Blue Collar

by Danny King

  ‘In your own time, please, love,’ I eventually shouted over, only to be told she was already serving someone. That particular person had only been waiting half the time that I had, but he shrugged apologetically in my direction, which saved me from having to ask the bouncers later on if they knew any of my mates.

  I finally got my pint, or at least about eight-tenths of a pint, precision pouring in this place being ranked about as highly as speed and geniality, and found somewhere at the end of the bar to perch until the final whistle blew.

  Within five minutes of the match ending the pub emptied out, freeing up a stool for me, though Charley was still missing from the picture. I tried not to read too much into this, figuring she was just useless with timekeeping full stop, even when the place we were meeting in was in her own backyard, and sure enough a quarter of an hour later she arrived in full fluster with herself.

  She didn’t clock me straight away, but instead made a beeline for this big group of boisterous wankers who were sprawled across two enormous leather sofas who I’d been rolling my eyes at for the last fifteen minutes. I felt my shoulders sag as I watched her greet and kiss the entire party as she took off her hat, scarf and coat before finally looking around and noticing me in the corner.

  She quickly scuttled over and gave me a kiss, then apologised for being late and asked if I wanted to come over and meet everyone.

  ‘Not even slightly,’ was the obvious answer, but I remembered what Jason had told me about Charley’s approval and her mates’ approval being index linked and realised one sure way of giving myself the elbow was to spend the night over here by myself, getting steaming and sporadically flicking my fingers up at everyone else on the other side of the pub.

  ‘I’d love to. Lead on,’ I told her, rising to my feet and then dawdling in her wake as slowly as possible to shave precious seconds off the inevitable.

  ‘Everyone. Everyone. This is Terry. Terry, this is everyone,’ Charley told the gang, winning me a few nonchalant nods and one outright frosty glare. Charley then turned and told me, ‘I’m really glad you could make it. Oh, you’ve almost finished your pint. Let me get you another.’

  ‘No, please, I’ll get it. You stay here and I’ll get you one as well. What do you want?’ I insisted, my cup suddenly running over towards the tortoises behind the bar. ‘Glass of wine?’

  I retreated with our orders and managed to avoid all ten of the bar staff’s eyes for a good fifteen minutes before the least lazy pump monkey finally recognised me as a man waiting for a drink and served me despite my best efforts.

  ‘How much? Fuck me!’

  Two minutes later I handed Charley a big glass of wine and clinked it against mine. ‘It’s good to see you again,’ I told her.

  ‘You too,’ she agreed. ‘Shall we sit down?’

  I looked around for a couple of chairs to grab but rather ominously her friends were already shuffling up on one of the sofas to make room for either a couple of fag papers or the two of us.

  ‘Come on,’ Charley said, sinking into the space and dragging me down with her.

  The sofas were pretty low so that I was now at cock and fanny level with at least half a dozen or so of Charley’s mates who hadn’t been lucky enough to find a spare square inch of leather to squeeze themselves into.

  ‘Comfy,’ I pointed out, tucking my elbows in and stretching my pint out two feet in front of me in an effort not to tip half of it all over myself every time somebody got up, sat down or smiled without warning.

  ‘Terry, this is CT,’ Charley said, introducing the bloke on the other side of me whose thigh was pressed hard into mine.

  I resisted the obvious joke about him missing a couple of letters and simply shook his hand and smiled.

  ‘How are you?’ I figured I should ask.

  ‘Good,’ CT replied, regarding me carefully. ‘So you’re a bricklayer, are you?’

  Charley had either mentioned me before or CT was fucking great at guessing people’s jobs.

  ‘Yes,’ I confirmed, then debated whether or not have a stab at guessing his. I decided against it, not least of all as I really didn’t want to get sucked into a ‘so, what do you do?’ conversation with some bloke I cared so little about that I couldn’t even be arsed to ask him what his initials stood for. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a rude, antisocial bastard, even though that’s the way it sounds.

  I just wanted to be with Charley. I hadn’t seen or even spoken to her all week long, and now that I finally had her in the same room as me, I just wanted to give her my full, undivided attention and fill in a few blanks from the past week.

