Site Works

by Robert Davidson

  ‘Think you can stick it?’

  ‘I can try.’

  ‘I know that tone. You still love it out there. You love the conflict. That side of your life always came first.’

  ‘So, what did you really want?’

  ‘I meant what I said. Did you know Alison is falling behind at school?’

  ‘Really? She thinks about music all the time, and friends. Isn’t that how it should be at fourteen? She seems okay to me.’

  ‘I want her back early this time. Thursday.’

  ‘Why? I see little enough of her. You want to protect her from my influence?’

  ‘We’re going to Ronnie’s parents this weekend. It would be nice for them to meet.’

  Now it was Mac’s turn to make a silence. A9 traffic, men shouting, beep warnings from reversing vehicles, laughter, all went on outside the impregnable bubble of anxiety that had him for its centre.

  ‘Is this a joke?’

  ‘They asked to. They like young people. They have grandchildren the same age.’

  ‘It would be simpler if I wasn’t here, wouldn’t it? Better if I was dead.’

  ‘Look,’ she went on with effort, control. ‘I can see I’m going to get no sense out of you. Try to think this through rationally for a change. We are already living together, the three of us. That’s not going to change. It makes every kind of sense to ease the relationships. Think about Alison for once.’

  ‘For a change? For once? Do you mind if we end this call now? Just leave it there. I have Alison until Saturday morning. That’s not changing.’

  ‘Look Mac, don’t go into your martyr routine. You’ll always be her father but Ronnie has his place too. Times are changing.’

  ‘Lets leave off there. Right there! I’m not going into any martyr routine and I’m not swallowing any of this guilt and responsibility stuff and I’m not budging on dates. Just leave it there.’

  After two years it was no easier to get off the phone. They hung up together.

  Well, he knew what Patricia was about all right, reducing his time with Alison on an ‘it’s-good-for-her’ basis, building her into this new family. He was the lesser, no-rights, partner. So, who was he to stand in the way? Another stint in the Middle East would suit Patricia down to the ground. He would be out of the way. There would be more money. By the time he came back, assuming he didn’t end up with his head in a bucket, Alison would be at University and a stranger. Ronnie would be her dad. Some day he would have to meet this Ronnie. According to Alison he wasn’t so bad. Gratifyingly though, he wasn’t so great either.

  She still preferred her real Dad.

  Outside he heard John Kelly shouting in irritation. The pipe bedding material had arrived a day early and he had nowhere to put it. He decided to let John get on with it and take the longer view, the programme, the gathering labour force.

  If Swann was bringing in a grip squad the chances are they would be good. Almost certainly it was the beginning of the end for their full-timers. He would be obliged to back Healey’s labourers, hard enough workers but slapdash and thuggish. Derek the steelfixer and his squad would, in a way, set off against them. In addition, and more to the point, Derek was ace at what he did and strong enough to keep his own men in line. Unlike most steelfixers he would bring problems forward as soon as he saw them. Most steelfixers just let the job run to a halt and turned the meter on. On a ‘reward-what-you-want’ basis Mac accepted Derek’s higher rate. The good builder was already gone. Harry, the clerk of works, rated him but the time he took was unconscionable.

  I see further than James Swann, he thought. Maybe I can wait him out. But no, Swann was as much Syme’s man as Healey was Swann’s. There was a programme of change for the company just as surely as there was a programme of works for the job and Mac was no part of it. To give himself a chance he had to keep his head in the job.

  Later, as the light began to fade, he picked up the phone and called Paul’s mobile.

  ‘Light’s going. Come off the hill now.’

  ‘I’m packing the theodolite away now.’

  ‘Will John MacKenzie be out tomorrow?’

  ‘So he says. Two days to finish this.’

  ‘Good, I’ll bring Conn and his machine over day after tomorrow. He can start the soil strip as you start to come down this side. That should be safe enough. Later you can set out the profiles for Healey’s men. They can start first thing next week. I’ll see them later.’

  ‘You’re using Healey’s men?’

