Last Days of the Bus Club (8 page)

We started with the sand; sand was easy because you can get a huge load on the shovel and if you’re placed
right it’s just a deep satisfying thrust into the pile, a twist of the body, a superhuman heave of the arms and that’s twenty kilos down. The gravel was different: you can only get so much on the shovel, much of it falls off, and it’s hard to drive the shovel into the pile. On pouring days Dave and I were the motive power of the whole site. Everybody depended on us for the great loads of concrete to be shifted, poured into the shuttering, and vibrated, and so whenever we flagged, we would be lashed with the most hideous abuse from all sides. In the main this would be good-natured chaffing, but if we got too far behind, tempers would sometimes flare.

We worked, even on cold days, stripped to the waist, warmed by the sunshine and the herculean labour, which tore at the skin of our hands, leaving fearful blisters which immediately burst and filled with grit and cement and started suppurating. Nobody would think of wearing gloves, though; it wouldn’t have gone down well, wouldn’t have been manly … and, for better or for worse, manly was what it was all about.

One day, there was an accident. Scott was using his drott to haul out a colossal ten-ton trunk of oak. A drott is a tiny open bulldozer, all engine and a huge powerful toothed grab for a shovel. Anyway, Scott was heaving this tree backwards but it was heavier than the drott, so as he raised the shovel, instead of raising the load, it raised the drott itself in the air, so that it was tiptoeing backwards on the tips of its caterpillar tracks. This seemed to work alright, though, so Scott kept on coming. Then suddenly the drott hit a bump and slammed back down on the ground,
whereupon
the colossal oak tree rolled down the arms of the shovel and right over Scott. He screamed and managed to
duck beneath the bonnet just enough to save himself from having the life crushed out of him. He was badly hurt, and was rushed out in an ambulance to hospital.

Later in the mess hut there was a silence as everybody thought over the awful thing that had happened.

‘Poor Scottie,’ somebody said. ‘Fuckin’ awful thing to ’appen to a bloke.’

Some heads were nodded, then a brief silence, until Frank said, echoing everybody’s unspoken view, ‘Yeah, but ’e didn’t oughter of screamed.’

‘Nah,’ everyone agreed.

‘That’s right,’ concurred Terry. ‘It wasn’t manly.’

I wondered if my own nascent manhood would stand the test of a ten-ton tree trunk rolling towards me, without uttering a sound. I knew now that you were not supposed to scream, but it wouldn’t be easy.

The pouring went on all day long; there were hundreds of tons of concrete to fill each lift. For Dave and me it was the most mind-numbing repetitive work hour after hour, with barely a break, but you didn’t need to think much, so we amused ourselves by telling stories and jokes and horsing about. The pain in our hands and the pull on our muscles were fearful, but if you’re young and well fed your body puts on muscle very quickly and after a couple of weeks I was hard and tight as a drott.

We poured every third day. On the other days Dave and I had it a little easier, down in the hole bottoming up with the vile Jim Reilly, or helping out with the shuttering and steel-tying. The day after the concrete was poured, we would break out the shuttering, the plywood mould that gave the poured concrete the desired form, according to the plans for the bridge. Then we would spend a day and a half
perched precariously above the railway lines, constructing the steel skeleton that would form the next lift of the pier of the bridge. This was a complex web of steel reinforcing rods that we would tie together, armed with pliers, tape measure and a roll of tying wire. And then finally we oiled the
shuttering
boards with fish oil, so that they could be broken out easily for the next lift, and lashed, nailed and bolted them into place, ready to hold the hundred tons or so of sloppy concrete from the next pour.

I cannot remember ever feeling so vital and alive. I was a teenager, of course, and that had a lot to do with it, but there was something about the fiercely hard physical work out in the open air. It felt good to be tanned and muscular and powerful and dirty, and always, seemingly, teetering on the verge of laughter.