  Not that there was much danger of that. Not now that Charley was in full jabber with some posh bloke with trendy glasses on the other side of her and CT had begun mulling over what bricklaying meant to him.

  ‘Very skilled work, bricklaying. People think you just slap them down but there’s a real art to it,’ CT informed me. ‘Churchill used to lay bricks for relaxation, you know.’

  ‘Yeah, well there was no shortage of work back then, I suppose,’ I replied, crossing my legs to try and get them away from CT’s.

  ‘Good money in it too, I hear,’ he then told me.

  ‘That’s odd, I keep hearing that an’ all,’ I said, wondering just how much Churchill was on. More than me I wouldn’t be surprised.

  CT nodded at nothing in particular and took a big sip of his wine. Wine? I responded by nodding away myself, just to show him that I was still tuned in, even though I was biting to get back to the safety of Charley before CT could turn the conversation on to football. But Charley was doing fantastically well without me and there was suddenly the danger of me looking like some big, dumb, ignorant, millstone date who couldn’t fend for himself in company without throwing a big sulk or playing Beach Rally II on his phone, so I took the decision to let Charley enjoy all of her evening, and not just the part that featured me, and asked CT the inevitable.

  ‘So, CT,’ I remembered, trying my best to look interested. ‘What d’you do?’

  ‘I’m a producer,’ he told me, turning slightly to fill in the gap my leg-crossing had just left.

  ‘Like a greengrocer?’ I double-checked.

  ‘No, nothing so fancy, I’m a producer for the BBC,’ he replied, catching me off guard and actually impressing me.

  ‘Really? Which one? BBC1 or BBC2?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t work on any one single channel. I produce programmes across the board for all of them,’ he explained, so I snapped my fingers and demanded examples. ‘At the moment I’m working on a show called Lost Touch with Reality on BBC3. Have you seen it?’

  I hadn’t. Had anyone?

  ‘It’s basically a fly-on-the-wall-style thirty-minute show that catches up with and follows the fortunes of former reality stars. Remember Colin from Car Pool?’

  I didn’t even remember Car Pool, let alone Colin.

  ‘We’re working with him next week. Following him around for a week, at home, at work and, of course, in his car, to see how his fifteen minutes of fame has changed his life. It’s that sort of thing,’ CT explained.

  ‘And how has it changed his life?’

  ‘I don’t know, we haven’t filmed the programme yet, but if the others are anything to go by, he’s probably lost all his friends, had an affair and turned into an unbearable, nasty twat.’

  That was pretty good. I liked that one and warmed to CT a touch, though not so much that I was suddenly glad it was him I was snuggling with on the sofa and not Charley.

  ‘Are they all a big load of cunts, then?’ I asked, shifting my leg again to try to get the circulation going.

  ‘Mostly. You get the odd occasional one who’s nice but most of them do love to let their little bit of fame go straight to their heads. Well, it’s inevitable really, if you think about it. I mean, who else is going to appear on reality shows other than people who think they’ve got something to offer already? Even rubbish collectors, believe it or not. Remember Dustm
an’s Holiday?’

  Of course not. I didn’t pay my licence fee to watch dustmen going on holiday.

  ‘No, I must’ve missed that one,’ I simplified. ‘So, who’s the worst one? Who’s the biggest wanker you’ve ever met?’

  ‘Ah, now that would be telling,’ he teased, passing up a perfect opportunity to tell me it was me.

  ‘Oh, go on, don’t be a cunt, just tell us. I ain’t going to say nothing, am I. Go on, just tell us,’ I prodded.

  CT finally buckled and asked me if I remembered the first series of Supermarket.

  ‘You’re making all this up, aren’t you?’ I finally twigged.

  ‘No, of course not. Didn’t you ever see it?’ CT insisted.

  I was half tempted to tell him it was on at the same time as Paint Dry Challenge, but Jason’s advice was still bumping around inside my head, so I plumped for acting all gutted that I’d been out every time it had been on and let him tell me about some prima-donna checkout girl who used to bollock the cameraman every time he missed her doing something interesting – which was all the time, according to her, and not once during the whole series, according to the cameraman.

