by Danny King
Why would she even think about calling me again?
She wouldn’t. It was as simple as that. Of course not.
And as if to prove it, she didn’t.
Not once. Not even by accident while deleting my number from her phone.
In three days’ time, I would finally come to accept this and move on with my life. I wouldn’t move on very far, admittedly, only from desperation to devastation, but it would still be a step away from where I found myself Monday morning when Jason came calling for me.
‘All right, squire. Fuck me, you look rough. Late night, was it, you old bastard?’
‘I didn’t get much sleep last night,’ I explained.
‘Oh yeah,’ he winked, nudging me in the ribs from the safety of the driver’s seat. ‘Back in Charley’s good books are you, then?’
I turned my bloodshot slits in his direction and caught the full force of his chirpy smirking worry-free delight and immediately realised today was going to be the worst day of my life.
And it was still only a quarter to seven. There was so much of it left.
‘Here, pull over here so I can pick up a few beers, will you?’ I told him when we passed a parade of shops. ‘You want any?’
‘Yeah, get us a …’ he started, only stopping when he saw I was serious. ‘Here, Tel, are you all right? What’s the matter, mate?’
I swallowed a few times to try and summon up the words, but they had such a long way to crawl from the pit of my stomach that it took almost a full thirty seconds before I was able to spit them out.
‘Me and Charley… we split up,’ I choked, then let out a blub of misery before I was able to slam down the hatch again.
‘Oh no, Tel, you haven’t, have you?’ Jason responded, shaking his head with deep regret. ‘I’m so sorry, mate. Get rid of you, did she?’
‘No she didn’t, actually, you big cunt, I got rid of her!’ I snapped back, prompting Jason to furrow his brow and ask a question I’d been asking my pillow all night long.
‘Really? What d’you do that for?’
‘I don’t know,’ I replied, my head almost fit to burst. ‘You told me to.’
‘Uh? You what?’
‘On Friday. You said I should bin her if I wasn’t happy with her,’ I said.
Jason looked suitably confused and told me he never said any such thing.
‘All I said was, if she wasn’t making you happy, you had to ask yourself if it was worth the effort, or something like that. I never meant for you to bin her. I just meant for you to have a think about what you wanted.’
‘Oh right, tell me that now,’ I exaggerated.
‘Don’t give me this,’ Jason countered. ‘You’ve never done anything I’ve told you to do in your life, so don’t come the old “I was only following orders” bit with me. You did what you did because you decided to do it. Now you’re all gutted and looking for someone to grumble at so you’re grumbling at me, but if you’ve given Charley her marching orders then it was for more than something I said in the pub on Friday night that I can just about remember. At least, I fucking hope so for your sake, mush,’ he told me, turning us south on to the Sydenham Road.
Of course, he was right. My relationship with Charley had come a cropper on the rocks and I was trying to blame the seagulls when I’d been the one at the wheel. Actually, that wasn’t true. Charley had been the one at the wheel, I’d been the one stoking the boiler down below. But then stoking the boiler was just as important as turning the wheel, as you couldn’t steer if you didn’t have a stoked boiler, so if the boiler stoker down below downed his shovel, then it amounted to much the same thing as turning on to the rocks.
Oh, what was I talking about? I knew even less about boats than I did about women, so what was with the seafaring analogies? I wasn’t sure. I think I was just a bit bored with my usual bricklaying analogies, but the seafaring ones hadn’t worked out as well as I’d hoped so I decided to switch back for the time being until I grounded myself in something else.
‘You’re right,’ I finally admitted to Jason. ‘Sorry, mate. It wasn’t nothing to do with you.’
‘That’s all right, I know how it is,’ he accepted, before asking me how I went about calling it a day with Charley, then.
I told him all about it. My lunchtime date, St Paul’s Cathedral, the Whispering Gallery and her reaction, omitting only the real reason I’d picked somewhere so memorable to do the dirty.
‘Well, it’s a shame, I know, but if it wasn’t to be, it wasn’t to be, mate,’ was Jason’s opinion, as he pulled up at Thornton Heath roundabout next to a yawning Robbie.
