It’s still dark when I wake, but I check my watch and I’m glad I did; it’s almost six. If I’m to get to this job anything like on time, I need to leave now. I wonder if I should go and tell Joe that I’m away, but he’s better off asleep, so I pull on my trainers and slip out without waking him. I drive home, feeling queasy. I make some sandwiches and get my stuff together, and I’m on the road by six thirty. I stop at the Spar for a large box of ibuprofen and then drive out of the village.
Years of the three of us getting lost in that van – stewing in our farts and bad tempers – has left me with a deep distrust of other people’s directions, but Lee’s turn out to be accurate. Each turning is exactly in the place he said it would be and is signposted in exactly the way he said it was. When I miss one, it’s my own fault for going too fast. I arrive at my destination with hardly a swearword uttered.
I park on the verge of a private lane with a hardcore surface that looks like it was only recently put down. No one else seems to have arrived yet; apart from a mini-excavator bearing hire-company stickers, mine is the only vehicle here. I’m too early. The sky is still a night blue, but the horizon glows red and against it stands a group of agricultural buildings. I switch off the radio and the latest atrocities drop away in the silence of the morning. For something to do, I strap up my bad wrist with the bandage they gave me in hospital and swallow double the recommended dose of painkillers. Then I sit and watch as the light in the east infuses the furls of cloud. I begin to hope that nobody comes and that I could just wait here until I didn’t want to anymore and then turn round and drive home.
Fat chance. A car crunches up the track behind me, sweeps past, and parks up near the buildings. A man in a woolly hat gets out, stands and looks at me for a few moments, and then disappears into the shadows pooled around a stone barn. After a while, I hear the reluctant chut-chut-chut of a cold diesel engine being cranked before it coughs and spins into life. Shortly after this, a rectangle of light appears on the darkest wall of the barn – the one facing me – and I see the man cross the doorway, then cross back. I decide to stay where I am until Lee turns up.
When Lee said ‘bright and early’, it seems the emphasis was on the ‘bright’ rather than the ‘early’ because by the time he gets here it’s broad daylight and getting on for nine o’clock. I am still in the car, half asleep, when he knocks on the window. I wind it down.
‘You’re sleeping on the job,’ he says in mock horror.
‘I’ve been waiting for over an hour.’
‘Sorry, mate – bit of a hangover situation.’
‘It’ll get you nowhere, the boozing game.’
‘Yeah, yeah…Let’s have a cup of tea and I’ll show you the ropes.’
‘Sounds good to me.’ I get out of the car and follow him down the lane to the buildings. Woolly Hat Man’s car is still there, but I don’t see any sign of him.
‘We’ve only been here a couple of days,’ Lee says as we walk.
‘Who’s “we”?’ I ask.
‘Me and Rupert.’
‘You and who?’
‘Rupert.’
‘Who the fuck is Rupert?’
‘You know – short bloke, black hair, face like a Rottweiler.’
I vaguely remember a man fitting that description who worked in Mac’s gang. I never spoke to him, and he never made any attempt to speak to me. ‘And his name’s fucking Rupert?’
‘Aye,’ says Lee with a smile.
‘Fucking hell, no wonder he kept himself to himself.’
Lee goes into the barn I saw Woolly Hat Man enter earlier and I go in after him. The inside is bright, lit by fluorescent tubes fixed to the beams. Judging by the noise, the generator must be just on the other side of the back wall. Otherwise the barn is empty, except for a battered old sideboard where the tea-making paraphernalia sits. Lee goes over to it and sloshes the kettle.
‘So where is Rupert, anyway?’ I ask.
‘He’s here. He came in with me, but he ran straight off to answer a call of nature. You look fucking horrible, by the way.’
‘Thanks. No one’s mentioned that yet; I thought I’d got away with it.’
‘What happened?’
‘I fell.’
‘I’ll bet you did, but who punched you first?’
‘Are you making that tea or what?’
He grins to himself while he fills the kettle from a bottle of water.
‘Here, I saw a bloke in a woolly hat poking around earlier.’
‘That’ll be the owner, Jethro.’
‘Jethro?’
‘Yip.’
‘Fuck me. That’s even worse than Rupert.’
‘Careful, mate. He can’t be far away.’
Involuntarily, I look around, but we’re still the only people in here.
Lee shrugs. ‘He’s all right really.’
‘Tea ready?’ Rupert appears in the doorway.
‘Just a minute,’ says Lee without turning round to him. ‘You two’ve met, right?’
Rupert gives me a nod and a grunt and seems to be satisfied with that, so I just nod back. The three of us stand around in awkward silence for a few moments until I ask, ‘So what are we on with, then?’
