Site Works

by Robert Davidson

  ‘That reminds me,’ said Tammas. ‘John Kelly says his prick is twelve inches long but he doesn’t use it as a rule.’

  ‘Funny? Don’t try to be,’ said Harry. ‘Pass me that shovel.’

  Harry took Tammas’s shovel without looking up and dug into the wall of earth above the pipe at the low end of the trench. The bedding was the full 15cm where JB had faked it but Harry kept digging until he found the original 6cm. He leaned the shovel against the trench wall and crouched on his hunkers and looked at it.

  JB ran his wet sleeve across his nose and thought about lifting and relaying the pipeline. The welded polyethylene, now a single unit, would all have to come out. It couldn’t be just a length. With the ground turned over it would take twice as long or three times. There would be no extra money. The whole job would be set back by days, weeks if the Clerk of Works was going to be difficult. The wind cut through him but he shuddered as much with apprehension as with the cold.

  Harry straightened up and kicked some of the backfilled earth down over the pipe. He looked into the distance, into the rain as it swept along the glen from the sea and then down the wayleave to the road and the mist above the river.

  The wayleave was tidy enough given the conditions. Would having the pipe out make the job better or worse in the long run? He could stand on the spec, of course. It was the right thing to do, but the whole place would be turned upside down and no one would thank him. It would do no real good. Then there was the human factor.

  JB and Tammas had tried to cheat him but so what? Caught out, they were that much less likely to try again.

  He climbed out of the trench and looked at the two of them blue tinged by the freezing wind and soaked through and shivering. Poor sods, they looked half dead. Further up the hill the sheep still had their green stained rumps to the wind, taking it. The men were worse off than the sheep if only because they understood.

  JB had been right earlier. There would be no bus running over this pipe. Standing on principle now was pointless. He had made his mark with the sub-agent. The job wasn’t up to spec but it would be adequate. It would do. Like the men.

  ‘That’s okay,’ he said wearily. ‘Fill it in.’

  ‘Okay Harry.’

  ‘In future don’t backfill without permission.’

  ‘No Harry.’

  ‘I want to see every pipe as it goes in.’

  ‘Yes Harry.’

  ‘You’d better get back to the compound. Get washed. Get something to eat.’

  ‘Thanks, Harry.’

  They made their way downhill together to the road and went their own ways. JB and Tammas went back to the compound to do as Harry had said and get away early. Harry went back to the hut he shared with the RE to tell him the pipeline was within spec knowing he had applied his own values to prove its adequacy. Everything was in its place according to the larger specification, the one that time and life had taught him.

  It was okay because he said so, because his experience and humanity were truer than the printed word however legally absolute. When he reported to Allan Crawford he would give him his place and so prove his own. Allan would colour in his wall plan to signify the job was done and eventually let GR know through his reports.

  First though, Allan would call Trevor and Trevor would tell Mac. Mac would include this length of pipeline in his next valuation. GR would recommend payment and the Client would pay. This way reporting and acceptance and reward would go along the line. Not as far as the Queen but possibly, yes, maybe, God.

  6

  There’s a grip squad coming

  Hovering about thirty metres above the site Mac looked down first on the Ness septic tank and the new pipeline leading from it towards the compound. He moved his eye southwards along the line until it came to the Collection Chamber and saw that it was the crux not only of the Works, when they were built, but of the Contract. Everything passed through this point, the untreated sewage from Struie which would come tumbling downhill from the new culvert, the sewage from Ness. Their work all radiated from this point because the combined flow entered a larger pipe and from there ran into the two circular settlement tanks that were being constructed now and, thereafter, to the sea. He blinked and the layout plan he had been staring down on became once again just a plan.

  At the window of his hut he looked out on the reality. James Swann had pointed out that the Contract duration was eight months but that Strath Construction, under Ewan Matheson, had programmed for six. Sime Atwood would achieve substantial completion in four. Mac had learned not to protest. He had been humiliated in front of the men too often and the more experienced knew beyond doubt, as he did, that what was happening would eventually propel him down the road. Not Trevor though, still an idealist, nor Allan with the dew of morning across his whole being.