The men were raunchy and funny, utterly
unselfconscious
, and always ready with a scurrilous story or joke. Money was tight: their cars were wrecks, not one of them owned his house, but they were neither wretched nor miserable. I loved being with them, and was happy as a hen when they accepted me – almost – as one of them.

One morning, the foreman carpenter came into the mess hut rather the worse for wear. He sat down with his mug of tea at the wooden table and said, rather enigmatically, ‘I pissed on me own teeth las’ nite.’

The assembled company looked up quizzically from their mugs and crumpled copies of
The Sun
. Terry burped loudly to make sure he had everyone’s full attention.

‘We was down the Angel an’ I’d ’ad a dozen beers or so, too much really, so I ducks out to the toilets to barf it all up. I leans over and shoots the lot into the gutter, but fucked if I don’t shoot me teeth out with it. Just that moment a load
of blokes comes in, they was well gone, and one of ’em says, “’Ere look, some fucker’s lost ’is teeth; let’s piss on ’em!” I wasn’t going to let on they was mine, was I?, so I keeps me mouf shut an’ joins in wiv ’em, an’ there I was grinnin’ away an’ pissin’ on me own teeth as they floats past. I ’ad to go back in there later on an’ fish ‘em out.’

‘Scrubbed up nice, though, ain’t they?’ he concluded, flashing us a pearly grin.

Terry was a natural storyteller, and by the time he finished telling this appalling tale the whole hut was heaving with laughter.

And so the long days of summer passed and the hideous concrete bridge grew, and I learned how to hold my own in the exchange of obscenities that passed for bonhomie among my workmates. And I learned how to work, to give my strength and skill – or, rather, sell it, as I was earning sixteen pounds a week for this – for some cooperative endeavour. I learned, too, how to use a pick and a shovel and a sledgehammer, and it was learning that has stood me in good stead all my life.

Chloé had just finished her first month on the festival circuit when Martin of Shepherds’ Ice Cream phoned. They had been unlucky with the weather: the rain had been torrential and ceaseless; the tents had been waterlogged; the vans had got bogged, and some of the bands had cancelled. ‘But Chloé was great,’ he told us. Apparently she had dealt with everything – the mud, the weariness, the occasional crazy customer – with good-natured efficiency and tact and, even after an all-night party, had turned up
looking fresh as a daisy in the morning, acting as if her life’s sole ambition was to sell more ice cream. ‘She’s a terrific worker,’ Martin went on. ‘You should be proud. I’d have her back any year.’

I was. To discover that your offspring has what it takes to earn an honest wage is a pleasing discovery indeed.

I
HAVE NEVER BEEN MUCH OF A ONE
for competition. My grandfather would try and instil some sense of the competitive spirit in me by looking at me earnestly (his name was actually Ernest, though he loathed and never used it) and saying, ‘Remember, Christopher: the race is always to the swift.’ But even as a nipper I thought this a peculiarly daft and unedifying piece of nonsense.

First of all, life is not a race, or, if it was, then it would be more like Alice’s Caucus race, that great sporting event in Wonderland, where, at a given signal, all the competitors would start milling aimlessly about and, upon another signal, would stop where they were. Alice, if I remember rightly, was incensed at the futility of this, but to me a Caucus-race seems just the ticket. Instead of busting a gut in order to be first, it may be better just to mill about and enjoy the view and the pleasure of encounters with others. And if there’s a race to be run at all, then I’d much prefer to be jogging along at the back, with the idlers, the dreamers, the wanderers and philosophers.

Yet there are times when we have no option but to gird our loins and join the fray, jostling shoulders with the pack hurtling swiftly along. And without exception these outbreaks of competitive zeal are spurred by, and entered on behalf of, our offspring. In this case the impetus was provided by the need to register Chloé for her university place. By some quirk of planning the enrolment for the Chinese part of the course was on a different day to the others, and it was a day on which Chloé happened to be in some muddy field of England selling ice cream. So at six o’clock on a July morning we sprang from the bed in order to get to the city in good time.

