Site Works

by Robert Davidson

  ‘Careful JB.’ Forgotten Tammas was standing nearby, Trots and Jinkie glancing warily from the other side of the tank base.

  ‘You lahk this work?’

  ‘Hard labour and I were made for each other but I admire also the organisation and foresight the likes of Mister Swann and yourself demonstrate day by day. How do you do it?’

  ‘You’re being sarcastic.’

  ‘Bought the next job yet?’

  ‘Bought it? Think you’ll be on it?’

  ‘Now I had no difficulty understanding that,’ said JB. ‘You can do it if you try.’

  He pushed the pinch bar under the strap and prised it upwards and again the strap splintered.

  The fitter didn’t appear until 2:00pm and it took him an hour to get the batcher working. Trevor called the troops back into their own hut.

  ‘Swannie’s breathing fire,’ he told them. ‘We’re going ahead right now.’

  ‘We’ll finish in darkness,’ said Trots. ‘It’ll mean overtime.’

  ‘You’ll get paid. When the pour is done Conn will drive you all back to Inverness as per usual. JB and Tammas can stay on and finish the top surfaces.’

  ‘In the dark, and how do we get back?’

  JB as usual asked the questions, Tammas being an accepting sort. Trots and Jinkie were diplomatically silent.

  ‘Paul will stay on. He’ll sit in Conn’s cab and shine the headlight down.’

  ‘The headlight? The one headlight?’

  ‘That’ll be enough. Then he’ll drive you back.’

  ‘Lets start,’ said Lammerton. ‘I’ll get the batcher going. Jinkie can help me. Trots!’

  ‘Yo ho.’

  ‘You drive the dumper.’

  Back at the settlement tank JB and Tammas stood by the crane, ready to step across the gangway on to the steel shutter. Conn sat in his cab smoking. Chains hung from the jib to the elbow shaped concrete skip resting on the ground in front of his machine. From his high position he could see Trots driving down from the batcher, the dumper bouncing from side to side and the first batch of concrete swilling about.

  ‘Bloody dangerous machines,’ he mouthed.

  Trots parked the dumper by the crane and hauled back on the tipping handle. The dumper skip lifted and concrete poured into the concrete skip. JB and Tammas held the backs of their shovels at the edge, directing the sides of the flow, preventing spillage as best they could. They stepped on to the shutter and when Conn had swung the skip across JB steadied it with his shoulder, grabbed the handle and opened the chute.

  Wet concrete, plastic, flowed downwards into the shutter opening. He pushed the handle down again and cut off the flow. Tammas banged the poker against the side of the shutter and it started up with a high-pitched whine. He dropped it into the shutter and saw the concrete slump downwards, watched while air bubbles rose to the surface and a thick grey cream formed on top. JB opened the skip again and let the rest of the load flow out. ‘Beautiful in its way,’ he said. ‘Right down to the bottom with the poker, Tammas, we don’t want honeycombing at the joint.’

  Tammas let the hose run through his hand until the poker met the hard. Another moment and he drew it out to drop it again further along. By now Trots was coming back with the second load and when that was in they got both pokers going.

  They worked through what was left of the afternoon and into the dark, watching the sun pass low in the sky to eventually disappear behind the hill. It might have been descending into Struie and on to the RE’s hut for all they could tell. The temperature plummeted and Paul went back to his hut for a second pullover. At these times he was worst off of them all since he had to stand by his level and couldn’t move and burn energy and so be warm. They all knew this, although they also knew he had a future or at least the possibility of one.

  When the shutter was full and the concrete vibrated into place with all the trapped air freed and the smell of cement everywhere Jimmy Gillies and Paul checked the shutter’s line and level by torchlight. Willie and Cammy made the few necessary adjustments to the props and were finished. Trots and Jinkie also were finished. Conn left the keys of his cab with Paul and drove them away and then Paul and JB and Tammas were alone. The compressor was off and Conn’s machine barely turning over for the sake of the light although the moon was out for once, and stars so bright they could almost have done the job under natural light alone.

