Blue Collar

by Danny King

  ‘Daddy always told me if I ever married beneath my station he’d cut me off without a penny and you can’t get much farther beneath my station than Terry,’ Charley pointed out. ‘Still, a girl’s got to have her fun, I suppose, so he’ll do for the time being, but the moment I grow weary of him I’ll upgrade him for a nice rich investment banker and just call on his services occasionally when I need my… what do you call the lead around the chimney again?’ she asked me.

  ‘Flashing,’ I replied, cold to the core.

  ‘Yes, that’s it, when I need my lead flashing repointed,’ she chuckled, before cutting one of Sandra’s golden potatoes into four and lifting a quarter to her mouth.

  It was only then that Charley became acutely aware of the stunned silence hanging over the table and saw that she had a splendid uninterrupted view of each of our tonsils.

  ‘Er… only joking,’ she tentatively explained.

  ‘Oh! Oh, yeah, we know. Ha ha ha!’ Jason suddenly boomed, grabbing me by the shoulder and shaking me in agreement. ‘I wouldn’t let this common bastard near my dog, let alone my daughter if I had one either, so you tell your old man he’s all right by me.’

  Charley said she’d get straight on the phone.

  I also played along and agreed that I wasn’t fit to lick the dirt from such a well-to-do bit of crumpet’s boots, though much of this was just a desperate attempt to talk over Sandra and stop her from asking Charley which bit she’d been joking about, me being a fucking pleb or her not wanting to marry me?

  Mercifully, though, Sandra got with the team and spent the next ten minutes agreeing with Charley and Jason about what an oily undesirable I was until a few of their observations pitched up a bit too near to the truth for comfort and the whole conversation was ditched in favour of more potato talk.

  I don’t know what it was that knocked me for six about Charley’s remarks. It had clearly been intended as a joke right from the start. She hadn’t just accidentally blurted out her innermost thoughts and frantically tried to back-pedal with the old ‘only joking’ loophole when she saw her comments going down like Sandra in a cemetery after four cans of Diamond White. I can completely accept that.

  And I can also completely accept that she may have felt a bit awkward about being backed into a corner over the question of the rest of her life and where exactly I fitted into it, and had tried to kid her way out of it. That was fairly obvious too.

  No, I think what unsettled me most about Charley’s joke was precisely what Charley had chosen to joke about. Namely, me, my lower-classness and our complete and utter lack of suitability. It was almost as if she’d peered into the darkest corner of my worst fears, seen that there was a dartboard hanging up there and hit the bull’s-eye with her first dart.

  It was a hell of a shot.

  And I saw that Jason saw it too, as he gave me a right good eyebrow when Charley went to the loo, though neither he nor Sandra sought to wade any farther out into those particular waters.

  Not at this time of night.

  ‘Thanks very much for dinner. I had a really lovely time,’ Charley told Jason and Sandra at the end of the evening, kissing them both on both cheeks and making Jason blush with surprise.

  ‘You’re most welcome,’ Jason promised her. ‘We’re glad you could make it. It was so nice to finally meet you. Tel, I’ll see you Monday, cock-a-doodle-doo, son. All right?’

  ‘You too, mate. And thanks, Sand, that was handsome.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  Etc.

  We stepped out into the early hours of Sunday morning and struck out for my place. Before we’d got halfway down Jason and Sandra’s garden path, though, Sandra decided to risk one last throw of the dice and called on after us, ‘Oh, and Charley, don’t mind us. He’s all right really, I suppose,’ she told her, meaning me, I’m guessing.

  Charley looked back and smiled.

  ‘I suppose.’ She shrugged, before waving one last goodnight and turning back to loop her arm through mine.

  And that was it. Not exactly a ringing endorsement but at least she wasn’t calling me a dirty peasant and threatening to bin me for bankers any more.

  Which, under the circumstances, was about as close to a compliment as I had any right to expect.

  I wondered what her old man would say about that.