El Palacio de las Columnas on Puentezuelas is where the Faculty of Translation and Interpretation at Granada University holds court, and at ten to eight Ana and I were standing outside the great door with its serpentine marble columns. We felt the tiniest bit intimidated, perhaps because neither of us had made it to university, but more because we knew with ghastly certainty that we would have failed in some infinitesimal particular of document-gathering and form-filling required by the faculty, and we would be upbraided by the administrative staff and made to feel the fools we feared we were.

Registration did not start until nine, but even so we were not the first there. We sidled up and introduced ourselves to the smart blonde woman and her daughter, who had beaten us to first place in the queue. She was English, for heaven’s sake … it was to be a good half-hour before the first Spaniard turned up. We felt a little
sheepish
, being so early, and also being English… but we had somehow got wind of the fact that registration for the Chinese department was on a first come, first served basis,
and there were only fifty places, a fact that not many others seemed to know.

Ana is good at administrative stuff and had gathered all the required documentation and put it in a big file, which she was leafing through now, and asking me questions to which I did not know the answers. I was along for the bulk and body mass, in case it came to a scrimmage over who was attended to first.

Soon the first Spaniards began to turn up and an
amorphous
melee began to surge up the steps and around the door. We kept tight to our preeminent spot. ‘Stick close to me and be ready to do as you’re told,’ ordered my wife.

Under normal circumstances queuing is a most orderly business in Spain, although it may not appear so to the uninitiated. It’s like this: you enter the place where you’re going to do your queuing, look around and ask, somewhat bafflingly, ‘
¿Quien hace las veces?
’ (‘Who makes the times?’), whereupon the last person in the queue will turn to you, and say, ‘It’s me.’ So now all you have to do is keep an eye on one person; you can amble over to talk to a friend, find somewhere to sit, or even wander off for a bit, once you’ve made the time yourself. When the person who has ‘made the times’ for you makes a move, then you’re on next. This system works very well, but it doesn’t look good; it hasn’t the neatness of a good orderly line. And of course the whole shebang breaks down when there are foreigners involved who don’t know the score.

But on the steps of the Palacio de las Columnas that morning, as the first hot rays of sunshine came pouring over the house tops and down into the street, the orderly
queuing
system was nowhere to be seen. The place was full of parents, all of them having clearly been laid on the line by
their kids, and these parents were in pugnacious mode, ready to fight like rats for the furtherance of their children’s future.

On the dot of nine the door opened and we were washed in on the head of the flood. Somehow we managed to present our documentation amongst the first half-dozen petitioners, but then we were all given new forms and told to come back when we had done so. They had to be filled in – and there were the direst of consequences for not complying with this order – with a 4B pencil.

We ratched about in our bags, but neither of us had anything resembling a 4B pencil; I don’t think anybody did – after all, you don’t generally carry a 4B with you, do you? The flood of parents headed in dribs and drabs back out onto the street in search of the all-important utensil. We went to a bar in Plaza Trinidad and, while Ana ordered herself a coffee and started getting to grips with the new form, I was despatched to find a pencil.

This proved more taxing than one would have imagined, as there wasn’t a stationers to be seen for miles around. I wandered hither and thither, ducking fruitlessly in and out of shops that I thought with a little imagination might conceivably sell 4Bs … but no luck. Perhaps some rat had received advance information about the pencils, and had bought up all the stock within a three-kilometre radius of the faculty, and was even now, unctuous and alone, handing over the correctly filled-in form. People will sink pretty low.

And then a cry, ‘Cristóbal! What are you doing here?’ I spun round. It was none other than Pinhole Johnny, so called because of his consummate artistry with the pinhole camera.

‘Hey, Johnny. Good to see you.’ I was really pleased to have bumped into him, hadn’t seen him for ages. There was a lot to talk about.

‘Shall we go for a coffee?’ he said.

