Blue Collar

by Danny King

  CT saw that he was losing his audience so he cut to the chase and suggested a working figure in the region of a thousand pounds.

  ‘You’re fucking joking!’ I almost yelled in his face. ‘A grand?’

  ‘Well, obviously we could look into it and see if there was more available…’ CT started, getting the wrong end of the stick.

  ‘No no no, a grand’s absolutely fine. Honestly, I’d be happy to settle for a grand, no problem. Just show me where to sign and give me a pen, quick,’ I rushed him, my heart crashing at the thought of getting my hands on the easiest grand I was ever likely to earn. That was unless CT wanted some more ideas. In which case, all he had to do was take me and his chequebook down the pub and he could buy all the drunken nonsense that tumbled out of my gob he wanted.

  ‘Well, we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves here. All I wanted to know was that you’re interested in principle,’ CT told me.

  ‘Right.’ I nodded. ‘Yeah, I see. So let me get this right, you want to know if I’m happy to be on the telly, and if not, you’ll give me a grand?’

  Hmm, I had to think about this one.

  ‘Of course, you don’t have to make up your mind right now…’ he started, but I didn’t give him a chance.

  ‘CT, you drive a hard bargain but OK, then, let’s do it,’ I agreed, offering him my hand.

  CT beamed and shook it enthusiastically as Charley, Clive and Russell all erupted in joyous celebration (like I was ever going to say no?). Only Simone remained unmoved, though this could’ve just been because most things paled into insignificance once you’d started knocking pinboards out for four figures.

  ‘This is so exciting,’ fizzed Charley, seeding my mind with a dozen doubts I’d beat myself over the head with in the weeks and months to come.

  ‘Well, I was going to save this, but why don’t we pop it open now? Champagne, anyone?’ Russell announced, pulling a bottle of bubbly from the fridge.

  ‘No thanks, but you can get me another Stella while you’re there,’ I told him.

  I think I did about eight of them by the end of the evening and I decided to make a present of the remainder rather than ask Charley to hold open a carrier bag while I emptied CT’s fridge again.

  ‘Shall we walk?’ Charley asked. ‘It’s probably only a twenty-minute walk home.’

  ‘No, sod that, it’s gone midnight and us celebrities don’t walk anywhere on our own legs at the best of times,’ I told her, checking Simone’s ‘piece’ for cab numbers.

  Ten minutes later, I waved and kissed goodnight to CT, Russell, Clive and Simone as I saw fit and bundled Charley into a waiting minicab.

  ‘Well, I think that went well,’ I said, and, the odd cough and hiccup aside, I thought it had. Once we’d dispensed with the business of dinner and settled down to beer and baloney I’d had a genuinely nice time. Of course, I’m sure it helped that a lot of the baloney had been about how I was going to be the next big thing and how, come tomorrow, no one would even remember old whatsisface off Car Pool.

  I’d actually had a good laugh.

  ‘CT’s nice, isn’t he?’ Charley said, in the back of the cab.

  ‘Yeah, no, he’s all right, I really rate him,’ I agreed.

  ‘What did you think of Russell?’ Charley then asked.

  ‘Russell? Yeah, he’s a nice enough fella, I suppose,’ I shrugged.

  ‘You do realise he’s CT’s boyfriend, don’t you?’ Charley said, with an impish little grin dancing across her lips.

  ‘Well, blimey, I’d guessed that,’ I told her, stopping her smirk in its tracks. ‘Two blokes who live together and cook each other lentils and have pink bog roll? How are they not going to be gay?’ I wanted to know.

  Charley stared at me, struck dumb by what I could only take as amazement.

  ‘Well, we do have ’em in Catford as well, you know,’ I pointed out.

