‘There’s nothing in this beach work. The sooner we’re up the road the better.’
‘So listen, it’s several millennia ago and the Ice Age is blowing down from the north and here is a tribe of our still not quite human ancestors, Homo Hairiarsus, covered in brown fur with their noses flat as toad in the hole.’
‘I’ve got the picture,’ said Paul.
The vibrating poker shrieked and dulled as Trots pulled it in and out of the concrete. ‘This is all racist nonsense,’ he said.
‘I’ll be a Fascist then, Trots?’ asked Willie.
‘Sure sounds like it.’
‘Well, never mind that. So they come across this hot spring and one of them jumps in and, hey, this is good, I mean really warm and comfortable. There aren’t too many of these apes so they all get in and just sit around in the warmth for years while the temperature drops all around and the other ape tribes get hairier in order to cope, as do the mammoths and sabre toothed tigers and all the rest that manage to survive at all. The temperature continues to drop and their shoulders and heads get very cold indeed so they lie a little bit lower in the water and then a bit lower still until eventually only their noses are poking up and only the apes with long noses survive. They pass this characteristic on to their successors and, eventually, here we are.’
‘Hoho,’ said Trots.
‘I tell you true.’ Willie raised a hand and swore on his joiner’s apron.
‘The males had to get out of the water every so often and go find food for the females and the young. That’s why men today are hairier than women. When the ice eventually receded and they came out of the water for good and walked off through the long grass their skin was white. Like ours.’
‘Racist,’ Trots muttered, but Jinkie was staring into space with his mouth open.
‘That makes sense,’ he said. ‘It explains why white men are superior to blacks. The blacks lost their fur later, and their noses are flat.’
No one contradicted Jinkie who would need to believe he was superior to someone somewhere. Willie slapped him on the shoulder. ‘Ever meet a black man, Jinkie?’
‘No.’
‘That’s enough vibrating,’ Jimmy said. ‘The concrete’s right down and, look, it’s about two centimetres low and we can’t make any more without the batcher or get it here without the dumper and the tide is at our feet already.’
‘We’re beat,’ Paul said. ‘Swannie isn’t going to like this.’ His mobile phone rang and once again it was Trevor.
‘Finished yet.’
‘No way,’ said Paul. ‘We’re two centimetres short of the top and the dumper’s broken down.’
‘Plumbs,’ said Trevor. ‘Tell Jimmy.’
‘Plumbs,’ Paul repeated.
‘Nope!’ insisted Jimmy.
‘This is our job,’ said Trots. ‘You tell him, Paul. We’re doing this’.
Jimmy hung his thumbs from the belt of his apron. ‘Looks like we’re finished for the day.’
Paul still had his mobile phone at his ear. Trevor spoke.
‘Did I hear Trots say he’d do it? Tell him to make sure the plumbs don’t touch either the shutters or the pipe.’
Trots stood close enough to hear. ‘Jinkie,’ he said. ‘Scoop up some of that concrete. I’ll get the plumbs.’
Where the shingle met the marram grass the beach stones were biggest. Trots gathered a dozen and carried them in pairs and placed them by the shutter while Jinkie dug. When he had them all he took his finishing trowel and widened Jinkie’s first hole and placed the first stone in and covered it with concrete. When they had two plumbs at each of the shutter joints, one either side of the pipe, they set about spreading the displaced volume and so raising the top level of the concrete.
‘C’mon, Jimmy,’ Trots said. ‘The tide’s winning.’
‘I give in,’ said Jimmy. ‘C’mon, boys, grab a trowel each or a shovel or anything and let’s get this job done before the tide wipes it out.’
The three joiners and the two labourers worked away at the top surface of the concrete, putting in more plumbs as required, spreading the concrete and smoothing it, Trots finishing the surface with the metal trowel and all of them knee deep or over in cold salty water by the time the job was done.
‘The tarpaulin now,’ said Jimmy. ‘Quick, cover it before the tide gets over the top.’
