Site Works

by Robert Davidson

  ‘… never loved and never parted, we had ne’er been broken hearted.’

  So, it had all been illusion, and the reality was in the distance he had built between himself and his own family, his real family. That is, his family in the world of reality. How might it have been different if he had been without that great yearning? Now he realised that he had to separate the illusion from the memory and somehow hold on.

  His hand wandered to the loose flesh below his eye where Diana Russell had kissed him that afternoon at Kano Airport. It felt like a sting even then, leaving the skin for dead. It was something to hang onto though, a real memory, although memory was a lash and it was always merciless.

  16

  It’s the principal tool of my trade although I seldom use it

  Pitch black and the hotel’s heating full on it felt like waking in the bowels of the earth. GR checked his watch: 3:00am. The pouches of soft flesh below his eyes felt swollen and heavy, his finger joints thick with coming arthritis. He ran his fingertips across his face and down, through the dry, old man’s body hair that had grown stiffer as it grew the more grey. Sleep was ended for an hour, maybe two. To lie awake was to go over so many things and all of them repetitiously.

  He remembered in his office, at his desk, how the same fingertips ran down the spines of the Lochdon Contract Documents, now due for tender. Emma, his secretary, had placed them on his desk before opening his office door to leave. The same fingers had turned to the pipeline section and the road crossings and the items that covered excavation down through the road surface, the layers of bitumen and roadstone, their excavation, careful removal and costly replacement. The Ness and Struie document was open beside it but in the same section there were no such items, omissions which had survived all three proof readings.

  This was why James Swann had chosen to tunnel under the A9. The decision had nothing to do with traffic control or safety, nor the ducts. Stone-faced he had played his card and won and now would claim all the additional costs of tunnelling below the A9. His claim would take the final valuation of the contract far beyond the low priced items the ineffective, now dismissed, Strath Construction management team had priced. Forty years of experience in contract and claim told him James Swann had already won and he, yes, GR, had lost.

  Well I know you, Mr James Swann, he thought in the small-hours darkness of his hotel room. You’ve kept your secret close all this time and, yes, you are a strong one and clever.

  Emma had returned from her long weekend in France seemingly distracted, more morose even than usual. Things had perhaps not gone well. It was no great deduction that she was pining, or manipulating, or angling for a man, husband or live-in lover, or partner, or whatever such agreements were called these days. However modern woman looked on such matters it was a contract the same as all else, possibly written down and signed, perhaps merely spoken in private, maybe silent and unenforceable, but a contract nonetheless.

  Now thirty she would want this, and children. Likely the man was married and she was active in the breach of another contract, which would explain the foreign trips. It wasn’t for him to judge beyond their employer employee relationship. Besides, he felt himself past such breaches now.

  In the small hours he counted off the secretaries he had employed over the years. Two of them he had affairs with. The first, with Gail, had destroyed his marriage to Diane but he had made her his second wife and had his children with her. The second with (in the early hours he struggled to recall her name) Theresa, had been turbulence nothing more. Gail had let it run its course because she too was a strong one. They worked out their accommodations and silently, discreetly agreed to go their own ways in such matters and to mostly fulfil the contract of their marriage. Somewhere between the letter and the spirit they kept it in place. They adhered or at least observed. People with such common interests as children, inheritance, home and lifestyle, people with their intelligence worked things through. Nothing fundamental ever would or could be destroyed and while each of them recognised their common ends this would remain the salient fact.

  He swung his legs out of bed and tugged his robe from the door peg, pulling it on as he crossed the sweltering room to look on Brora’s empty Main Street. None of the houses had lights on. By God it was dark out there, cold winter with a smir of rain that thickened around the streetlights. Not good, not good, but he had known worse all over the world. He sat at the window table and opened his laptop and thought about the message he would send to his junior partner, Vernon Street, Vernon who was above all responsible for the omission of the road surface items. These things happen.

  Mistakes happen and someone has to pay. That’s why we have contracts.

  Should he send it now? He thought not. An email of such importance timed at 3:15am would look unconsidered although his mind was diamond hard as ever. On screen he flicked through Allan Crawford’s weekly reports. The boy was naïve but time would answer that. He could use him on the Lochdon contract and the contract following. He would do.

  He thought about the other thing. James Swann was 42 years of age, twenty years younger than he was himself and coming to his peak. His cold far-sightedness had given him the prize. It could do so again in future.

  Trevor stood at the corner filing cabinet watching Swannie at the window, looking past him as the sun separated itself from the North Sea horizon. Outside in the compound Derek the steelfixer and his boy were tidying the remaining reinforcement steel while Healey’s men emerged from their hut stamping their wellies to the ground and pulling on gloves as the sun’s low, slanting light scattered sparkle across frozen mud that soon would melt. Soon the contract would be substantially complete and he would have to lay them off and, having laid them off, might have difficulty getting the best of this team back together again.

  ‘When are you meeting Sir Graham?’

  ‘11:00am.’

  Swannie never showed emotion but it was impatience, a saw toothed aggravation with delay and lack of commitment. Commitment, he said over and over, that’s the name of the game. You had to care. You had to care the way he did. Trevor looked in wonder at the man’s indifference to personal comfort and rest. There was something there he hadn’t managed to put his finger on, something beyond work programmes and progress and cash flow.

