Sitting in the cab of his tracked excavator at the top of the hill, relaxed by fan blown hot air from the engine, Conn looked down on the squad laying the gravity sewer up towards him. They were in a mess down there.
The ground was loose where he had tracked over it and dug it and the rain was carrying watery silt in rivulets down to the road drains. It would only get worse. Beyond them his eye travelled to the A9 and the compound and the shore and the oil rigs and as much of the North Sea as torrential rain and mist would allow and, ach, on to infinity.
The trouble with this job, he reflected, was it gave him too much time to think. He finished making half a dozen roll-ups, sealed five in his tin and lit the sixth
He placed the tin in his bag under the seat and fired up the excavator, tracking it back over the top of the hill like a giant fiddler crab. On the Struie side the troops were laying the pumping main and building the access road at the same time. They were better organised but it was still hopeless. When the pumping main and the access road were complete he would track the crane up the access road to work topsides on the culvert.
Now though, for the present, between the two squads and the road what they really needed was three machines, static at each pipeline and the road. This he knew. Skinflint Swannie was making do with one, travelling, and it was cutting up the ground everywhere for the rain to turn into a thin watery gruel. Getting a second machine into position now would be impossible.
At the top of the hill above Glen Struie he looked down on the two lines of wayleave fence, the stone road that reached about a quarter of the way up and the lengthening pile of arisings he had dumped outside the fence. The hill above the pipe trench where his tracks had spun was a sea of mud. Beyond and below all this the River Struie was overhung with alders and willows and a thin mist. Across the hill a few bedraggled sheep stood with their green and slimy rear ends to the wind.
Curtains of rain swept along the glen from the sea, thrashing the door of his cabin, whipping at the four man squad in their dripping oilskins. Off to his left the village of Struie looked very small.
Not for the first time he pondered the economics of what they did and shook his head and let it go past to just drive his machine and continue to do what he was told without question. When he opened his cabin door to lean back and spit his rollup the wind blew it back and down against the tracks.
By now the pumping main squad were nearly half way up, laying and backfilling as they went, local drains neatly dug, black polyethylene pipe and yellow warning tape laid out along the line of the trench, bedding gravel spaced along the route. The contrast with the Ness side was profound. This would be the two with experience paying off, or else a brain had come into play. True, they were working with bigger and heavier pipes over there.
Also true though, with the access road, on this side there was more going on to trip over. After Conn had cast the next three metres of topsoil over the fence the geotextile had to be laid and then stone would be carried up in dumpers and spread and compacted. The pipelayers had to live with this and work their trench. They had to lay bedding, butt weld pipe lengths, lay pipe, cover pipe to 15cm, lay warning tape, backfill, compact, and all this according to Specification, to Harry the Clerk of Works’ precious spec. The idea of compacting the backfill when it was this wet was a joke. Put the wacker plate on that stuff and it just went – brrrp – down through it.
Healey’s men, Trots and Jinkie who had survived from the Black Isle, along with JB and Tammas who were new, shovelled gravel bedding into the trench. They pushed it round the outside of the pipe and against the trench and filled up above it.
Back aching, JB looked up to see Conn’s machine crest the hill and start downwards, up to the hubs in mud with a bow wave folding out in front and the weighted mass of the thing sliding from side to side as it descended. Conn behind the glass had a frown etched so deeply between his eyes JB could make it out through rain speckled glasses.
‘What you looking at?’ Tammas asked.
‘A robotic dinosaur looking dangerously uncontrollable and it’s coming our way.’
‘Huh?’
Suddenly their hand dug drains were overcome as a flush of muddy water ran down and spilled into the trench.
‘Out of this,’ JB said, stepping on the pipe, the bedding and the first layer of backfill to get out and join the other two at the wayleave fence. Conn brought the machine slithering to a halt only two metres short and half stood at his seat to peer across at the new road.
‘What’s he looking there for?’ JB asked. ‘The troops are offski. Unlike us they know when they’ve had enough.’ He took off his glasses and wiped rain and sweat from the lenses. ‘Useless,’ he muttered. ‘I can hardly see.’
