Blue Collar

by Danny King

  At least, until the starters started rolling out.

  ‘Oh, this looks gorgeous,’ Simone said, smacking her lips and leaning into her plate in a way that made me wonder if she wasn’t going to bother with cutlery for this round.

  Here, you can have mine as well, then, was the favour I desperately wanted to do her, but there was no getting out of it. I was nine years old all over again and I wasn’t going anywhere until I’d eaten all my greens. How had that happened? I thought when I got this big, got a job and got my own place, I wouldn’t ever have to eat something I didn’t want to ever again.

  ‘Here you, eat these turnips.’

  ‘Oh yeah, try and fucking make me, mate.’

  But dinner parties? I’d never bargained on dinner parties.

  Now obviously, I’d never had goat’s cheese before, but cheese was cheese, wasn’t it? The same went for sun-blushed tomatoes, I presumed. They were just tomatoes, only sun-blushed? I was just having a cheese and tomato… what the fuck was that? Salad. Yeah, a cheese and tomato salad. With little sort of peanuts in it? What? Oh, fuck it, through the lips and over the gums, look out, T-shirt, here it comes.

  Back when I was a kid, I developed a number of different strategies for coping with horrible food and one of them was to wolf it down as fast as humanly possible. No dawdling or chewing to taste, just hold your nose and chuck it back until it’s all gone. It’s a similar strategy to running through a tunnel of punches, which had been a particularly popular game in our playground.

  Anyway, it seemed to do the trick because I did the lot in a bit under thirty seconds and was rinsing out with half a can of lager before the others were even on their second bite, though that wasn’t surprising considering how much time they were spending gassing instead of eating. Their own particular strategy, no doubt.

  ‘There is some more if you’re hungry,’ CT told me, consternation and confusion splashed all over his face.

  ‘Gawd, no thanks! I mean, no thanks, that was just right for me. Very nice,’ I replied.

  It was a bonkers situation when you think about it, wasn’t it? I mean, we were all grown-ups, we were all expected to stand on our own two feet, so why couldn’t I just come out with it and say, ‘Actually, I don’t really fancy any of the stuff you’re dishing up tonight. Nothing personal, I’m sure it’s delicious, I just don’t fancy any of it myself. Still, you crack on and don’t worry about me. I’m perfectly happy to just sit here and get absolutely trolleyed until the pudding comes out. Actually, thinking about it, is there a chippy near by? I’m starving. Ain’t had no dinner tonight.’

  No, it didn’t matter that that was what we were all thinking – or at least I was. I wasn’t allowed to say as much because offending someone’s feelings is deemed a worse taboo than offending someone’s taste buds. I tell you, this country.

  Or at least, this particular colony of it. Try palming this stuff off on my old man and you’d get it straight back across the table at you. After a while, CT turned to Charley and asked her if she’d noticed it yet.

  ‘Noticed what?’ Charley replied, and for a moment I thought CT was going to point out our complete unsuitability and the goat’s cheese down my front.

  ‘My new piece,’ he said instead, indicating over his shoulder with a flick of the eyebrows.

  Me and Charley looked towards the wall behind him and furrowed our brows. Charley must’ve had better eyesight than me because she cooed in wonder and commented that something was wonderful.

  I sharpened my eyes a few more twists and scrutinised the back wall even harder but all I could make out was a pinboard with a load of shopping lists and bus tickets stuck all over it.

  ‘I’m sorry, what are we looking at?’ I finally had to ask.

  ‘CT has a new piece of art,’ Charley announced in a smiley way that told me there was an in-joke at work here. And by the way, Simone, Clive and Russell smiled too, I could tell everyone was in on it but me.

  I looked again, but still I couldn’t see anything at all. I wondered if it was completely white, like the walls. You know, a ‘look how avant-garde I am, I’ve got a white picture on a white wall’ sort of nonsense, but seriously there wasn’t anything there.

  Except the pinboard.

  No!!!

  ‘The pinboard?’ I cautiously asked, fully expecting them to tell me not to be so ludicrous and please could I take CT’s new invisible white picture seriously, but astonishingly, I’d hit his battleship. It was the pinboard.