  Now James had cranked up the site’s resources to the point where they were falling over each other. The men were working under lights, Mac and Trevor were staying on late to decide the rapid day to day changes that had to be made in the light of events, to keep records up to date, and to project their thinking into the future.

  Between here and Struie Healey’s men had completed the uphill pipelines in torrential rain leaving a mess of enormous proportions behind them. This side was worse because the ground was steeper, the pipes were larger, and the squad was more slapdash. On the Struie side casting outside the wayleave had saved the day; that and the haul road which had a stabilising effect and the squad with the new man, JB, and his natural organisation in it. Conn was still up top, excavating for the first length of culvert, which meant that James Swann had hired in another excavator and driver for the pipeline from Ness. Six of Healey’s men were working on it now with the Clerk of Works standing by their shoulders breathing fire and Trevor, at this moment, standing in apparent despair.

  He had also hired in another crane to work on the tanks with the staff joiners. Derek and his boy were tying reinforcement steel on the tank bases now, glad to be earning again, keeping at it. The staff joiners were leisurely as ever, erecting the curved formwork that Swann had invested in, hopeful of the following Contracts. JB and Tammas laboured to them, JB impatient with their lack of urgency. Soon he would be a foreman, in time a general foreman, new as he was to the job and having made such progress. When the culvert was done Conn would come back to the main site and the other machines would be shipped out.

  That left John Kelly and the nipper, Ikey, the only local start the Contractor had made and that to conform to the letter of the contract. Nip here, nip there, nip all about, he cleaned the men’s hut as far as Kelly would allow, and went for messages. Not good for much what he did he did thoroughly, the wee man. Ikey limped from hut to hut avoiding John Kelly’s eye, but with no worries at this time since John was receiving a load of steel piles for the Collection Chamber, calling the new crane across to lift them from the flat lorry to lie beside Paul’s peg marking the Chamber centre. James was not bringing in a piling squad. Kelly could do it, he said. He’s experienced enough. By the look of the piles they were far from new. All were rusted and dirty, some obviously twisted and unusable. John stood above them shaking his head.

  Beyond the legalities of putting all of the A9’s traffic onto one carriageway and then switching it to the other, no provision had been made for laying the pipes under the road, presumably in a deep, closely piled trench. When Mac asked him James had said he had not yet made up his mind about method.

  Over at the Ness end of the job Trevor looked at his watch and returned to the hut for their valuation meeting with Allan. He entered and hung his helmet behind the door. A likeable lad, Mac thought, he had redrawn the programme and would present it to Allan later. ‘There’s a natural law involved,’ he said. ‘Deluge when you least want it. It can feel like a conspiracy.’

  ‘But we’re ahead of programme, even the new version.’

  ‘We’ve pressured up on the programme, sure, but look at the hill on this side when you leave. A wrong st
ep and you’re in up to the thigh. It’s going to take years to settle, and Conn couldn’t separate the topsoil the way he should so it’s mixed with the gritty stuff below. That means when we reseed it’s going to grow in patches. We’ll be coming back for years. Before then though, if it rains again like it did before, the surface is going to come sliding down onto the road.’

  ‘The Authority wanted it done quickly,’ said Trevor, enamoured with the idea of progress.

  ‘And we’re going even faster because James wants to impress and reckons speed and cost are the most persuasive arguments when it comes to winning the following contracts. That’s where his head is now, pricing the Lochdon contract. If we’d waited three weeks we could have laid those pipes in the dry.’

  ‘You couldn’t tell how long the rain would last.’