‘We’re paid on the metre laid,’ said Trots. ‘One more and we’re offski too.’
JB was intent on the driver’s face.
‘He’s going to strip the soil back? In this rain?’
‘What if he is?’
‘Ho, Conn! Are you going …? He can’t hear me’.
JB stepped ankle deep along the wayleave, the mud deepening as he climbed, sucking on his wellies and through them to haul at his calves and thighs. He stopped when it began to spill over on to his socks and signalled to Conn. The driver climbed from his cabin and onto a track. Holding on to the door handle he leaned outwards.
‘What?’
‘Don’t strip the topsoil now. By the time the troops come back it’ll be saturated. I mean – tomorrow, overnight rain’
Conn waved his mobile phone. ‘Kelly says.’
‘Use your bucket here. Push the firmer stuff up into a bund above the trench.’
‘Bund?’ Conn shook his head.
‘Bund, wall, dyke, I mean a barrier. Look, I’ll show.’
JB waded downhill again and made shaping gestures with his two hands uphill of the trench. Conn nodded and climbed back into his cabin and fired up the machine. With JB directing him he used the bucket to push the drier loose material into a sort of wall that ran diagonally across the line of the trench. When it was complete it captured the flow of muddy rainwater that streamed downhill and directed it across to the side of the wayleave where it ran down onto Trots and Jinkie and round their feet.
‘That won’t last forever but we’ll get another pipe length in and backfilled and then, as Trots puts it, we’re offski.’
‘Telling Conn was my job.’ Unhappy Trots stepped out from the wayleave fence. ‘I’m the ganger.’
‘You didn’t think of it,’ said JB.
‘You should have asked me first. Always ask me first.’
‘It was JB thought of it,’ Tammas said in his innocence. ‘It’s always him that thinks of things.’
‘There’s ways things are done.’
‘And there’s better ways,’ Tammas said.
‘Will I hit you with this shovel?’
The bedding was a round pea-shaped gravel that rolled before the backs of their shovels and tumbled down into the trench. Tammas and Jinkie jumped down to level it before the next length of pipe; now they stood below ground to their waists with the cold, saturated dirt sides of the trench still standing firm although oozing muddy water.
‘The quicker the better,’ JB told them.
They spread the gravel evenly across the trench floor first with their shovels then with the sides of their boots.
‘Look down there,’ said Trots. ‘Harry. The last guy we need right now.’
At the foot of the hill the Clerk of Works was speaking to Trevor.
‘Harry’s pretty animated,’ JB mused, ‘At this early stage of proceedings he’ll want to show who the boss is.’
Below them Harry took off his safety helmet and ran his hand over the back of his head. Tonsured and bare the stubble around it swirled in a bristly, natural circle.
‘It’s like a monkey’s arse,’ said Trots.
‘A chimpanzee’s,’ JB corrected. ‘Monkeys have tails.’
‘Look you �
��’
‘They’re coming up. C’mon, let’s get the pipe in and covered.’
Together they rolled in the next pipelength leaving its leading end curling up and out of the trench ready for the next butt weld. They shovelled in the top bedding, JB objecting when Trots wanted to skimp and get on.
‘Make sure there’s plenty on,’ JB said. ‘Look down now. They’re close.’
Harry was leading the two others up hill, stopping twice to push in hand pegs.
‘Know what the pegs mean?’
‘Trial holes,’ said Jinkie. ‘Like on the Black Isle.’
‘And they’re still putting those pipes right,’ said JB.
‘No matter,’ said Trots. ‘We got paid and we’re still here.’
Harry was fitter than Trevor in spite of his years. He arrived first.
‘Aye right,’ he said.
‘These young guys,’ said JB. ‘They can’t cut it.’
Harry didn’t respond.
‘You flaming well backfilled all this without me seeing,’ he said. ‘I don’t think you’ve laid it to specification. I want trial holes hand dug down there. I want to see the bedding.’
‘Hand dug?’
‘Aye.’
‘Now?’
‘Aye now.’