  ‘She’d then act it out for us all over again and get anyone else who’d been part of the lost scene to do the same and repeat what they’d said. Real fly-on-the-wall stuff it was,’ CT said.

  ‘No, sorry, I never saw it,’ I apologised again.

  ‘Don’t worry, no one did. At least not any of her footage. That all ended up on the cutting-room floor.’

  I wondered if they really did just drop everything on the floor of the cutting room? If it wouldn’t be easier to maybe get a bin in there or something? I even thought about suggesting this to CT, but decided against it as I figured someone must’ve addressed this problem in the hundred or so years since they’d invented film-making and it was just an expression these days. I mean, I couldn’t really have been the first bloke this had occurred to, could I? Surely the cleaners would’ve said something by now? Anyway, I had more important things to point out to CT, not least of all:

  ‘You must be gutted, mustn’t you? Working on telly and having to hang around with a load of nobodies all day long,’ I chuckled.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, I would be. If I worked on telly I’d want to get to work with famous people, not a load of fucking binmen and checkout girls. Don’t you ever get to work with anyone famous? Aside from Colin off Car Park, that is?’

  ‘I’ve worked with a few in my time,’ CT explained. ‘I started on Noel’s House Party when I first joined the Beeb, so I met my fair share of celebrities back then, but they’re nothing special.’

  ‘Who was the most famous?’ I pressed.

  CT thought about this for a moment or two then told me Mr T.

  ‘Nice fella too. Then I went to work on The Brain Game with Ted Allen for a couple of series, but then Ted did his little disappearing act…’

  ‘Oh yeah, I remember that. That was in all the papers, that was, wasn’t it? What happened to him?’

  ‘God, I wish I had a pound for every time somebody asked me that,’ CT sighed theatrically.

  ‘Get it a lot, do you?’

  ‘Just once or twice a conversation,’ he reckoned.

  ‘So what did happen to him?’ I asked again, not one to be deterred by a well-trodden line of enquiry.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he shrugged. ‘Most people think he owed a lot of money in gambling debts and took off rather than pay it back. I’m sure he’s probably living in Venezuela or Vietnam or somewhere tropical these days, drinking himself to death and buggering the houseboy every Friday.’

  ‘Well, it is the start of the weekend,’ I pointed out. ‘So do you know any famous people these days? Actors and that?’

  ‘Lis is an actress,’ CT told me, directing me towards a pretty little brunette on the sofa opposite.

  ‘What’s that?’ Lis asked, turning around and catching me in mid-gawp.

  ‘This is Terry,’ CT told her, before making me freeze when he described me as ‘Charley’s boyfriend’.

  I hadn’t thought of myself as Charley’s ‘boyfriend’ before and I certainly hadn’t ever described myself as such, particularly in front of Charley, so it was a bit of a shock to the system hearing these words for the first time.

  I had a quick feel next door to see if Charley had likewise turned to stone and found that she was still pleasantly soft and babbling away ten to the dozen to her trendy mate with the glasses, two arses along, so I unclenched my jaw and confirmed I was indeed ‘Terry’. Though I left it at that.

  ‘Hi,’ Lis said, giving me a nod, then the rim of her glass a quick suck.

  ‘I was just telling Terry that you were an actress,’ CT explained a little further.

  Lis baulked, like CT had just told me she got all her pants from Oxfam, but she got over it pretty quickly and told me she was, but that it was very, very boring.

  ‘Fair enough,’ I said, not wishing to press her for details. Not if it was boring.

  We stared at each other in silence for a bit before I finally realised I should probably tell her something about my line of work if she didn’t like talking about her own.

  ‘I’m a bricky,’ I told her, and backed up this revelation with the news that most blokes down the pub called me Tel the trowel.

  Lis looked around Signed For! accordingly. ‘No, no, God, no, not this pub. No, my local, down in Catford. The Catford Lamb. Do you know Catford at all?’

  Lis didn’t.