  ‘Simone did it,’ Charley told me, making Simone blush, and I could see why.

  She’d got a normal, bog-standard pinboard and stuck on it bus tickets, train tickets, theatre tickets, receipts, flyers, including a couple of those dirty cards prostitutes plaster up in phone boxes, shopping lists and abstract doodles and enclosed the whole lot in a clear perspex frame.

  Why she’d done this was anyone’s guess. All I know is that she looked suitably embarrassed about it, sort of how I’d look if I got up and pushed over the fridge for no reason, and that everyone else was enjoying the moment.

  ‘Is it one of the new ones?’ Charley asked excitedly.

  ‘Only twelve in existence,’ Simone confirmed freely.

  ‘What, there are more of them?’ I couldn’t help blurting out.

  ‘It’s Simone’s new line,’ CT then told me, leading me to wonder what her old line was, making wigs out of old banana skins?

  ‘Hang on, I’m sorry, but am I being thick or something?

  What’s all this about?’ they forced me to ask.

  ‘It’s Simone’s work,’ Charley explained.

  ‘What, laminating pinboards? Is there much of a market for that, then?’

  ‘Don’t, Terry, don’t be rude,’ Charley warned me, waking me up to the fact that I was on thin ice with this one. I looked across at Simone and Clive and caught the full force of two frosty glares.

  ‘Sorry. No, it’s very nice,’ I reassured them, then thought better of adding that I had one just like it in my kitchen at home.

  Only mine was a work in progress.

  Which just went to show the double standards some people had. Only ten minutes earlier Simone had defended herself for laying into my mercenary mates on the grounds that honesty was the best policy. Yet all of a sudden I was the rude one for raising an eyebrow when I found out that she went around doing stuff that would’ve seen my Great-Auntie Doris put in a home and never talked about again.

  ‘So are you just borrowing it or have you actually bought it?’

  Charley asked CT.

  ‘Oh no, I’ve bought it. It’s all mine,’ he boasted proudly.

  Charley dealt a few congratulations around the table and the five of them talked of their excitement about Simone’s upcoming exhibition, but no one even got near to asking the only thing I wanted to know. Namely, how much?

  ‘Er… without seeming rude, can I ask you how much you bought it for, CT?’ I finally cracked.

  Everyone around the table clammed up when old money-grabbing Tel inevitably lowered the tone.

  ‘Oh no, don’t get me wrong. Seriously, I don’t mean any disrespect, I’m just curious, that’s all,’ I explained.

  ‘Well, I’m sorry, but I’d really rather not say,’ CT apologised. ‘It’s not really my place.’

  ‘Ah, no, that’s fine, don’t worry about it,’ I climbed down, all embarrassed and in urgent need of booze. I filled the rest of my glass with my latest can and took a big reassuring swig. I wasn’t sure how I was doing it, but somehow I was upsetting everyone around this table and I was starting to get to the point where I was almost afraid to open my mouth.

  ‘I’ve got no problem with Terry knowing if you don’t,’ Simone then stepped in.

  ‘No, oh, all right,’ CT shrugged, then told me he’d paid sixteen hundred for it.

  An enormous cloud of Stella sprayed across the table in Simone and Clive’s direction as I choked on this figure, sending chairs flying in all directions as my fellow
dinner guests leapt to escape my beer.

  ‘Oh shit, sorry!’ I gasped, my face all purple and sweaty as I coughed and honked on a lungful of lager. ‘Went down the wrong way,’ I croaked.

  ‘Well, yes, quite,’ CT agreed, taking stock and relighting the candles. ‘Don’t worry about it, it happens to the best of us, you know. Right then, tea towels?’

  Charley patted me on the back and gave me a napkin to wipe the tears from my eyes.

  ‘Sorry,’ I rasped, incredibly embarrassed and apologetic.

  Russell began wiping down the table while CT took away everyone’s half-eaten starters and scraped them into the bin, now that everyone was suddenly finished.

  ‘Are you all right?’ was all Charley asked.

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ I replied, coughing out the last of my beer and standing my chair on end again. ‘Oohh.’