‘Fucking loads, mate,’ and as Lee prepares the tea, he reels out a long list of jobs that include gutting the buildings, demolishing one entirely, digging out the floors, taking roofs off, cutting trenches. My eyes glaze over; all I wanted to know was what we’re doing today. ‘In other words, we’ve got our fucking work cut out,’ he concludes – with a wide grin that reminds me a little of Mac – and then hands round the tea.
I hold my mug up to my face and let the steam condense on my chin. For now, Lee seems to have exhausted his repertoire of motivational banter, so we settle back into silence as we drink. I’m aware of the hands on my wristwatch ticking past nine o’clock and I begin to feel anxious to get to work. There’s a flap of wings from above and I look up into the rafters but don’t see the bird.
‘Are you going to get anything done today?’ A different voice.
Lee speaks up. ‘Aye, we’re just giving the new man his, uh…orientation, Jethro.’
I don’t turn round to see him; I’m afraid I’ll laugh.
‘Well, you’ve got the list.’
‘Yes, we do. It’s all in hand.’
Lee waits until Jethro has gone and then turns to Rupert and me. ‘Right. I suppose we’d better get to it, then.’
—
I think I expected more ceremony, or some sense of occasion. This is the first time in my adult life I’ve ever worked without Barry and Geoff. As it happens, we just troop over to the other barn, climb into its loft, and begin ripping up the floorboards in preparation for removing the timbers that support it. We start at the wall and work back towards the ladder, discarding the boards by dropping them through the gap we’ve created and wearing masks so we don’t inhale the dust thrown up by years of crusty dirt and bird shit. Soon I’m filthy, but it makes me feel cleaner.
Rupert is shorter than me, but strong, and working side by side, we fall into a rhythm disrupted only when one of us has to stop to tease out a tricky nail. My wrist seems to hold up pretty well, and I just ignore the stiffness in the rest of my body. Rupert and I make good progress, and it becomes apparent that Lee can’t keep up with us.
‘Fucking hell, lads,’ he says at last. ‘Don’t get too keen. You’re just making a rod for your own backs.’
‘You could have done without them last few pints, mate,’ says Rupert, without stopping work.
Eventually, Lee gives up and climbs down the ladder to concentrate on dragging the old timber out to the skip.
Rupert looks at me. ‘He was still pissed when he picked us up this morning. I was shitting meself. All over the road, we were.’ I’m relieved to hear that Rupert’s voice is nowhere as posh as his name.
‘He looked mostly all right to me.’
Rupert shrugs and carries on working. Either he’s exaggerating or I’m far too used to spending time with heavy drinkers. I jam my crowbar in the gap between two planks and lever one up, and we fall back into the rhythm of work.
Even at our speed, it’s going to take us all day and probably some of tomorrow to entirely remove this floor. We break for lunch and go back into the other barn, and I eat my sandwiches while sitting on a fold-out deckchair. We don’t talk much, just chew in satisfied silence, and I’m happy with that. The morning’s labour has improved my state of mind, and for the first time in years I feel relaxed at work. It’s a novelty; I hadn’t realized until now just how tense Barry’s constant whingeing made me. Once I’ve finished my food, I make my excuses and go outside to find somewhere to have a slash.
I go into a neighbouring field, and once relieved, I walk back along the line of the hedge to where I climbed over. Although it’s only just after noon, the sun is weak and low among the hazy cloud. I can look right into it without hurting my eyes; it appears as a perfect disc, stamped out of some impossibly smooth material. I stop and watch it. Without seeming to grow bigger, it floats up until it’s all I can see. Then it doubles and the two discs move round each other like the effect of a coin on a tabletop set to spin off kilter.
‘Now then.’
I turn round, suddenly dizzy, and a human figure shimmers on the other side of the fence. Jethro. I blink. Black spots dance over him.
‘All right,’ I say.
‘Where’ve you come from, then?’
It takes me a moment to work out the intent of this question and then I explain where I live while trying to look at him sideways so I can at least see the shape of him.
He makes a gravelly, descending hum from the back of his throat and pauses. If he was smoking a pipe, he would be thoughtfully chewing on the stem right now. ‘Aye, I know that area.’
‘Oh. Then I’m sorry for you.’
He grunts. ‘My brother-in-law lives around there. Do you know him?’
‘Uh…’ I squeeze my eyes hard shut and then throw them wide open, but it just makes the black spots move faster. ‘What’s his name?’
‘John Smith.’
‘Um. No. I don’t know him.’
‘Ah well, nice talking to you, then.’
As my vision returns, I see him ambling away, woolly hat still pulled down firmly over his head. ‘Fucking hell,’ I mutter to myself, then climb the fence and walk back towards the barns and the rest of the day’s work.