‘After we finish this backfill we’re for the off,’ said Trots.
Another curtain of rain and hail mixed blew in from the sea, a wicked whipping wave that stung their faces, that forced them to turn their backs to it and speak across their shoulders. Trevor arrived and faced it for just a moment and then gave in. As they faced inland to Struie and the Sutherland hills the rain lashed against their helmets and the upturned collars of their donkey jackets and ran down their necks and the backs of their legs.
Conn in his waterproofs walked past them and downhill on the other side of the wayleave.
‘Enough is enough,’ he said. ‘See you back at the hut.’
‘This weather,’ Harry said to Trevor, ‘is made for haste and corner cutting, and men make mistakes when they’re this miserable. It all,’ he indicated the pipeline, ‘has to be proved’.
‘Can’t this wait until morning?’
‘I guarantee there’ll be the full 15cm all round the pipe in these positions come the morning. The spec has to be proved now.’
‘You’re saying these men will dig the holes before you get here and fake the bedding?’ Trevor said angrily.
‘Know how many minks in a mink coat?’ JB asked Tammas.
‘The full 15cm all round, is all I want. That and to be sure.’ He kicked at a length of black pipe. This stuff’s plastic, only the bedding protects it. The strength is in the gravel’
‘You’re saying we’d lie?’
‘Don’t come the injured innocent with me.’
‘Between 80 and 100,’ JB said. ‘Mink I mean, not centimetres. Know how many donkeys in a donkey jacket?’
Trevor ignored JB and Tammas. ‘We won’t cheat you, Harry,’ he said, appeasing. ‘All you have to do is be here for the excavation and you’ll see for yourself. 7:30am.’
The muscles around Harry’s eyes took a stubborn set.
‘Tell you what,’ said Trevor. ‘I’ll get John Kelly himself up here in the morning. Trots!’
‘Yo ho.’
‘Assign one of these three to help John.’
‘Assign?’
‘He means get one of us to dig the holes by hand while Kelly looks on meaningfully,’ said JB. ‘Just the one, by the way.’
‘Just one,’ Tammas repeated, at first puzzled. ‘Donkey you mean.’
‘Okay,’ said Trots. ‘You do it, JB.’
‘Hard labour. Sure you want both holes dug, Mr Clerk of Works?’
‘Don’t speak back,’ said Harry, too fiercely. ‘You’re not even a ganger.’
‘I know it.’
‘I’ll help,’ said Tammas.
‘We’re soaked to the skin anyway,’ said JB. ‘Why don’t we do one now, the other in the morning? If it’s okay that’s it. Which it will be, is.’
‘If the bedding is out of spec,’ Harry held a warning finger in the air, swung it downwards along the line of the laid pipe, ‘that lot is coming out and going in again.’
‘There’s a bus going to go over it?’ asked JB. ‘Here?’
‘It’s to be to spec. That’s what’s we’re paying for.’
‘Come back in an hour,’ said JB. ‘Tammas and I will have it exposed and we’ll be standing to eager attention.’
‘Now we go?’ Jinkie asked Trots.
‘Back to the hut.’ To JB he said, ‘You’re full of ideas. This for your clever lip.’
‘Just the friendly malice of a respectful underling.’
JB chose the topmost to dig at, half way down the hill.
‘How come?’ Tammas pushed the edge of the shovel into the ground and pressed down with the sole of his boot. ‘We know it’s light on bedding here. Trots wanted to get on.’
‘That’s right,’ said JB. ‘Trot’s commitment to the People doesn’t extend to giving them their money’s worth.’
He took his place beside Tammas, both with their backs to the wind and to the sea. He put his boot to the shovel and turned the first ground. ‘You’re a good bloke, Tammas,’ he said. Funny how we get on. Opposites, I guess.’
The ground being already broken, and none too well compacted, the backfill moved easily for them. Their shovels went hishsht hishsht as they pressed the blades home, shshloop as the wet ground gave way. It stuck to the blades when they turned the shovels over so they had to shake it loose, the weight of clay straining across their lower backs and in their shoulders and thighs.