  ‘Good job Simone didn’t tell you how much she normally sells them for, then, wasn’t it?’ Charley whispered, her lips curled into a barely concealed smile. ‘Well, CT is one of her oldest friends, you can’t expect her to charge him the full amount, now, can you?’

  ‘I guess not,’ I choked in response.

  Now, I’m not going to get into this whole modern art debate because we all know it’s simply a case of the emperor’s new clothes here. Seriously, anyone with half a brain in their head can see that a load of bricks painted blue, or a video of a man hopping on one leg, or six buckets of paint upturned on a canvas or, in this case, a pinboard full of bus tickets, isn’t art. And all the clever eggheads in the world insisting that it is and that I’m a thicky philistine ain’t going to convince me otherwise. And I’ll tell you the simple reason why – because I could do any of these things. I mean, blimey, who couldn’t? Only if me or old Joe Knucklehead from down the road did do it, it wouldn’t be considered art because we weren’t coming from an artistic background. So I could paint a load of red arrows on a canvas and then cover it in crisps and it wouldn’t be considered art. But if someone from the most exclusive, swankiest, wankiest art college in London were to do exactly the same thing it would be. That’s just how it works.

  Anything can be art apparently, but not everyone can do it. So there you have it in its clearest light – the emperor’s new clothes.

  Of course, every now and again someone shows these con men up for what they are by exhibiting the work of a new up-and-coming genius and roping in a load of nobby art critics to wax lyrical about it, before wheeling out some chimp in a beret and big floppy shirt who’s drinking from a bucket of emulsion. And that’s always great when that happens. I love it when they do that and I read all about it with a big grin on my face. But even this isn’t enough to faze these boys because, you see, at the end of the day, it always comes back to us. We’re simply philistines and we’re not clever enough to understand it.

  Perhaps not, but I understand this much; I might be a philistine, but I ain’t no mug.

  Sixteen hundred quid for a pinboard in a frame? I’m sure if I shopped around a bit I could find a Pole who knocked ’em out cheaper. Fabulous artists, the Poles. And so much cheaper than those unreliable British artists who, frankly, in my opinion, are more extortionately expensive than British builders.

  ‘Here we are. Is everyone hungry?’ Russell asked, a tablecloth change later.

  He put my dinner down in front of me and I saw that it consisted of an extra-thin bit of bacon wrapped around a bit of salmon, sat on top of a load of really burnt peas (which I later found out were lentils. I’d heard of these before, but had never actually ever seen them) and all covered in cream.

  OK, I’ll admit it, I’m not the most sophisticated bloke in the world – no, seriously, I’m not – so I hadn’t done that much posh grub in my time, but really, please, tell me, how was this nicer than a chicken dinner? Or a chicken curry? Or chicken and chips? Or chicken casserole? Or chicken nuggets? I mean, if I was having people around for dinner and I wanted to impress them (and the butcher’s had run out of chicken) I’d get a steak in for everyone.

  A big dirty great slab of sirloin with onions, mushrooms, grilled tomatoes, a baked potato, a bit of salad and a scattering of mustard and pepper. I’d expect a good write-up if I served up six plate-loads of that to everyone, so what was the deal with the cat food challenge in front of us this evening? Fish, as well? I’d specifically told Charley that I didn’t like fish, and here in front of me was a fish, though she’d been as good as her word as far as the Microchips were concerned.

  ‘Has it got bones in it?’ I asked, digging open my fish with the funny-looking knife and fork I found by the side of my plate.

  ‘No, it shouldn’t have, I boned the fish myself this afternoon,’ Russell told me, almost making me choke on my Stella again.

  Childish, I know, but he said it, not me.

  Unfortunately ‘shouldn’t have’ didn’t carry the sorts of cast-iron guarantees I needed to commence Operation Wolf It Down again, so I had to rethink my options and selected a different strategy to beat this particular dish.

  The ‘eat a bit, drink a bit’ option wasn’t really a goer either, as I wasn’t sure I’d be shown the same sympathy and understanding if I hurled a second mouthful across the table if it all got a bit too much for me, so this called for Strategy C.

  ‘Here, CT, have you got any brown sauce?’