  ‘No choice. Let that go, Paul. Adapt.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Good boy Paul, he thought. Good teamwork beginning with Trevor. With Mac as Contracts Manager, Trevor as Agent, Paul moving up to sub-agent after he got that elusive qualification, it could be good. Good, but not what was written in the stars. James Swann was Contracts Manager and Mac was increasingly like the spare prick at a wedding.

  He put his head back into his work and lost himself there until, outside, he heard John Kelly bringing the shift to an end, heard the troops piling into the minibus and leaving. John looked in.

  ‘That’s time, Mac.’

  ‘Off you go. I’ll wind up here and then head for the Black Isle. I’m bringing Conn over in a couple of days. That should please you.’

  ‘Sure will. See you tomorrow, Mac.’

  ‘See you then.’

  ‘And good luck.’

  Luck? Yes, the GF knew he needed some luck.

  Mac called the Black Isle site hut and asked Conn to stay until he got there. He tidied up what he was doing and packed away his laptop and drove off in fading light that was soon black as pitch and as he drove both Patricia and James Swann kept invading his head.

  The man was a bully. He would be Northern Director over Mac’s twitching corpse. You had to be an animal to get on in this game. The civil engineering contract was the survival of the fittest, nothing more.

  He drove the A9 under a low cloud cover, headlights sweeping the forest at bends. This was his land. He didn’t want to leave. He didn’t want to be sickened out of what was his own, his place in the construction industry in the Highlands. He wouldn’t let it happen, by God, he wouldn’t. He struck the wheel with the flat of his hand. He wouldn’t.

  It was after 6:30pm when he drove onto the site. Most of the old compound had been cleared and they were down to just a few troops. Derek’s squad, with no reinforcement to tie, were tidying, repairing fences here and there. Healey’s squad were struggling to get the sewer past Harry’s tests. Conn stood by with his machine to lift old scaffolding, formwork, small items of plant, onto the lorry. Patience, a capacity for boredom, was as vital to him as his hands on the controls. A round man, his fair hair thinning on his ball shaped head, he was waiting in the hut for his instructions when Mac arrived.

  Mac told him he was bound for Ness at last.

  ‘There’s no big lifts left here,’ Conn reassured him. ‘The labourers can throw what’s left on the lorry without me.’

  ‘They’ll be following on as well.’

  ‘No problems. I mind my own business.’ This meant he didn’t respect Healey’s men either, although he was maybe afraid of them.

  ‘What’s the surface like out there? It’s too dark to see.’

  ‘Harry’s happy enough. At least he will be when these last two pipelines pass.’

  ‘They’d better. If we have to bring you back to dig them up again there’ll be hell to pay.’

  ‘They shouldn’t have been backfilled before the test, Mac.’

  ‘I know that. You know that. John knows that. Swannie said otherwise.’

  ‘He’ll be hoping for a claim against the contract? That’s how we’re working these days?’

  ‘You can go home now, Conn. I’ll lock up.’

  Conn left and, as he locked up his machine and started his car, Mac sat and stared into space. The heating was off and it was cold but he sat unmoving, suddenly exhausted.

  This was how it was. By now even the cran
e driver had the lie of the land, knew the new rule was haste and deception and claim, smash and grab. He could almost taste the sympathy in the man’s voice and hated what he must become if he was to survive.

  ‘The only answer,’ he said to himself, ‘is to stay and take it, adapt, or catch a flight east.’

  So, struggle against it. Risk it all. He would have to work the weekend. Likely he would have to work every weekend. No hardship in itself because, never mind the cost to himself, he loved his work, the smells and sounds, the men, the demands on his foresight, his experience and intelligence, his leadership. Patricia was right about that, if nothing else. He went to the window and looked out, his hand against the thin plasterboard wall of the hut. There was a wind picking up. Conditions could change very quickly. As he watched, the clouds opened over the City and the stars shone through with their eternally cold, inanimate brilliance.

