Blue Collar (12 page)

13 Muckraking

‘I can’t even think which one you mean,’ Big John said, scratching his head. ‘Was it that one where the bird fell out
of the window and she got stuck on the railings?’

‘Er, yeah, I suppose. Must’ve been,’ I agreed, figuring it didn’t really make any difference to the story so why not?

‘Oh, it was good, that one was,’ he nodded, all impressed.

‘Wha’ wuz she like? Al’right, wuz she?’ Nobby asked from the other side of Monday morning’s joist lift.

‘Yeah, she was nice enough, I guess,’ I told him.

‘Course, all thos lassies on th’ telly haf’ta suck evr’one off ta git their jobs, ya ken tha’, don’t ya?’ he then informed
us.

‘Do they?’ Robbie asked, dropping a hod of muck down on Nobby’s board.

‘Oh aye, tha’s well known, that is,’ he confirmed, looking up from the soldier course he was laying across the patio lintel
to fix Robbie in the eyes.

‘Sounds a bit like the time I hired you,’ Gordon sniggered at Jason from the chimney flank.

‘Christ, I’ll say,’ Jason agreed. ‘I didn’t think you was ever going to stop sucking me off.’

We all had a good laugh at that. Even Gordon, who had a tendency to giggle like a schoolgirl when something tickled him, despite
looking like a grizzly bear in a plastic hard hat.

Funnily enough, the lads were less than chuffed when it came to tales of Hugo. Jason asked if he wasn’t actually just trying
to rip the piss out of me, while Tommy thought it was par for the course with ex-public-school types these days.

‘Not cool to talk like you’ve got a plum in your gob any more. No street cred in it. Much better to act like you were dragged
up on some slum council estate, running guns for your crack-whore old lady and knife-fighting down the local snooker whenever
you got five minutes. That’s what’ll get you a job in a bank these days, not a posh accent and a loada fucking O-levels.’

‘What about real council estate crack-heads then? Wouldn’t they get all the bank jobs going, then?’

‘Don’t work like that. They only take on council estate crack-heads who’ve been to Oxford or Cambridge. Is that what old matey
did, then? Worked in a bank?’ Tommy asked.

‘No, he reckons he did something in marketing.’

‘There you go, then. All about image, that game.’

As much of life was these days. The house we were working on being an excellent case in point. Nice place it was. Four bedrooms,
detached, with a mock-Tudor finish. Mock-Tudor means that the front of your house (usually just the upper storey) gets a white
rendering and then has fake wooden beams screwed to it, so that it looks like an old Tudor mortar-and-beam mansion. Of course,
it doesn’t really, but some people think it does.

Oddly similar are the sales staff from head office who come down to show potential buyers around. Like us, if they want to
walk around on this site, they have to put a plastic hard hat on.

Unlike us, though, if we ever see them in the pub up the road at lunchtime or after work, they’ll still be wearing theirs,
because wearing a hat makes you look like Bob the Builder. Of course, it doesn’t really, but some people think it does.

‘Maybe she’s going out with you to get back at him,’ Jason suggested. ‘Have you thought about that?’

Curiously enough, I hadn’t. At least, I hadn’t up until Jason mentioned it.

‘What d’you mean?’ I asked, stopping in mid-cut-and-butter.

‘Well, if this Hugo likes to play at being Johnny Clicky Fingers, everyone’s favourite geezer from the streets, maybe Charley
thought she’d bring down the real McCoy to rub his nose in it. Or even make him jealous. Win him back. A sort of ‘you never
appreciated me but this doughnut does, how d’you like those vinegar strokes, college boy?’ That type of thing.’

Some of what Jason said tallied a little with some of my own thinking, but with a slightly different slant. For a start, I
wasn’t a geezer. I was a working man. In point of fact, I fucking hated ‘geezers’. Geezers were the worst blokes down the
pub. Forever on the ponce, or trying to flog you something you didn’t want or bullshitting everyone’s pants off about some
incredible deal we could be a part of if only we didn’t mind waving goodbye to three weeks’ wages and never seeing it again
when some other ‘geezer’s’ van broke down and the cops… etc. I hated them. And so did Jason. Which was why we drank in the
Lamb, a distinctly un-geezerly pub that was mostly frequented by working men, of both the suit- and overall-wearing varieties.

Geezers were just dickheads.

‘Yeah, well, maybe she thinks you’re one,’ Jason said.

‘What, a geezer or a dickhead?’

‘Hey, it’s your paranoia, you can be whatever you want, mate,’ Jason shrugged, slotting the last brick into the course and
giving it a tap with the handle of his trowel.

