Chapter 18
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The spring went, then the summer, the site climbing floor by floor, the heat curing the concrete too fast so we poured at six to beat it.
July does what July does to a slab, which is try to set it before you’ve finished it.
We pour at first light, done by half nine, and by ten the crew’s down to vests and Kenny’s got the hose on the third floor like a man watering a garden he hates.
Saturday crew, the volunteer shift: me, Dean, Gaz, Kenny, two agency lads whose names I’ll have learned by the time they’re gone.
The flatmate tour happens, finally. Steph’s architect, the one from the text I never answered.
It had sat there for months, the little x on the end of it, until Gaz brought it up at lunch like a snag I’d been ignoring.
Her mate still wants the site, you know.
You never answered. So I answered, because unanswered questions don’t go away, they just get heavier, and this one weighed nothing once I put it down.
Sally turns up at ten with her own hard hat, which tells you most of what you need to know, and asks about the underpinning before she’s through the gate.
Where the Victorian brick starts. What we did about the water table.
She photographs a wall tie like it’s a face.
Steph trails her with two coffees and sunglasses, out of her depth and happy about it.
Celyn texts at half ten. You left your charger. Also I want to see the crane.
At eleven there’s a person at the gate in a vest and green nails, holding my charger up like evidence. The summer version: stubble, sunglasses pushed up, the notebook in the back pocket because the notebook goes where Celyn goes.
Dean’s nearest the gate. He looks at Celyn, looks at the charger, opens the gate. ‘Alright.’ Dean’s whole speech.
Gaz comes over wiping his hands on his shorts. ‘You’re the writer.’ Puts his hand out. Gaz shakes like it’s a site visit, which it is. ‘Gaz. The talented one.’
‘Celyn.’
‘I know,’ Gaz says, and doesn’t look at me when he says it.
Steph’s by the mixer. I watch her clock Celyn, and I watch the half second, the same half second from the bar, the eyes deciding where to land. This time she crosses the yard. ‘Hiya. Steph. We sort of met.’ To Celyn, first, before anything else, the eyes landing and staying.
It’s not a big thing. It’s a hello. It lands where the last one didn’t, and Celyn takes it the way Celyn takes things, with the nod that gives nothing away and writes everything down later.
I do the crane. Walked Sally round the formwork already, so this one’s Celyn’s. The base, the ballast, the counterweights. How the whole thing stands up because somebody did the sums on a thing that looks like it shouldn’t.
Celyn looks up the mast for a long time and says, ‘It’s a sentence, isn’t it. One end holds the other end up.’ I don’t know what to do with that, so I say the safe working load. Celyn writes something in the notebook. I don’t ask. Asking’s not how the notebook works.
It’s the notebook that finishes my tour. Sally asks what Celyn’s writing down, and Celyn tells her. Horror. Houses.
‘Houses,’ Sally says.
‘Houses that aren’t right,’ Celyn says. ‘Where the wrong wall’s load-bearing.’
‘There’s a chapel in Gorton.’ The phone’s out, then it isn’t, then it’s her hands, both of them, drawing the thing in the air.
‘1890s. They’re letting it rot. The roof truss is still holding two tonnes of slate nobody’s touched in thirty years.
King post, queen struts, the lot. It’s standing on spite. ’
‘Standing on spite,’ Celyn says. The notebook’s out, the pen moving. ‘I’d put a family under that roof. And not let them leave.’
Sally looks at Celyn like she’s found the matching half of something. ‘God. Yes.’
Twenty minutes at the hoarding, the two of them. Sally mends ruins, Celyn collects them, same religion, different orders. Steph stands between them holding both coffees, learning what I learned at the corner table: you don’t keep up. You hold the drinks.
Steph catches me at it. Not Celyn, me, the face I’m making at the back of Celyn’s head.
She reads it in a second and a half, longer than the half second she gave Celyn at the bar.
Something in her mouth starts and doesn’t finish.
Then she looks back at Sally and drinks from the coffee that isn’t hers, and the knee from under the table months ago goes wherever she’s decided to keep it.
Filed. Same as Gaz. Nobody on this site says the thing. They find a drawer for it and shut it quiet.
Kev rings at noon. London number, a pour going on behind him, gulls, somewhere south of the river. ‘Carrick. When you coming home? There’s that much work down here they’re paying silly money.’
I watch Celyn at the hoarding, the crew moving round the visitors the way water moves round a stone. No fuss. New shape.
‘I am home,’ I say.
Kev laughs like I’ve made a joke. I let him keep it.
They leave before the tea run, the three of them, the market, Sally’s number in Celyn’s notebook. Gaz stands next to me at the gate, watching them go.