  15 Hugo and cry

  If you were to ask any builder who they thought was the biggest blight on society, you’d probably be surprised by the answer. See, it’s not anyone ethnic or Polish or gay or pen-pushing, as Charley and her friends seem to think we’d say – oh yes, for some reason they have us all somewhere to the right of Bernard Manning with tattoos for brains and fists for solutions, but they couldn’t be more wrong. Half our site is either ethnic or black or gay – at least, all the roofers take it up the arse, according to the graffiti in the Portaloo. And Jason himself is, or at least was, half-caste until he got recategorised in the nineties so that now he’s mixed race for another ten or twenty years or so until he starts to offend everyone again. But it doesn’t matter to Jason, and it certainly doesn’t matter to us. I mean, why should it? Live and let live, that’s what we say. Just as long as people don’t try to convert us to their religion, put us in a big pot and eat us or pinch our bottoms and smother us with kisses, seriously, who cares? Black people, Muslims, Hindus, homosexuals and even estate agents, they’re all part and parcel of this big old wide world of ours and it’s a narrow-minded fuckwit who can’t accept that. No, builders are no more bigoted than any other profession. I mean, we still whistle at saucy old housewives and everything, but that’s only because it is expected of us. And they love it. Oh no, on the whole, I’d say we are a surprisingly tolerant lot. That said, there is one section of society that almost universally gets our goats up, and that we will unapologetically discriminate against and persecute to the ends of the earth.

  Students.

  For some reason… actually, no, scrub that, for dozens of reasons, we fucking hate students: lazy, spoilt, dopey, scruffy, long haired, constantly complaining, work-shy, cheque-writing, fucking dreary cunts. Ask any builder what they think of students and that’s the sort of glowing tribute you can expect.

  But weirdly, none of the above is what gets our goats up the most. What really does it is the fact that despite being lazy, spoilt, dopey, scruffy, long haired, constantly complaining, work-shy, cheque-writing, fucking dreary cunts, they all seem to think it’s their divine right to tell the rest of us how to live. That theirs is the generation that has been chosen to show us the way. Most students are like lippy, backchatting little teenagers who think they know it all. But the thing with teenagers is that this confidence soon dissipates once they get handed a hod and told to load out a dozen muddy footings, or giving a broom and told to sweep up around the barber’s feet, or a shirt and tie and told to add up a column of the chief accountant’s numbers. Because work has the curious effect of slapping down your ego, while at the same time elevating your opinion of your elders, particularly if those same elders started out loading out footings, sweeping up hair or adding up numbers years before you came along. There you go, son; been there, seen it, done it. Now it’s your turn. Try to keep up – if you can.

  But students never go through this experience. Most little darlings go straight from bawling out their mums and dads for not buying Fairtrade bananas to bawling out the rest of us for not erecting statues of Germaine Greer on every street corner.

  I could go on and do a few hours on this subject without pausing for breath but it’s not that relevant. Suffice to say it was with mixed and conflicted emotions that I used to listen to Charley’s university stories.

  Not least of all because most of them featured that unbelievable arsewipe, Hugo.

  Charley went to Bristol University some ten years earlier and met Hugo for her troubles. At first they’d just been friends, in the way that all good middle-class boys and girls always try to be when one of them doesn’t fancy the other as much as they do. Anyway, they were both bright, both had issues with their parents and both wanted to save the whale, ban the bomb and free Nelson Mandela – despite the fact that he’d already been president for several years. Anyway, it was while working towards one or two of these ends that they found themselves in the library late one Friday night, passionate, enthused and yearning for revolution. Hugo had been spinning her a fine line in guff about the rights of the workers and the evil
s of an oppressive society for the best part of two months and Charley had all but choked on the hook. And this was when he made his move and gave her a big smoochy kiss on the lips, which only stopped when he tried to follow it up with a hand up the jumper.

  Charley knocked him back and told him that she couldn’t, that it was impossible, that she liked him and everything, but not like that. Besides, she already had a boyfriend at home, called Nigel, who she couldn’t bring herself to cheat on.

  Hugo told her she could do anything if she just put her mind to it. He believed in her.

  One angry slap around the chops and a night of frantic tearful wanking later, Hugo apologised to Charley for crossing the line and promised her total sisterly respect from now on. All he wanted was her friendship – and possible her dirty bra and pants if she had any spares going. Some of these details, as you might have detected, have been added by Jason after a few sherbets so either run with our slant on the story or sieve out the facts as you find them.