Again from the grass they took a sheet of hessian, wide enough to cover the shutter’s top and sides and spread out to either side on the shore, long enough to cover its length. Together they unrolled it bottom end to top and dropped stones through the water to hold its ends down on the shore.
‘Job done,’ Willie shouted. ‘Okay, I know we cheated but, way down here, it’ll be okay. All this concrete has to do is stop the pipe floating away.’
‘And take any knocks,’ said Jimmy.
Willie was puzzled
‘What knocks? No boats here. No vandals.’
‘That’s right,’ said Trots. ‘What was the point beyond getting it done and saving the bosses money? Why did we get so into it?’
‘Getting it right,’ Jimmy told him. ‘Except we didn’t, we cheated.’
Up at his instrument Paul once again turned the telescope down on the outfall, now looking onto the billowing hap they had used to protect the concrete surface from taking on wave patterns that no one would ever see.
The job was done. All he had to do now was ring Trevor and tell him.
‘Job’s done. The troops are tidying up.’
‘Okay,’ Trevor told him. ‘The fitter just called to say the batcher’s fixed. Tomorrow you’ll be further into the water and the tide will turn that bit quicker. We can’t afford another breakdown.’
‘That’s what Jimmy says.’
‘Well, he’s right. Two pipe lengths to go and with the tides the way they are the last one is going to be desperate for time. We’ll have the fitter standing by the batcher just in case. He’s the best insurance we can have.’
‘We’ll be quicker by then. Jimmy will have it down to a fine art. This was just the first.’
‘We’re sending JB and Tammas down for the next two days. That should help. Now you can wrap up, early start tomorrow.’
‘Four labourers? They’ll fall over each other.’
‘Never mind that.’
Trevor hung up.
Paul put the phone back into his pocket and looked at Jimmy.
‘JB and Tammas will be here tomorrow as well.’
Jimmy and Willie and Trots looked at each other and something unspoken passed between them.
‘We’ll tidy up now,’ said Jimmy. ‘We have to carry all this gear back up to the compound.’
Paul went back to his instrument and out of their way, turning its telescope on to the nearest rig and focusing on the platform. A group of men were working at something, he couldn’t tell what, but they were intent on their business and all their attention was on this unreadable activity. Two were speaking animatedly together and pointing. Others were laying out what looked like a rope but might have been a chain or a hose. They were thinking and talking and working together on their man-made world and he took the impression somehow that they were working against the possibility of some future catastrophe.
He turned the wheel at the side of the instrument to bring them as close as he could and refocused.
Yes, they seemed to know what they were doing and what they couldn’t be sure of they worked out as they went. Now other men appeared, walking past them in pairs, in threes, ignoring them it seemed, all in the service and protection of the great machine that stood on its three sturdy legs in waiting for the power of the sea to turn against it.
‘Can I see?’
Cammy put his tools down among the marram grass and stepped into Paul’s footprints behind the instrument. He turned the focusing wheel to suit his own eyes and, that done, his hands went down to rest on his thighs and take his body’s weight against the crouch, against back pain, and as he watch
ed with visible admiration all those tiny men working in the distance his forehead creased and a thoughtful smile formed on his pressed together lips.
Paul’s mobile phone rang again. This time it was Pat Healey calling from Glasgow.
‘Trevor said it was okay to call. I need to speak to Trots.’
Paul held out the phone to Trots on the shore. Trots took it and put it to his ear and listened and turned it off and handed it back. Jinkie stared at him with his mouth open, waiting for the inevitable.
‘We’re paid off. This lot don’t want us any more. Healey says he’ll call when something new comes up.’
Jinkie walked into the long grass with his hands to his head and Trots swayed where he stood before sitting down on the beach pebbles.