  18 The Domino theory

  When Charley was a little girl, she wanted to ride horses for a living. Showjumping, three-day eventing, equestrian stuff, you know, that sort of thing, not delivering milk. I guess this is quite a common ambition with young girls. They have a fascination and love for horses the way that young boys have a fascination and love for dog shit and scrambling over garage roofs. At least, that’s what me and my mates were into when we were boys.

  Anyway, most girls, though, can’t afford to do anything about this inherent yearning. Horses are a lot of money. Stabling fees, vets’ bills and carrots, they all add up. And up and up and up, more often than not. But a determined girl can always find a way.

  A girl who lived across the road from me used to shovel shit at the local stables after school just for a free half-hour at the end of every week, while Charley herself had to… well, actually, she didn’t have to do anything as her old man was minted and she was the one and only apple of his eye.

  Want a horse? No problem. What colour?

  All she had to do was promise that she was serious about the whole thing, that it was no passing fad, and she could have what she liked. Charley duly promised.

  Consequently, from the age of eight or nine she used to spend her every waking hour riding, grooming and cuddling a succession of smelly horses and all other times dreaming about them until around about the tender age of eleven she met Domino – her first love.

  Naturally Domino was a horse as well, but it’s OK to love a horse when you’re eleven, so long as you don’t expect it to be faithful when the paddock gate gets left open and Buttercup’s swishing her tail about next door.

  Now Domino wasn’t just a biological motorbike to Charley. She really genuinely loved him and the pair of them forged a bond that was to last for most of her early teenage years. Build a time machine and go back to the eighties and you’d find Charley in jodhpurs no matter what time of the day or year you ran into her. She was totally dedicated to her horse, much to the relief of her old man, who’d forked out a few grand to get him for her.

  Not like me. Not like in our house. When we weren’t flushing goldfish down the bog we were off up the pet shop buying some more. We should’ve probably tried remembering to feed the ones we had once in a while, but who could be arsed when they were only 90p a bag?

  So Charley and Domino became best friends. They ate together, hung out together and grew up together. They also started competing in events and collected ribbons and cups from around the county. But it wasn’t about the silverware for Charley (or presumably Domino), it was about being together.

  Now, you could argue that Charley being an only child, her relationship with Domino took the place of a sibling relationship. That if she’d had brothers or sisters reading her diary every time she was out of the house, like my sister did, she probably wouldn’t have felt the need to form such a close attachment to an animal.

  Possibly. Possibly not. Who knows. I guess it depends what you want to read into it. But these early years are so important in a person’s development. They’re when you learn how to form relationships. How to maintain them. And how to grow inside them. So this isn’t just a story about a little girl who liked horses, this is a story about a girl and her best friend.

  OK, so back to 1987 and everything had been going swimmingly up until this point. Charley had found the love of her life, Domino had found someone to shovel his shit away from his feet and Charley’s dad had found a way of making his daughter the happiest little girl in the world. Everyone was a winner.

  Or perhaps not, as the case may be.

  See, as Charley and Domino got older, the competitio
ns she found herself taking part in got more serious. I’d like to say that Charley rose to the challenge and flourished like a true champion, but unfortunately she didn’t. No matter how hard she tried, no matter how much practice she put in, she and Domino just couldn’t get anywhere near the podium. There was always someone better than her. And more often than not, there were usually quite a few.

  But this was OK, wasn’t it? As it was more about being with Domino and taking part than about actually winning, wasn’t it?

  Wasn’t it? Of course, it’s very easy to say things like this when you’re doing well, but when the cups dry up and you suddenly find yourself simply making up the numbers, it’s hard not to wonder where it’s all gone wrong.

  And who’s not pulling his weight.

  It’s also hard not to get frustrated when the career and the future you’d always dreamed of are slipping away before your very eyes.

  Two years of dragging her horse around the sticks saw the addition of just two ‘thanks for coming’ rosettes to her old man’s optimistically roomy trophy cabinet, and before very long the competitions started coming and going without Charley and Domino.

