Blue Collar

by Danny King

  ‘This straight has a pig in it. About a two-and-a-half-to-one,’ I told him, which was absolutely terrible, even by our shonky groundworkers’ standards. They must’ve poured it about five minutes before last knockings to have left a pig that bad in it. ‘A pig is an unevenness in your footing. Have you ever heard of the expression, “to get on an even footing”?’

  CT had.

  ‘Well, this is where that expression comes from,’ I told him, indicating the ditch I was currently standing in. I have no idea if this is true, to be honest. I doubt it. I think it’s probably more likely a sword-fighting expression from the olden days. Half the expressions we use these days seem to be, but CT wasn’t to know this. Or if he was, he wasn’t letting on, so I continued banging on about the importance of getting on even footings and the inherent dangers of building on pigs before leaving him to pick the bananas out of that bucket of pilchards, which is an expression all of my own, though sadly one that has yet to catch on with any great effect.

  CT nodded, like this was all very interesting, which it clearly wasn’t, even by BBC3 standards, so I upped the ante and talked him through the merits of brick foundations over concrete block foundations until I finally killed the camera.

  ‘No, it’s OK, it’s just the tape,’ Barrie told CT, dropping the camera off his shoulder and popping open the side.

  CT said nothing while the tape was being changed. He just stood on the edge of the footing and stared down at me with a semi-amused smile on his face. Likewise, I clammed up during the switch, reluctant to spill a drop of this gold without having some professional eavesdropper catch it for posterity, and before a minute was out we were up and running again.

  ‘Of course, things can get tricky once you start piledriving your footings…’ I was in the middle of saying when CT cut right through my blarney and asked me if I was going to call Charley at all this week.

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ I insisted, a little irritably.

  CT let the question hang in the air for a few seconds, either for maximum effect or because his mate in the sound van had accidentally turned over two pages of 1001 Dynamite Responses and lost his place.

  ‘I just wanted to know if you were planning on calling her, that’s all,’ he finally said.

  ‘I thought we were talking about footings?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know what we’re talking about, Terry, but it’s certainly not footings,’ he pointed out.

  I responded with a snort and a shake of the head before getting back to the business of quietly marking out the corners off the profile lines. When CT saw he’d got all the footage he was going to get out of me, he tapped Barrie on the shoulder and Barrie lowered the camera.

  ‘We’ll shoot some stuff up on those roofs over there where the tilers are now, OK?’ I heard him tell Barrie, sending him on ahead to get set up while he hung back and had one final word with me. ‘Give her a call, Terry. Some time this week. I know she wants to talk to you,’ he told me, before thanking Gordon and turning to catch up with his cameraman.

  ‘What was all that about?’ Gordon asked ten seconds later when CT was out of earshot.

  I just shrugged and carried on marking out.

  ‘I thought we were talking about footings,’ Gordon then said, his face the picture of confusion.

  ‘Yeah, so did I,’ I lied, dipping the tip of my trowel into a dollop of smoothed-out green muck and writing the word ‘PIG’ as a heads-up to whoever was going to work on this particular corner.

  22 Upcoming talks

  The expression ‘I know she wants to talk to you’ kept getting snagged on sticking-out corners of my brain. Charley didn’t want to hear from me. Or see me. Or be with me. She wanted to talk to me, which sounded ominously specific and came with its own wailing klaxons and cold, clammy hands. I pretended for a moment that I couldn’t guess what she wanted to talk to me about and idly speculated as to the subject of said forthcoming conversation.

  Perhaps she thought it was time we took the next step and started leaving socks and underpants around each other’s houses. Unlikely.

  Perhaps she thought it was time we spiced up things in the bedroom and asked some of her thoroughbred mates to come round and drop their keys into a bowl in the middle of the coffee table, because they’re all into that sort of thing these thoroughbreds, you know. Even unlikelier.