Paul couldn’t look at them. Instead he looked at the Grip Squad, Jimmy, Willie and Cammy, one by one. None of them could look at the labourers either. They couldn’t even look at each other. Jimmy and Willie kept on gathering together their tools and Cammy kept peering through the telescope until Trots and Jinkie had recovered. In this way Paul learned that, although tomorrow their cares would be about income and provision, today the searing truth they had to contend with was expendability and insult. Jimmy spoke.
‘You guys heading back to the compound? We’ll take you to Inverness. You won’t need the company bus then.’
Trots nodded slowly.
‘That’s good of you.’
‘Next time it might be us.’
It wouldn’t though. Paul knew it.
Deep down all of them knew it
Trots folded the vibrator’s air hose and gripped the generator handle and hefted it but no, the beast was too heavy. It would take them both to carry it.
‘She won’t like this,’ he said. ‘She won’t like it.’
‘There’ll be another day, Trots. We’re never out the game for long.’
Each took his handle and together they put their backs into it, leaning outwards and away from each other, as their ancestors had done when between them they took the weight of an animal they had killed, to carry it back to the compound.
Paul unscrewed the theodolite from its legs and clamped it in its case. The tripod stand he also broke down, unscrewing the butterfly bolts and pushing the extensions inside and tightening them again. With the gathered legs on his shoulder and the heavy case in his hand he nodded to the joiners standing with their hammers hanging from their belts like long knives and their saws and pinch bars over their shoulders like spears, providers and protectors for their women and their children no matter the colour of their skin.
Now the labourers entered the long grass and Jimmy Gillies and Willie Quinn and Cameron Stobo also entered it and all moved through it and eventually were lost in it and none of them left anything to mark their existence in this place at all, at this time, but the scrapings they made on the ground in the course of their passing. Burdened by the weight of his tools, the tripod legs and instrument, by his book and the pencil he wrote with, he followed.
20
What can’t be cured
These are the best of months, April and May, the daylight hours stretching but the ground still hard in the morning, with a skin of frost that melts away in the time it takes Malky to mix the first batch of mortar. It never gets really hot like in the summer so the shirt doesn’t come off but I prefer that. The sky is a clear, bright blue and the sea matches it in its own way. I am looking out towards the oil rigs from just below the A9, looking down on the shore and the new Works and behind me is the hill and over the hill is the village of Struie and behind that the big mountain ranges that reach all the way across country to the Atlantic shore.
Today we’re working on the new Collection Chamber. It’s as deep as the pumping station we did on the Black Isle job but Swannie had his way on this one and they used those big manhole rings backed with mass concrete, no bricks. This will have taken them a fraction of the time I would, but there will not be the same qualities of appearance and care for that whoever-he-will-be that will one day enter it for some unknown reason and look at the walls and make his judgements. No one will want to sign the walls on this but that isn’t going to weigh much on the Swannie scales of importance.
There is only Harry and me left that give much of a toss about these things. Good guy, Harry. We’re getting to talk that bit more now. He comes down from the new job in Lochdon and, let’s face it, there isn’t much to do beyond poking the rubber end of his pencil into Malky’s mortar mix and discussing that big pyramid job in Egypt. Those were the days.
The roof slab of the chamber is below ground level and all Joe Public will see is a cast iron bitumen coated entry cover embedded in the grass. The cover will sit on a brick shaft and it’s the shafts to all the site’s chambers we are building now. It’s not too demanding except on the small of the back and half the time I do it on my knees, the other half sitting on a fish box. This is how it is now. From time to time Malky leaves off mixing to make a roll-up. He also has a fish box and from time to time he sits on it and dips his nose in his comic. Meanwhile I sit here and place brick on brick, mortaring them and placing them and knocking them flush one with another. No problem, but no rhythm either.
For this bitty kind of work Malky does the mixing with a shovel on a board. No machine required for these small amounts. The day stretches out and there is no wind and no rain and the sun is shining. I tell myself I am happy and if I can say so, why, it is so. It’s all in the mind.
