by Danny King
Nothing had changed for us.
And Charley still hadn’t rung.
It was all very disappointing.
But things didn’t stay disappointing for very long.
No, as the weeks went by, the disappointment soon gave way to disbelief as more and more episodes were screened. Week after week, we tuned into a show I began thinking should’ve actually been called Stick It to Tel rather than Building Site as this seemed to be the recurring theme. Again and again we’d cut away from some token scene of roofers roofing or plasterers plastering to eavesdrop on one of my mates nattering around the mixer about my chances of finding a diplomatic solution to my relationship. Sometimes the lads were aware of the cameras, sometimes they weren’t, but mine and Charley’s problems inched their way towards centre stage a little more each week.
It was like CT was growing in confidence the more shows he got under his belt. There had been just the merest mention of us that first week and he’d got away with it, so come the second, there we were again, only this time in more detail. And then the third. And then the fourth. And so on. All spread out for teatime viewers to pick over and digest.
Talk about reopening old wounds. It was more than a little jaw-dropping.
All our rows were there too, like a collection of porcelain squabbles; the wanky bars, the dinner parties, the posh food and her dodgy time-keeping, the fact that Charley earned more in a year than I would in three (and that’s before subtracting all the unpaid rainy days I’d lose) and our niggling little disagreements over newspapers, celebrities and the need to clip kids around the ear on a regular basis. They all made unwelcome appearances. Even the classic old theory about posh birds and rough bits of trade made it in there thanks to a moment of profound insight from Robbie, which pretty much ticked my entire card.
All there, and all snaking their way through the series like pockets of rising damp.
I tell you, when CT set out to do a job on someone, he really did a job. I had to give him that much if nothing else.
Naturally, whenever my name was mentioned by either Dirty Den or the lads, the camera would find me in the distance and zoom in on me, either finishing off one of my chimneys, trudging around a footing or forlornly picking my nose in the van.
By Christ, I cut a sorry figure and no mistake.
In fact, the only mistake I’d made was to give CT the benefit of the doubt that his loyalties to Charley wouldn’t cloud his judgement and lead him to portray me as some sort of enormous lovesick mug – which I guess I had been at times, but still, that was no excuse for letting the rest of the country in on the joke.
What an arsehole.
And by that, I mean CT.
By episode five, pretty much half the programme was now taken up with the lads’ gossip about me and Charley and our petty trials and tribulations. It had simply ballooned out of all sense of proportion.
Gone was any anger I’d initially felt at CT; in its place instead was honest-to-goodness incomprehension. Forget how my late-lamented love life wasn’t anybody else’s business, I simply couldn’t figure out how CT had thought it would be of interest to the viewers. I mean, blimey, there was some pretty tedious shit flying about on this building site of ours, I’ll tell you.
One week there was a little subplot where Charley hadn’t phoned me. Boo hoo.
Then there was the incident where she hadn’t wanted me to meet her parents. Whahh!
Then there was that hilarious spat where I’d gone to a party with some of her mates one weekend and Charley had once again spent the whole night talking to Hugo instead of me. Lord take me now!
All brought to the attention of the Great British licence-fee-paying public courtesy of the fucking lads.
I mean, ‘Christ Almighty. Big deal. So what?’ was basically what my neighbours heard me shouting at the telly every Wednesday at seven.
I didn’t want to have to relive this puerile drivel week in week out and surely I wasn’t alone in this. I would flinch each time my name was mentioned and grit my teeth whenever I saw a tiny me looking away into the middle distance with starry eyes. It got to the point where I longed to see that wet blanket either pull himself together or take a long walk off a short length of scaffolding.
I mean, what had happened to Dan the chippy’s pencil?
Hadn’t he found it yet or what? Why weren’t the BBC dedicating a prime-time half-hour slot to that drama? It was on a similar par with my hullabaloo.
I really, really, really couldn’t credit how CT had thought he could get away with it either. And by that I don’t mean he had anything to fear from me or the lads because he didn’t. We might not greet him with big sloppy kisses if he ever dared show his face on our site again but no one was of a mind to turn his lights out. Not even me, who it could be argued had every right after being stitched up like some middle-class kipper’s mum.
No, I was talking about his bosses at the Beeb.
Surely they weren’t going to take kindly to him using their show for his own private muckraking. I mean, how could they? All that money, all that manpower and all that screen time and all they’d got for this substantial outlay was six episodes of some sullen bricky walking around with his thumb up his arse.
Nice. It was possibly the equivalent of Gordon asking me to set out a footing on a three-bed semi, only for him to come along half an hour later and see that I’d decided to spell out ‘TEL IS THE GREATEST’ with all the bricks instead. That would be a sacking offence at the very least with possibly a referral to the site psychiatrist – if such a person existed. But they didn’t. I wondered if they did at the BBC. I hoped so for CT’s sake because he was going to need all the wordy sick notes he could lay his hands on if he wanted to keep his job after Building Site.