  ‘Erm… er, yes… I think. I’m sure we must have,’ he replied, looking at Russell in pity.

  Russell himself chose not to say anything, he just stared at the dinner in front of me with a mixture of sadness and resignation in his eyes.

  ‘You can’t beat a bit of brown sauce,’ I reassured everyone, and you certainly couldn’t. Nothing completely annihilated something else’s original taste quite like brown sauce. It was the napalm of all condiments.

  ‘Here you go,’ CT said, reluctantly handing me a plastic squeezy bottle as if it were a gun and I was his son. He looked like he desperately wanted to urge caution but wasn’t quite sure how to go about it, so I quickly popped the lid and put him out of his pickle with a sweeping flourish all over my dinner.

  ‘That got it,’ I told him, and CT just agreed. It certainly had.

  I mashed it all up together and stirred in half the lentils while I was at it, then helped myself to an enormous forkful before anyone could ask me if I wanted a bib, and I must say, it wasn’t very nice. Even with half a bottle of brown sauce all over it.

  ‘A sauce-on-everything man, huh?’ Clive commented. I was going to tell him ‘yeah, everything except pudding’ but decided to hold fire until I saw what crème brûlée was.

  I struggled on with my lot, determined that I should finish every morsel for fear of looking like a big ignorant rude dummy, and within four minutes it was mission accomplished. Bring on the pudding and then we’re out of here. What time is it?

  ‘Attend a lot of dinner parties, do you?’ Russell asked.

  ‘This is my first one,’ I corrected him.

  ‘Really?’ he mulled.

  After a while, CT turned to me and caught me by surprise when he confessed that he had an ulterior motive for inviting me along this evening.

  ‘Dishwasher on the blink, is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Ha! No, but I’ll bear you in mind the next time it is,’ he chuckled. ‘No, actually, it was something we talked about the other evening, in the pub. About making a fly-on-the-wall show set on a building site. Do you remember?’

  I did, but I had only been joking at the time. It had just been a pub conversation. I mean, blimey, If I was taken seriously every time I opened my mouth in the pub I’d be doing a dozen consecutive life sentences by now and we’d all be at war with Wales.

  ‘I actually think it’s a really good idea and I’d like to pitch it to my commissioner in the next scheduling round if that’s all right with you? What do you think?’ CT asked.

  ‘What, my building site?’ I asked back.

  ‘Ideally, yes, if we can get the agreement of everyone involved and the i
nsurance to cover the crew,’ he confirmed.

  I turned to Charley and asked her if this was a wind-up.

  ‘It’s just an idea at the moment,’ Charley downplayed. ‘But I agree with CT that it could be really good. He’s talked about nothing else all week.’

  ‘What, me on the telly?’ I triple-checked.

  ‘Only if you agree. Like I say, ideally we’d like to come down and scout your building site, but if it’s not suitable for whatever reason and your guys don’t feel happy about it then obviously we’d look for another location, but it’s the idea I’m really excited about. I think it’s a wonderfully workable idea,’ CT enthused.

  ‘And Jason? Would he be on the telly as well?’ I continued to press.

  ‘Well, again, if Jason signs up and we’re able to get agreement from all parties and we’re given the go-ahead from the commissioner and the channel give us a slot and we’re able to get enough material in the time allowed and the dozen and one other hurdles we’ll have to clear to put together this show, then yes, hopefully Jason too,’ CT confirmed.

  ‘What, me and Jason on telly?’ I could hardly believe it.

  CT looked around the table for help and eventually Charley came to his rescue with the Janet and John version.

  ‘Yes, you and Jason on the telly,’ she explained. ‘Would that be OK?’

  ‘Because if it’s not, I might ask you to sign something to say that you’re happy to relinquish the rights to this idea in order for me to take it elsewhere. Obviously, you would be compensated in the event that the show went ahead and…’ CT started to tell me, but I picked up on the word compensated straight away and asked him what that actually meant in terms of beer tokens. I mean, if he was happy to pay sixteen hundred for a pinboard, how much was he willing to shell out for a cracking idea like Building Site (working title)?

  ‘Well, er… I can’t really say until we’ve been allocated a budget and had the lawyers look at it in terms of…’