  ‘Think he’ll resist the claim?’

  Silence.

  ‘I’ve been over the figures a hundred times,’ Trevor continued. ‘So long as the principle is accepted, that we had no instruction to go down through the road, and no obligation to discuss the contractual point, then the costs of the tunnel can all be drawn into the valuation. That puts 24% onto the contract price and, bingo, we have a profit element that beats the low tender price Strath Construction won the job with.’

  Swannie didn’t turn from the window, his steady eye on the men moving across frozen mud and broken stone. Trevor felt almost as if he was addressing an authority higher than flesh and blood, or perhaps lower.

  ‘There are two more jobs along the line and no doubt more to come after them. 24% is a whopping addition and it’s likely to mean the Engineer, I mean Sir Graham Russell personally, going cap in hand to the Client for funds. Believe me he won’t like it. If he digs in his heels there is a danger of arbitration and, believe me again, we don’t want that. The arbiters go through the records with a sieve and will note that we’ve had a serious industrial accident that cost John Kelly three fingers and a broken hip, a near thing with traffic control at the tunnel which went as far as the police, and official complaints about muddy run-off from the hill filling the A9 road drains. That’s the environmentalists, the Roads Department and the public all with their noses out of joint. We’d win, but would we work here again?’

  Swannie’s eyes hadn’t come off the men on their way to the new settlement tanks. The plant contractor’s van pulled in to the compound and his men tumbled out.

  ‘Our record doesn’t look too good and telling them we were changing the structure of
our team for the better all the while won’t cut any ice. If he plays hard ball you might have to revisit those figures and trim 5%, maybe more. If we want to price for Lochdon and after we might have to take the hit.’

  ‘Every possible cost cut is made,’ Trevor said. ‘We couldn’t be better placed to win Lochdon.’

  Swannie wasn’t listening. ‘Those missing road items are an embarrassment to him. The tunnel puts him on the spot but he doesn’t want arbitration either.’

  Alan Lammerton came into the hut to look at the tank plans, to check a size, and while the new GF was present they said nothing of higher matters, neither the money in bare figures, still less the principles. Trevor stood beside him at the spread open drawing and made the sketch required by the joiners. Swannie stood in brooding silence until he was gone.

  ‘Don’t tinker with the valuation. The Contract is on our side for once.’ He gestured out of the window at the compound, the stored materials and the men at their work. ‘Adhere to it’s every letter, Trevor. We’ll risk the next job and screw him anyway.’

  Harry looked down through the opening to the new Struie Pumping Station, hands clasped behind his back. Why did he feel this undercurrent of excitement, he wondered, at the coming of Sir Graham? Easily answered, he thought, it’s because the job in West Africa had been the best job of his life.

  Since parting at Kano Airport their lives had crossed several times and always they had recognised each other first through their shared experiences and trust. Their places within the industry were such they never met off site but the GR energy throbbed through his working life and it was a sort of love mixed with envy he felt, although he would not, could not, name it as such. For the last fifteen years he had worked for the Partnership.

  Downside the plant contractor was fitting out the new Pumping Station. JB and Tammas were labouring to them, carrying hooks and chains from their lorry to the derrick by the chamber opening. Acute to the demands of health and safety Harry’s eye searched out kick boards, counterweights, hard hats, second cables set against the breaking of the first. All were in place and the area was fenced and tidied as well as could be expected. For two days he had gone over the site with GR’s fabled fine-toothed comb and all was well, but how typical to be embarrassed this close to completion.

  Beyond the burdened Tammas GR’s car appeared around the fence and drew up, and when the Man emerged the throb became a surge because this was a power far beyond Harry, that controlled him but was for all that benevolent. Controlled him yes, although Harry could direct the power, as in choosing when to circumvent the letter of the contract and when not, the aggregate of his experience and wisdom instructing him so, GR trusting him so.

  ‘Harry!’

  ‘Sir Graham!’

  ‘No formalities, Harry. Not from you.’

  ‘Okay. GR.’

  They shook hands.

  ‘Thanks for going to Newtonmore at short notice.’

  ‘Pity I couldn’t have been in two places at once.’

  ‘The foreman’s accident? You would have caught all those safety misdemeanours. So would the RE if he had been more experienced.’

  No, thought Harry.

  ‘Still, he recorded it all very fully after the event and that’s what’s important.’

  No, again. He was hiding in the hut right through and got it all from Paul and Conn. What else would he do being weak and directionless?

  GR opened the boot of his car, and changed into wellies. He put on his hard hat.

  ‘Allan not coming out?’

  ‘He thought you’d go directly inside. He doesn’t know you.’

  They stepped across to the new Pumping Station reducing the troops to silence. Harry watched GR’s eyes flick from this place to that observing the quality of finishings, the adequacy of the fence, the ladder down into the dark and the torchlight where the sub-contractor was working below. The ladder was tied and safe.

  ‘Wait here’, GR said and first of all shouted then climbed down.

  JB and Tammas looked at each other.