I even half thought about suing. Actually, I never really thought about it. Jason suggested it one night while we were on the lash, which was about the only time it made any sense. Come the next morning, two ibuprofen and a double egg-and-sausage sandwich later, I knew I didn’t have a leg to stand on (much like the previous evening). I’d signed a waiver agreeing to be filmed, I’d had nothing more than my pride hurt and at the end of the day I’d said and done all of these things.
Or at least, Jason and the lads had.
Maybe I should sue them?
At the end of the day, I was just embarrassed by the whole affair and wanted nothing more than for it all to go away. Even if there had been grounds and I’d had a spare few grand burning a hole in my bank account for the lawyers, the prospect of slinging ‘you said this’ and ‘you said that’ backwards and forwards across an open courtroom for two weeks didn’t exactly get me whistling.
All I’d ever wanted was to be able keep my dignity, keep my pride and end things with Charley amicably. It had been the whole reason I’d bought two tickets to St Paul’s and deleted her number from my phone the very next day, because I hadn’t wanted to expose Charley to my soft underbelly.
Me moping around like a wounded kitten.
Me looking like a sap.
Me looking hurt.
But most of all, I hadn’t wanted Charley to feel bad about dumping me… hang on, I dumped her, didn’t I? For some reason, I always remembered it the other way around. Anyway, I didn’t want her feeling bad whichever way the cards had fallen, which I guess was my real concern. I was big enough and hairy enough to take all of this nonsense on the chin. But I was genuinely worried about Charley, though admittedly for selfish reasons.
I didn’t want to give her any excuse to hate me.
Or to remember me poorly.
Or curse our time together.
Or feel embarrassed that we’d been close at one time.
And what tumbled out of our screens for six weeks gave her every reason and then some to feel all of the above, culminating in Jason’s observation in the final show that my collywobbles were born long before I met Charley.
‘See, the way Tel sees it,’ Jason told Big John as the camera eavesd
ropped, ‘is if Jo could walk out on him for some supermarket manager without so much as a cheerio, then what chance did he have of hanging on to a bird like Charley?’
Which was funny because I couldn’t remember saying anything of the sort to Jason, which probably meant that this pet theory was all his own work – though that didn’t necessarily mean there was no truth to it.
I don’t know, but I didn’t really have time to think about it because I was suddenly far too busy reeling from CT’s final parting shot.
When exactly he’d filmed it, I couldn’t tell you, but he’d saved the best for last and played it out masterfully.
It was one final humiliation for poor old Terry to chew on.
Jason had just finished speculating as to the reasons for my and Charley’s break-up when the shot changed and suddenly we were looking down over the site from above. I guess CT must’ve rented a helicopter and buzzed the place at the weekend because I don’t remember him flying overhead any time during the week, but that was really neither here nor there. All that mattered was that from above we could suddenly see what I’d only intended God, the birds and passing rocketmen to see – my chimney-top declarations.
Oh… bollocks… In complete honesty, I didn’t realise I’d done so many, but there they were in all their glory, around the tops of every chimney flue and as blatant as the horrified expression on my face.
Terry Charley, 2008
I love Charley, Terry 08
Terry + Charley, xxx
x Charley x 3/5/08
T&C 4ever
T+C= 2008
Charley Charley Charley Terry Aug 08
With all my heart T2Cxx
Be mine T+Cx
And most pointedly of all:
I miss Charley, T
These messages were repeated again and again and again, in every flaunching, on every chimney, on every house and on every street of our little estate. Scored in soft muck and hardened for posterity. Messages that should never have been seen. Messages that should never have been read. And messages that should never have been.
Much like Charley and myself, I guess.
28 Hitting the roofs
Jason knocked on my door around half nine that night. ‘I’ve been trying to phone you for the last two hours,’ he said, when I finally opened up. ‘I unplugged it,’ I told him, my eyes bloodshot with beer, tears and shame.
‘What d’you do that for?’ he asked in all seriousness.
‘Well, I didn’t suppose anyone would want to speak to me this evening, so I was trying to save the battery obviously, you twat. What d’you think I unplugged it for?’
Jason pondered this for a moment and agreed it had been a stupid question.
‘So,’ he speculated, following me into the flat, ‘watch anything on the telly tonight?’
I slumped on the sofa and chewed on my lip. This was where it started. I’d successfully managed to dodge the consequences of my actions for two measly hours, but now Jason was here to crank open the floodgates.
I guess this is what inevitably happens when you do something stupid. On such occasions all you ever really want is for the source of your embarrassment to go away, be forgotten or at least be swept under the carpet and never spoken of again, but before you can get to that point, you have to run the gauntlet of smart-arse quips or overly concerned arms around the shoulder (the smart-arse quips being infinitely more preferable).
‘Get it over with,’ I told Jason, before ripping open another can of lager.
‘Tel, mate, I ain’t here to have a go at you, but what were you thinking?’ he asked, curiously sounding like he was having a go at me.
‘What do you mean, what was I thinking? You read my housing estate, didn’t you? You know what I was thinking,’ I replied, then conceded, ‘or rather, wasn’t.’