  ‘That’s what James said,’ said Mac, noting the echo. They had been speaking separately, no doubt in Trevor’s innocence. ‘He called me this morning to say there’s a grip squad coming to build the culvert. So, that’s one mystery solved. You won’t know what the grip is. The name goes back to when the tax man was more easily fooled and the grip was a lump sum paid on the QT. The labourer, joiner, miner, whatever, agreed a sum to do the job and did it, gripped the money and left. Nothing passed through the books. Often these would be the dirty jobs, or dangerous. They’ll be quick all right. They’ll also be hard, physically tough. They’ll be uncompromising where money is concerned.

  At that moment Allan Crawford drew in, approaching from the south. That meant he had been to Brora for the buns. Like his predecessor on the Black Isle job he had taken that responsibility. Punch the air.

  7

  A velvet glove

  The chill was barely off the air in the hut when Paul arrived. Ikey should have turned on the bar at 7:30am, but twenty minutes later the window was still rimed with frost. Paul’s first move was to check the kettle was free of ice and switch it on.

  He undid his trousers and stepped out of them, folded them onto the end of the table and pulled on his cold working jeans. He took off his good shirt and pulled on the old one he was wearing on site this week and an old pullover that was holed at the elbow and frayed at the cuffs. Sitting down on one of the hut’s two chairs he pulled his thick working socks over the socks he was wearing. He pulled on his wellies and turned the muddy socks down over the tops.

  His jeans were stiff with the clay they picked up on site, clay that overnight had froze rigid. The wellies were worse because by the time he got back in to the hut, two days before, he had been too fed up to take a newspaper to them. Yesterday, Wednesday, he had been at day release in Inverness and spent the afternoon in the pub.

  The kettle came to the boil and he poured hot water into his mug and dipped a tea bag. It was still dark outside. He checked his watch – 7:55am, almost start time – and sat down again, clasping the mug in his two hands against his chest, crossing his legs tight against the cold.

  He looked around him at the broken down drawing table and the dented-in-the-middle filing cabinet, at the floor that was piled with dried clay from his boots and from John Kelly’s. As long as Paul was working on the high culvert the place wasn’t cleaned out. John should be taking a brush to the floor from time to time, except it was beneath him. That was Ikey’s job, but Ikey was out of sorts since John had rousted him from his hidey hole in the cludge and called him ‘a humphy backit wee shite’, and John would accept such squalor before he would lift a finger. Paul drank deep from his mug and closed his eyes as the agent’s car drew up. Inevitably, Mac looked in.

  ‘You should be topside with old hookey-nose by now,’ he said.

  Paul got up and swallowed the last of his tea. He took the tripod legs from the corner and stood them on the floor, snapped open the theodolite case on the table and screwed the instrument to the top of the legs.

  ‘If you’re going to carry that out of its box you’ve to hold it vertical. Keep the weight off the screws. Fixing costs money.’

  ‘Okay’.

  ‘You might as well stay up there till the light goes. That should see you back here about 4:30pm. You can tackle the Plant Returns. That should keep you going until 5:30. Tell Jimmy Gillies he’s to meet me here first thing in the afternoon with his measure.’

  ‘I’ll tell him.’

  Mac went off to his own hut where the heaters would have been on all night.

  Paul checked the left pocket of his donkey jacket to make sure his survey book was still there and dropped his iPod into the other. He took the tripod legs by the adjustment screws and hoisted them awkwardly so they leaned almost vertical against his chest with the heavy weight of the instrument at the top. Carrying this way meant he would have one hand free and could shift the weight from one side to the other as he went. He swung his shoulder bag round back, plonked his safety helmet on his head and set out across the compound, across the road and onto the hill to climb the wayleave.

  The gravity sewer had already been laid to the top where, eventually, sewage pumped across from Struie would spill in from the culvert the grip squad was building now. Paul walked close to the fence that kept the hill sheep and the cattle out of the works and the troops in, but whenever he was forced away from it he would sink into the churned surface and mud would squelch up over his boots, dirty water splashing as high as his face. Counting fence posts he forced himself to cover ten metres before resting and changing shoulders until, at the top of the slope, the view opened out on to the mountains and the ground was still unturned and firm underfoot. It was almost 9:00am.