‘Mawning, chaps, have a good weekend, did we?’ Robbie enquired when he drew back the side door and climbed in with his hod.
‘Tel split up with Charley,’ Jason quickly gossiped, clearly unable to wait until I was out of earshot to spread the breaking news.
‘Nah, you ain’t! Shit, that’s bad news, man. What reason she give?’ he asked, more or less answering his own question, in roundabout terms.
‘No reason, Robbie. No reason at all,’ I told him, too finished off to even put him straight.
I wondered how many of Charley’s mates would make the same assumption when the news broke up in Islington. Pretty much all of them, I guessed, which meant that stupid old predictable Tel had managed to somehow catch a lot of clever people off guard with his weekend’s work.
It was absolutely no consolation.
You know what, when you split up with someone, it’s awkward enough bumping into one of their mates after the event as it is. All that ‘yes, I’m having the time of my life what with all the great times and enormous successes I’ve been having just lately that I hardly even think about old whatsername any more’ old bullshit you have to go through until they’re far enough out of earshot that you can start crying again. And that’s usually only for five minutes. Try having the bastards following you around at work all day long and pointing a camera at you whenever you open your gob. See how you like that. It takes ‘putting on a front’ to a whole new level.
CT was waiting for me from the off. As was Barrie and Joel with camera and boom. They normally didn’t arrive until after ten o’clock but today they were here at half seven. What a coincidence.
‘They’re starting early, ain’t they?’ Robbie said, climbing out of the van with the mixer handle to start knocking up.
‘You don’t think that CT’s here to film you, do you?’ Jason asked, staring at the film crew through the van’s dusty windscreen.
‘That’s exactly what I think,’ I replied glumly, when I saw Barrie shoulder the camera at our arrival.
‘What, because of you and old Charley?’ Robbie couldn’t believe it. ‘No! That’s bang out of order. You want to knock his fucking lens in if he points it at you.’
‘No, don’t do that. Don’t give ’em the satisfaction,’ Jason advised. ‘They’re looking for a reason to paint you as the villain, mate, make you look like a wanker for dumping Charley. Don’t give it to ’em. That’s the best way to give it to ’em.’ Jason then turned to Robbie. ‘You neither, Rob. Sunday best, boys. Pass the word.’
‘Hang on a minute, you dumped Charley?’ Robbie double-checked.
‘Yes, I dumped Charley. Is that so unbelievable?’ I replied.
Robbie didn’t respond, he simply shot Jason a pair of raised eyebrows, slid out of the van and went to give Dennis a knock.
‘Chin up, mate, chin up,’ Jason said.
‘What the fuck’s he even doing here this early?’ I wanted to know, incensed that I had CT to deal with on top of everything else.
‘He’s just nosing around, just like last week. Rise above it and don’t give him anything you’ll regret six months down the line. Be bigger than him.’
At this moment, Gordon came over and leaned in.
‘Here, what’s this Robbie’s saying about matey boy trying to stitch you up?’ he asked.
‘Tel’s split up with Charley,’ Jason replied
for me, positively first with the news today.
‘Have ya?’
‘Yes, and I dumped her, all right,’ I pre-empted him.
‘Oh. Oh right. Well, that’s the main thing, I guess. So what’s with Gladys? He out to start trouble, then, is he?’ Gordon replied.
‘No, you know him,’ my official spokesman continued. ‘He’s just looking to make us look like arseholes, only this ain’t the time, so I say we don’t give the bastard nothing.’
Gordon thought about this and nodded in agreement.
‘You all right today, Tel? You want to go home?’ he asked.
‘Nah, don’t do that,’ Jason interrupted. ‘Worse thing he could do.’
‘Yeah, I’ll be OK. Get me head down and lay some bricks.
That’s what I need,’ I told him.
‘All right,’ Gordon agreed. ‘There’s a couple of table lifts and chimneys loaded out if you want to get away from the lads. As long as you promise not to chuck yourself off the side,’ he laughed, then stopped when he saw that I wasn’t.