‘But Jesus, Terry, we all know you’re cut up about Charley and everything but you could get the sack for what you did,’ Jason then said, which knocked me along the sofa by a good six inches as this upshot hadn’t even occurred to me.
‘You don’t think I might, do you?’ I suddenly fretted.
‘I don’t know, mate, you might do. I mean, you defaced God knows how many houses and left the company open to as many compensation claims. At the very least they might have you up on all the roofs repointing every flaunching in your own time or have your wages docked to pay for the job. And that’s if you’re lucky.’
Oh, bollocks.
I tell you, when it rained it fucking poured, didn’t it? And to think, only thirty seconds earlier I’d been worried that everyone was going to laugh at me, but now all I could see was a horizon of angry faces all demanding my head because I’d vandalised their properties. The calls would start at the top of course with the chairman of the company, and they’d tumble downwards through the shareholders, regional manager, site agent and finally Gordon, before knocking me on to the dole with a thump.
All I could do was hope that the blame would stop with me. I’d feel dreadful if I’d landed Gordon in it or cost him any money or future contracts. That would be more than I could bear. Christ, how was this all going so disastrously pear shaped?
‘I’d better give Gordon a ring,’ I concluded, and endured a five- minute tongue-lashing from said subby before he finally calmed down enough to tell me to keep my chin up.
‘Look, no real harm done, lad, not when you think about it. Nothing structural or nothing, so we’ll just go see Pete in the morning and offer to put it all straight, OK?’ Gordon proposed, before telling me to stop apologising. ‘See you in the morning, boy.’
It was only after I’d hung up that I noticed no mention was made of money and I asked Jason if he thought I should offer to cover the costs when I saw him.
‘Stop trying to pre-empt everything, mate. Just see what they’ve got to say and go with that. I mean, it’s not like their share price ain’t done all right these last six weeks, so don’t go making any offers they might take you up on,’ Jason insisted, then chuckled, ‘even if you have just knocked them out of the FTSE 100, you big, dumb, love-struck idiot.’
The next morning came around surprisingly quick, despite the fact that I hardly slept a wink. The alarm went off at half-six and I got out of bed to the sounds of my own pitiful whimpering.
I know this is probably stating the obvious here but there’s something about facing the music that holds a particular foreboding for us stupid people. It’s not like going to the dentist’s or having your lungs swapped out in a transplant operation, it’s an altogether different kind of dread, because there’s zero accompanying sympathy.
I did it. And now it was time for me to face up to it.
What’s the matter, don’t like it? Good, that’s the point. Facing the music’s all about not liking it. In fact, the more I didn’t like it, the better. That was music-facing in a nutshell. That was being sorry and being made to feel sorry. That was what today was all about.
I knew all of this as I washed my face and I knew all of this as I brushed my teeth. I would’ve known all of this as I made my sandwiches too but I didn’t make any sandwiches, not this particular day. I didn’t deserve sandwiches. All I deserved was a flask, but even then I stewed the tea slightly to stop myself from enjoying it too much.
That was all I deserved.
Jason was already parked up and waiting for me when I emerged. I braced myself for the first dig of the day but Jason just told me not to worry about it. What was done was done. The worst they could do was sack (and possibly sue the arse off) me but that was it, and in thirty or forty years’ time we’d look back on this day and laugh.
‘Can’t wait,’ I glumly replied, as Jason twisted the key in the ignition and drove me towards my fate.
I didn’t say much during the van ride over, Jason did enough jabbering for the both of us. Then when Robbie climbed in at Thornton Heath roundabout, the conversation clock reset and the whole thing started all over again.
I realised this was how it
was going to be for the next few weeks: the same questions, the same digs and the same bewildered looks, and I wondered if it was at all possible to rent a big marquee, fill it with everyone I knew, everyone I’d ever known and everyone I was ever likely to know, and invite them to ask me ‘what the fuck’ for an hour or two to get my humiliation dealt with in one fell swoop. It would be logistically difficult to arrange and probably pretty pricey, but it might be worth it all the same. Especially if Jason set up a stall selling rotten tomatoes and old cabbages. We might even make a bit of the money back. Enough to pay for a few chimneys in fact. Worth a thought.
Unfortunately it would have to wait, because like my night’s sleep, the van ride was over all too quickly and suddenly we were here.
We were at work.
We rounded the corner and pulled on to the estate, but all at once Jason suddenly hit the brakes.
‘What the shit…?’ he spluttered, staring straight ahead towards where we normally parked.
‘What is it?’ Robbie asked in the back, climbing forward to peer over our shoulders. ‘Who are all them lot?’
‘Christ knows. Jesus, you don’t think they’re here for us, do you?’ Jason fretted.
Fifty yards ahead, where normally only beaten-up old Escorts and sleeping hoddies lingered, a swell of bodies turned to greet us. I don’t know how many people were there, maybe two or three dozen. Definitely too many for us to mow down, so I suggested we stuck the van into reverse and got out of there as fast as our tyres could carry us.