Authors: Danny King
Blue Collar (9 page)
‘Have you ever drunk beer?’ Charley finally asked.
‘Well, it’s a bit early for me, to be honest, love,’ I said, checking my watch. ‘I’ll stick with the bacon and eggs for now
if you don’t mind, but we can go for a cheeky one around lunchtime if you want.’
‘When you first tried beer, and I mean your very first sip, what did you think of it?’ Charley asked. I cast my taste buds
back to my twelfth birthday and sucked my mouth.
‘I don’t know,’ I reflected. ‘I didn’t really like it, to tell the truth, but that’s got nothing to do with this,’ I cut in,
before she could pop the cork and celebrate her monumental cleverness.
‘It has everything to do with this. Your taste buds change, they refine as you get older. Just because you didn’t like spinach
as much as you liked Wotsits when you were a child, it doesn’t mean you’re not going to like it now, does it? It’s very good
for you,’ she underlined.
‘So’s jogging. At least, that’s what they say, but you won’t catch me running around the park like a berk on Saturday mornings
when I could be in the café having bacon and eggs,’ I said, expecting full agreement on all the points I’d just made. But
Charley just dropped her eyes and let me in on something that should’ve probably occurred to me already.
‘I sometimes go jogging on Saturday mornings.’
‘Oh,’ I ohhed, then started backtracking so frantically that Charley almost caught a couple of shoes in the face. ‘No, I didn’t
mean it like that. There’s nothing wrong with jogging. I think jogging’s great and I really admire…’
‘Let’s just drop it,’ Charley cut me off, using the worst four words a girl can use on an early date short of saying, ‘I’m
telling my dad’ or ‘I’m really a geezer’.
‘I just… I… sorry. Really, I’m sorry.’
‘Shall we order, then?’
‘Good idea,’ I readily agreed, then spent the next three minutes working myself into yet another one as I waved my menu about
in an effort to attract the attention of the Zebra’s ovulating waitress and drag her away from the long-haired herbert with
half a ton of scrap metal in his face and the scuffed guitar case he’d decided to come to breakfast with.
‘Oi, for fuck’s sake!’ I finally had to yell across the café, winning me dirty looks all round and a roll of the eyes from
Charley. ‘Sorry, I was just trying to get the waitress,’ I explained, and the sullen young cow duly waddled over with a scowl
slapped all over her puss. I looked down at her feet to see why she was walking the way she was and saw that her full-length
skirt was actually just a big long tube which never gave an inch and which made her look like one of those ex-fatty weight-watchers
you see in the papers who pose for the cameras standing in one leg of their old trousers. As hip and trendy as her skirt undoubtedly
was, I couldn’t help but wonder if she’d chosen the wrong outfit for a job in the catering industry and was sorely tempted
to suggest she saved it for school sports days or rolling down hills in.
‘Yeah?’ she yeahed, doing her best to swivel about on one leg inside her confines to show me how little she cared about me,
my breakfast or this stupid crappy waitressing job.
Call me Sherlock Holmes if you like, but to me she smacked of someone trying a little too hard to give off an aura of total
disinterest. Why? I couldn’t tell you. Maybe she was just working here for a bit of cash until her real career took off and
that really she was a poet or an artist or a musician or a designer or something. Something cool. Something creative. Something
amazing. I hoped so for her sake as one thing was clear, she sure weren’t no fucking waitress.
‘What d’you want?’ she asked, finding a pencil behind her ear and giving one end a chew.
‘Can I have the haddock and eggs Florentine, please?’ Charley asked, prompting our one-legged waitress to scribble
H e F
down on her pad then stare at me.
‘And I’ll have the… er, the…’ I read the expression on Charley’s face and finally gave in. Oh, bollocks, go on then. ‘…the
eggs Benedict, please.’
‘You want Tabasco on that?’ Zebedee asked me.
‘What? Urgh, no! Jesus, people put Tabasco on it?’ I gasped.
What sort of a breakfast was this anyway?