‘Er … I can’t really, right now. I’m on a serious mission. You don’t happen to have a 4B pencil on you, do you?’

He fumbled about in his bag. ‘Nope, no such luck. I’ve got an HB, oh, and a 2B even … will that do? Or how about two 2Bs stuck together?’

‘This is no time for facetiousness, Johnny. It’s got to be a 4B.’

‘I tell you what, there’s a printer around the corner; they do a lot of work for me and they’re bound to have one. Let’s go and see them.’

So we went round to the printers and after a little negotiation they promised to lend Johnny their 4B pencil so long as he promised to bring it back. It appeared that the 4B was as scarce as hens’ teeth in this part of the city.

By the time I got back to the bar with Johnny, Ana was in a state of some agitation. I think she felt that I was not taking the business seriously enough and had been off somewhere fooling around with Pinhole Johnny, as opposed to wearing the soles of my shoes to the bone in the search for that 4B pencil.

Ana set to filling in the form while I ordered a couple more coffees. ‘Do you think we count as minors?’ she asked, her brow furrowed with wondering.

This stumped me. It seemed an odd question: if you were still a minor at fifty-something, then who
wasn’t
one?

‘No, miners,’ she elucidated. ‘It seems there are certain advantages to be had if you’re employed down a mine.’

‘Who has to be the miner, Chloé or us?’

‘The parents, I should think, although it’s far from clear.’

‘Probably not, then. I think that might be swinging the lead a bit.’ And with that the form was filled in to the best
of our ability and Johnny was sent back to the printers with the pencil, while we went back to the Palacio de las Columnas.

The 4B pencil ruse had thinned out the crowd of parents, but you still had to claw and thump your way through just to be seen. At last, though, we were in sight of the final desk, behind which sat the bespectacled dragon of a woman who would have the final word over Chloé’s destiny. We stood before her, a respectable distance from the desk, and dithered a little, timidly proffering the 4B form, when suddenly a balding short-arsed man shot in front of us and sat himself down at the chair before the desk, spreading his documentation like a card sharp. I gaped like a dying cod, seeking the words of righteous indignation, but it was too late: the bastard, still panting slightly – he had clearly just shouldered his way through from the street – had launched into a carefully prepared peroration and was already in full flight, a full flight that we, with our inept country Spanish, would never be able to match. Why, I believe the dragon woman had already sized us up and was thinking, Oho, here’s a couple of half-witted foreigners and they won’t understand anything and they’ll have filled out the form all wrong, and they’ll barely speak Spanish. Heaven help us.

She shot us a glance as the baldy rabbited ingratiatingly on. ‘I think you’ll find everything in order here, señora – I’ve filled out the form myself – I had to do it because my son is in Canada right now having won a scholarship to a prestigious language school in Montreal – he is a terrific linguist you see, speaks four languages, amongst them Hungarian, does it in his spare time for his own amusement – I know he’ll be a great credit to the …’

The woman administrator peered at him owlishly as he delivered this torrent of codswallop, and then lowered her eyes to his impeccable form. She scanned it, then looked up at him and raised a finger. ‘Everything seems to be in order here, señor.’ She paused. ‘Except that it appears you have used an HB pencil for the form. I’m afraid our computer will not accept that. You’ll have to go over the little boxes with a 4B pencil, then come back and present the form once more.’ She gave him the most charming of smiles and handed back the form, then smiled at us and beckoned us to sit down.

There used to be a bar in the university building, ostensibly for the students, but it was such a hell of a good bar that everybody in the neighbourhood soon got wind of it and packed the place out, and the poor students, who had the disadvantage of having from time to time to attend lectures, found themselves unable to get within even shouting distance of the bar … so they closed it down. This was a shame, as we would dearly have liked to buy that dragon woman a drink, especially when she said to us that we had made a terrific job of filling in the form and that Chloé was to present herself at the Faculty to commence her studies at the beginning of September.