  ‘No escape from detail’, Harry told them. ‘That’s what Sir Graham says. Good suit and all.’

  ‘Another Swannie then’, said JB.

  ‘Better.’

  Rising out of the Chamber there came voices, laughter. GR had his common touch still. He would have the men on his side but, even so, nothing would go past him unnoticed. Topside again, GR nodded in the direction of the RE’s hut.

  ‘How’s he doing?’

  ‘He leaves me to get on.’

  ‘Will he make it?’ This GR asked below his breath.

  ‘He wouldn’t have gone down into that Chamber. He didn’t go into the cofferdam, didn’t so much as look at the tunnel.’

  ‘He writes good, clear reports.’

  ‘He only sees the past. Present and future don’t figure.’

  ‘Let’s walk down the road a bit.’

  Side by side they looked all the while at the line of pipe JB and Tammas had laid and then, at the foot of the hill, the surface of the wayleave as it doglegged up to the plateau and the culvert the grip squad had fashioned. Here and there were runnels where the rain had turned to streams and carried away the thin topsoil even though JB had done a better job of directing it than could have been reasonably expected. GR frowned.

  ‘That can never be what it was.’

  ‘I’d say it’s as good as it can be given the weather the troops worked through.’

  ‘If you say so I’ll accept that – except the Contractor chose to proceed when he might have waited and that, very firmly, is their responsibility under the contract. The Ness side looks worse.’

  ‘Different squad, but also steeper ground.’

  ‘Roads aren’t pleased. Neither is the Environmental Agency.’

  Harry didn’t like this tack that might turn back on him.

  ‘The troops didn’t get the silt traps in before the damage was done. I was away.’

  Harry heard the whine in his own voice and hated it. Neither GR nor Swannie nor he believed in excuses.

  ‘Okay,’ GR said. ‘So no job is perfect and the conditions they had to work in were atrocious and the slopes would challenge a team of mountaineers. It could be worse. The Black Isle job was so lousy they’re still putting the pipelines right. There have been big changes since the takeover. If anything I’m surprised they took so long. Are these changes kicking in to the good? Is it better? What’s the word from the front line, Harry? If James Swann gets Lochdon will quality be better or worse?’

  ‘Everything is better. He’s shed the easy-lifers and brought in good grip men. Healey’s chancers are mostly found out and gone. He has better men on the job now, thinkers.’

  ‘No replacement for the Agent yet?’

  ‘Trevor will be Agent on his next job wherever that is.’

  ‘What really happened at the cofferdam?’

  ‘Swannie pressured Mac and cut his resources at the same time. That same pressure cost John Kelly his fingers.’

  ‘But that’s done and Mac is gone and now he’s free to remake Trevor in his own image. There’s a new GF?’

  ‘Lammerton’s okay. He can do the job.’

  ‘So they could tackle the next two Contracts in the series? I’m not asking for nothing.’

  ‘They’re getting better. I’ll say no more than that.’

  GR took out his mobile phone, punched a memory button and put it to his ear.

  ‘Direct line’, he told Harry, ‘to the Client’s CEO.’

  Harry looked away.

  ‘Dennis? Graham. Listen, the idea I floated yesterday looks more likely today. Did you fly it past your Chair? Did he receive it well?’

  Not wanting to hear this kind of thing Harry drifted over to JB and the plant Contractor’s men and Trots and Jinkie.

  In the RE’s hut GR commandeered the only desk and looked around while Allan filled the kettle. Site plan to the wall, colouring it as the job progressed, dating successfu
l pipeline tests and completed concrete pours, all was regular and ordered, reflecting the mind of a cautious man. Allan was shaping up whatever Harry thought. More detailed drawings were laid out on the plan chest also coloured and dated. GR laid the Contract Documents on the desk.

  The Preamble, and Job Description, the Bills of Quantities and the Specification, these were the Russell Partnership documents.

  The Standard Specification the job spec varied from, the Conditions of Contract, these were Institution publications.

  Together they were the Bible he lived by, that the whole industry lived by although even the likes of Pat Healey had hardly so much as heard of them.

  Respectfully he picked up the Conditions, its dark cover creased and folded and marked here and there by muddy fingers and the underside of coffee mugs, and fondled it lovingly. Here was his Bible’s Gospel, its essential centre on which all else turned.

  Allan put his coffee down on the desk beside him.

  ‘Will you be going into the Conditions today? Challenging principles?’

  ‘Shouldn’t think so. I just like to have the book close. It’s a sort of talisman to me.’

  ‘Why do we still use the 5th Edition? It’s years behind.’

  ‘It’s because I know where I am with it. Allan, there is no creature on God’s earth so innately conservative as a civil engineer and when something works we hold on to it against all notions of progress. We have things to build and we get on with the tools we can be sure of. No change for change’s sake. It has to work. I love this book and I expect you to love it also. It’s the principal tool of my trade although I seldom use it, Gospel, law and moral compass. Was that a car?’

  Allan said yes.

  ‘That will be James Swann.’

  The Contracts Manager entered and his eyes met GR’s. He advanced to the desk and put down his brief case and GR stood up and they shook hands.