by M. T Hill
‘I didn’t realise.’
‘No one did. Something happened there. Neither his mother nor I can understand what. She took off with Oriol, and that was that.’
Freya shifts, tingling. Something new is forming, but with flaws in it.
‘Was he much of a drinker?’ she asks.
His father frowns. ‘Surely you… No. He’d have been a lightweight. All that exercise.’
‘He took the split badly, though.’
‘Not at all.’
‘What?’
‘No,’ Stephen’s father stresses, as if at last noticing her questions. ‘Not in the ways you’d think. I think it was a liberation. I know everyone blames that… thinks he might have, you know. But it was all going this way before their break-up. Her third trimester. That whole time he was… how to put it? Delirious? And I mean he was arrogant with it, quite unbearable. How would I describe it? Excruciatingly… happy. Helen found him insufferable. His brother had to stop having anything to do with him. He was constantly on. Constantly wanting to do things. Dance, climb, run, playfights, whatever. Like a toddler – and this was even after Alba left with Oriol. Even after she took off with his son. I can’t work out why he’d start drinking any more than I can understand his behaviour during that whole period.’
‘So it wasn’t just that one night out?’ Freya feels deeply sorry for Stephen’s father, whose loss, whose frailty, is showing in his sideways glances. And yet this is all confirmation to her that something changed Stephen before he climbed that scaffolding, stopped him caring about the absence of his own young son. That his parents saw it, however unconsciously. That Freya is right.
‘I don’t know,’ his father says. ‘We don’t know.’
‘Why weren’t Alba or Oriol at the funeral?’ Freya asks.
Stephen’s father sighs. ‘You’d have to ask her. Not that a funeral’s any place for little ones.’
‘You’re not in touch?’
‘We wrote to her. She’s the mother of our grandchild.’
‘But nothing back?’
Stephen’s father shakes his head.
‘Has anyone else tried to contact her? I mean, I could try for you. If that would help.’
Freya holds her breath. Stupid, stupid. She’s pushed too hard, and now Stephen’s father will sniff her out. Call the police, even. For so much as being here, she deserves that and more. Sneaky. Bitch.
Only Stephen’s father doesn’t react. He just says, ‘Have you got your phone?’ So Freya nods and passes it to him, and when he returns it to her, case damp from his hands, he says, ‘Maybe you’ll have better luck.’
Freya looks at the screen. He’s entered Alba’s address in a fresh note.
‘You don’t have a number? An email address?’
‘The number’s disconnected, and our messages bounce. We don’t even know if she’s online. I thought about flying over there, but Helen needs me here, and her heart… You understand. She’s aimless. There’s all this paperwork… Perhaps in time I might. Or perhaps that bloody woman will come to her senses.’ He looks away, eyes red. A hand on the shelves by the papers to steady himself.
‘I’ll do what I can,’ Freya tells him. And for so many reasons, she means it.
The Steeplejack
Shep would take another month in the yard over the next week dangling from a concrete plant roof with his knackered finger. Mallory Junior knows this, so has the scheduler send him anyway.
Shep’s first day on site sets the tone. A taxi out to an industrial estate on the fringes of a quarry, up towards Newcastle, where he’ll support a crew of subcontractors as they cut sections from the roof’s steel joists ahead of a full renovation. The labour is dull, heavy on the forearms. Frustrating because the roof beams are spaced just widely enough that he has to reset his protection for every movement. Doubly trying because the repetition makes it easy to forget where he’s up to with his gear. Is he on? Is he off? Is he only suspended by a lucky knot, or by his foot coiled round that bar, or by the crook of his elbow as he grazes cold knuckles on rough welds for the millionth time that day? A ruthless draught sweeps through the gaps in the plant’s cladding. Shep’s nose runs, his toes are numb, and he never feels far from a grim death in the block machinery running beneath him. Tonight, he’ll sleep on a rough bunk in a dosshouse up the road.
