the site immediately because the last thing I needed now was a call from another politician, talking to him without the full story, so I dialled up Keville and got him after a few rings
hello, yes
Keville’s voice rising over a barrage of background noise, an engine roar swelling nearby as a jackhammer kept up a series of short metallic bursts with Keville yelling again
hello, hello
hello Andy, Marcus here
Marcus, how’s it going, give me a second till I move away from here and
I could envisage the whole site now as it was only a few days since I had driven out to it so it was still clear in my mind, the bridge cordoned off behind orange mesh wire, the machines and the crew in hi-vis jackets with the smell of raw stone and concrete and diesel coming down the phone towards me and
Marcus
yes
can you hear me
Keville yelled, with some distance between himself now and the jackhammer so
Andy, I said, is there some sort of a delay on the job, have I heard right, to which
there followed then a fragmented story which did indeed confirm the gist of what Halloran had told me, there had been a single day’s delay due to a power outage in the Roadstone yard that had knocked out their concrete production for a full twenty-four hours – and no, they had no backup generators – but that he’d got an assurance that they would deliver the pre-cast slabs later today and that the mobile crane was already in place and ready to go so there would be no time lost on that and no surer thing, he had been onto Roadstone already this morning and they had given him their solemn word that they would be there this afternoon at the latest and
I let him go on in this vein for a couple of minutes or so, repeating himself and letting him run the story on towards the assurance that he could handle it himself, which was what I wanted to hear from him, this being one of the first jobs over which he was the site engineer, but I knew to listen to him that any hope of bringing the project in under time and budget was now likely to come a cropper, his frustration and sense of injustice mounting with him ranting on for another few minutes while I sat there listening, hoping he would finally hear my silence through his frustration and realise that I was not happy with the situation and sure enough his voice begin to fray and take on that burred edge of anxiety which threatened to tip over into self-pity as he blurted
there’s not much more I can do
no one is blaming you Andy
if I could cast the fucking things myself I would
calm down
I’ve only the one pair of hands, you can count them yourself so
I cut him off then for fear this running temper of his might spill over completely and then we would have a different sort of crisis on our hands so I said
look, get it sorted out as soon as you can and call me when those slabs are unloaded, I don’t want another politician coming on the phone and blindsiding me with stuff I should know and
someone’s been on the phone
I had a call from Halloran this morning
the Councillor
yes, it was him who told me about this delay – I shouldn’t have to hear it from him or
how did he know about it
you must have spoken to him yesterday
I didn’t speak to anyone
it was one of the lads on the Stop/Go signs, talked to a man who wound down the window and asked a load of questions, sometime in the afternoon, around three o’clock and
there was a long, thickening silence on the other end and I could feel Keville’s rage fizzing as he listened because
that’s how I heard about it – so be careful who you talk to and keep me abreast of things and
I hung up and the office contracted around me, grey light swel- ling up to the ceiling and the vacant hollow in my belly reminding me that I had set out that morning without any breakfast, so I checked for money in my pocket – two twenties and some loose change – before I walked out of the building and across the grassy mall towards the café deli on the street corner where I bought a chicken sandwich and a large cup of strong coffee which I took back to a bench under a large maple tree, a cool enough spot for the time of year but bearable for the length of time it would take to eat the sandwich and drink the coffee, so I sat down after I wiped the seat, finding myself facing into the low, watery sun over the columned building across the street in front of which stood a handful of people, wigged and gowned in close consultation among themselves, leaning towards each other for a long moment before they finally broke apart, two of them turned back into the building and the other two walked up the street and I remembered the court was sitting and that this building with its costumed players was the very source of Agnes’s work which had caused me so much upheaval the night before and which, till then, I had not given a thought, apparently having done a good job overnight of pushing the whole thing to the back of my mind, but now, sitting there the whole evening came back to me in a red surge, all those anguished feelings returning in paler versions of themselves to swing through me there on the bench so that for a loose, churning moment
I did not know how to react, whether to stay seething on the bench or to enter the courthouse with some ludicrous idea of holding someone to account for what I had experienced the night before, an idea which almost raised me to my feet and carried me forward on a surge of anger, already seeing myself plunging through the swing doors of the court and into the inner chamber where I would pull some defendant from the dock or judge from the bench – I would not be choosy – and give him a battering there on the floor of the court
and
and