  Anyway, Charley forgave Hugo and apologised herself for overreacting and they became the best of friends for the next semester, studying together, doing homework together and giggling at the back of the lecture hall like a pair of budgerigars.

  I find this a decidedly odd set of circumstances. There’s something weirdly calculating and domineering about keeping someone close to you when you know they fancy you and would happily jump you in a heartbeat if you were to drop your guard. I think this is a uniquely female practice. Actually, I don’t know. I’m sure there are some blokes out there who like to string along little fat birds for kicks, but by and large I think girls are probably better at it than blokes because they’ve got better self-restraint. I also think they are better at playing the indignation card, as it sounds more plausible coming from them, in that it’s nigh on impossible to take them to task over their friendships with other blokes without leaving yourself open to all manner of accusations of small-mindedness, jealously and control freakdom. Yet you turn this one on its head and try nodding it your girlfriend’s way when she wants to know why you’ve been seen all over Catford with that little scrubber from the chip shop and see how it sounds to the clatter of flying crockery.

  I asked Charley what Nigel thought of her whole set-up with Hugo, and Charley assured me he was ‘cool’.

  Well, he shouldn’t have been, for I know what happened next.

  Charley and Hugo got heavily involved with the Student Union movement… ‘Hold on, they have a union?’ Jason choked on his pint.

  ‘Yeah. It’s one of the biggest in the country.’

  ‘What, and like, they go on strike and everything?’ he asked.

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘But, who’d care?’

  It’s something I’ve never been able to answer myself.

  Still, Charley and Hugo got involved despite Jason’s reservations, waving placards and doing whatever Student Union activists did. They complained to teachers, liaised with wet-nosed freshmen and generally swanned around Bristol with an air of self-appointed importance. And remember, this is Charley I’m talking about here, the women I adore, which should show you just how ingrained my prejudices against students are.

  Anyway, at the start of their second year at university, the college decided to close the Student Union and sell off the building to try to recoup a few quid.

  Now confusingly, the Student Union we’re talking about here was not the action group that Charley and Hugo belonged to, but the subsidised bar on the campus grounds that all the rest of the students belonged to. This place was called the Union too, for reasons Jason can’t explain, but it sold lager for £1.20 a pint at a time when the rest of the country were having to shell out £2.10 for it, so it was a very popular place.

  Naturally, everyone was up in arms; the Student Union, the Student Union and other alternatively titled student folk. So, without delay the Student Union got its skates on and did what Student Unions do in times of crisis, they organised a sit-in – in the Student Union, no less. Probably not the hardest rallying call they’ve ever had to make.

  Three hundred of them barricaded themselves in for three days and three nights, demanding a reversal of the decision and a seat on any subsequent review board, and amazingly, the university caved in. Incredible isn’t it? That the board of governors quivered and climbed down because a load of scruffy herberts threatened not to leave the pub. I couldn’t see me and my mates getting away with this. I think we’d have to make do with an SC60 through the letterbox and a fire hose through the catflap. But they got the decision. The Student Union was given a reprieve, the establishment assured everyone that it would remain open for another two years (by which time Charley and the other ringleaders would’ve left university and who gave a fuck after that?) and the Union folk were toasted as heroes.

  Charley and Hugo obviously got a bit caught up in the moment and knocked poor old Nigel’s picture off the bedside cabinet as they celebrated their historic victory by frantically banging each other long into the night.

  Naturally, Charley felt devastated about her betrayal the next morning, but not so devastated that she didn’t spend the rest of the month hopping in and out of beds and broom cupboards with her lover-in-arms, stopping only to drop Nigel a ‘you’re great, it’s not you’ SC60 of his own.

  And that’s how it happened. I guess that’s how it always happens. Time and close proximity are like water for their erosive properties. Hugo’s patient drip drip drip of respect and understanding slowly seeped behind Charley’s resolve, so that all it took in the end was one almighty thunderstorm in the shape of a collective high for her defences to finally crumble.

