Blue Collar

by Danny King

  Why hadn’t I heard from her? Why hadn’t she responded to either of my texts? Why didn’t she want to talk to me? And why was I the one moping over a silent phone? I was the bloke, for fuck’s sake. Surely I was the one who was meant to dick her around.

  I resisted the urge to text her for the third time or leave a frantic voicemail message on her mobile or landline. At least I had that much going for me, but not much else, to be perfectly frank.

  See, when I’d said goodbye to her on Sunday after our horrible breakfast, I’d genuinely thought I’d cracked it with Charley. I’d seen her a few times, we’d spent the night together and we’d never even run out of things to tell each other. She’d updated me on all the latest Rocket Sauce news and I’d educated her all about band lifts and oversites, so why had she suddenly gone quiet on me? Some might argue that it was because I’d educated her about band lifts and oversites, but I couldn’t see that. OK, so it might not have had goose bumps popping out all over her body, but by that same token she’d shown a genuine interest in what it took to build a house. I mean, it’s an interesting subject, isn’t it? We all have houses. At least, most of us do, and it’s good to know how the everyday things around us are made, I reckon. I’d been interested in what it took to push Rocket Man Sauce on the rest of us. I hadn’t necessarily understood half of it or why the hell anyone would want to bother, but I’d still found it interesting all the same. Hadn’t she felt likewise?

  Had I bored her?

  I hoped not. I’m admittedly not the cleverest bloke in the world and I’m sure I’d have trouble keeping up with her if she suddenly put her grey matter into fifth gear and started talking about something clever like… like… See, I don’t even know what. That’s how dumb I am.

  Politics? No, I read the papers. I could talk about them lot of crooks if I wanted to.

  Economics? I had a mortgage. I had savings. I even had a pension. And the housing market is a barometer for the UK’s economy, everyone knows that, so blokes like me and Jason felt the peaks and troughs of the nation’s fortunes long before the Hooray Henrys in braces up in the City did, so I could probably stand my own on that subject too.

  No, the more I thought about it, the more I realised it all boiled down to eggs Benedict. I should’ve just had it, liked it and shut the fuck up. I should’ve even suffered a mouthful of hers if I’d thought about it. But I hadn’t. I’d argued with her. Over eggs Benedict? What an idiot. What a tosser. I’d lost the woman of my dreams over a disagreement about eggs Benedict and in the process found out what it would feel like to swallow a real-life cannonball.

  What an arsehole.

  I don’t think it helped either, that crack about me hoping to get married one day when I met the right lady, because I had met the right lady. Only I’d been such a plank that I’d gone and talked her right out of my life.

  And all of a sudden, everything was too late. I’d gone from taking the first few tentative steps on the road to a lifetime of love and happiness with the best girl in the world, only to turn back for Alphabetti Spaghetti the moment the grub got a bit grown up. Not that I had much of an appetite at the moment, you understand. What a fuckwit!

  You can probably now see why it wasn’t within my powers to appreciate the beauty of these late afternoon skies. You can also probably now see why Gordon had stuck me up here on my own, away from the rest of the lads. Well, fair enough, I suppose.

  I was starting to bore even myself going on about it these last three days. They needed a break from me. It was just a shame I couldn’t get a break from myself.

  ‘Tel? Tel? Terry? You all done?’ Robbie shouted up from the deck, a fresh hod of muck on his shoulder.

  I gave him the thumbs-up to show him that I was, so Robbie had a quick check about to make sure Ebenezer, our site manager, wasn’t anywhere around, then slung his muck into the nearest hole to save himself having to carry it all the way back to the mixer.

  ‘She rung you yet?’ he then shouted up. I shook my head. ‘Well, yo’ can’ spen… ne resta… lif’ ’orryin’ ’bout wheth… ’ … sin’ ’e … … ife … ’ork or … ot, … … an’ …stal …’an … ’ou. Ah mea… …se’s t… …ay… ’ …’s …m … … …’matoes?’ he elaborated, apparently forgetting that I was on the roof and he was on the ground.