  Across the water Inverness burned with electric light, the Kessock Bridge was strung with moving vehicle lights and along the Moray coast was all pinpoints of light, street lights, houses, the airport lights. Real constructs, they were the reality within which Alison would live her life. It had been his privilege to go to the basics of nature, the ground and the water and the energy, and turn them into the basics of civilised living. All along his life had direction and purpose he had never even considered. He had no inclination to leave. He would not leave. He would fight and he would lose, but he would fight. His mobile phone rang. Alison.

  ‘Dad, you’re late. It’s after 7:00. I’ve made the dinner and it’s getting cold. Are you coming home? I mean now.’

  ‘Sorry, Ali. I’ll be a while yet.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘On the Black Isle, in my old hut that looks across the water at the city. As a matter if fact I’m looking that way now. You know I’ve played my part in building all this. That’s really important.’

  ‘I know, Dad. It’s your job. I know it pays for the way we live and I know I’m lucky, but aren’t you coming home?’

  ‘Don’t think it’s just a job.’

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘Let me tell you what I’m looking at. Above the town the clouds have just opened and the stars have come out and it’s as if the city is answering with its lights. I have this huge wonderful feeling of ‘‘home’’ that surged through me when I heard your voice and saw what I saw. It’s an amazing thing, the City, because it’s always growing although, just the same, it’s always complete. Like you, Sweetheart.’

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘I’ve played my part in its making and as I sit here on my own I think I understand what I never did before. It was all for you, in some ways directly for you, in others not so direct, but all for you and Gillian and Mike and the rest and if there’s a price to pay it’s worth it.’

  She said nothing but he could hear her breathing.

  ‘And it goes on.’

  ‘Does it?’

  ‘And you will go on.’

  ‘Oh, Dad.’

  ‘I guess that’s enough. It has to be enough.’

  4

  The specification is everything

  The Resident Engineer’s hut was split new and warm and smelled of plasterboard and paint and the scorched plastic odour an electric heater gives out in its first usage.

  Behind his new desk, his new contract-purchased telephone/fax to one side and his new internet linked laptop square in the middle sat Allan Crawford, 26, two years out of University and also new. The three Contract Documents were open before him. The Bill of Quantities he had written himself, hastily, under Vernon Street’s direction. The Specification and Conditions of Contract were standard except that The Russell Partnership insisted on the 5th Edition. He paused in composing an email to his girlfriend in Glasgow when a van drew up and Harry Gilfeather, Clerk of Works, entered.

  Aged 63, Allan knew from the file, Harry was not new. Vernon described him as an ‘old soldier’. Darkened by years of outside work, his face had been beaten by weather hard and cold and thrown at him by the winds on sites all across Scotland. A number of moles grew about it, each with its individual black hair sprouting and, below his left eye, the lid hung limp over a lifeless square inch that lay flat on the bone. Caution was perhaps required, Vernon had suggested, since Harry and GR had been together in West Africa before the Partnership was formed and while the great man was still was making his name.

  Harry pulled a chair across and sat, removing his safety helmet but not his duffel coat.

  ‘They’re using Pat Healey’s men again,’ he said. ‘Eight of them.’

  ‘I heard.’

  ‘Only skilled man on the Black Isle was the builder and they got rid of him.’

  ‘I hear he was slow.’

  ‘He did the work right. More and more it’s about speed. Slap-dash and get it done and onto the next flaming mess. They’ve made some changes, got rid of most of the thugs, which will mean the new men have still to learn.’

  ‘Some of them. Mac and Trevor seem responsible.’

  ‘The Contracts Manager sets the tone. Swannie is different. First time on site?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘First time as Resident Engineer?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Harry made a ‘what-have-they-sent-me-this-time’ kind of look and nodded at the documents. ‘The Specification is everything. You know that?’

  ‘GR says it’s the Conditions. He says it’s our Bible.’

  ‘If the job when it’s done doesn’t work the game’s a bogie. Where’s your Bible then?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  Harry gave him a ‘what-kind-of-answer-is-that’ sort of look.