  I don’t blame Charley for this and, oddly, I don’t even blame Hugo. She was young and a long way from home. He was there, saw what he wanted and went after it. Each in their own way had their reasons. No, the person who I think was most at fault was Nigel. He’d waved Charley off at the station. He’d let her go. He’d thought he could hold on to her from a distance. He’d had the most to lose. And he had duly paid the price. It was his blame to shoulder.

  Of course, he could’ve been banging half of Berkshire the moment Charley left and used her rolled up ‘Dear John’ note to snort a big fat line of gack off a big fat prostitute’s arse to celebrate his new-found freedom. I don’t know, it’s possible, but for the sake of this particular story we’ll assume he was all gutted about it.

  So his relationship was history. But what could he do? Not a lot, because Nigel’s time had come and gone. Just as Hugo’s time would come and go too. Oh yes, he didn’t last much beyond their mortar boards landing at their feet before he joined Charley’s roll-call of exes. I don’t know why precisely. Perhaps he just didn’t stand up to long term scrutiny or perhaps she got distracted by some other doughnut (it wasn’t me, by the way, I came along about eight years later), but whatever the reason Hugo bit the dust and slid down the ‘see-ya’ tubes to Dumpsville too.

  So, what did Hugo do?

  Did he drift off into her past and spend the rest of his days licking his wounds and praying for an Oscar or a lottery win to get Charley regretting her decision? Or did he up sticks and follow her to London, move in just around the corner from her, and start biding his time all over again?

  Now this was very sticky ground for me to be speculating over, not least of all because I didn’t want to lay myself open to accusations of small-mindedness, jealously and control freakdom, but it had to be said that Charley (and Hugo) had done it before, so it wasn’t out of the realms of possibility that they could do it again.

  It was unlikely. But then I’m sure that’s what Nigel thought when he waved Charley off at Ascot station after a tender kiss and a lot of ‘I’ll write you soon’ reassurances.

  16 Hey, lads, guess who’s going to be on the telly?

  ‘Let me get this right; your mate’s going to come down here with a camera crew and film us and then put us on the telly?’ Big John said, his brow a tightly knotted mass of scept
icism.

  ‘All except the ‘your mate’ bit, yeah. That’s the plan,’ I confirmed, enjoying this particular Monday morning like I’d never enjoyed a Monday morning before. ‘Smart, eh?’ Jason reckoned, slinging the muck about with more than the usual flourish.

  ‘Are you sure he’s not just pulling your leg, Tel?’ Big John asked.

  ‘No, definitely. Well, pretty sure anyway. I don’t think they’re the type,’ I said, though to be honest, at the back of my mind somewhere I had to admit it was possible. I mean, thinking about it, the whole evening could’ve feasibly just been one long middle-class joke on me, in fact. You can never completely rule these things out. It would’ve certainly explained the lentils.

  ‘But why the hell would anyone want to film us laying bricks? Come to think of it, why the hell would anyone want to watch us laying bricks on the telly, like?’ Big John couldn’t work out, before going on to slap a couple down, presumably to see just how interesting it was.

  ‘John, mate, they’ve got five hundred channels to fill these days, they’re desperate for programmes,’ Jason explained.

  ‘Yeah, I know, but even so, this?’ Big John still couldn’t believe it, and he wasn’t the only one. Gordon, the boss, was convinced that it was some sort of divine conspiracy to stop him skiving off down the pub in the afternoons for fear of copping a rolling pin over the head off the old lady when he got home.

  ‘What are the odds?’ he asked, when this particular consequence dawned on him. ‘She’s home in Bagshot, I’m at work in Wimbledon, but all she has to do if she wants to keep her beady eye on me is tune in to this week’s episode of Gordon’s in the Boozer Again?’ he fumed. ‘It’s not right. It’s not right at all. A working man should be entitled to a bit of privacy when he’s at work.’

  ‘Or not, as the case may be,’ pointed out Robbie, right on cue, when he strolled by and made Gordon a gift of the hod of muck he’d brought with him.