‘Actually, scratch that last order,’ Charley suddenly cut in.
‘He’ll have the full English.’
Our waitress started scribbling it down before getting confirmation off me and I had to kick up a stink to get my eggs Benedict
reinstated.
‘No no no, don’t listen to her. I’ll have eggs Benedict.’
‘Look, Terry, just have your full English, it’s what you want to have anyway,’ Charley said, but I couldn’t, not now, things
had gone too far.
‘No, I want the eggs Benedict. I want to see what it’s like,’ I insisted.
‘No you don’t, you want the full English.’
‘No, I want the eggs Benedict.’
‘You don’t.’
‘I do.’
‘You don’t.’
‘I do.’
‘Can you make up your minds, please, as we’ve got other customers waiting?’ our waitress pointed out, though this hadn’t
seemed to be a factor when she’d been sniffing around Frankenstein over yonder.
‘Terry, honestly, I don’t care what you have, so just have whatever you want,’ Charley pressed home.
‘Good, then I’ll have the eggs Benedict,’ I told the waitress, handing her my menu to signal that my breakfast think tank
had turned in its results.
Charley just frowned and shook her head, but if you think about it I’d been backed into such a corner that there really wasn’t
anything else I could do. Fucking eggs Benedict! I didn’t want it, Charley was now dead set against it and our waitress probably
wouldn’t get two yards from the kitchen without tripping face first into it, but suddenly I had to have it. And what’s more,
I had to like it.
‘Drinks?’
I looked to Charley and simply asked for ‘the same’ when she chose a suitably stupid coffee.
‘OK, that’ll be with you in a minute,’ our waitress lied, before hopping away.
‘Seriously, Terry, you should’ve just had what you wanted to have,’ Charley continued, and I could see that this one was likely
to rumble on all day so I did what I could to take the wind out of Charley’s sails by telling her that I could have a full
English any day of the week and that it was good to try something new for a change and a load of other old codswallop that
I thought she wanted to hear until our breakfasts arrived a mere half-hour later.
Jesus
, I decided simply to think this time around.
So that’s
what eggs Benedict looks like, is it?
I don’t know if you’ve ever had eggs Benedict but here’s the deal.
It looks just like half a Bacon & Egg McMuffin with custard and dead insects dumped all over it. And what the hell were they?
‘Asparagus,’ Charley informed me, when she saw my confusion.
‘Have you never had asparagus before either? Try it, it’s lovely.’
So I did and found it tasted exactly how it looked, only it was cold and therefore even more revolting.
I poked my McMuffin about with my knife and fork, trying to scrape all the dead insects (or chives) off the top in order to
get a clean bite of it, and finally looked up to see Charley watching me like I was doing card tricks.
‘Nice this, isn’t it?’ I reassured her, and you know what, I genuinely meant that, albeit only in the face of what she’d got
for breakfast. Oh yes, I’d got off lightly all right and no mistake.
I tucked into my breakfast using the old one-mouthful-of-food-quickly-followed-by-a-gulp-of-coffee-to-wash-away-the-taste
technique and managed to get halfway through it before I’d done all my coffee.
‘Shame we haven’t got any Rocket Man Sauce. I could do with a squirt of it around about now,’ I told Charley. ‘What’s yours
like?’
‘It’s lovely. Here, try a little,’ she said, loading up her fork like she meant it.
‘Er, no, I won’t actually,’ I panicked, making my chair squeak as I backed away from a load of oncoming haddock. ‘I’m pretty
stuffed already and I won’t be able to get through mine if I’ve got to have some of yours too.’ Especially not without something
to wash it down with, I didn’t add.
Charley withdrew her fork from my face and I breathed a sigh of relief as she defused it herself. That said, I was still all
dried up on the drinks front so I called Zebedee over again and asked her for two teas and a can of Fanta if she found a moment
before she clocked off tonight.
‘What, are you getting a fizzy drink?’ Charley asked, and my shoulders sagged when I realised I’d done something else wrong.
