Page 163 of Undefined Terms

At the lights on Great Ancoats Street, stopped, the engine idling. Dad looks out the window, the mills, the new flats.

‘Your brother still at the university?’

The question. The careful one. The one that asks about work because work is safe and work is the language and the university is a building Dad can picture even if the man inside it married someone Dad can’t.

‘Yeah. He’s good, Dad. Him and Laurence. They’re good.’

The name. In the van. Between the traffic and the radio and the lights changing. Dad’s hands on his knees. The fingers press once. That’s it. The whole response. Fingers on the kneecaps and the lights going green and the van moving.

At the drop-off he opens the door, steps out, turns back.

‘The building,’ he says. ‘You should be proud of that.’

‘Yeah.’

He shuts the door. Brown coat, Piccadilly, the crowd. I watch him go through the entrance and I don’t drive away until I can’t see the coat anymore.

The sausage rolls on the passenger seat. Still warm.

I eat one in the car park. The pastry flakes onto my hi-vis. Greggs. The taste of every Saturday I spent at seventeen learning what my hands were for from a man who couldn’t tell his sons he loved them but could show a boy where to put the spirit level and trust him to read it true.

He came. Three hours on a train to look at a building and bring me lunch and not say the thing and go home.

He came.

That’s the crack. Not the door opening. Not the wall coming down. The first line in the plaster that says: this is where it starts to give.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

The email comes on a Wednesday. I’m at the site, the last pour, the final section, the concrete going down smooth and grey and permanent. The pump’s running, the mixer’s turning, Gaz is on the vibrator, the hose in the formwork, the bubbles rising as the air pushes out. Dean on the far side with the screed board, me with the trowel, the finish.

Last pour of Victoria North. Eighteen months of this site. Footings I checked in January, the first week, the first cold, the boots that were new and are now cracked at the toe. The steel that went up in winter with the ice on the beams and the gloves that stuck to the metal. Walls. Floors. Roofing. Everything I touched is becoming a building where people will live and sleep and make tea.

The phone buzzes in the pocket. I don’t look until lunch.

From: Henderson & Roe Construction. Subject: Project Manager, Rotherhithe Riverside.

I read it on the bench, the sandwich in one hand, the phone in the other. The words, they’re real words. Not a feeler, not a ‘keep in touch.’ An offer. Project manager, Rotherhithe. Permanent position, starting September. The salary. I read the salary twice.

Good money, proper money. Career money. Money that means you stay.

Rotherhithe, twenty minutes from Lewisham, the same river, the same south, the same streets I grew up knowing by feel. The pubs and the chippies and the sound of the train that’s different from Manchester trains, faster, angrier, louder.

I close the email, open it, close it.

Gaz sits down, the sandwich, the thermos.

‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost,’ Gaz says.

‘Just an email.’

‘Must be some email. You’ve gone white.’

I haven’t gone white, I’ve gone somewhere. Between Rotherhithe and this portacabin.

‘You alright, boss?’

‘Yeah. Fine.’