The site safety rules and meta-rules pile up for his second day. Hypnotising reminders within and without. DO NOT BACK-CLIP. Watch you don’t dash your brains on the poured floor. BEWARE FALLING OBJECTS. Don’t overgrip. DO NOT SMOKE. Ignore the engineer calling you a twat because you didn’t hear him ask you to brew up while he went for a dump. DO NOT REMOVE HEAD PROTECTION. Don’t mind the crew sniggering between themselves because your Stillson went missing yesterday. The crew laughing at your Stillson being in your sleeping bag come morning, because you’d been ‘poking at your arse with it’. Sneering at you, calling you a little bender because you admitted you don’t have a partner, because you haven’t been in the kind of broken relationships that to their minds turn young greens into real jacks.
Don’t take it to heart when they compare you unfavourably to ‘the birds’ they’ve had on crew; when they say you’ve got your head up your arse along with your Stilly; that you think you’re smarter than them, or better than them, or worth more than being here, a tiny fly stuck in the steel webbing of this roof, taking their insults over the relay while knowing if you try to give it back, you’ll only get your pay sanctioned for reasons obscure.
Don’t rise to it, with your temper like it is. Don’t reveal the heat in your face, the way your eyes can sometimes well up when your anger rises, so that people accuse you of balling, or being a ‘wee fanny’, et cetera. Don’t lash out or break something. Don’t bust another finger thumping a wall. You can’t show your weaknesses in sight of them, and you know exactly why.
Don’t miss your regular crew, the regular work, and the rare occasions when you’ve earned the right to backchat. The crew you’ve forsaken by blowing old Gunny’s hand off. Don’t reminisce about the last time you were working in a concrete works – roped up and fully masked and dangling inside a preheater tower with five other jacks gouging bad lagging from the wall, laughing at the state of it, at the danger and the heady buzz.
Don’t miss being outside, the winter sun on your face, dry rope in your hand, your shunt planing up its line. Overalls damp and grimy and stinking, ears weeping with the cold. The wood of the bosun’s chair reassuring under your backside. The view from a big old stack, where nothing else on the ground matters or even really exists.
Don’t pause to think about a badger, a bird, a bunker in the Lakes—
The thing you saw within yourself, that structure, that hive—
Don’t think about a reporter called Freya who broke into your world without a care—
Don’t think about where you’re going back to, the place only you know, the only place you want to be—
And don’t let Mallory Junior break you.
But do expect this feeling to last for days. Do break through your second night, your third day. Fight through the tiredness. Tackle the fourth day head-on despite the aches all over, the flu coming on. Take that cold shower without a squeak. It’s grey out there and it’s grey in here, but you’ll be back there, soon. You’ll be back.
* * *
By the fifth morning on site, Shep has all but forgotten the allure of the petrol smell, the tension of his near-arrest, the darkened Lakes. The flayed badger that, in hindsight, served as fair warning. Though his finger continues to heal, he’s convinced his lungs are filling up with grey particulate, that he’s sneezing ready-mix up his sleeves.
But at least nobody talks to him now. At best, the crew simply tolerate his presence. All the same, he stays alert. He reads and rereads the site’s method statement in case they question him – the day before, the site engineer had taken him to one side because ‘head office’ wanted drug tests. He’s also mindful of the eng
ineer’s productivity monitoring – the ubiquitous cameras that follow him, heatmapping his passage across the roof.
At the end of the sixth day, the crew go out drinking without him. He sits on his bunk in their empty dosshouse, caked in dust, sipping from a tin of lager in silence, playing solitaire on his new phone to pass the time. I could be in a submarine, he tells himself. These are the effects of pressure. And each sip brings unwanted memories of confined space training for gas leaks – his tight mask steaming up when they pumped in the soup, a literally blind panic. A desperate climb up the inside of a three-hundred-foot chimney, a tiny disc of light above him.
I am a good team player, Shep had written in his job application to Mallory Limited. I am fast to learn.
He’ll be out of here soon. Won’t he? Maybe his sanity dangles from that promise of clean air, a better view. Get up high. Get some fresh ice-cloud packed into his lungs. Shep puts down his beer, the thought proving sticky. The beta island will be warm, and it isn’t warmth he wants. But the Himalayas…
He closes his phone. He lies back and pictures a crystalline tower reaching away from the Earth. He’s climbing the lattice of it, completely naked. He tops out. His lungs are close to exploding and his hands are frozen solid around a length of diamondoid monofilament. And he’s happy. Cold and happy.