  Perhaps she wanted to agree with me that Saturday’s march had been a load of bullshit and that ninety per cent of the people who took to the streets to be part of it did so just so they could say they’d been there, which is why the whole thing descended into some sort of Mardi Gras for angry brats. Possibly the unlikeliest.

  No, Charley didn’t want to talk to me about any of these things. That was pretty obvious, even to me. Charley wanted to talk to me about our future, or lack of one, to be precise.

  ‘I’ve been thinking…’ she would say as sadly as possible, hoping that these few words would speak for themselves and save her having to spell out exactly what she’d been thinking (helped no doubt by a few quiet words from that guttersnipe Hugo).

  If I didn’t immediately leap in with a ‘yeah, yeah, I know. It’s OK, there’s no need to say anything’, she’d then have to dig a little deeper and see if any of the following lit up any light bulbs when she tried them out.

  ‘I’m not sure we’re in the same place…’

  ‘It’s not you, it’s me…’

  ‘I just think we’re very different people…’

  ‘You’re going to make someone a really great boyfriend one day…’

  ‘Things have just run their course…’

  ‘We had some great times but all good things must come to an end…’

  ‘Listen, dummy, do you need a diagram or what…’

  I wondered if I could ride it out by playing all my stupid cards at once so that I missed everything Charley tried to tell me, though I wasn’t sure I fancied us still being together to celebrate our diamond wedding anniversary if this was my long-term strategy.

  And I wasn’t about to argue my way out of the inevitable dumping either.

  ‘Actually, Charley, we are right for each other. In fact, we’re really well suited if you just gave me a chance, dropped that arsehole Hugo from your life and stopped trying to make me eat puy fucking lentils all the time…’

  No, I’m long enough in the tooth to know that once your other half starts expressing doubts about their commitment to the cause, it’s basically game over from that point onwards. You simply can’t argue yourself back into someone’s heart. Nigel had known this ten years earlier. And I knew it now. All you can do is take it like a man, keep your dignity and try as best you can to leave them with the awful nagging doubt that they may have done the wrong thing, so that when they come begging back to you three months later, you can tell them to fuck right off and emerge from the whole sorry mess feeling like the winner.

  Not that I’d be feeling like any sort of winner any time soon after all I’d put up with.

  You know, it’s unbelievable, I’d really given this relationship my best shot. I really had. I’d travelled north to her neck of the woods. I’d drunk in her awful pubs. I’d eaten her awful foods. I’d watched her awful foreign movies. I’d made the effort with her aw… with her friends. And I’d gone on her fucking awful marches. I’d even resisted the temptation to smack Hugo in the gob, which really was above and beyond the call when you think about it, but at the end of the day, none of this had counted for Jack Johnson.

  Because Charley wanted to ‘talk to’ me.

  Thinking about it, my post-demo disappearance and subsequent phone call boycott were possibly the first and only time I’d ever openly expressed any irritation at anything Charley had done. Don’t get me wrong, I hadn’t spent the entire last few months walking around holding her hand and muttering ‘fucking stupid cow’ under my breath, but then by that same token I hadn’t always voted with my conscience over every little decision either. Rather
than say anything that might’ve sparked a bit of friction between us (like the now infamous eggs Benedict incident), most times I’d just ended up biting my tongue in order to keep the peace. And if this resulted in me eating the odd vegetable I didn’t like or nodding enthusiastically to some opinion a big fat raspberry might’ve better suited, then so what? I was a big boy. It hadn’t done me any harm and certainly hadn’t done Charley any harm either, so why not duck all the silly little disagreements and just get on with the business of enjoying each other’s company? That was the way I saw things. I think it’s the way most blokes see things, i.e. anything for a quiet life.