‘Don’t worry, Gord, I ain’t going to do myself in. I dumped her, remember?’ I told him.
‘That’s true,’ Gordon agreed.
So once again I found myself thirty feet above the deck, staring out across a cloudy grey sky, well away from the hurly-burly of Monday morning.
CT hadn’t approached when I’d climbed out of the van and neither had he followed me up here. Instead, he was filming the lads who were starting an oversite on the far side of the estate. I wasn’t sure how much he was going to get out of them this morning seeing as Jason had them closing ranks on him like a well-drilled detachment of teenage girls. I hoped they wouldn’t make their needle too obvious, as I’d tried to leave Charley on the best possible terms so that she’d think fondly of me whenever she glimpsed St Paul’s, not hock one out and curse my name over the lads’ treatment of her friend. Not that there was anything I could do about it if they decided to go that way. Blokes being what they are generally as a rule can’t be talked out of blanking, threatening, smacking, burgling, firebombing or, most disastrous of all, having a quiet word with, a third party once they get it into their heads that they’re doing their mate a favour. I just had to keep my fingers crossed and try to set an example.
Not today, though.
Not so soon afterwards.
I simply couldn’t face it.
That’s why I quite liked finishing off chimneys.
A lot of brickwork, such as when you’re just running in a big long featureless wall, can be pretty straightforward. There’s still a skill to it, don’t get me wrong, but if you’re a time-served trowel, you can easily switch on to autopilot and either lose yourself in your thoughts, have a natter with your mates or listen to the radio. The corners are already built, you’re simply laying to the line, so there’s not much to distract yourself with. But chimneys are different. There’s a little bit more to them. You have to keep an eye on your measurements and your levels as you’re taking them up. They have to be sturdy enough to independently withstand thirty or forty lashing British winters. The flues inside have to be set with heat resistant muck and sit flush. And they usually have to be finished off with a little ornate flourish of brickwork, usually involving a couple of different types of brick, more often than not flettons and either engineering bricks or Staffordshire blues.
So a table lift and chimney represented a good morning’s work and enough of a challenge to focus my mind away from the events of the weekend.
At least, until I came to the smooth muck flaunching around the chimney pot.
It wasn’t until lunchtime that CT finally came over. Remarkably, he wasn’t accompanied by either his cameramen or his sound operators.
‘Hey, Terry, how are you?’ he asked, hanging on to the van’s roof as he looked through the open window at me.
I thought better of telling him that I was ‘absolutely fucking fantastic’ and settled instead for downplaying it with an ‘OK’.
‘I heard about what happened with you and Charley at the weekend and I just wanted to say that I’m really sorry,’ he explained, also looking across at Jason and the mess him and his cheese Sandrich were making all over the driver’s seat to share his sincerity around.
‘Yeah,’ I thought to nod, then added, ‘Thanks.’
‘I just want you to know that whatever’s happened between Charley and you, as unfortunate as it is, I hope it doesn’t affect us,’ he went on, presumably trying to salvage his shooting schedule in the face of the lads’ change of attitude towards him and his crew.
‘Yeah, you say that now,’ Jason butted in on my behalf before I had a chance to answer, ‘but how do we know how you’re putting this programme together or what the voiceover’s going to say until we see it? You could be making old Tel out to be a right cunt for all we know and we wouldn’t know jack shit about it until it came on the telly for everyone to see and then what if we didn’t like it? Tough shit all round.’
CT looked gobsmacked at the very suggestion and asked us if that’s what we thought of him.
Once again, before I could get in between the two of them, Jason was speaking up on behalf of the silent thoughts I’d hoped to keep silent.
‘Oh, come off it, Top Cat, you TV people are all the same. Everyone’s best mate when you want to get your pictures, then right stitch-up merchants once you’ve got what you need,’ Jason said through a mouthful of Hovis and Red Leicester. ‘I’ve seen those documentaries on the telly with old Paul Daniels and Noel Edmonds and Robbie Williams and you always make them look like right wankers,’ he pointed out.