  I guess there’s only so much polite applause one plucky competitor can take, so I can’t really blame her for that, but another year of the silver drought saw the weekday visits to the stables peter off along with the cups. Where once Charley had run from school to groom, ride and water the love of her life as regularly as Newsround, she now began hanging out with a ‘school friend’ from next door. Domino got relegated to best-mate-to-visit-on-the-weekends-if-it-wasn’t-pissing-it-down-too-much while school study-buddy and future fall-guy Nigel got to knock knees on the bed with Charley as they crammed for their finals. Nice work if you can get it, mate.

  The wind continued to blow in this direction until one drizzly Saturday morning, Domino lost his footing while Charley was taking him for a rare trot around the fields and he dismounted Charley on to an exposed tree root, breaking her leg in a couple of places.

  Naturally, Charley’s dad was distraught – and not just about having spent all that money on baize and plinths – but at how close he’d come to seeing his precious daughter seriously injured.

  He feared her taking up the reins again and getting back on the horse, as the expression goes, but he needn’t have worried because Charley had had enough. She packed in riding from her hospital bed, sold off all her gear and never sat on a horse again. Not even Domino.

  Two years later she went to university, then about ten more after that another dumb animal started trotting around her paddock, hoping to get the odd handful of oats.

  Anyway, the second animal heard all about the first from the horse’s mouth and he came to the conclusion that, as far as horses went – hang on, I’m starting to confuse myself here. Let’s drop all the synonyms and analogies for a minute and just lay our cards on the table.

  In my opinion, Charley chucked in Domino a bit too lively for my liking. OK, so she wasn’t winning her trials any more, and OK, so girls start to notice things other than horses as they blossom into womanhood, but still, it showed a remarkable ability on Charley’s part to outgrow her own feelings.

  One minute Domino was the love of her life. The next, he was just another fad of childhood put out with the jumble. The same could be said of Hugo at university. Worrying patterns were starting to emerge.

  I always wondered what happened to Domino after Charley’s old man sold him off. Did he go on to be part of another young girl’s life on the equestrian circuit? Or did he go on to be part of a few hundred kebabs on the A10 bypass? I always wanted to ask but it was something of a sensitive subject for Charley so that I’d only really pieced together most of the above after collecting the facts from numerous conversations. She always got a bit choked up when she talked about Domino, and unlike Hugo, he didn’t get down Signed For! much, so the conversations never lasted long, but I often wondered if that was because she missed her old four-legged friend or because she felt guilty about binning him so readily. Needless to say, I read more than my fair share into this whole sorry affair, enough to give Sigmund Freud a run for his money, but the lads reckoned I’d gone a bit off piste with this particular theory.

  Horses are horses. And men are men, as Jason helpfully pointed out.

  But people are people. And that’s not just a rather good track by Depeche Mode. If you’re fickle in your feelings about one thing then you’re fickle in your feelings full stop. You can’t change your personality. You might be able to lie to everyone including yourself for a bit, but time will always find you out.

  That’s what time does. It always exposes a person for who they are.

  I thought about Charley and Domino more than I probably should have over the course of a few weeks before eventually putting that particular line of paranoia out to stud. Whatever else had happened to Domino, one thing was at least clear. He’d been loved by Charley once upon a time. And loved very dearly.

  Even if it hadn’t lasted.

  19 Lights, camera, action

  I was surprised how quickly CT and the BBC got things going on the filming front. I had expected the whole thing to take years and years or simply turn out to be a load of old beer talk when all was said and done – like Lance Corporal War Hero from the Lamb. But sure enough, only seven weeks after it had first been mooted, CT and an assortment of cameramen, sound engineers and clipboard-tickers showed up in shiny new hard hats, brand-new Toe Tecs and designer donkey jackets to bring the whole site to an almighty great grinding halt.

  I guess CT must’ve seen this sort of thing before because the first thing he did was call a meeting of everyone who’d agreed to take part in the documentary (which was everyone) to introduce his people and to urge us to ignore them from that moment onwards.