  Women see things differently, though. For some reason – and I don’t know why this is – most of the women I’d been out with felt the need to be agreed with as far as everything was concerned. Even the things that didn’t affect them in any way, shape or form. In fact, especially the things that didn’t affect them. Like I said, I have no idea why this is, but if life’s taught me one thing, it’s that there’s no such phrase in the female vocabulary as ‘OK, let’s just agree to differ’ except when they’re confronted with conclusive and corroborated scientific evidence that proves beyond all reasonable doubt that they are talking out of their arses on a given point. This is the only time a woman will ‘agree to differ’ and possibly the reason most of the Foreign Office’s diplomats aren’t women.

  ‘Excuse me, Mr Mbuko, but do you know you’ve got a plate in your mouth? You do? Well take it out, then, it’s stupid. No, I don’t care about your heritage, take it out now. There are people staring.’

  This might seem a bit of a sexist thing to suggest, but then just because something’s sexist it doesn’t automatically mean it’s not true, does it? Men and women are different. And women do do things that blokes don’t (and vice versa, by the way). Just look at that palaver over the aforementioned eggs Benedict, for example. Why had it mattered to Charley what I had for breakfast that morning? Why had it bothered her so much that I’d ordered a can of Fanta as well as a cup of tea? Why had I had to try her horrible haddock Florentine? And why had I had to like all these things, with the exception of the Fanta?

  Also, and on other occasions, why was some long, drawn-out, boring, moody Chinese movie where everyone was able to fly and hit treble top with three samurai swords blindfolded more intelligent than what I’d wanted to go and see at the pictures (the latest James Bond in case you’re interested)?

  Why was an enormous tree trunk suspended from the ceiling of the Tate Modern and wrapped in clingfilm not a pointless load of old horse shite? It had certainly looked it to me.

  Why was the Congestion Zone charge a fantastic scheme that needed to be extended to every corner of the country, regardless of how little sense that made?

  Why had I been wrong not to be outraged that the AIDS charity, the Terrence Higgins Trust, received a fraction of the donations that donkey sanctuaries up and down the country received? I mean, people can avoid getting AIDS, can’t they, but donkeys can’t avoid being donkeys.

  Why had I been wrong to question the saintliness of the homeless? I had just been stating a fact that Big Issue sellers do look like the last people on earth who’d ever put their hand in their pocket to buy a copy of the Big Issue if things were the other way around.

  And why had I been a Nazi for not thinking it absolutely scandalous that students had to pay back their student loans when they started earning a certain wage? A university degree seemed like the key to a nice healthy career and salary. Why shouldn’t students be expected to foot a little of the bill themselves when they were going to be the ones who reaped the rewards? No one was forcing them into highly lucrative jobs in the City or the media at gunpoint. There were still plenty of ditches in this country that needed digging for people who didn’t want to fork out for their own Student Union bar bills. No degrees required.

  Why had I been wrong about all of the above and more? All of these things had come up at dinner parties or drinks parties over the course of the last six months and I’d clammed up or performed three-point turns every time Charley had developed a scowl. I’d compromised and compromised and compromised again in an effort to keep the peace with her and I’d done everything in my power not to annoy or upset her in any way in all that time because I was so utterly nuttily about my smart, beautiful and heart-wrenchingly adorable girlfriend.

  But enough was e-cunting-nough!

  I’d gone through shit and back on Saturday, I’d paid my dues in full and this time around I had the right to have the almighty hump.

  I had that right.

  And I deserved a heartfelt apology and a generous helping of love and understanding. I had that right. But I wasn’t going to get an apology. And I wasn’t going to get any understanding.

  Instead, I was going to get talked to.

  Un-fucking-believable.

  How was that fair? How was that right?

  It wasn’t. There’s your answer. It wasn’t right and it wasn’t fair. But it was tediously and predictably typical. A normal, ordinary working bloke tugs his forelock for six straight months and has no grounds to say boo to a Christmas goose because that’s all normal, ordinary working blokes have the right to expect. Some privileged, spoilt, rich little public school girl has it all her own way for exactly the same six months and the first time buttercups don’t make her chin glow yellow she digs out the binning brush and has a spring clean. Why was I even surprised?

