Blue Collar (4 page)

‘Well, yeah, Tel, but all I’m saying is you shouldn’t size up every bird you meet as potential life partner material. You’re
setting yourself up for a fall every time. And with this Charley bird especially. I can tell you that for nothing,’ Jason
told me, as good as his word, for nothing. ‘Just enjoy it for what it is and don’t go twisting your knickers into knots over
what it isn’t because at the end of the day you’re only going to shoot yourself in the foot before you’ve filled your boots.’

I think I got what Jason meant, although he could’ve just been trying to sell me his spare Toe Tecs again.

‘So you reckon she’s not properly interested, then? She’s just after a bit of something else?’

‘Oh no, I’m sure birds like that always go searching for future husbands down the dogs, Tel. When they want to get their hands
on a real good one like,’ he smirked.

At that moment Tony the barman came over and asked if we were ready for another drink. I was disheartened enough to go for
several more barrels so I pointed to the Stella and stuck a hand in my pocket.

‘What d’you think of posh birds, Ton’? Old Prince Philip over here reeled in a bit of a plum-sucker last night and is wondering
what his chances of long-term happiness are like,’ Jason asked the Lamb’s resident expert on everything.

‘Has she got money? I’d love to meet a bird with money. Get me out of this shithole,’ he said without even having to think
about it.

‘I couldn’t tell you,’ I replied. ‘Maybe.’

‘Yep, posh old rich bird wants you to go and live in her mansion rent free you jump at the chance,’ was his advice.

I promised Tony I would, then told him to send over a half of stout for old Stan in the corner before pocketing my change.

‘Look, I don’t know what this bird of yours is like but if you ask me she’s probably just up for a spot of Lady Chatterley’s
with old ditch-digger McArse-Crack, so try not to go building her up in your mind because it probably ain’t going to happen,’
Jason laid out. ‘Never the twain shall meet, as my old man used to say.’

As depressing as this all sounded, I’d come to much the same conclusion on the train ride home this morning. We might meet
up again. We might get on like a mansion on fire. We might even go to bed and make sweet squeaks together but when all was
said and done, we weren’t going to be picking out baby bonnets in John Lewis any day in the future.

Like I said, I’m not really the bed-hopping Jack the lad in tight trousers that some of my mates like to think they are.

I’m just a normal bloke with normal aspirations and normal desires. I’d sown a few wild oats back in my twenties and as much
fun as that was back then, it’s not the sort of thing that would have me dodging the altar for the rest of my life to go on
chasing it around discos into my sixties. I’d see old Stan in the Lamb every time I came in for a pint, and it terrified me,
the thought that I might turn out like him; no wife, no kids, no family. No nothing. Just a half of stout and a seat in the
corner.

‘That’s old Terry’s stool that is,’ I can hear them saying in thirty years’ time. ‘You can’t sit there, he’ll be in soon,
the poor mad lonely old bastard.’

No, I’d like to get married and settle down and have a family.

Sorry if that lets the side down, lads, but that’s just the way I was built. So if I met a girl these days and I liked the
look of her, I’d ask her out because I wanted to see her again. If I didn’t, then I wouldn’t, even if a few carefully spun
compliments could’ve probably won us both a roll around in the nude, because there’s no point. All that ever got you was a
reputation as a wanker and a mobile you could never switch on.

…and Jason was right. What odds would you give on a girl like Charley wanting to share a dozen dates with a bloke like me?

I had to face the facts, I was just a bit of rough.

Another box to tick on her ironic tour card.

4 Rainy Mondays

My alarm is set for half six, but I tapped the snooze a couple of times this particular morning so that I’d have to make my
sandwiches and flask to the accompaniment of Jason leaning on his horn outside.

‘You have a beer last night or something?’ he asked when I climbed into the van.

‘No, I just overslept,’ I lied.

The sky was still tinged with darkness and we talked a little about how the nights and mornings were spreading themselves
a little wider these days, but for most of the journey we simply stared out of the windows.

I like how everything looks first thing cock-a-doodle-doo in the morning. I’d prefer it if I didn’t have a day full of gables
ahead of me, but by and large I’m a morning person. Early mornings are a real no-nonsense time of the day. The only people
who are up and about are people who have to be up and about. Nobody gets out of bed and goes for a walk or a drive at six
in the morning if they don’t have to, so for a couple of short hours the world’s a neatly ordered and professional place to
be. It’s basically a world for grown-ups. There are no little ASBO ratboys kicking bins all over the pavements or molly-coddling
mums gridlocking the streets driving their lazy fat bundles of preciousness half a mile up the road to school or smelly old
pisshead work-dodgers venting their spleen at not being given the moon on a stick. Yep, this time of the morning was all right
with me.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, yes, Jason’s van is white.

We picked up Robbie as usual at the Thornton Heath roundabout and carried on to the site in Wimbledon. Only Dennis, one of
the other hoddies, was here from our gang already, sat in his car with his eyes closed and his head against the glass, so
Robbie jumped out, gave him a shout and the pair of them went off to start knocking up muck – which is what us chaps in the
trade call cement when it’s mixed up.