I whiled away a few minutes with this pleasing fantasy, honing its climactic moments to an escalating scene of chaos and outrage which spilled out of the chamber and into the street, a scene which, for all its alluring comedy, left me with little proper idea of how it might resolve, what it all meant or what good it would do me, just a few more minutes sitting there savouring its dismal pleasure till it was clear then that the images of the previous night were going to vex me for the rest of the day leaving little hope that I would be able to immerse myself fully in the work which lay on my desk, but nevertheless so intense was my desire to bury those memories and the fears they drew with them that I drained off the last of the coffee and returned to the office in a purposeful mood where, for the next few hours, I ploughed grimly through the jobs lined up on my desk – settled the issue with the procurements office, despatched a two-man crew to open the penstock in Kilasser and agreed the price of granite from a quarry in Ardrahan, sixty miles away, by faxing them a cheaper quote for the same stone quarried on the other side of the world in South China then shipped to Turkey for polishing before it ended up in West Mayo at two-thirds the price – jobs I ploughed through before late afternoon when
Casey, a road engineer put his head around the door, looking for advice on how to deal with a difficult residents’ association that would not see sense and
I can’t get them to budge, he said, three meetings with them and they won’t listen to reason or
what’s the problem exactly
the problem is this mile of road running through the village, these people want a fine chip surface which is totally unsuitable in a residential area with a school and a pub in the middle of it and
you outlined the engineering reasons against it
of course I did, the engineering reasons and the safety reasons – the surface they want has a breaking distance nearly twice that of the coarse chip surface and it’s dangerous in a built-up area, plus you won’t be able to keep it gritted when the frost comes
not to mention surface water
and surface water – the least drop of rain and you’ll have cars aquaplaning all over the place
I know those people – they haven’t a good word to say about each other but when it concerns the village they pull together and
of course Halloran is egging them
on
I’ll bet he is – that village can have their road surfaced with polished glass as far as he’s concerned, Halloran is harvesting fifty or sixty votes along that road
that makes sense, I can understand him keeping them sweet but you’ll never guess why they want this particular surface
why
the fucking tidy towns competition – the smooth road surface looks a lot nicer that the normal coarse chip finish which should go on it – when it’s lined and striped and with cats-eyes running along the sides and middle it will be worth ten extra points in the tidy towns competition and
ok, I said, now wanting to draw a line under the discussion, here’s what you do – call one more meeting with the association and hand each board member a letter which repeats the points you’ve made and tell them that this dated letter is going on file and
it’s going to take more than a filed letter
let me finish, give them a moment to think about it and if that doesn’t shift them tell them how you see this panning out – tell them that sometime in the near future, this year or the next – they will be presented with an accident report drawn up by the Gardaí or the NRA which lays the blame for the collision at the feet of whoever it was decided to lay that surface on a straight road going through a village with an 80km speed-limit and
Casey’s face opened in a broad smile
shift responsibility onto them
exactly, they won’t be half as anxious to press for that surface if they think there’s a possibility of their name being brought into adverse legal proceedings
it would give them something to think about right enough
and the letter puts you in the clear should there be an accident
that might do it all right, Casey said, opening the door and nodding his head as if he could see the problem solved already, I’ll give it a try anyway, thanks Marcus
no bother, let me know how you get on
I will, mind yourself
and he pulled the door and was gone, leaving me to savour the assurance that I had done a decent job of playing the older, wiser head, passing on the tricks of the trade, a good feeling that held till the end of the day when I dropped a load of invoices into the accounts department across the hall on my way out onto the mall where
a few walkers were crossing the grass and two young lads in school uniforms were kicking a ball to each other, the whole evening having that end of winter feel to it without it being properly spring and for some reason I decided to take a quick spin up to Keeva to see how the bridge site was going, it was a nice drive and it would be no harm to have a look at it, bring myself up to speed on how things stood, so I sat into the car and turned on the radio, tuning into
hearing it now
Midwest Radio
the lonesome lilt of country music coming across the airwaves, something odd and misplaced about the teary melodies and lyrics swirling around the kitchen at this time of day, the mood of the song better suited to late at night when darkness and that lonesome distance proper to country music takes hold but of course
it’s me and not the music that’s misplaced, being so seldom at home on a weekday like this, it’s difficult to say what’s normally played at this time while
sitting at the table and
letting the song wash through me like a steady tide from a world of manageable heartache, a world where bad feelings come with melody and are capable of being rendered down into verse, bridge and chorus, which can be sung away to your heart’s content with that just measure of regret which allows you to feel that, for all your loneliness, you are still part of the wider human drama and that this is a genuine kinship, more valuable and heartfelt than hearing the news or reading the paper, listening to
Hank or Waylon or George and
knowing that we are all part of the world’s heartache, its loss and disappointment mapped out in the songs of
Hank and Waylon and George so