‘She’s—’ he says. Stops. Looks at me. Doesn’t fix it.
I don’t fix it either. The fixing’s mine and I’m not doing it at a gate with the slab going off behind me. There’ll be a table for it. A pint. A right time, or no right time. Just a time.
‘Good pour,’ Gaz says instead.
‘Good pour.’
The slab cured clean, no cracks. You check anyway. Checking’s free.
Celyn’s things stopped being Celyn’s and turned into ours without anyone saying so. By the time the clocks went back, I’d stopped counting how long it had been.
Monday, Dean brings cake.
Proper cake, home-made, in a Tupperware with his mum’s handwriting on a label that says DEAN DO NOT LOSE THIS BOX. Chocolate, thick icing, sticking to the knife. His mum makes one every time his niece hits a birthday and Dean gets the leftovers and brings them to site.
We eat cake in the portacabin at seven fifteen in the morning. Gaz has two slices. Thomas picks the icing off and eats it separately which is a crime. Dave cuts a thin slice, eats it standing up, goes back to the report. Jay licks the knife. I tell him not to lick the knife. He licks it again.
‘How old’s the niece?’ I ask.
‘Four,’ Dean says. ‘She wanted a dinosaur cake. Mum did a dinosaur cake. Got the spikes and everything.’
‘Your mum’s class,’ Gaz says with his mouth full.
‘My mum’s terrifying,’ Dean says. ‘But yeah. She’s class.’
We eat. The portacabin smells like chocolate and thermos tea and wet hi-vis drying on the radiator.
The radio’s on low. Capital, some song I don’t know, the one where the bloke keeps saying baby like it’s the only word he learnt.
Rain outside, light, not enough to stop you working but enough to make everything slower and heavier and grey.
Nobody talks about anything. Gaz shows us a photo of his dog in a hat. It’s a small dog in a big hat. We look at it for too long. Dean says ‘that’s a hat’ and Gaz says ‘that’s a dog’ and that’s the end of it.
I finish the tea, wash the mug. Put my hard hat on. Monday.
The number is wrong.
I mean, I feel it. The way you feel a footing that’s settled wrong, before the level touches the surface. The pencil on the page and the line where the line should be and it’s not. Forty millimetres, that’s the gap.
Block D, the tie rods, East elevation, I’ve done this setting-out.
I’ve done this specific measurement in twelve different variations on nine different sites in six years and I could do it pissed, I could do it with a hangover that’d kill a smaller man, I could do it at three in the morning with Dave shouting numbers from the cab of the excavator and the rain coming sideways.
Today I did it thinking about Celyn’s mouth.
Last night, sat on the bed, the laptop on the knees, the glasses they only wear for screens that I didn’t know about until two weeks ago.
The bottom lip caught between the teeth.
The concentration. The glasses sliding down the nose and the finger pushing them back and the nail, yellow, catching the lamplight.
Forty millimetres.
Dave finds it in the report. Course he does. Dave finds everything in the report. Dave reads it with his hands, with his gut, with the part of the brain that does not forgive. How I read a site. Same method, same nothing-gets-past.
‘Ron.’
I look up, the site office, the prefab with the heater that rattles and the desk that’s two sheets of ply on trestles. The coffee’s gone cold, the hard hat’s on the desk, Dave’s got the printout.
‘This measurement’s off by forty mil.’
I know. I know before he says which one. The tie rod, East, Block D.
‘Let me see.’
He puts it down and points. The number, my handwriting. The wrong number in my handwriting that hasn’t written a wrong number since. When. The apprenticeship. The first year, the shaky hands, the bloke who checked my work and said you’ve got good eyes, son, use them.
I’ve been looking at the wrong things.
‘This isn’t like you,’ Dave says. That’s worse. Angry I can handle. Angry is a bollocking and a pint and it’s done. This is, the chair leaned back. The arms crossed. Eleven months of trusting me to be the one who doesn’t make mistakes. ‘You’re the one who catches MY mistakes. What’s going on?’
‘Nothing. Won’t happen again.’
‘It better not.’ The chair comes forward. The printout under his finger. ‘Forty mil in a tie rod is a structural failure in two years. You know that better than I do.’
I know that, I’ve said that. I’ve said that exact sentence to apprentices on three different sites. The words in Dave’s mouth that came from mine.
‘I’ll redo the setting-out.’
‘You’ll redo the whole section. And I want the pour delayed until I’ve checked it myself.’
‘Right.’
Dave looks at me, doesn’t ask.
‘Whatever it is,’ he says. ‘Sort it. I need your head on the steel, not on whatever’s got it spinning.’
He goes. The rattle of the heater. The cold coffee, the printout.
Forty millimetres.