‘Oi, don’t knock up too much,’ Jason shouted after them.

‘Looks like we could have a drop of rain today.’

The skies had stayed dark despite the big hand making it around to a quarter past and I reckoned Jason might be right.

There was a bit of wind in the air and a big flat shadow across the land which told me we could be home again by lunchtime.

That’s the thing about working outside. After a few years you get to be able to read the skies like newspapers and these particular
ones looked like they were ready to piss down on our heads all morning long.

‘Two quid says it starts raining the moment we get up the ladder,’ Jason offered, keen to recoup some of his dogs losses,
but I’d done with gambling for the week. We watched the windscreen and the puddle across the road for the first couple of
drops all the same, but none made themselves known.

Big Mick, the groundworkers’ gaffer, slapped the front of the van as he mooched past and told us not to bother going anywhere
with our tools. ‘Gonna rain today, lads,’ he said, but the rest of the gang was already arriving, so we figured we might as
well make a show of it.

‘They reckon it’s going to chuck it down today,’ was Stuart’s assessment when we met him at the bottom of the ladder. Nobby
agreed and said his missus had phoned up from Slough to tell him it was already bucketing down there.

‘What do we want to do?’ Nobby asked, as Big John, Tommy and little Mick all came over to join us. It was pretty obvious what
little Mick wanted to do from the way he’d left his hod in the car but Gordon had the final say. He was the subby (the subcontractor
ergo the boss), it was his shout.

‘Well, it ain’t raining now, is it, so get up that ladder and lay some fucking bricks, you lazy bastards. Mick, go and get
a roll of plastic from the compound and we’ll get everything covered up in case it starts coming down.’

The great rain debate went on for another half an hour, each of us stopping every few bricks or so to feel the wind, until
eight o’clock brought a skyful of cats and dogs with it.

‘Told ya,’ Jason pointed out helpfully.

The rest of the lads were holed up in a newly tiled house and were debating how long to give it before they chucked in the
towel and called it a day.

‘Any inside work going?’ Big John asked Gordon. He had a few windowsills and a couple of houses that needed scraping out but
nothing that was going to keep the nine of us in Caribbean holidays so he told Robbie to go and wash the mixer out and the
rest of us to point up the few courses we’d laid and go home.

‘How depressing,’ was the general consensus.

I checked my watch. What was that, half an hour’s worth of work? Gordon would probably give us the hour but that wouldn’t
add up to more than ten quid once we’d covered the cost of our petrol and cheese and chutney.

‘Still, worth it, though, weren’t it?’ Robbie reckoned when we dropped him off at Thornton Heath roundabout and told him we’d
see him tomorrow.

‘What are you going to do today?’ Jason asked, when he pulled up outside my place.

‘I don’t know. You up for a quick half at lunchtime?’ I tried.

‘No, can’t, I’m afraid. Sandra’ll have me working on the kitchen, so no booze for Jason today,’ Jason said, talking about
himself in that weird other-person way he sometimes did whenever Sandra was calling the shots. I sympathised with the both
of them then climbed out of the van and into the rain.

‘Meant to piss down again tomorrow,’ he called up the path after me, then pulled away and went home to give himself a hand
with the kitchen.

I had a shower, a cup of tea and a couple of digestive biscuits, in that very order, then stood at the kitchen window and
looked out at the rain for a bit. It was really coming down.

There’s something about watching rain that’s spellbinding. I particularly love it when the wind gets hold of it and really
whips it against the window, though this can lose a lot of its allure when you’re cupping your hands against the outside of
the double glazing and looking at a set of keys, an umbrella and your mobile phone on the draining board. I was an angry man
that day, I can tell you.

Still, that was then and this was now. And for the moment I was inside, clean, dry, fed and suddenly very, very bored.

I hated being rained off when I had nothing else to do. Losing the money’s always bad enough in itself, but spending the day
rattling around inside your flat while the rest of the world’s at work can leave you depressed to the point of tears by the
time CBeebies comes on. It’s OK if you’ve got jobs that need doing or there’s some snooker on the box that needs watching
but I had neither today so by one o’clock I had the fridge out of its hole and a bottle of Ajax in my hand just to give myself
something to do.

Of course, the other reason I was so restless was because Charley’s number kept taunting me from my mobile.

I picked it up every now and then just to check that I still had it and even wrote it down on a piece of paper in case my
SIM card decided to commit suicide just for a laugh. Her 0s and 7s and 5s and 6s looked so inviting from where I was standing
that I keyed them in just to hear the sounds they made, then tried the same thing on my landline to see if they made the same
sort of beeps. Naturally, I hung up before I got to the last digit, as it was only Monday and you didn’t phone a girl up on
Monday if you’d only met her on Friday. Not unless there was a war on. Even I knew that. So I weighted down her number with
a cup so that it wouldn’t get blown through the gap under the door and down a drain when my phone exploded and wandered back
into the kitchen to look for something else to do.