  ‘You don’t have to pretend we’re not here, just try to forget why we’re here,’ CT told the assembled congregation. ‘It’ll be hard at first, but the more time that goes by, the more you’ll get used to us until you’ll hardly notice the cameras at all.’

  Robbie put his hand up.

  ‘Er, yes, Robbie?’ CT asked, after consulting his clipboard.

  ‘What if you’re under the scaffolding and we see the scaffolding boys about to sling a loada tubes off the side? Do you want us to say something then?’ he asked, winning laughs all round from the lads and one steely glare from Pete, the site agent.

  ‘If you wouldn’t mind, yes please,’ CT replied with amusement, scoring a few early points for taking the joke with good humour. ‘But for the most part, we’ll try to be as unobtrusive as possible. We’ll be shooting a lot of long-range footage and planting microphones around the site so that we’re not hovering over your shoulders the whole time and hopefully after a few weeks we’ll become as familiar a sight on this site as Gordon here,’ CT said, prompting the whole compound to erupt with laughter once again, this time Pete included.

  CT looked baffled at having scored such a big laugh by simply putting the words ‘sight’ and ‘site’ in the same sentence and asked me if we’d not heard that one before.

  ‘It’s not that, mate, it’s just… oh, you’ll see,’ I told him, grinning from ear to ear and unable to look at Gordon, who was chewing his top lip.

  I’m not sure how many bricks we laid that first day. All I’ll say is, I was glad I was on a day rate rather than piecework. CT, his cameramen, Barrie and Nat, sound engineers, Joel and Neil, and production assistants, Jill and Elaine, aka Saucy Blonde and Old Big Tits (well, fair’s fair, we were a building site after all, not New Labour’s HQ) spent most of it checking the place over from the show homes up by the road all the way around to the stakes in the mud that represented the cul-de-sacs yet to be started, and like an enormous spider watching its dinner, the site’s eyes followed them wherever they went.

  Eric in the forklift was the first to start the showboating. Riding his JCB around like a rusty yellow Domino and bouncing it past the cameras at top speed as he dashed
here, there and nowhere in particular in an orgy of hat-tilting nonchalance.

  Dennis was the next to tumble, running around the site as if he had ants in his pants and forgoing ladders wherever possible to jump stuntman-like off the scaffolding into the sand piles below until Brian, the health and safety officer, gave him a bollocking when he caught wind of it. Not that this fazed him, or anyone else for that matter. The whole site seemed to lose the plot during those first few days of filming, with even the most normally miserable of bastards whistling, yodelling, juggling bricks and working at a rate that would’ve seen the estate finished and us all out of work two months earlier than scheduled had it continued.

  Even Jason started wearing his hard hat back to front like he was some sort of bricky from da hood and only turned it around again when Brian started stapling posters up all around the site stating that protective clothing not worn as instructed was considered not worn at all and anyone found breaching health and safety regulations would be sent home, ending Jason’s gangster-bricky phase.

  Whether you believe me or not, the fact of the matter was that I was one of the few blokes not to go nuts when the cameras rolled up. And it wasn’t because I was too cool for school or a consummate construction professional or anything like that, I just had other things on my mind. And you don’t need to be able to bend spoons for a living to guess what.

  All in all, it had been a little under six months since me and Charley had got together and our relationship had strayed on to a bit of a plateau. We were still seeing each other regularly and going for dinner, going for drinks and going to the pictures, but more and more it seemed to be in the company of her friends. CT and Russell, Clive and Simone, Adam and Lis, Ben and Nadia, Stephen and Louise, Greg and Katie. A never-ending production line of his and hers to share pancetta, Pinot and Polanski with. Don’t get me wrong, most of them were nice enough, even to me. I just wondered what had happened to mine and Charley’s time. Other than waking up next to her or sitting in a cab destined for Graham and Tanya’s, Malcolm and Philippa’s, Andrew and Sally’s, or any number of other dinner parties, drinks and modern art exhibitions, I rarely got to see Charley on her own these days. We’d become a couple.