‘Why show Harry the worst bit?’ asked Tammas.
‘Because it’s also the shallowest and we can get down quickest. Because we can fake it up and fool him. Because he might insist on another trial and if someone else such as Kelly digs here he might not fake it, or might not get the chance because Harry will be standing by.’
‘You never stop thinking.’
‘I don’t, but for all that I’m humble.’
‘You won’t stay in this game. Something better will come along and you’ll go.’
‘Hope so.’
‘Take me with you.’
‘I’ll do that. You can be my driver, my chauffeur.’
‘Great. Better than this.’
‘We’re down. Look, there’s the yellow warning tape.’
They dug along the pipe length for a metre and across its width. Trots had only put in 5 or 6cm of bedding, well light of spec. They dug with the rain rattling on their safety helmets and the sweat running inside their oilskins, inside their donkey jackets and working shirts, running in rivulets along the natural creases of their bodies. They brought more bedding from uphill on the blades of their shovels held level and packed it down the sides of the pipe until the width was the full 15cm and more and then they spread it along the top.
‘That’s it,’ said Tammas.
‘Not quite,’ said JB. ‘Watch.’
Standing on the fresh bedding he dug into the trench at each end of their excavation, tunnelling over the pipe so he could pack more bedding in. Then he piled more earth around the opening. The new bedding was muddied by their boots and so didn’t look fresh. Outside the trench again they had ten minutes to wait for Harry.
‘If he comes back,’ said Tammas.
‘He’ll come back.’
‘Want a drink?’
‘You got a drink?’
Tammas undid his oilskin and pulled a quarter bottle from his donkey jacket.
‘Vodka,’ he said. ‘No smell.’
He took off his glove, unscrewed the cap and wiped the opening with the palm of his hand and offered it.
‘Take it by the neck.’
JB looked at it for a long time.
‘Ah God,’ he said, took it and drank from it and handed it back for Tammas to drink from also and put away.
‘There’s
a bit of you likes this work,’ said Tammas.
‘There’s not a bit of me likes this work but there’s maybe a bit of me a masochist.’
‘What’s a masochist?’
‘No matter. I’m being punished for things I did in a previous life. Some ways it’s good to be at the bottom of the pile. The only way is up.’
‘There’s worse places than this,’ said Tammas. ‘But you’re going to bounce, JB. The way you can talk you won’t stay here. Don’t forget I was your friend.’
‘I won’t forget, Tammas. You’re one of the best. Look, Harry’s back on the hill. He’ll be here in a minute.’
‘Everything’s okay. You thought of everything.’
‘Yes? We’ll dance for him though. When he whistles we’ll dance. It’s all about hierarchies really. We’re below Trots and Jinkie although they’re nothing because they don’t think. Trots has grievance where his brainbox should be. We’re all four of us below Healey and Kelly and Harry but for us it all turns on Kelly and the Clerk of Works and so we dance for them. They’re below Mac and the RE and they’re below Swannie and this guy Sir Graham Russell or whatever he’s called and he’s below whoever pays the bills and they all dance for whoever is above.’
‘And whoever pays the bills is below the Queen and she’s below God. That’s how it’s supposed to be, JB. We’re the bottom of the pile. We’re just shite.’
‘Worse than that, Tammas. We are the heavy sediment of the shite. Verily we are the very crème de la crème of the faecal matter, except where it floats we have sunk. Here’s Harry now. He can’t like this any more than we do.’
Harry arrived and looked at the two half drowned wretches who had been washed up on the shoreline of his life. He looked into the hole and jumped down and scraped at the gravel bedding with the side of his foot until the warning tape was exposed. Seeing the tape JB remembered it should have been on top. He should have cut it away and replaced it on top according to spec. From this Harry would know they had filled above it with extra bedding.
The Clerk of Works kept scraping until he reached the top of the pipe. He took a wooden rule from his pocket and placed it on top, marking the top of the bedding level with his thumb. When he looked at it closely it was 14cm. Even allowing for the blunder with the warning tape they were still one centimetre short. JB drew in his breath. The cold must have addled his brains.
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