Blue Collar (16 page)

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

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.

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 competitions 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.

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 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.

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.

I know this was something I should’ve liked but oddly enough it wasn’t. Because it seemed like the one thing couples were
attracted to more than each other were other couples. And the one person they never seemed to talk to when they were out with
other couples was the matching half of their own couple.

I lost count of the number of conversations I had about the TV show; when it would be on, how long the shoot would be, whether
I’d be the star of it and whether or not I was free to come round and retile Clive’s kitchen for nothing. I was not.

In fact, the one couple I never got to meet in all that time was her mum and dad, and the two weekends Charley disappeared
back to Berkshire to attend family functions, my presence was noticeably not required. I guess parents and friends have different
amusement levels when it comes to watching hairy-arsed brickies trying to butter bread rolls with fish knives.

Yes, it was still on my mind, that comment. You know, the one about me being beneath her station. That was still bugging me.

Why had she said it? Why had she chosen to make that joke? It must’ve been something that had crossed her mind in the past,
otherwise how else could she have even come up with it? Everyone knows that all great jokes contain a seed of truth, which
meant that this particular seed was planted somewhere in Charley’s brain and that one day it would grow into a mighty oak
of doubt and misgiving. Particularly when she was no longer winning ironic ribbons for being with me. And this is in spite
of the fact that I know oaks don’t grow from seeds, they grow from acorns, but an ‘acorn of doubt’ didn’t sound right and
a ‘mighty tree’ sounded like I didn’t know the names of any big trees when I did. Just none that grew from seeds.

Anyway, all of this stuff must’ve taken a stroll around her mind at some point or another and if it had, then she had probably
also got to wondering what our long-term chances were like, because you don’t get yourself in a tizz worrying about parental
approval and inheritances when you’re simply sowing your wild oats, do you? Which meant that somewhere along the line Charley
had also probably pictured us in fifty years’ time, old and grey and holding hands, rocking backwards and forwards on our
porch together and moaning about the price of robot oil, to see if she liked the image.

Cue thoughts of stations, Daddy and money.

Oh, what was the point? I knew how this was all going to end before it had even started so why was I even surprised? I mean,
Christ, if this stuff had occurred to me, Tel the thicky trowel, then it had to have occurred to a clever girl like Charley.
And her mates. And her parents – at least it would’ve had they known about me.

Not that Charley was getting me angry, you understand. That was probably just a bad analogy. I should stick to oak seeds in
future. No, quite the opposite in fact. The whole situation was just making me sad because the more weeks that passed, the
more it felt like I was turning on to the last straight of a ride that I didn’t want to get off.

But I was going to have to. Because all good things come to an end. And this was a very good thing. So the end was going
to come with that much more of a bump.

I dwelt on this thought as I slowly chewed my egg sandwich in the passenger seat of Jason’s van.

One day, Charley would finish with me. I knew this was going to happen. And it wasn’t like knowing that one day I was going
to die or that one day the taxman was going to catch up with me because this was something that was going to happen sooner
rather than later and I was never going to be able to get rid of that apprehensive crease in my brow until I’d been through
the worst of it, much like an amputation I kept putting off.

‘Smile, then,’ Jason told me, pouring us both a cup of tea from his two-litre flask.

‘What?’ I said, looking up from my sandwich.

‘I said smile,’ he repeated, handing me a cup and nodding towards the side window.

I looked around and almost spilt my tea when I saw my sullen puss reflected back in a big black camera lens.

‘Shit.’

‘Exactly,’ Jason replied. ‘Creep up on you, don’t they?’

My reflection continued to stare back at me for another couple of seconds before moving off to stare at someone else.

‘How long were they there?’

‘About two minutes,’ Jason guessed. ‘Can’t wait for that particular episode. I’ve always wanted to see myself eating Scotch
eggs while reading the paper.’

‘Who hasn’t dreamt of that?’

‘I’m sure it’ll be everyone’s favourite bit,’ I mulled.

We watched the camera team move from car to car, filming the lads and their lunch until the clock struck half past one and
we went back to work. We’d started an oversite this morning and were just moving inside to take up the internal walls, but
Gordon had other plans for me.

‘Fancy doing a couple of chimneys, Tel? Roy’s just lifted the scaffold on those gables we did yesterday.’

I looked around and saw that CT and Barrie had followed us inside and were settling in for a gripping afternoon of breeze
blocks and banter, so I dropped my trowel into my bucket, grabbed my level and headed for the rooftops.

Grateful to leave the showmen to their show and return my head to the clouds.