That was true. Not about the paranoia… well, that too. But more to the point that Charley thought I was some sort of geezer.

Hmm?

Oh, I didn’t know.

Well, everyone felt terribly bad about poor old Paul, not least of all his girlfriend, Peggy. So one day Peggy wrote a letter
to the Fusiliers branch of the Old Soldiers’ Society, or whatever it was, pleading Paul’s case.

A few days later two Fusiliers in full uniform walked into our pub and dragged Paul up to the bar by the scruff of the neck.
They twisted his ears until he bought everyone in the pub a drink, then put the rest of his money into an old soldiers’ charity
box they’d brought along with them.

‘Well,’ I said to myself, ‘those Fusiliers certainly know how to look after their own.’

Of course, Paul had never been in the Fusiliers. In fact, I don’t think he’d even seen a real Fusilier before, so the only
way they could possibly have been held responsible for the loss of his leg was if one of them had stopped mid-battle to phone
back home and ask for a pizza to be delivered to his mum’s house in Sydenham. As that turned out to be the road on which he’d
lost his leg. Not the one to Basra.

I know this because the Fusiliers made him come clean in front of the whole pub.

Paul dropped his act shortly afterwards and spent the next six months feeling even worse about himself. Well, fair enough,
I guess. I mean, he had still lost his leg. His new mates hadn’t reattached that when they’d dropped by, had they? Only now,
all of the sympathy had dried up and he had no one to blame but himself.

The free drinks had also dried up right along with the sympathy and Paul eventually took on a little light casual work to
supplement his invalidity benefits.

Now it’s incredible what a little bit of honest labour can do for a fella’s self-respect and pretty soon the casual work led
to a full-time job and as a result Paul lost a lot of the bitterness and resentment and eventually learned to stand on his
own two feet. Er, well, you know what I mean. He also became the most generous bloke in the pub almost overnight.

‘Sure you don’t want one, Tel? My shout. Jason? Ton’? Stan? Go on, put your money away.’

I really like him these days. Paul the ironmonger is a much nicer bloke to know than Paul the war hero. Much more sorted.
He still doesn’t really like Iraqis, though he doesn’t hate them anywhere near as much as he does Domino’s Pizzas or the Royal
Fusiliers.

Now, you may be wondering what all this has to do with Charley. Well, I got speaking to Peggy on her own one time and I told
her I reckoned it all worked out for the best, her inadvertently grassing Paul up to the army, and you know what she said?

‘What makes you think that was inadvertent?’

She didn’t say too much else on the subject but reading between the lines I’d say she knew all along, or at least suspected,
he weren’t really in the war and this was just her way of shaming him out of his playacting.

Which led me to wonder if Charley was trying to do the same for Hugo.

That was Jason’s theory. Or was it mine? Can’t remember who came up with it first.

Tommy was more inclined to believe that she just thought it was cool stepping out with a big dumb ape like myself in order
to impress all her posho mates and show them just how ‘real’ she was, which made me this season’s ‘must have’ accessory.

While Robbie maintained she was just enjoying having a dirty fling with a bit of rough.

‘That’s what these posh birds are into,’ he reckoned. ‘My mate reckons you can’t walk into a greasy spoon on the A1 without
tripping over some posh housewife on the pull while her old man’s away on business. Laura Ashley knickers all over the car
park, there is.’

They all seemed like plausible theories (except that one about Laura Ashley knickers. Pants that expensive don’t get left
behind) but it was Big John who really pissed on my apple cart when he suggested the most improbable theory of the lot.

‘Christ on a donkey, Tel, has it ever occurred to you that she might just like you?’

14 Dinner dinner dinner
dinner dinner dinner
dinner dinner, Batman!

It took me half an hour trying to work out what the ‘ct’ part of the message meant and I went through any number of possibilities
(Court? Can’t? Cocktails? Coffee-time? Can Terry? Coded text?) before realising ‘ct’ meant CT. Her mate, CT. He was inviting
us to dinner.

What, at his house?

Bit weird.

I’d never been to someone’s house for dinner before, my mum and dad and my sister’s being the exceptions, so I was dubious
from the off. I mean, what if they made me something I didn’t like? What if I didn’t know which fork to use? What if I had
to have a poo?

When you go for a bite in the pub, you can happily leave half your peas if they give you too many and disappear off to the
bog with the paper for half an hour afterwards. It’s not a problem.

But around someone’s house? They’d think I was some sort of rude bastard.

But then, wouldn’t they think I was being an even ruder bastard if I turned down their cordial invitation in the first place?