  ‘I worked with Sir Graham Russell long before he was a ‘‘Sir’’. In West Africa he knew the point was to get it done and make it work.’

  Allan closed the lid of his laptop. ‘Vernon told me you two go back a long way,’ he said.

  ‘What’s this meeting for?’

  ‘Mac says the wayleave on the hill is too narrow.’

  ‘It’s been widened for them already.’

  ‘To carry materials topside they need to put an access road alongside the pipeline. That’s why they asked for the first extra width. But to meet the landowner’s requirements they have to strip off the topsoil and when they’re done put it back. That means they can’t just cart it away and free the space. Now they realise there isn’t room for the pipeline work and the road and the topsoil storage they’d like to drop it outside the wayleave fence’

  Harry shook his head in a ‘you’ve-got-a-lot-to-learn’ kind of way.

  ‘All the space in the world won’t stop these clowns cheating. They’ll dig the trenches shallow to hasten themselves on. They’ll skimp on gravel bedding to save a few pence, you watch. It’s a game to them and you have to be up to it. You’ve to stand over them when you can and demand trial excavations where they don’t expect them. If the job isn’t to spec they’ve to take the whole line out and lay it again.’

  ‘No room for compromise?’

  ‘The Specification is all. Merciless with the lash.’

  Together they stepped from the warmth and newness of the hut into the cold airs of winter and the stink from Struie’s broken septic tank.

  ‘They’ve parked you well out of the way of the main action,’ Harry said. True enough, but it suited Allan to be out of the way. The sting should be out of any crisis by the time it reached him.

  Thirty metres along the road the flow of sewage would turn and be pumped uphill, up to the right. Mac was already there, talking with an older man, his hair white, his forehead broad.

  ‘Allan,’ said Mac, ‘this is Iain Sutherland acting for the Estate.’ He opened the land plan and laid it on the roof of his car. ‘Here’s the amended layout we’re proposing.’

  ‘What’s the dog leg for?’ Iain Sutherland asked.

  ‘There’s an outcrop of rock,’ Allan said. ‘The Engineer thought it best to go round.’

  ‘Did he now?
And you’ve already asked for a widening?’

  ‘For the access road. Yes.’

  ‘And now you are looking for a further accommodation?’

  ‘It’s in everyone’s interest,’ Mac said.

  ‘It should have been thought of first time round?’

  ‘I guess so. We’ve gone through this merger. Turmoil. Sure, all the changes should have gone through at the same time.’

  ‘That’s honest enough. So what’s it all about?’

  ‘We’re going to put an access road up alongside the pipeline, that’s why we asked for the extra width. To meet your client’s requirements we have to strip off the topsoil and when we’re done, after we remove the roadstone, put it back. Now we realise there isn’t room for the pipeline work and the road and the topsoil storage. We’d like to drop it outside the wayleave fence. We could go up and look?’

  All four climbed as far as the dogleg and turned to look back. The surface was covered in thin spiky grass. Iain Sutherland put the heel of his boot in and scraped the thin soil back to the gritty pan below.

  ‘Not much depth,’ he said. ‘All the more reason to keep top and under soils separate, of course. All right, Mr MacPherson. If it helps the job along and ensures a good reinstatement go ahead.’

  ‘Financial implications?’ Mac asked.

  ‘We’ll include, say, five metres to the side of the east fence in the reinstatement specification and increase my client’s reimbursement on a pro-rata basis. That agreed you can get on.’

  ‘That’s between the Contractor and the Estate,’ Allan said. ‘No payment implications for the Client?’

  Mac said nothing.

  ‘I agree with that,’ said Iain Sutherland. He looked at the sky. ‘Think the weather will hold? The forecast is appalling.’

  ‘We’ll manage,’ Mac said.

  ‘No problems with this proposal though?’ Allan asked.

  ‘No problems,’ Iain Sutherland agreed.

  Harry and Mac looked at each other, looked at the slope and the lowering clouds.

  5

  The strength is in the gravel