As luck would have it, my kettle needed descaling and I remembered seeing a descaling block in the box of cleaning products
when I dug out the Ajax, so I killed another half an hour defurring its element before finally losing the will to live.

This was ridiculous. Why couldn’t I phone a girl on the Monday if I’d only just met her on the Friday? Who had made up that
stupid rule? All weekend long Jason, Tony and old Stan had been telling me I had to wait until at least Wednesday before calling
Charley and I’d nodded like a pigeon and promised them that I wouldn’t even think about it. But seriously, why couldn’t I?
And why the fuck was I listening to old Stan?

I marched back into the living room and picked up her number like I meant it. It was now almost twenty past two and if I had
to twiddle my thumbs for another forty-eight hours before I could even phone her and listen to her racking her brain for excuses,
I was going to go off my chump.

I recalled her number and pressed the green button and instantly felt like runner-up in a cream-cracker-eating competition.

It started to ring at the other end, so I took a quick belt of water before she answered and brought it all up through my
nose when it went down the wrong way.

‘Fuckig… urgh… ug… guurr,’ I told Charley when she said hello.

I coughed out the worst of it as urgently as I could and half thought about asking if it was OK if I rang back on Wednesday,
but the ball was now rolling so I had to go for broke. ‘Sorry about that, fucking swallowed some water down the wrong way
just as you answered,’ I explained. Hang on, did I just say ‘fucking’ or was that in my imagination? ‘Er, anyway, I just wanted
to give you a quick ring and see how you were. How are you?’ I asked.

‘I’m fine, thanks,’ Charley replied, dropping her voice a little. ‘Much better than Saturday anyway. I stayed in bed the whole
day.’

‘Oh, really?’ I pondered, then wondered if that sounded pervy, like I had my hands down my pants as I was talking to her or
something.

‘So, how are you?’ Charley then asked.

‘I’m good. Rained off today,’ I explained.

‘What?’

‘It’s raining today. Can’t work when it’s raining.’

‘Why? Are you made of sugar or something?’ She chuckled.

I quickly double-checked to make sure I hadn’t rung Gordon by mistake then explained that it wasn’t me who didn’t like it,
it was the people who bought our houses. They were the ones that weren’t so keen on paying good money for walls with no muck
between the bricks.

‘So what are you up to? Having a day in front of the TV, are you?’ she asked.

‘God, no, I’m just…’ I thought about telling her about the kettle and the back of the fridge, then thought better of it. ‘…
reading, you know.’

‘What are you reading?’

‘The telly guide, and there’s nothing on.’

Charley’s snigger of polite laughter quickly tailed off into a sigh and I heard the word ‘anyway’ without her actually having
to say it.

‘Where are you?’ it was my turn to ask.

‘Work. The office. So I can’t really talk… that much,’ she explained in hushed tones, then explained to one of her colleagues
her end that she was talking to ‘no one’. I decided to press ahead and keep this as brief as possible before she really was
and asked her if she was free at all this week.

‘Sure. What day?’

Any day was good with me. In fact, right now would’ve been just about perfect, but I figured one of us ought to stay at work
and earn some money if we were going to buy that house together one day in the future, so I went ahead and suggested Wednesday,
figuring old Stan would go along with that.

‘Wednesday’s good for me. Where do you want to go?’

Hmm, good question, and one to which I hadn’t given even a jot of thought. Normally, when I went out, I just went up the Lamb.
Occasionally, I went to the bookie’s. Even more infrequently, I went to the dogs. I wondered which of these Charley would
fancy.

I quickly nipped to the front door, opened it and rang my bell.

‘Oh, hang on a minute. I think someone’s at the door. Can I call you back in a second?’ I asked.

‘Sure, give us a call,’ Charley permitted.

I hung up and took a few minutes to run around inside my own head in a sweat. Where did I take her? What did we do? This was
a first date, so I had to bowl her over with something special.

Bowling?

Some good irony points there but I wasn’t sure it said what I wanted it to say about me. Also, I didn’t really want to spend
our entire relationship going to funfairs, snooker halls and donkey rides just to prove to her how earthy I was. No, I had
to show her my classy side, so that she saw me as someone to look up to, or at least someone she didn’t have to look all that
far down at, which called for dinner.

Just one thing, what did posh girls eat for dinner? I didn’t know. But then, that was because I hadn’t been to a posh restaurant
in… well, ever really. I’d been to Indians and Chinese before but usually only after the pub closed when I had double vision
and double everything with poppadoms and prawn crackers please.

Still, everyone liked a Chinkie’s, so why didn’t I take her to the best Chinkie’s in the West End and Chinky Town itself.
Or perhaps that should be Chinatown from here on in.

Yeah, that was a smashing idea. Really show her that I knew my way around the best places in London and that I wasn’t just
some Catford kebab head.

Naturally we’d have to meet for a couple of cheeky cocktails first and it would have to be somewhere central, a short walk
from Chinatown that was easy enough for her to find. Leicester Square was the obvious solution. It was central, flash and
just the sort of place a bloke in the know would sweep a young lady off to.