Me and CT glanced at each other and the names on Jason’s list and for the briefest of moments were of one mind, before CT assured us we had nothing to worry about on that score.
‘I’m not here to do a hatchet job on anyone,’ he promised us both. ‘That’s not even the style of documentary we’re making. It’s a seven o’clock family spot. We’re just looking to make a fun and factual day-in-the-life show. We’re not out to make anyone look bad.’ CT then turned and spoke to me directly. ‘You don’t think I’m trying to portray you badly, do you, Terry?’
I didn’t know what to think. Not any more. Events were out of my hands and in the laps of everyone else. If CT was going to stitch me up, then he was going to stitch me up. If the lads were going to get arsey with him, then they were going to get arsey with him. And if Charley was going to hate me, then she was going to hate me. There was nothing I could do about any of it any more, not least of all because I simply didn’t have the energy to. I’d finally chucked in the towel.
‘CT, I just want to come to work, get my head down and lay some bricks. And that’s all I want to do,’ I almost pleaded with him.
CT weighed this up for a moment, then let out a long sigh.
‘OK,’ he accepted. ‘You have to do what’s right for you. I know it can’t be easy having us here so, look, we won’t get under your feet or make things difficult for you. We’ll just let you get on with your job if you like,’ he assured me.
As it turned out, he was as good as his word.
26 Laying bricks
Six months ticked by. Christmas came and went. And brick by brick, the estate slowly neared completion. In all that time I didn’t hear from Charley once, though she never wandered farther than a frown’s throw from my face. I gave up trying to make sense out of our time together, the conclusions I’d leapt to and the decisions I’d taken, and made do with tormenting myself with dates, places and times.
A week earlier, it had been six months exactly since my last glimpse of Charley. It had been in St Paul’s in the Whispering Gallery. She’d slipped through the doors to the stairs without looking back. She’d been wearing her blue suede jacket, her black cotton trousers and her knee-high heeled boots underneath; her hair had been untied, she’d worn a pale pink lip gloss and, most memorably of all, just the tiniest dab of Allure that I could still smell whenever I closed my eyes. I couldn
’t remember what I’d been wearing that day. I was pretty sure it wasn’t my donkey jacket, hard hat and half a bottle of Brut, even though that was what my prankster memory was desperately trying to convince me I’d gone in, but it didn’t really matter. All that mattered was that single point in time, because that was the last time I’d seen Charley.
And as if to complete the symmetry, in just under two weeks’ time it would be a year to the day since I’d first met her. What she’d been wearing or smelling like that evening, I had no idea. I could only speak for the next morning when I’d first encountered her wearing nothing but a smile and a generous stench of champagne, but I circled that particular Saturday night in my mind all the same. Just so I could mark it with a few sad thoughts when it came around.
Despite these mental etchings, I’d managed to work alongside CT for much of the winter without Charley cropping up in the conversation. In fact, she’d been rather conspicuous by her absence and there had been times when it had been almost torturous not asking him how she was, if she was happy, how her Rocket Sauce campaign was getting along and if she’d moved on and was seeing anyone new. Anyone I might know, like a cunty four-eyed ex who’d been hanging around like a bad smell for years? Incredibly, I managed not to ask him any of these questions somehow, though by New Year’s my tongue felt like an old bit of boot leather.
Still, it had actually turned out quite good to work with CT, to know that he was seeing Charley on a regular basis and that stories of me were possibly filtering back to her, so I stayed on my best behaviour, put my best foot forward and entertained myself with silly scenes in my head in which CT told a rapt Charley every detail of my working week over couscous and baby otter’s cheese.
‘…and he had grapes in his sandwich box the other day. He even offered me one. He’s eating a lot more fruit these days and cutting down on the crisps and sausage rolls and has even switched to wholemeal bread. He says it’s better for his bowels.’
‘Wow, that’s great. That’s really good that he’s looking after himself. I was worried he might go to pieces after we split up, but he’s obviously made of stronger stuff and really getting on with his life, isn’t he?’