  JB had brought the trowels and floats down in two buckets. Their job now was to level the concrete top of the wall and make it smooth and finished to Class C as Harry the Clerk of Works would agree conformed to spec. They had to use the metal trowel to dig away the excess concrete and make the first surface, then the wooden float to bring up the cream and then the metal float to smooth and polish.

  JB and Tammas got down on their hands and knees while Paul looked on, digging and flicking with the trowels making thik and tuk and tch noises and not speaking to each other until they were properly going. The night air was still and there were no other sounds but occasional passing traffic on the road and the sounds of the shore below, waves on the shingle, oystercatchers, a curlew.

  The two of them worked their way along the wall head taking the concrete level down, chapping it with the trowel edges to leave it like a ploughed field viewed from the air and, when they were done, taking the wooden floats and starting again, pushing the wooden plaque down flat on the wet surface, using the natural suction to draw up the mortar, sand and water mix, the cream.

  ‘How long you gonna be?’ Paul asked.

  ‘About an hour,’ JB told him from his knees. ‘Hear that, Tammas? The lad wants home. Must have a home to go to.’

  ‘Same as me, JB. I’ve got a home as well.’

  JB straightened up and rubbed at his back.

  ‘Just me, is it? I guess.’

  He went back to pushing the float down and pulling it up again and now the air was filled with shloop and thup noises. Paul looked down on the two backs lifting and falling, the shoulders and arms working.

  ‘Why’d you rub the new GF the wrong way,’ Paul asked.

  ‘Lammerton? What’s he trying to prove?’

  ‘John Kelly thought you could be a ganger. Maybe even a GF. Mac had his eye on you.’

  ‘Before he got whacked? Not much of a reference.’

  ‘He said you see further than most. Sometimes, he said, further than John Kelly.’

  ‘That would be difficult?’

  ‘Nothing wrong with John. He’s a good guy. Good to me. I don’t like to speak about him after what happened.’

  ‘Wake up, Paul. He broke every health and safety rule in the book. Worse than that, he showed no common sense. He was pressing on the way they do in this game. He took risk to keep Mac in with Swannie and now he’s lost three fingers and won’t be back and Mac is off the site and as good as down the road. And Swannie’s still king of the castle.’

  ‘You see further than most. Mac thought you could have been Agent if things had been different.’

  ‘That what you want to be, Paul, a site agent?’

  ‘I guess.’

  The two labourers were getting to the end of the wall head again but it was the last phase of finishing that would take the longest. The steel float made the final surface that had to be right and correct and absolutely level because this surface would be forever.

  ‘Feel the heat in the concrete, Tammas,’ JB said. ‘Lammerton’s put in too much cement and it’s going off too quick. We’ll need to finish and get it covered. Don’t want the frost to get in.’

  ‘We’ll do that.’

  They got to their feet and dropped the wooden floats into the buckets and got back on their knees and went at the wall head again with the steel floats. Now the noise they made was swoosh and swoosh as they made circular motions across the concrete surface, leaving it smooth and dead level between the two sides of the shutter. Tammas led from right to left making the first smooth surface and JB followed making the finish.

 
; ‘You going for a pint in Inverness, JB?’

  ‘Need it after this, Tammas.’

  ‘I wanted to ask you,’ Paul said. ‘Your name is George King. I saw it on the wages list.’

  ‘That is correcto.’

  ‘So, how come you’re called JB?’

  ‘Trots called me that when he found out. It stuck. It’s okay. It’s part of my afterlife. I accept. Tell him what it stands for, Tammas.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘It stands for Jail Bird,’ said Tammas.

  The two men had their heads down and their faces could not be seen.

  ‘Jail,’ JB repeated. ‘Bird.’

  Into the silence of the waves and the birds Paul said that he was sorry.

  ‘Tell him what I did, Tammas.’

  Swoosh.

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘The more often it’s out the sooner it’s over. The punishment I mean.’

