Blue Collar (10 page)

10 Secrets and thighs

‘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

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?

‘In your own time, please, love,’ I eventually shouted over, only to be told she was already serving someone. That particular
person had only been waiting half the time that I had, but he shrugged apologetically in my direction, which saved me from
having to ask the bouncers later on if they knew any of my mates.

I finally got my pint, or at least about eight-tenths of a pint, precision pouring in this place being ranked about as highly
as speed and geniality, and found somewhere at the end of the bar to perch until the final whistle blew.

Within five minutes of the match ending the pub emptied out, freeing up a stool for me, though Charley was still missing from
the picture. I tried not to read too much into this, figuring she was just useless with timekeeping full stop, even when
the place we were meeting in was in her own backyard, and sure enough a quarter of an hour later she arrived in full fluster
with herself.

She didn’t clock me straight away, but instead made a beeline for this big group of boisterous wankers who were sprawled across
two enormous leather sofas who I’d been rolling my eyes at for the last fifteen minutes. I felt my shoulders sag as I watched
her greet and kiss the entire party as she took off her hat, scarf and coat before finally looking around and noticing me
in the corner.

She quickly scuttled over and gave me a kiss, then apologised for being late and asked if I wanted to come over and meet everyone.

‘Not even slightly,’ was the obvious answer, but I remembered what Jason had told me about Charley’s approval and her mates’
approval being index linked and realised one sure way of giving myself the elbow was to spend the night over here by myself,
getting steaming and sporadically flicking my fingers up at everyone else on the other side of the pub.

‘I’d love to. Lead on,’ I told her, rising to my feet and then dawdling in her wake as slowly as possible to shave precious
seconds off the inevitable.

‘Everyone. Everyone. This is Terry. Terry, this is everyone,’ Charley told the gang, winning me a few nonchalant nods and
one outright frosty glare. Charley then turned and told me, ‘I’m really glad you could make it. Oh, you’ve almost finished
your pint. Let me get you another.’

‘No, please, I’ll get it. You stay here and I’ll get you one as well. What do you want?’ I insisted, my cup suddenly running
over towards the tortoises behind the bar. ‘Glass of wine?’

I retreated with our orders and managed to avoid all ten of the bar staff’s eyes for a good fifteen minutes before the least
lazy pump monkey finally recognised me as a man waiting for a drink and served me despite my best efforts.

‘How much? Fuck me!’

Two minutes later I handed Charley a big glass of wine and clinked it against mine. ‘It’s good to see you again,’ I told her.

‘You too,’ she agreed. ‘Shall we sit down?’

I looked around for a couple of chairs to grab but rather ominously her friends were already shuffling up on one of the sofas
to make room for either a couple of fag papers or the two of us.

‘Come on,’ Charley said, sinking into the space and dragging me down with her.

The sofas were pretty low so that I was now at cock and fanny level with at least half a dozen or so of Charley’s mates who
hadn’t been lucky enough to find a spare square inch of leather to squeeze themselves into.

‘Comfy,’ I pointed out, tucking my elbows in and stretching my pint out two feet in front of me in an effort not to tip half
of it all over myself every time somebody got up, sat down or smiled without warning.

‘Terry, this is CT,’ Charley said, introducing the bloke on the other side of me whose thigh was pressed hard into mine.

I resisted the obvious joke about him missing a couple of letters and simply shook his hand and smiled.

‘How are you?’ I figured I should ask.

‘Good,’ CT replied, regarding me carefully. ‘So you’re a bricklayer, are you?’

Charley had either mentioned me before or CT was fucking great at guessing people’s jobs.

‘Yes,’ I confirmed, then debated whether or not have a stab at guessing his. I decided against it, not least of all as I really
didn’t want to get sucked into a ‘so, what do you do?’ conversation with some bloke I cared so little about that I couldn’t
even be arsed to ask him what his initials stood for. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a rude, antisocial bastard, even though
that’s the way it sounds.

I just wanted to be with Charley. I hadn’t seen or even spoken to her all week long, and now that I finally had her in the
same room as me, I just wanted to give her my full, undivided attention and fill in a few blanks from the past week.