  ‘What’s he saying?’ Dan, the chippy, looked up at me from the fascia board around the gable.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘But I’m sure it’s probably good advice.’

  Thursday came and went without a phone call too and I cut and buttered my way through most of Friday in a miserable trough of despair before my phone finally beeped and wobbled excitedly in my pocket to let me know that I had a new text.

  I’d already made up my mind to climb into the mixer if this turned out to be fucking Car Phone Warehouse again, but my heart did a backflip when I pressed the green button and saw Charley’s name.

  soz 4nt gtg bck 2u – wks bn crzy :-(. im out 2nite but cll u tmw :-)

  Which I translated to mean, ‘Sorry for not getting back to you, but work (or the week) has been crazy (either really busy or amazingly fun). Here’s a frowny face to show you either just how sorry I am or alternatively what an arse-ache the last few days have been. I’m off out tonight, but I’ll call you tomorrow for reasons unspecified. Here’s a smiley face which you can take to mean I’m either happy to do this, or I hope this makes you happy, or hooray it’s the weekend or any number of other things, including I couldn’t think of how else to end this text.’

  I read the short message a dozen times and tried to read between the lines. It hadn’t been exactly the most heartfelt message in the world but at least she’d finally texted, which was a definite improvement on five days of lip-wobbling silence.

  ‘Happy now?’ Jason asked, brushing the murder lift flank we’d just pointed up.

  ‘Yeah, I suppose,’ I replied, but I wasn’t really. I’d waited all week long to hear from her and had finally been rewarded for my patience with a one-line text to let me know that she was off out with someone else tonight. Pardon me if I didn’t giggle with boyish excitement and run around handing out cigars.

  ‘Oh, for the love of fuck, give your brain the rest of the week off,’ Jason pleaded with me. ‘You’re miserable when she doesn’t text you, miserable when she does. I don’t know what’s the matter with you, mate, but I’ll tell you this much, if you don’t sort yourself out you’re just going to make yourself unhappy moping over this bird and she ain’t going to thank you for that.’

  Of course, I knew he was right. I’m not that much of an idiot that I couldn’t see that I was behaving like a right plate of eggs Benedict and that if Charley could see me like this she’d probably run a mile and have every right to do so. It’s just hard sometimes, when you’ve convinced yourself that you’ve finally found the thing you’ve been looking for all your adult life, only to feel it slipping away from you for reasons you can’t quite put your finger on. You try telling jokes and visiting water-slide parks under such circumstances, motherfucker.

  ‘It’s OK, I’m fine,’ I told Jason, then started texting Charley back.

  ‘Oi, what d’you think you’re doing?’ Jason suddenly said.

  ‘What? I’m just texting her to let her know that that’s all cool and that I’ll speak to her tomorrow,’ I explained.

  ‘She hasn’t replied to you all week and only finally gets back to you on Friday afternoon and you’re straight on the buttons back to her without so much as a breather? What’s wrong with you?’ Jason said, snatching my phone away from me.

  ‘Oi, give me that back.’

  ‘No, you can have it back in the Lamb tonight and not before,’ he told me in no uncertain terms, warning me off with his brick brush, before retreating to the other end of the scaffolding with my phone, muttering to himself, ‘Texting her straight back like a great big plank after only five seconds. Unbelievable.

  Un-fucking-believable!’

  10
Secrets and thighs

  Jason eventually gave me back my phone at eight o’clock in the Lamb that night and I skipped and danced through big gay sun-drenched meadows when I saw that I had yet another text from Charley. That said, I almost went head over heels in a big pile of shit when a moment of paranoia flashed across my brain in the shape of Charley telling me she never wanted to see me again because I hadn’t got back to her straight away.

  ‘I can’t deal with this game-playing shit,’ being the phrase I feared the most.

