Seeing the Wires. Patrick Thompson
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Mr Fallow, advised me.
I had, I thought. I might have been forced to work there until the debt was cleared. I told him how grateful I was, shook his hand, and left him straightening his tie.
I had a degree – a second in Historic Peculiarities, which we’ll get to presently – and I was more or less able-bodied. How difficult would it be to get the sort of job where I wouldn’t even notice the loss of thirty pounds a week?
As it turned out, very difficult indeed. The only office jobs going were for people inputting data, and they paid low wages. I was not qualified to be a team leader or supervisor. I knew this, because during the course of what felt like several hundred interviews several hundred people told me so. The building society became concerned, and started writing to me with helpful suggestions. To give me that extra bit of impetus, they charged me for each letter. When I asked why, they explained that it was to cover their administrative costs. They charged me for that letter too. I doubted this. I had seen their adverts in the job pages and they paid around three pounds a day. They were charging me fifteen pounds a letter. It surely didn’t take one person five days (or five people a day each) to write a letter three lines long with my name misspelt at the top of it.
I wrote to them, including these calculations, and asked them to take into consideration the administrative costs incurred in the writing of my own letter. If they would pay thirty pounds into my account, that should cover it.
They paid the money in. Mr Fallow was nothing if not fair. Then they sent me fifteen letters explaining that they had done so, charging me fifteen pounds per letter. I could no longer afford food or rent. I explained this to my landlord, Mr Jellicoe, who said, ‘Don’t have food then.’
At least he didn’t charge me for the advice.
I spread my job-searching net a little wider. I ruled in some areas I had ruled out. I considered more physical jobs. Eventually, I got a job on a building site on the bleak outskirts of Dudley, helping to dig the foundations of what turned out to be the ugliest factory in existence.
It was easy enough work.
I would rise at seven, get washed and dressed, and be at the bus stop by eight. Some time later, a white Bedford van would pull up, and I’d hop in. I had to use the van. I could have walked to the site – I live in Dudley, and it was less than a mile away – but collection by van was a condition of the job.
‘That’s what it’s there for,’ the foreman – Mr Link, who we’ll get to presently – told me.
I would get into the back of the van and spend a short, uncomfortable journey bouncing about on a stack of shovels, picks, and hefty sacks of gravel and sand. The van was driven by Darren, a short youth with a good-sized collection of foul language and a full head of very black hair, which looked dyed. The van was co-piloted by Spin, a black man who never spoke at all. They would pull into the bus stop and I would clamber into the back and settle myself in among the implements, and as I closed the rear doors someone at the bus stop would say something disparaging.
I don’t know what it’s like in the rest of the world, but in Dudley the bus stops are where old people gather when they aren’t gathered at the post office. They like bus stops. They don’t like people jumping the queue. I wasn’t in the queue, strictly speaking, but they didn’t like me getting into a van at the bus stop before they had a chance to get on a bus and go to town and complain about how much everything cost and how many worrying new vegetables there were nowadays. I wouldn’t have minded one or two of the less obviously incontinent ones getting in the van and having a lift but we only went to the building site and there were no queues there for them to stand in.
There were trenches. I helped to dig them. I thought that building sites used mechanical diggers for the foundations. I asked Mr Link about it.
‘Well, we could,’ he said. ‘But you cost a lot less and the last JCB we had got stolen.’
‘Stolen?’
‘Joyriders. I can’t see what joy there is in a JCB, myself. I’d rather have a Jag.’
He did. It was part of being a foreman, Darren explained. The foreman had a Jag and everyone else shared a van and did all the work. That was the building trade according to Darren. It seemed simple enough.
Mr Link had – as well as the Jag – thinning black hair containing thick black grease, presumably placed there deliberately. He had sideburns several years after they were last fashionable and several years before they were next fashionable. He had watery eyes and looked uncomfortable in the hard hat he had to wear because of regulations. The main purpose of hard hats, Darren told me, was not to protect the heads of workmen. The main purpose of hard hats was to make visiting dignitaries look twats.
‘Office people,’ said Darren, ‘never get the hang of hats.’
Spin nodded, silently.
‘There you go, Spin agrees.’
Spin nodded again.
‘Thing is,’ said Darren, dragging on his cigarette, ‘the thing is, some people are hat people and others are foremen and managers. That’s what it is.’
He smoked on. Working on a building site apparently consisted of a lot of smoke breaks interrupted by short periods of digging. I was able to keep up with this and the wages were higher than I would have expected. I saw a light at the end of the overdraft. I paid Mr Jellicoe some of the rent he thought he was due and began to reimburse the building society. Things were, I thought, on an even keel.
II
One day – it was summer, and the sky was clear and blue, but because we were in Dudley the temperature was cheerlessly low – I was digging foundations when I turned up an old coin. It was nothing special – a shilling, slightly dented and much corroded – but Darren had a look.
‘We find things sometimes,’ he said. ‘Digging. You turn things up.’
Spin nodded, silently.
‘Once found a bone,’ said Darren, ‘off of a dog we reckon. Well, Spin thought it was a dog, anyway. He knows his bones, does Spin. Used to do archaeology at the Poly.’
‘What, Spin was a student?’
Spin nodded, silently.
‘We all were,’ said Darren. Looking at him, I doubted it. He must have caught my expression.
‘I done Social Anthropology,’ he explained, ‘at Cambridge. Bloody freezing and flat, Cambridge. Course, I finish the course and get ready for one of those graduate jobs, thirty grand a year and more holiday than workdays. That’s when I realized Social Anthropology might not have been the course to go for. Same with Spin. There’s no call for archaeologists. At least he gets to do digging, keeps his hand in. Only person on the site hasn’t got a degree is Mr Link.’
‘What?’
‘Left school at fifteen, self-made man, blah blah. Don’t get him started on it. What did you do then?’
‘When?’
‘When you was a student. I mean, the rest of us was students but don’t look it. You look like a student. Only poorer.’
‘I did Historic Peculiarities.’
‘You did what?’ Darren dropped his shovel. It seemed like a strong reaction. Most people just said it was a waste of taxpayers’ money.
‘Historic Peculiarities.’
Darren and Spin exchanged a look.
‘Is that one of those new courses?’
‘It was. There were only three of us doing it. I don’t think they run it any more.’
‘Well,’ said Darren, picking up his shovel so he’d have something to lean on. ‘Well. So, what was that