Not that there was much danger of that. Not now that Charley was in full jabber with some posh bloke with trendy glasses on
the other side of her and CT had begun mulling over what bricklaying meant to him.

‘Very skilled work, bricklaying. People think you just slap them down but there’s a real art to it,’ CT informed me. ‘Churchill
used to lay bricks for relaxation, you know.’

‘Yeah, well there was no shortage of work back then, I suppose,’ I replied, crossing my legs to try and get them away from
CT’s.

‘Good money in it too, I hear,’ he then told me.

‘That’s odd, I keep hearing that an’ all,’ I said, wondering just how much Churchill was on. More than me I wouldn’t be surprised.

CT nodded at nothing in particular and took a big sip of his wine. Wine? I responded by nodding away myself, just to show
him that I was still tuned in, even though I was biting to get back to the safety of Charley before CT could turn the conversation
on to football. But Charley was doing fantastically well without me and there was suddenly the danger of me looking like some
big, dumb, ignorant, millstone date who couldn’t fend for himself in company without throwing a big sulk or playing Beach
Rally II on his phone, so I took the decision to let Charley enjoy all of her evening, and not just the part that featured
me, and asked CT the inevitable.

‘I’m a producer,’ he told me, turning slightly to fill in the gap my leg-crossing had just left.

‘Like a greengrocer?’ I double-checked.

‘No, nothing so fancy, I’m a producer for the BBC,’ he replied, catching me off guard and actually impressing me.

‘Really? Which one? BBC1 or BBC2?’ I asked.

I hadn’t. Had anyone?

‘We’re working with him next week. Following him around for a week, at home, at work and, of course, in his car, to see how
his fifteen minutes of fame has changed his life. It’s that sort of thing,’ CT explained.

‘And how has it changed his life?’

‘I don’t know, we haven’t filmed the programme yet, but if the others are anything to go by, he’s probably lost all his friends,
had an affair and turned into an unbearable, nasty twat.’

That was pretty good. I liked that one and warmed to CT a touch, though not so much that I was suddenly glad it was him I
was snuggling with on the sofa and not Charley.

‘Are they all a big load of cunts, then?’ I asked, shifting my leg again to try to get the circulation going.

Of course not. I didn’t pay my licence fee to watch dustmen going on holiday.

‘No, I must’ve missed that one,’ I simplified. ‘So, who’s the worst one? Who’s the biggest wanker you’ve ever met?’

‘Ah, now that would be telling,’ he teased, passing up a perfect opportunity to tell me it was me.

‘Oh, go on, don’t be a cunt, just tell us. I ain’t going to say nothing, am I. Go on, just tell us,’ I prodded.

‘You’re making all this up, aren’t you?’ I finally twigged.

‘No, of course not. Didn’t you ever see it?’ CT insisted.

‘She’d then act it out for us all over again and get anyone else who’d been part of the lost scene to do the same and repeat
what they’d said. Real fly-on-the-wall stuff it was,’ CT said.

‘No, sorry, I never saw it,’ I apologised again.

‘Don’t worry, no one did. At least not any of her footage. That all ended up on the cutting-room floor.’

I wondered if they really did just drop everything on the floor of the cutting room? If it wouldn’t be easier to maybe get
a bin in there or something? I even thought about suggesting this to CT, but decided against it as I figured someone must’ve
addressed this problem in the hundred or so years since they’d invented film-making and it was just an expression these days.
I mean, I couldn’t really have been the first bloke this had occurred to, could I? Surely the cleaners would’ve said something
by now? Anyway, I had more important things to point out to CT, not least of all:

‘You must be gutted, mustn’t you? Working on telly and having to hang around with a load of nobodies all day long,’ I chuckled.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Who was the most famous?’ I pressed.

CT thought about this for a moment or two then told me Mr T.

‘Oh yeah, I remember that. That was in all the papers, that was, wasn’t it? What happened to him?’

‘God, I wish I had a pound for every time somebody asked me that,’ CT sighed theatrically.