This work is easy but there isn’t much money in it and I could use some more of that stuff now that I’ve lost the other squad. When we finished at the factory Big Tam got the idea he could do as well on his own. There’s another building going up but I’m not bidding for the work this time. He can have it. Between the troops and the client, too much hassle. The accountant, that crook. The tax man. For years I’ve put enough away to cover the government bill but this time, first time, I had to dip in and it won’t be there when the Big Man comes along wanting his cut. If there’s a problem with this work it’s that it gives too much time to think.
All the big chambers were built with rings when it’s bricks shown in the drawings and priced for. That’s money into Healey’s pocket and out of mine. Along the line it’s money into Swannie’s pocket, or the guys above him, ultimately the Authority’s and then, yes, the People’s. That’s the justification for turning out crap. It’s good for us. Ho!
On this new job further north, Harry tells me, they are adopting the rings from the start and that is reducing the price. So that’s Harry’s nose out of joint because he strives for quality but like the rest of us he accepts these things. What can’t be cured must be endured.
So, I sit here on my fish box beside the A9 and the traffic rushes past and I don’t suppose that Malky and I get so much as a glance. The fish box sits on the concrete roof of the chamber and there is an opening in the slab just big enough for a man in breathing apparatus to get through. Round this opening we build the shaft. Below the slab there are the concrete rings and, in the base, concrete benching shaped in channels to take the flow of sewage. Round the whole thing, but buried and out of sight are the cofferdam piles and, somewhere down there, John Kelly’s fingers. Out and under the road is the pipeline tunnel, now infilled. Working Man did this. Past goes the traffic and no one gives a toss so long as it doesn’t block up somewhere and overflow and make a bad smell and a mess. This is what you have to understand: no one cares.
Except, for some reason, I care. I care that these bricks go one on top of the other and that the bond is correct, even in a wee box of walls no more than 45cm high. So, why? Why keep checking the diagonals on this? The bricks have to be sound. They’ve not to slip or crumble and when that guy goes down the hole some time in the future, whatever he thinks about the rings and the benching he’s to think; hey, good brickwork to the shaft. Later we’ll manhandle the cast iron cover into place and after that shovel the arisings around it and smooth them off.
I smiled just now and Malky looked at me. Better not say what I smiled at. The places your head goes.
The system is now what is known as live. That is to say the pumps over at Struie are working and the diversion has been made from Ness. Looking down into the Chamber through the slab opening I can see the flow coming in from under the A9 and the flow from Ness joining it and turning left and the two together running out towards the Works. The access ladder is in place, as are various pieces of safety ironwork but, for all that, I can’t go into the chambers, any of them, because of the danger of gases. Of course I am liable to drop things, bricks, mortar, into the chambers when I work. Coming on the job this far along I can’t go in and tidy up. They should have let me get this done before they turned it all on. These are the results of haste but nobody cares. It’s money first, money last and money all down the line.
Down below us the Authority’s troops are getting the new place in order, the instruments building, their own mess building. Of course they are putting their own building in order first and looking at the Works second. No surprise in that. Three of them, they have their new van, their clean overalls and their ordered, limited days. They have rules and hierarchies and jealousies and their own jobs to do and they don’t like us much, Malky and I. We’re beneath them. Also, we are a threat. We could do their jobs better and quicker and cheaper. Everyone knows this. Their easy jobs have cost them their edge. They keep their jobs for reasons other than how well they do them. That’s the politicians for you. They look after their own.
I pick up a brick and sit straight up on my fish box to ease my back. The clean blade of the trowel enters Malky’s pile of mortar and I like the dry shushing sound it makes, like the wife, way back, when she’d hush me in the night and me not knowing I’d made a sound. I don’t dream the way I did now I’ve put the wackybacky aside. I miss the deep relaxation but not the Technicolor cartoon nightmares. It got beyond the bearable when the beheadings and castrations started popping up and I woke thinking it was me. No more. The trouble is the vodka tide goes up. There’s a balance to be struck between the substances and whatever the need is but try telling that to a quack.
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