  Fortunately for Jason and my liver, no such text came up when I pressed the appropriate buttons and instead, an invitation appeared on-screen.

  my frns bday tmw nite. wnt 2 cm ^ + hv drx in isl @ 7? :-)

  A bit more backward and forward texting revealed that it was one of her friend’s birthdays the following evening and that she wanted me to come along. Or more accurately, was giving me the option of coming along if I wanted. Which are two subtly different positions but let’s not stare at our navel too much here.

  Now, I have to say right off the bat that I wasn’t exactly kicking the stable door to meet a load of posho strangers I probably wouldn’t have a thing in common with and who would probably view me with scorn and amusement because I’d never had eggs Benedict up until quite recently, but I was desperate… ‘Steady on,’ warned Jason.

  …sorry, eager to see Charley again, so I texted her back and made out like I thought the whole evening sounded like a Saturday night knocked together in heaven and agreed to see her in some boozer called Signed For! in Islington at seven.

  ‘What? Signed For!? What is that? Is that a pub or something or are you going for a drink in a sorting office?’ Jason wanted to know.

  ‘I don’t know. You don’t think I’ll have to sign for everything, do you? Like my drinks and all that?’ I was more worried about.

  ‘Nah, probably just the name of the place. They come up with all sorts of weird names these days. It’s almost like it’s become a point of principle, you know, to come up with the most un-pub name possible for your new pub,’ he speculated, prompting ten minutes of laughs as we competed to think up the most unlikely pub name imaginable, which Jason won hands down when he decided to call his future bar, nightclub and restaurant complex Fuck Off.

  ‘Still, good sign that is, her wanting you to meet her mates,’ Jason said.

  ‘You reckon?’

  ‘Oh yeah, shows that she’s not ashamed to be seen out with you, which is definitely a step in the right direction.’

  ‘Oh, cheers, that’s nice, innit. Don’t go giving me too much of a big head, now, will you?’

  ‘Hey, don’t knock it, mate. It’s better than going out with a bird who doesn’t want anyone to know you’re knocking her off,’ Jason said. ‘I had a couple of them before I met Sandra, you know, and fun and games they are too.’

  He then went on to tell me about this overly secretive secretary who used to work in the site office of one of the first sites he’d worked on when he first left school. I hadn’t worked on that particular job myself so I had to take Jason’s word for it that she was ‘all right’ rather than up to usual building site secretary specifications.

  Anyway, what had happened was a couple of months of teenage flirting had resulted in a night of ‘unstoppable banging’ (Jason’s words, not mine) when they’d accidentally bumped into each other in a pub one evening.

  ‘It had been a real steam valve turner,’ Jason gor-blimeyed, before filling me in on all the unnecessary details, such as what she’d looked like upside down and the exact colour of her pubes. ‘Anyway, I go into the office to say hello to her the next morning, which is what I was led to believe was proper etiquette for a gentleman after he’d spent the previous evening rearranging her internal organs, and she just completely blanks me, like I’m not even there. I can’t think what I’ve done wrong, but I beat a hasty retreat anyway and put it down to honest-to-goodness embarrassment. And I can’t blame her, the things we’d done, like when she…’

  ‘Just get on with the story,’ I tell him.

  ‘Right, anyway, a few days goes past and I bump into her in the compound again, though this time when we’re both alone and suddenly she’s right up for it again. We arrange to meet that evening after work and bingo, my numbers come up again. Full house. And then some.’

  ‘OK, I get it, she didn’t want the blokes at work knowing,’ I reasoned, and I couldn’t blame her for that. A building site full of giggling hairy-arsed halfwits hanging off the scaffolding and whistling at her knowingly every time she left the office for a drink from the Feb mix barrels.

  ‘That’s what I thought but she didn’t draw the line at just them. My mates, her mates, our families, strangers in the street, in the pub, she didn’t want anyone knowing about us. She comes back to my bedsit a couple of times a week or we occasionally go to some little out-of-the way boozer, but that’s basically it for about four months. It’s not like either of us were seeing anyone else at the time either. She just didn’t want anyone knowing that we had something going on. How d’you like that for a long hard look in the mirror?’