  He stopped by the wooden peg he had established on the centre line of the culvert and looked across the hill to the mounds of earth and the excavator and the crane. On either side of the wayleave were patches of snow that had caught the windblown dirt and was streaked by it. He set the instrument up over the peg and focussed the telescope on the excavation.

  Beside the excavator was the compressor that fired the concrete vibrators that were used during concrete pours, and the lights and generator that hadn’t worked for the whole duration of the job and that Mac had so far refused to replace in spite of Paul’s reports.

  Willie Quinn walked into the crosshairs from behind the crane, waving his arm and shouting, the telescope bringing him up close. Paul couldn’t yet hear him, only recognise the joiner’s powerful build below his check overshirt, his impatient expression below his woolly hat.

  From the far side of the hill, the Struie side, the haul road ran to the top and along as far as the works. The grip squad would have set out from the bottom about the time he arrived at the hut. They would have come up along the haul road with torches, timing their arrival at the culvert for just before first light.

  Paul aimed the telescope past the excavation to where he had established another setting-out peg, driven it deep and concreted it in place. He focussed the instrument precisely on the nail head so that it made a little grey ‘tee’ in the cross hairs. That done he turned 45 degrees to a boulder he had marked with a yellow chalk patch. The pencil mark on the patch matched the cross hairs perfectly. Pegs, instrument and line were all okay and could be trusted.

  ‘Where you been, wee man?’ Willie had reached him, slightly breathless.

  ‘It was like walking on a sponge.’

  ‘Give me that thing. I’ll carry it now.’

  ‘Are you stopped?’

  Jimmy Gillies wouldn’t like it if they couldn’t get on. Normally Paul would give the next day’s setting-out before he left, but he had been in college, or should have been.

  Willie picked up the instrument, hoisted it on to his shoulder in exactly the correct way and set off along the hilltop. Paul half-walked, half-jogged beside him, his unburdened feet springing on the firm turf. When they reached the excavation Willie opened the legs over Paul’s temporary peg, allowing the instrument to lean over at an almost jaunty angle. Paul righted it quickly.

  ‘No time for that,’ Jimmy Gillies called from below. ‘Give us this
mark now so I know we’ve got it. You might get called away.’

  Paul stood on the edge of the excavation and looked down on the gang leader’s lean frame. As thin as Willie was wide Jimmy was nonetheless strong. His forehead was broad above cavernous cheeks, his huge nose, said Willie behind his back, like the prow of an ocean liner. As usual he wore an old khaki jacket from Army Surplus over his boiler suit. He stood on one leg with the other knee bearing down on a length of two by two and a wooden frame. Guiding the blade of his saw along the knuckle of his thumb he made his first cut of the day. When he looked up their eyes met.

  ‘Called away?’ asked Paul.

  Jimmy jerked a thumb behind him at the concrete culvert.

  ‘Called away, down the road, sacked, call it what you like. This is taking four times as long as it should. Swannie’s breathing down Mac’s neck and he needs a scapegoat. What will you do if you lose this job?’

  Paul shook his head.

  ‘Who knows?’

  ‘You’ll end up with one of these round your waist.’

  Jimmy Gillies shook his apron so the nails rattled together.

  ‘You’ll end up working outside in all weathers, always looking for the next job. Believe me, you don’t want that.’

  As a matter of fact, he did. The grip squad was happy in the teeth of foul weather and set backs. They worked for each other and looked after each other and when he was with them they looked after him as well. He liked them and admired then more than he respected Mac or John Kelly or even Swannie, although the Agent and the Contracts Manager should be his models, and the GF should be his guide.

  In the excavation they were preparing for the next wall pour. They had cast the base Tuesday and stripped the shuttering Wednesday, while he was away. Three double lines of starter bars stood up from the two wall kickers. Jimmy had cracked the previous wall shutters, ready to move them forward. Cammy, the third joiner, was untying bunches of reinforcement steel and checking the labels.