  Swoosh.

  ‘He was an accountant. He dipped the till.’

  ‘In a manner of speaking. Not so literally. I did it once and did it again and got into the habit. I learned to spread my bets. Moving money around from client to client I stayed ahead of the game for a couple years. That’s it, Paul. It’s dead simple. Listen, Paul, I’m on my knees here. I’m confessing again. I can’t do enough confessing.’

  Once again into the silence of the waves and the birds Paul said that he was sorry.

  ‘But he’s rising again,’ Tammas said, ‘and when he does that wife and kids is going to come back. That’s what you want, isn’t it?’

  ‘Don’t stop floating, Tammas. Don’t slow down. Keep smoothing this thing over. Don’t let it go off on us.’

  ‘And he’s going to get out of that rented flat and into his own place.’

  ‘That slum,’ JB said.

  ‘When some kind of opportunity comes up he’s going to take it with both hands.’

  ‘The punishment doesn’t finish when you come out,’ JB said over his shoulder. ‘It goes on in the names people call you and in the way they don’t trust you any more.’

  ‘I trust you, JB,’ Tammas said. ‘You’re going to get on again and I’m going to come with you. You’ll take me with you, won’t you?’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘You’ll be rich again and I’ll drive your car and make your coffee or whatever you want.’

  ‘That’s right, Tammas. We’ll live the life of Reilly or whoever it is. Not the life of Kelly. Ho ho. Or will we? Don’t even think it.’

  Swoosh.

  ‘Yet I never saw myself as rich. No sir, not even as well off.’

  The floats swept across the wall head. The shoulders worked from side to side but it was easier now.

  ‘They teach you about this stuff in the college? Meaning concrete.’

  ‘They teach the chemistry of it and the differences in the mixes and all that.’

  ‘You’ll need that qualification to be an agent I guess?’

  ‘Some people make it without.’

  ‘Not many. Most have a degree, don’t they? What you need is first to get that qualification and then get yourself to University and get that degree. That’s what you need to be like Mac and Swannie. Yes?’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘You’ll find your way. You’ve still got time.’

  Swoosh.

  Tammas came to the end of the wall head and stood up and dropped his steel float into the bucket.

  ‘I think about this stuff sometimes,’ JB said. ‘Concrete I mean. It’s a kind of miracle that it should flow the way it does, then go off and harden and be unchangeable short of the breaker. When we make these walls we make something that goes into geological time. When we bury it it’s in the ground for ever.’

  He made one last swipe along the wall head and rose to his feet. He dropped the steel float into its bucket and together, all three of them, they hauled the tarpaulin over the shutter to hold in the heat and to protect the top surface against a change in the weather and made their way back to the compound, to Paul’s car and the long road home, eventually the pub.

  14

  The first flower of spring

  Outside the window of the Resident Engineer’s new and well appointed hut, across the road in the verge, there bloomed a solitary harebell, the first of spring. Its blue head bowed by the wind, it shuddered in the slipstream of the site traffic and the traffic from the village of Struie as they passed. Allan Crawford placed his hands on the two sides of the window and leaned towards the glass to stare at the tiny perfect bell and the slender shepherd’s crook stem from which it depended.

  Harry was at the Struie Pumping Station excavation just a few metres to his left, looking down on Trots and Jinkie. Just out of sight he could enter the hut at any time. The grizzled oldster made him feel like a rookie without hope, a pale shadow unfit to shine the boots of the great Sir Graham Russell, the Almighty GR. At this moment Harry was the last man he wanted to appear.

  An hour earlier he had been putting the finishing touches to his monthly report when Trevor arrived with the latest valuation and dropped it on his desk. As usual he had turned to the last page first. His short experience had taught him the bullet list of variations would always hold some surprise. This month it was staggering. Every penny of cost for the tunnel had been included on top of the excavation figures. He flicked forward into the text and read the Contractor’s case for his claim and saw that his earlier work in making up the document, his office work, had been at fault.