‘I’m just thirsty,’ I tried. ‘I always have a can of drink when I’m at the café. It’s just a bit salty if I don’t.’
The bacon or ham or whatever it was they’d hidden under my custard and eggs was that really smoky type of bacon that Jason
liked and it was making me the thirstiest man in the world. A can of Fanta was just what the doctor would’ve ordered, had
he been here and as thirsty as me.
‘I don’t drink sugary drinks, just water. Sugary drinks just make you more thirsty and are loaded with calories.’
I looked on the side of my can when it arrived and saw that she was right, at least about the calories. It didn’t seem to
say anything about making me more thirsty, though. I suddenly felt all self-conscious and childlike about my Fanta and didn’t
drink more than three sips, just enough to finish my eggs Benedict and show Charley an empty plate.
‘Is that what you drink on the building site, then, fizzy drinks?’
‘No, I just have a flask of tea or drink from the standpipe, which is just screwed into the mains,’ I said. ‘Mind you, I’ve
seen some of the hoddies drink from the water butts before, and Robbie even drinks from them after he’s added the Feb mix.’
‘What’s Feb mix?’
‘It’s chemical. A plasticising agent that makes the muck more manageable on the trowel. The hoddies add it to the water butts
when they’re knocking up. It smells a bit like diet cola when it’s mixed with water which is presumably why Robbie likes to
drink it, though he reckons it don’t half give him gut rot.’
Charley gave this some thought.
‘I think Robbie’s going to die at an early age.’
‘Well, we all know that. Even Robbie. But like he’s always saying, he’d rather live in his twenties than his sixties, live
fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse, the silly bastard.’
‘And what about you? Do you want to be like Robbie too?
Live fast, die young…’ Charley asked.
‘… and drink Feb mix from water butts,’ I finished for her.
‘No thanks. I’d probably like to live a bit faster than our waitress here but I’m too old to be thinking about dying young
these days.
I’ll just have to make the best of it and see if I can’t leave a nice-looking old man for my widow to cry over.’
‘So you’re planning on getting married, then, are you?’
Charley teased, making me go red. Boy, these were rocky waters I was navigating.
‘Maybe,’ I finally replied. ‘One day. If I find the right lady.’
I figured this was a nice safe stock answer and Charley nodded like she understood perfectly. This wasn’t really a conversation
to be exploring on our second date (or was this our third?). No good could come of me declaring that Charley was that selfsame
right lady and if she just bided her time a few more dates and stopped trying to make me eat haddock Florentine then nothing
would give me greater pleasure than to get down on one knee, take her hand in mine and ask her if she’d mind awfully spending
the rest of her life with me. Does that sound a bit impulsive?
Apologies if it does but what can I say? I liked her.
Big John once told me that he knew he was going to marry his Glenda the moment he met her. Knew it in his bones, he did, and
sure enough, twenty-five years and four kids later they finally tied the knot last year. And a lovely do it was too.
And that was how I felt about Charley. I liked her from the very first moment we met (or woke up together) and I felt it in
my bones. She was the one for me.
‘Shall we get the bill, then?’ I suggested.
‘Halves?’ Charley offered.
‘Not a bit of it, my treat,’ I insisted, though I kind of wished I hadn’t when I saw how much it all came too. And that was
for half a custard-covered Egg McMuffin?
Probably a good job I didn’t get the full English after all.
T
he thing that surprises most people when they see bricklayers work is just how fast a house goes up. You look at your average
house, look at all the bricks and blocks it takes to build one, and then at the team of handsome devils whose job it is to
put it all together, and I couldn’t blame you for thinking it might take anything up to a month to finish the job.