‘We’d love to have you over for dinner on Friday night, Terry.’

‘No, you’re all right, mate. Fuck that.’

Between a rock and a hard place, I was. A rock and a hard place.

What was wrong with the pub? That was all right, wasn’t it?

Even that terrible Signed For! Why couldn’t we just go there if we wanted a drink and a bit of grub? Neutral territory for
everyone, it was. No need to worry about accidentally spilling dinner all over the place or nursing an empty glass for half
the night. You could just get up and help yourself in the pub. Do whatever you liked. But around someone else’s house you
were at their mercy.

No, a Friday night around some posh bloke’s house pushing peas around my plate and spitting feathers wasn’t exactly my idea
of the perfect way to unwind after a hard week on the sites.

‘So are you free on Friday? Would you like to?’ my mobile asked my ear.

‘Erm… yeah, sure. That’d be great. Unless you’d rather do something else that evening, that is?’ I offered in hope.

‘No, no, I’m happy to go to CT’s. He’s a really good cook. He serves up some really interesting dishes.’

Oh, bollocks.

‘That’s that settled, then. CT’s it is,’ I heard some brain donor agree. I knew I couldn’t very well leave it at that, though,
otherwise I’d be walking in there blind with my guts going round like a tumble-dryer before I’d even caught a whiff of what
horrors awaited, so I quickly double-checked something with Charley: ‘Just one thing, when you say interesting dishes, what
exactly do you mean?’

‘Oh, relax, CT’s dinners are gorgeous, just you wait and see,’ Charley reassured me, though I distinctly remembered her saying
the same thing about eggs Benedict. ‘But, just to be on the safe side, is there anything you really don’t like?’ she eventually
conceded.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to run up my phone bill that much so I plumped for naming and shaming only my very worst food nightmares.

‘Spinach, fish, tinned peas and Microchips,’ I told her.

‘Probably in that order too.’

‘What are Microchips?’ Charley asked.

‘You know, those chips you get in a box that you do in the microwave. The adverts say they taste like the chips you get in
the chippy but they don’t.’

There was a conspicuously long silence on the other end of the phone before Charley promised me she’d have a word with CT.

‘I’ll tell him no Microchips for you, then.’

My own particular way once again took me north to Canonbury and it didn’t escape my notice that I was the one who was again
being asked to leave his patch, rather than the other way around. You would’ve thought that Charley might’ve volunteered to
come south and see me in Catford just once by now, but no, yet again it was my turn to head north.

Unfortunately, those early days had set a precedent for the rest of our relationship along the lines of, ‘Want to see me this
weekend? You know where I’ll be’, which left me in little doubt as to what the alternatives were. So I had a choice. I could
either go north and see Charley again. Or I could stay in Catford and take all the plaudits my empty flat could throw at me.

The question was, which gave me a greater shot at happiness?

‘I’m so glad you could both make it,’ CT said, holding open his door and welcoming us with a smile. ‘Please, come in. Come
in.’

I shook CT’s hand on the way past and followed Charley through to the kitchen. Candles flickered on a big old table in the
middle of the room, illuminating three beaming faces that were already around it.

‘Hello!’ they called as one, craning their necks and offering their lips for kissing like a nestful of hungry chicks. Charley
did a quick circuit of the table, planting smackers on the lot of them while I stood my ground and jangled my keys from a
safe distance.

‘Drink, folks?’ CT offered, coming in at me from the side to take my coat.

‘That would be lovely,’ Charley replied. ‘Here, we brought this.’

Charley handed him a bottle of red wine we’d bought in the offie on the way round.

‘And these,’ I added, opening up my carrier bag to show him the sixteen cans of Stella I’d picked up from the same shop.

‘Like beer, huh?’ CT deduced.

Now, I’ll be the first to hold up my hands and accept that sixteen cans probably went a bit above and beyond for a sophisticated
dinner party with candles and conversation (to be honest, it probably went a bit above and beyond for a punch-up at a bus
stop) but the offie had had one of those offers on where you could buy so many and get so many more for free and that’s just
the way it had worked out. I could’ve either bought just four cans and left it at that or dipped a bit deeper into my pocket
and taken advantage of their offer. There really hadn’t been any middle ground. Of course, for just another couple of quid
I could’ve got a whole crate, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to turn up to my first dinner party with that many Stellas under
my arm. No matter how good the deal had been.

I spent the next five minutes reorganising CT’s fridge to accommodate all my beers before finally sitting down and popping
open the first of the evening.