He lets sleep take him.
* * *
On the seventh day, Shep deigns to change his attitude. The crew is just a rough bunch, nothing more. They ignore him because they so rarely work with greens, much less trust them. Or maybe they know what he did on Clemens. It’d explain the hard glares they share, the way Shep can stop grafting for a split second and know one of them has turned to check why.
It’s clear to him that the jacks have bonded despite themselves. Pressed together over the years like disparate stones at the start of a beach. How long have they gone on like this? He wonders if they’ve always been despatched to the margins of the country, condemned to these harsh jobs, hardened in their bones and whittled to sinew, earning the worst problems – asbestosis, miner’s lung, malign tumours – along the way. Why should they accept him?
The crew break for lunch early. Shep has watched the ritual several times in that endless week. At some invisible signal, the men silently unspin themselves from the formwork and descend. They set their backs against the massive churning machines and say little as they share milk powders and canteens and rolling tobacco, and regard the roof in deep reverence. On the final day, the eighth day in a row, Shep decides he’ll try and join them. He tacitly follows the crew down to the floor and stands there, hesitant under the mesh mezzanine, dwarfed by equipment. A film of concrete powder on every surface, his boots white.
He swallows and approaches the group. Their scarred and pitted knuckles. He stumbles a few metres off, and they turn to him. Shep says, ‘All right?’ and they blank him. He focuses on one jack in particular – a man with a perversely thick neck – and asks him, ‘How’s it going?’ and nothing comes back. The crew look among themselves, nonplussed, and return to their pastries.
Shep gazes at the far wall. A slow seepage of shame down into his feet.
‘Fuck off, then,’ one of them says.
With a brick in his stomach, Shep concedes that Mallory Junior has already won.
* * *
Later that day, Shep is clipped into the roof, the span of it illuminated in sharp flashes by mig-welders. He’s struggling to concentrate, fatigued and ruminating on his sacrifices – the concessions and compromises he’s made to work like this, with people like these. Count them out: the small things, like forfeiting nights out, or being the last to hear about his mates’ stag dos because he can never make them. Like not being messaged or called or asked after. The pains: intermittent tendonitis, weeping blisters, persistent aching in the lower back. Scuffs and swollen fingers and bruises impossible to account for. And the big things, the withering friendships. The mother he barely speaks to. Flings or relationships that fail in some way to ignite. All those second dates, when things could be heading somewhere, nice and easy and fun, until his date says, ‘Let’s get together soon?’ and he has to say, ‘I probably won’t be around for another month,’ and her face twitches, and her eyes, lambent over drinks, turn dull. The idea of starting a family is as remote as it is distant. No anchors. Fallow ground. Friable roots. The older jacks who rib him: ‘You’ve not even had one bloody wife yet!’
By the time Shep has marked the last beam for cutting, he’s ready to scream yes to Mallory Junior. Yes, he’s learned his lesson. Yes, he’ll go to the Pacific island and work to pay off his debts, if not defer his guilt. Yes, stand him there on that earth, beneath a different sun, next to the open sea, in thrall to the salt wind that puts a hardness through your hair. If only so he might arrive for a moment at the summit of the scaffold, shiver in the embrace of the cold – a welcome, foreign wind. If only to get his chance at becoming lost among the black rock and snow of the Himalayas.
Just get him away from here.
The Journalist
Late Saturday afternoon in sullen Salford. A steady whine of electric vehicles along Regent Road and Ordsall Lane. Freya waits under the awning of the McDonald’s, hair frizzy and hands raw, checking her phone every other minute. It’s long gone three. If Shep stands her up, she’ll find him at Big Walls and stick that autobelayer where the sun don’t shine.
Then a white van trundles along the drive-thru lane. Cheap white vinyl partially concealing a company name on its bonnet. Shep’s at the wheel with an infuriating smile. He holds up a bag of food, motions to the other side of the restaurant. She follows him round. He parks about as far from her as possible, apparently on purpose. There’s more crudely applied vinyl down the van’s side.
‘You’re forty minutes late,’ she says through the passenger window.
Shep leans over to pop the door and tips the bag of food towards her. ‘Soz,’ he says, still grinning. ‘Chip?’