  Putting the sheaf of papers down he noted his hand begin to tremble as Mac’s hand had trembled in the days before he was banished from the site, soon to depart the company and recently, if rumour was correct, the country. Reading from the screen of his laptop he amended the facts and figures he would send through to Vernon Street and that Vernon would pass to GR.

  He extracted from Harry’s notes and, where appropriate, quoted from the Contractor’s letters. Adding a few comments of his own he realised he had nothing much to add unless it was an apology. Responsibility would rest with him and very likely he would soon follow Mac down the road.

  He scrolled back the report to headline with the essential figures and the essential fact. The Contract would be complete well ahead of programme but it was going to cost a lot more than the Client had budgeted for. The final valuation was going to go through the roof. The great wheels of circumstance and human error was about to run over the first flower of his career. He returned to his desk and attached the report to an email, crossed his fingers and pressed the send/receive. It was 11.00am.

  At 2.00pm he received a reply from Vernon. Brace yourself, it said, the Thunder God cometh.

  15

  Merciless with the lash

  ‘Our whole focus is on the tanks now.’

  Harry listened to Trevor, a man fully ten years younger than his own son, who might have been his grandson but for West Africa. In the confidence of his youth he had gone there to line his pockets as he could not do at home, and no ambition to change the world but in the hinterland a young engineer entered his life.

  They met in a portakabin much like Allan’s at Struie, Graham Russell’s blue eyes piercing his own across a desk covered in charts and sketches and sheaves of calculations, his plans for stabilising the sliding face of a deforested mountain. After, that is, the big excavators had cut the worst areas into shelves and the injecting plant had been trucked through the jungle. Mister Russell had refused all bribes and driven the works along the received wisdom of the only Bible either of them recognised, the Contract, and when the job was done had earned the right to be recognised simply by his initials, GR.

  His beautiful wife, Diane, had been a second heart beating beside GR’s own, another mind that detailed and organised what his own had no space to entertain. All those they met, the tribal leaders, the government officials and all of their women, fell into love or respect or both and she held them in the palm of her hand. Harry knew the
liar that time makes of memory, but she was an impossible goddess in his own, and he was still more than half in love.

  ‘Allan tells me he’s coming,’ Harry said.

  ‘I said our whole focus is on the tanks now. We have to get them closed and lined before the Plant Contractor arrives. They’re contracted to take three weeks and we have to be ready.’

  ‘You’re nowhere near ready.’

  ‘James has already asked them to delay for a week. No can do. He’s asked them to start at the near tank. Again it’s no can do. They say they’ll be falling over themselves. They say a contract is a contract.’

  ‘Swannie won’t like being told what a contract is.’

  ‘What it means is that we have to get the gas pedal down.

  ‘GR says haste is the enemy of quality.’

  ‘Whatever checks and tests you want you’ll get, but we have to get on, Harry. Merciless with the lash, as you never tire of saying.’

  ‘You think Alan Lammerton is up to it?’

  ‘James has already shot a rocket up poor Mr Lammerton.’

  ‘JB would do the job better. You could promote him?’

  ‘Too soon, James thinks. You were saying something else?’

  Harry took his camera from the pocket of his duffel coat and tugged the skip of his safety helmet down against a smir of rain.

  ‘I said Sir Graham will be visiting soon. I got it from Allan who got it from on high. The valuation has shot through the roof thanks to the tunnel. I think GR and your Mister James Swann will be having a little confrontation and I wouldn’t want to be in Swannie’s boots. Now I have to inspect Derek’s steel work ahead of the next pour. I’ll take some pictures while I’m at it.’

  With two further pours required to close the circle of Tank Two the grip squad were working into every night. Trots and Jinkie had already moved the lights and were filling the generator with diesel when Harry arrived with his camera. As the sun dropped behind the hills Jinkie turned the starter handle and the machine coughed and shuddered and the lights flickered on, off and on again. Willie Quinn stood on the wall head.