it was shortly after half four when I got into the car and drove to Keeva, the evening closing in and the distant hills beneath the clouds drawing near in the rain which began to fall, steady at first for the first couple of miles, but pelting down in great blue swathes by the time I arrived at the bridge, the clock in the dash telling me that it was ten to five, twenty minutes past knocking-off time and sure enough the men had tidied up and gone home, which was a good thing as I preferred to inspect the site on my own, so I pulled over to the side of the road, just outside the bollards and caution tape that cordoned off the bridge site and rolled down the window to have a look as it was now too wet to step out and walk around, the rain drumming down on the roof of the car and the wipers swinging across the windscreen, but I could see enough to know that the whole project was back on track as Keville had promised, with the concrete slabs now set in place, laid across the span between the piers, resting on the steel beams, all the structural work completed so that if the weather held, it would take less than two weeks to finish it properly, pave and face it and surface the approach roads from both sides, two weeks all going well, the whole thing completed for the bank holiday weekend and Halloran and Lavelle happy and not ringing me up and annoying my hole and just as I was thinking this
I saw a shape coming towards me through the rain, a yellow blur at first across the windscreen before it tightened into a man in oilskins and wellingtons with the rain hopping off him, the last thing I wanted to see at that time of day but nevertheless, I wound down the window and he put his hand on the roof and leaned in with the raw face of a man used to being out in all sorts of weather, now looming in the window towards me to say
that’s wet
that is wet
it had to come sometime
what has you out in it
I saw the car, I knew it was you
you don’t miss a thing
no, not a thing
the forecast isn’t great, there’ll be no let-up till the middle of next week
isn’t that a bastard he says, with the rain still running off him
so long as we get it now and not in summertime
it’s a bit early to say that
I suppose
and with that my patience was at an end so I thought it was time to cut to the chase and put it up to him
you didn’t come over here in this rain to talk to me about the weather
you noticed that
I’d notice less
I’ll bet
what’s on your mind
I was thinking
what were you thinking
I was just thinking that you nearly have the bridge finished, another week or two and you’ll be out of it and
it’s going well all right, what’s your interest in it
I was just thinking that all that stone from the old bridge, you’re going to have to dump it somewhere
I suppose
well, it would save you time and money if you were to tip it there in the bottom of that field, it’s only across from the site and you could just pull in and leave it inside the gate and
I knew straight away what was on his mind, cut granite at one- fifty a ton, a couple of loads of it tipped into his field would be a tidy asset and
you’d make sure it wouldn’t go to waste
I was only thinking like
you were
and him grinning in at me now, knowing full well that his offer was indeed to our advantage but that it would also be a considerable boost to himself, fifty to sixty tons of cut granite tipped into his field so that he could be working away with it however he pleased or sell it on at a tidy profit, both of us knowing that it would be a lot cheaper to tip it on his land less than fifty yards from where it now lay, instead of loading it up and hauling it the twenty miles to the landfill site the far side of Castlebar, but still, I was not willing to give in, something about his naked opportunism had riled me, some part of me bristling so that I knew straight off that I would not relent today, not this evening at any rate,
which was not to say that I wouldn’t sometime in the future because I knew that what he’d said made sense, but even still, this was one of the things that sickened me about this job – every cunt wanting something – and even if I could make the whole thing legitimately difficult for him, citing all sorts of insurance clauses about vehicles under public contract entering on private land and all those by-laws covering fly dumping, I just finished up saying
leave it with me, I’ll see what I can do
sound he said, and smacked the roof of the car as if the matter was settled
how is your neighbour, I didn’t spot him when I pulled up
Thomas
Thomas, the curtains were drawn
you wouldn’t know with that man, he mightn’t have surfaced yet, he keeps his own hours
is he still dancing
he is, he’ll be in Digger Jay’s tonight
no sign of him bringing a woman into the house
no
he’ll do nothing foolish, the same Thomas
you can be sure of that, I’ll let you go
we’ll talk again
sound
mind yourself
and he headed off, not a bother on him, the rain still pissing down as he faded away in the rearview mirror, the yellow oilskin becoming a smudge of light as I turned the car and headed back the way I’d come, the road taking me past his house, which was all cluttered up outside with sand and blocks, and a mixer with a shovel leaning against it and I saw that he was putting an extension onto the left gable, a substantial addition which was already tiled and plastered, the scaffolding still up and the blue tape on the window frames while off to one side a large pile of topsoil showed where he had dug into the slope behind the house to find space for the extension so that now there was a low, sheer-faced ledge where the slope ended sharply and it was easy now to see what he planned to do with the stone – he’d use it to face off that bit of a ledge so that the soil wouldn’t subside onto the house if it took water, the heavy stone would buttress the slope all the way around the back of the house and whatever was left over could be used to landscape the garden that fell away from the front to the road and I could see what was in his head now, how
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