Freya huffs. A warm, sweet smell rises from the van. Shep has wires running all over the place, dodgy-looking equipment stuffed into the console.
‘Traffic was shite,’ he says. ‘I figured you’d wait… You getting in?’
Freya shakes her head. ‘Not till I know where we’re going. And when I’ll be back.’
‘Sure you don’t want a chip?’
‘Tell me, please – I need to let someone know.’
Shep opens his mouth, places a chip against his bottom lip. ‘Who?’
‘My editor.’
‘Told him it’s a date?’
‘He’s a her,’ Freya sighs. ‘And no, because it’s not.’
Shep nibbles the chip. ‘If you say so.’ Again, that proud smirk. ‘Bet you told her it’s a date.’
‘Jesus. Are you always like this?’
He pushes in another handful of chips. ‘Tell her we’re going to Chorley,’ he says, chewing noisily. ‘Back before bedtime.’
‘Chorley?’
‘Don’t you like surprises?’
Freya grabs the doorframe and gets in. She makes sure the door’s lockpin is up. There’s an army-style rucksack in the footwell, and she has to prop it between her knees. ‘Can’t believe I’ve agreed to this,’ she says. She fastens her belt.
Shep pours the remaining chips straight into his mouth and turns on the engine. Solemn now – just like that. ‘I get it,’ he tells her. ‘I’m some weirdo you met climbing. And now look at us. But don’t forget you’ve been digging on me as well. And on Stephen. How am I meant to trust you?’
Freya reddens. ‘You can.’
He nods into the passenger footwell. ‘Good. And you’re all right with that down there? My camera. They’re decent boots, by the way.’
Freya knits her hands. ‘I’m not an idiot.’
‘Never said you were. Did you bring a recorder?’
‘My mobile.’
‘I won’t say anything worth recording. But no pictures.’
‘Okay…’
She pats her jacket pockets. ‘Energy bar. Dried fruit things. Water.’
‘Sweet,’ he says. ‘Let’s go get lost.’
* * *
They drive up the M6 in silence. Shep seems preoccupied, almost adrift, and keeps overtaking other vehicles without indicating. Freya finds his elusiveness disappointing – she questions if they really have anything in common beyond a nebulous link to Stephen. Was it an error of judgement to approach him in the first place? To agree to this? It’s hard to justify how easily she got in the van. Maybe it’s the same nameless compulsion that drew her to him in Big Walls… his being alone, his being oddly sexless.
She glances sidelong at him. If he notices, he doesn’t care. Maybe it’s his face that sits at odds with her memory. Like he’s a different person. As he weaves the van in and out of lanes, it becomes harder and harder to reconcile him with the man who’d sent her those manic texts outside the library.
‘You’re even quieter than me,’ he comments later.
Freya doesn’t reply. Past Lancaster, the M6 opens out to massive skies, and Shep starts driving faster, the heater going, and the sweet smell she’d first noticed at McDonald’s – petrol? – grows heady.
‘Why don’t you tell me about what you do?’ Freya says.
‘My day job?’
‘Yeah.’
So Shep explains steeplejacking as basically as he can, and Freya listens. When he seems to be done, Freya presses a dot into her forehead with her forefinger. ‘And even though you work in these sort of urbex-y places,’ she says, ‘you don’t do reports on them?’
Shep smiles. Dashes of rain up the windscreen. ‘Too easy,’ he says. He doesn’t take his eyes off the road. ‘Half the buzz of a mission is knowing you shouldn’t be there. When you’re about to do a site, you’re shitting yourself because you know, deep down, you’re going to cross a border. Your heart’s going like a demohammer.’ He takes a hand off the steering wheel to draw a horizontal line in the air, then points to the near side of it. Is he trembling? ‘Here’s normal life,’ Shep says. He moves his finger towards Freya. ‘And here’s where you shouldn’t be. That’s exploring. Going from one to the other. Sounds simple enough, but when you’re dragged up a certain way, respecting rules or whatever, it’s a big deal to cross over. Like driving at a wall and trusting yourself not to brake. You have to learn. You have to face it down. Because when the bug bites, it never lets up. You enter a parallel world. It leaves a bit of its map inside you.’