But it doesn’t. In actual fact, with a gang the size of ours, seven brickies (when Gordon’s out of the pub) and three hoddies,
it actually only takes a bit under a week to build a house. And that’s from the first blocks laid in the footings to the muck
smoothed over around the chimney pot. Not that it stays smooth for long, mind, because in practice the bricky who smooths
it over almost always writes his name in the soft muck for posterity. It doesn’t really do any harm. Not if it’s small. I
mean, who’s going to see it up there facing the sky as it is, other than birds and eagle-eyed 747 pilots? Brickies have been
signing off their work as far back as the pyramids and I’ll stick my neck out here and bet that if you were to take your house
apart, brick by brick, somewhere in there you’d find a man’s signature and a date. Something like, ‘Albert Cooper, Aug 4th,
1923’, which is nice if you think about it, though before you start getting too dewy eyed about this fine old bygone craftsman,
just bear in mind that besides building your house, old Albert and all his mates also probably pissed in every room as they
were slapping it together. Another fine tradition that I think you’ll find dates back to the pyramids.
Well, it is a long old walk to the Portaloo and we have got work to do, you know.
Naturally, you don’t build each individual house in one go, as other trades have to have their say as it’s going up. The groundworkers
have to backfill and concrete the footings, the chippies have to add the joists, and then the roofing trusses, and the scaffolders
have to come along and raise the scaffolding as we complete each section, so in reality, we’re actually probably working on
a dozen different houses at different stages of development at any one time.
OK, there are six basic bricklaying stages to building a house. The first are the
footings
, the parts of your house that are underground and laid on the solid concrete foundations, which stop your house from sinking
into the mud and getting subsidence, that’s assuming the Paddies have dug down far enough, and that largely depends how close
in the calendar we are to the Derby.
When these are done, the lot is backfilled and concreted over to form a solid base. This is the ground floor of your house
and it’s called an
oversite
. We build up as far as we can reach, almost to the tops of the doors and windows, and then do all the internal downstairs
walls as well, and then the scaffolders come along and lift the scaffolding. This next stage is called a
joist lift
, and we continue on up for just a few courses of bricks and put in lintels and RSJs where they’re needed, then the chippies
come along and lay the joists for the first floor. The whole thing then becomes known as a
band lift
, because it’s usually a solid band of brickwork with no windows from here on up until we reach the bottom of the first-floor
windows, at which point our good friends and esteemed colleagues, the scaffolders, once again come to our assistance. The
next stage is called the
murder lift
, and we build up around the first-floor windows and again add lintels and RSJs where we feel they’re warranted, then the
scaffolders lift the whole thing up to roof level and all of a sudden the chippies get interested again. ‘Blimey,’ they think.
‘We’ve got some roofing trusses that would look great up there,’ and up they scamper to make a lot of noise with their hammers
and saws until the house has the skeleton of a roof in place. Our role is almost at an end at this point. We brick up the
gable
ends, then seal the cavities with slates and flat tiles, then the scaffolding gets raised one final time and some lucky young
fella gets to finish off the chimney, smooth over the muck around the pot, which is called the
flaunching
, and sign off the entire job with the tip of his trowel.
In this particular case, the lucky young fella in question was me, and I wrote in the soft green muck ‘
Terry Charley, 2008
’, then looked out across the horizon when I was finished. It was a perfect autumn day. Fluffy white clouds hung in the sky
and drifted slowly by, pushed on by a gentle breeze to pass shadows across the hustle and bustle below. It was actually a
very beautiful sight. The skies often can be, particularly if you’re able to admire them from a position of elevation, but
they were wasted on me this particular day. I might’ve been up on the roof but my spirits were way down in the footings with
the rest of the gang. And you know why?
Because Charley hadn’t phoned.
It was Thursday afternoon, four whole days since I’d last seen her. We’d parted amorously enough, with hugs and kisses and
promises to speak to each other as soon as, but then Charley hadn’t lived up to her end. I know it was only a day afterwards,
but I texted her on the Monday evening anyway just to see how she was, and then again on the Tuesday when I didn’t get any
sort of response, but still Charley hadn’t replied. It was then that the paranoia started creeping in and by a quarter past
four on this particularly fine Thursday afternoon it had swallowed me whole. Something was up. I didn’t know what but something
was definitely up.
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!
’