  ‘What happened to her?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know. The job finished, she moved on and I never saw her again. As far as I’m aware I think I’m still technically going out with her because we never actually ended it or nothing. And I couldn’t ring her to chase her down because she lived with her mum and dad and didn’t want them picking up the phone on me, so she never gave me her number or told me where she lived. I liked her an’ all.’

  ‘Did she only ever let you do her up the arse as well, and always cup her hand over her fanny in a way that suggested she might have a cock and balls down there?’

  ‘See, this is what always happens when blokes open up to each other. I’m baring my innermost here,’ Jason said, before pointing out what a phenomenal gay I’d been about the whole Charley deal up until now.

  ‘Sorry, mush. It was just too difficult not to say it,’ I apologised.

  ‘Oh yeah, I know. And it was a good one too,’ Jason conceded.

  ‘No, anyway, this little bird of yours was probably just a bit young and shy,’ I said. ‘I mean, how old was she? Seventeen?

  Eighteen?’

  ‘Well, probably. I don’t know. Anyway, the point stands that it’s better to have a bird who’s willing to show you off to all her mates than to have one who’s too scared to stand next to you on your wedding day in case everyone starts thinking that she likes you. It just bodes a bit better for your relationship. No, I think it’s a good sign.’

  All at once Tony, our eavesdropping landlord, leaned across the bar at us and picked up the baton.

  ‘I shagged this bird once,’ he told us. ‘Had the biggest arse in the world, she did. Seriously, I couldn’t believe it. It was enormous. Like that, it was,’ he demonstrated, using his hands and a fair stretch of his arms.

  Jason looked at me and nodded.

  ‘Are you writing all this down?’ he asked.

  11 Friends

  I arrived on the dot of seven the next night, with more of Jason’s advice ringing in my ears (most of which involved not getting drunk and chinning any of her mates) and poked my head around the door. Charley didn’t look like she was here yet, but the rest of Islington did. I squeezed inside and sidestepped my way through the throng in an effort to find the bar.

  The reason for the crowd was immediately obvious. A big screen at the far end was showing some football match and the whole place was jumping up and down and yelling at the projected images of the players as if they could actually hear them. One particularly noisy brain donor was repeatedly asking the referee ‘what the fuck’ was the matter with him, and I took a moment to wonder if he was the sort of person who spent his days looking around the backs of mirrors when he wasn’t shouting at walls.

  Fortunately, the clock in the corner of the screen showed that they’d already played eighty-four minutes so I fought my way through the crowd,
satisfied that I wasn’t going to have to put up with an entire night of ‘Football’s Coming Home’.

  There were at least five barmen and maids behind the bar, all of whom resembled fantastically trendy versions of the customers themselves, and despite the fact that hardly anyone else was waiting for a drink, what with the match reaching its nail-biting conclusion and all, it still took me a full ten minutes to get served.

  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not some sort of impatient juvenile who eats his packed lunch on the bus on the way to school or nothing, I just couldn’t work out how it took me ten minutes to get served when the bar staff seemed to outnumber waiting customers two to one. One long-haired herbert was brushing ashtrays, another one was charging about in circles announcing to the world that he was changing a barrel. One was stood around carefully inching a pint of Guinness closer to the top of a glass, while another looked like he was trying to reprogram the till in accordance with the instructions on the back of a packet of kettle chips, which left a single spiky-haired pixie to dance between the taps and take the odd order when she felt like doing someone a favour. It was maddening.

  Yeah yeah yeah, here I go on about Catford again, but seriously, in my local there was only Tony, and he seemed to cope just fine without too many problems, even when the football was on. Tony was like an octopus behind the bar, pouring half a dozen drinks at a time and storing half a dozen more in his head so that no one went thirsty or wasted too much of their precious Saturday nights banging empty pint pots on the bar, so how the fuck did these feet-dragging beer-tap-dodgers get away with it?