  ‘Oh well, you should check it out some time. It’s a nice place.

  Honest.’

  This seemed to confuse Lis even further and she looked to CT for the subtitles. CT just bypassed my babble, though, and asked Lis if she was working at the moment. Lis immediately perked up.

  ‘Yes. Yes, I am. I’m working on a one-woman show with Carl that we’re planning on taking to Edinburgh. It’s called The Lady of the Lamp,’ she told us enthusiastically.

  ‘Florence Nightingale, huh?’ CT ventured.

  ‘Yes,’ Lis confirmed.

  ‘Who do you play?’ I asked.

  Lis asked me who I thought she’d play in a one-woman play about Florence Nightingale. Her fucking lamp?

  ‘Well, I don’t know, do I?’ I said in my defence.

  ‘I finally saw that advert you were in the other day,’ CT then mentioned.

  ‘Really? You were in an advert?’ I asked, my interest stoked by the mention of proper acting. ‘What was it for?’

  ‘Oh, it’s embarrassing,’ Lis cringed, hanging her head to demonstrate.

  ‘Fair enough,’ I said, once again reluctant to press her for details. Not if it was embarrassing for her.

  This time around, though, Lis didn’t wait to be prompted by CT, eager no doubt to head off more stories about Catford, and told me how she’d been the young mum pushing the trolley with the little kid in it in the recent Morrisons advert. I couldn’t quite place that one. Mind you, that was no surprise as I never really paid attention to adverts at the best of times, and I had a particular mental block where Morrisons were concerned after one of their managers had run off with my girlfriend.

  ‘I’ll look out for it, though,’ I promised her, then decided to test the water and see if she was finally in the mood to talk about her job by asking her what else she’d been in.

  ‘I was in a run of Twelfth Night, at the Salisbury Theatre, up until last month. And before that I played the part of older Belle in Little Me at the National,’ she said.

  ‘OK,’ I nodded anyway.

  ‘And I had two stints with the Reduced Dickens Company and a summer season at the Swan in Stratford-upon-Avon,’ she added.

  ‘Yes, I remember your notices,’ CT applauded.

  ‘What, from your landlord?’ I suggested. ‘No, seriously, though, what about telly?’

  Lis finally saw what I wanted to hear and told me she’d been in the last Poliakoff drama, a BBC adaptation of Vanity
Fair, a late-night political sketch show called Eve & Stephen, a dramatisation of the Blue Arrow trial and a dozen and one other programmes she could’ve easily been making up on the spot just to steal some of Colin from Car Pool’s glory.

  ‘Right,’ I nodded carefully, trying not to give away the fact that I hadn’t seen or heard of any of the above, and even if I had, I probably still wouldn’t have sat down and watched them even if I’d been in them myself. ‘Great.’

  ‘And of course you’ve done Casualty and The Bill,’ CT nudged her.

  ‘You were in The Bill?’ I suddenly switched on. ‘Fucking hell, smart. I love The Bill. Who were you?’

  ‘I played a prostitute who’d been beaten up by her pimp,’ she told me.

  That didn’t exactly narrow things down as far as plots on The Bill went, so she agreed to give me a quick blast in order to jog my memory. Lis dropped her head for a second, and I thought she was going to start crying that her career had come to this, soap opera charades for brickies in pubs, but instead she looked up and came straight at me in full character.

  ‘You wanna sleep with me, Sergeant Carter? You wanna take me upstairs and have your way with me? Well, why not, everyone else does. But it’s gonna cost you, darling, just like it costs everyone else. Forty quid and you can have whatever you like. Seventy and I’ll even have my friend join us.’

  I still couldn’t remember the episode, but it sounded like a good ’un. I was just about to ask Lis how Sergeant Carter got on when I noticed the rest of the sofa had gone quiet and were now watching Lis grinding her tits at me. Including Charley. I figured an explanation was called for.

  ‘She’s just doing The Bill for me,’ I told her.

  ‘Well, make sure you get a receipt because seventy quid sounds a bit steep to me, fella,’ Charley’s mate with the glasses guffawed.