swallowed me whole. Something was up. I didn’t know what but something was definitely up.