‘Well, here’s to me,’ I said for a joke, but rather embarrassingly everyone lifted their glasses and joined in with the toast,
which never happened down the pub when Jason did it. ‘Er, yes, well, thank you very much.’

‘Terry, this is Simone and Clive,’ Charley said, introducing me to the couple opposite us.

‘Hello,’ I said, giving Simone a wave and braving the candles to shake the dead fish Clive had sticking out of his shirtsleeve.

‘And this is Russell,’ Charley then said, completing the introductions by grassing up the bloke at the end of the table.

‘All right, how are you?’ I offered.

‘Absolutely wonderful, thank you. And it’s so nice to finally meet Charley’s new beau. I’ve heard so much about you,’ Russell
grinned, squeezing my hand and shooting Charley a knowing smirk.

‘Oi, you, behave,’ Charley objected, giving Russell a playful dig and distracting him long enough for me to get my hand back.

‘So, you’re the builder,’ Clive said at me from across the table.

‘I’ve been looking for a good builder for the last six months. They’re so hard to find, you know.’

‘Well, don’t come looking on my site, mate, we’re a right bunch of cowboys, we are,’ I assured him in an effort to head off
this particular conversation before I found myself doing up his house on my days off for peanuts.

‘Do you not take on private work, then?’ Clive pressed, not taking the hint.

‘More trouble than it’s worth, captain. You can’t make any money out of private jobs, not these days, not now London’s flooded
with Poles.’

‘You don’t like Poles?’ Simone jumped in, taking issue with this last statement.

‘No, I think they’re great, I just couldn’t afford to undercut them and carry on putting food on the table,’ I replied, examining
CT’s crisp white tablecloth and worrying over just how much food I was going to be putting on his table before the evening
was out.

The thing about the Poles was true, though. I mean, what Brit could afford to undercut them? Don’t get me wrong, in their
boots I’d do exactly the same. Come over here, live in a shoebox for a couple of years and earn enough money so that I could
buy a nice place back home. Good on them. I don’t blame them in the slightest for it. I simply couldn’t do it myself because
I was born and bred in London. My shoebox in Catford was all I could afford and it was mine for keeps.

‘Well, I think the Poles do a fabulous job,’ Simone declared.

‘They’re ultra-reliable and they’re so much cheaper than British builders.’

‘That’s not very nice, is it, Sim?’ Charley objected on my behalf. ‘Terry is a guest, after all, remember.’

‘I’m just being honest here. I’d want people to be honest with me. And it’s true, British builders are extortionately expensive,’
she explained as a matter of fact, then looked to me for a response.

I thought better about sharing my own particular thoughts on the subject, at least until I’d had the rest of my Stellas, and
decided instead to simply ask CT what was for dinner.

‘For starters, grilled goat’s cheese with sun-blushed toms, toasted pines nuts and rocket…’

‘Rocket? What, like Rocket Sauce?’ I asked, wondering if Charley had put us together as some sort of focus group for her ketchup
company – a telly producer, an advertising exec, three unspecified poshos and Britain’s richest brickie. But CT just wagged
his finger and he and Charley chuckled like I’d been joking or something.

‘And for mains we’re having baked salmon wrapped in Parma ham, crème fraiche and puy lentils, lovingly made by Russell here,’
he warned us. ‘With crème brûlée for dessert if you’ve got the room.’

I wasn’t sure I would – my jacket only had three pockets.

Charley asked me if I was OK with that, so I put on my bravest face and promised her it all sounded lovely. Then, without
warning, she did something she’d never done before and it momentarily struck me dumb (dumb as in unable to speak. Not dumb
as in had never heard of rocket before); she took my hand in hers and held it beneath the table.

At least, until the starters started rolling out.

‘Oh, this looks gorgeous,’ Simone said, smacking her lips and leaning into her plate in a way that made me wonder if she wasn’t
going to bother with cutlery for this round.

‘Here you, eat these turnips.’

‘Oh yeah, try and fucking make me, mate.’

But dinner parties? I’d never bargained on dinner parties.

Back when I was a kid, I developed a number of different strategies for coping with horrible food and one of them was to wolf
it down as fast as humanly possible. No dawdling or chewing to taste, just hold your nose and chuck it back until it’s all
gone. It’s a similar strategy to running through a tunnel of punches, which had been a particularly popular game in our playground.

Anyway, it seemed to do the trick because I did the lot in a bit under thirty seconds and was rinsing out with half a can
of lager before the others were even on their second bite, though that wasn’t surprising considering how much time they were
spending gassing instead of eating. Their own particular strategy, no doubt.

‘There is some more if you’re hungry,’ CT told me, consternation and confusion splashed all over his face.