  You know the thing that I really hated, though? What I really hated was the fact that I didn’t hate her. I didn’t hate my Charley. I was on the verge of being ejected from her life because I’d become a bit problematic for a little ironic fling, but I didn’t hate her. I was angry, bitter and as miserable as a sackful of puppies heading for the river. But I didn’t hate her. I couldn’t. I simply didn’t have it in me.

  However… that would almost certainly change if I allowed her to take one last walking holiday up and down my back without ever catching sight of my spine. Oh yes, a few months of stewing on one final humiliation to accompany my dumping would really set the agenda for the next few relationships to come. Of that I had little doubt. And I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to turn into a sour old bastard who was driven by spite, a carousel full of baggage and an insatiable appetite for seeing mascara running down women’s faces. I’d always been such a nice bloke up until now. A bit thick and a bit of a worrier (no shit, Sherlock), but nice nonetheless. Ask anyone.

  ‘What’s Tel like?’

  ‘Tel? He’s all right. Nice bloke. Bit thick and a bit of a worrier, but nice nonetheless. Why d’you ask?’

  But that would all change once I was damaged goods; haunting the corner of the Lamb, starting every sentence with ‘you’re better off without them’ and poring over Dear Deirdre’s pages for giggles. I didn’t fancy that for a future one little bit.

  But that was what was in store for me. I knew it as plainly as I knew I loved and was going to miss Charley. I knew it in my bones.

  So what could I do to save myself from this fate? What could I do to emerge from this relationship with my dignity intact? After all, I’d always known that this day was going to come. Always. Our whole romance had been based on borrowed time, from the moment she’d said ‘yes, it might be nice to go out’ to the inevitable ‘we need to talk’, I’d always known we’d only had a certain number of dates. I hadn’t known how many we’d had. One? Two? Thirteen? A hundred? I’d never been sure. All I’d known was that I’d recognise the signs when my time was nearly up. And time was very nearly up now. The stabling fees had been cancelled. The jodhpurs had been sold. And I was going the same way as the loyal but suddenly surplus Domino.

  All I could do – my one and only shot at saving my sanity – was to finish things on my own terms. That would go some way to redressing the disappointment.

  I had to have the final say.

  So there it was, my Hobson’s choice. I finally saw what I had to do.

  I had to take
the initiative.

  I had to dump Charley.

  23 The planning department

  Despite CT’s continued urging, I didn’t phone Charley all week. I hadn’t phoned her at the start of the week because I’d wanted her to know that I was in a big boo with her and I didn’t phone her throughout the rest of the week because I didn’t want to give her a chance to dump me before I could dump her. Timing was everything with a dumping.

  Fortunately, other than her Sunday lunch invitation, she didn’t try to call me.

  I figured female pride wouldn’t allow her to either, not after I’d rejected her half-hearted stab at reconciliation in which she tried to pass off a plate of overpriced roast beef as a wordless apology, and in fact I even banked on it keeping her at arm’s length until I was ready to do the dirty. Fortunately, female pride is something you can stick your house, your life savings, both your kidneys and all your pets on if you want. There are few greater certainties in life short of the retaliation you can expect by slapping a Mafia don’s daughter around on her wedding day while goading him that he hadn’t got the balls to do anything about it or wandering around Tyneside in a ‘Paedophile & Proud’ T-shirt. Of course, it would be a different story if I was going out with another bloke. My phone would be ringing off the hook the moment the pubs chucked out with that deckchair blubbing his eyes out about how sorry he was, before booze got the better of him and the tariff suddenly turned into a drunken 0898 phone call.

  There really was only one remaining problem.

  I didn’t want to dump her. I didn’t want to do it.

  I loved Charley and I wanted to spend my life making her happy, if only for the selfish reason that my happiness and hers were intertwined. I loved her. I absolutely adored her.

  ‘Which is why you’ve got to do it,’ I told my miserable reflection on Friday evening when I stepped out of the shower, almost poleaxing myself with remorse at the realisation.