OK, Mr. Field by Katharine Kilalea

Author:Katharine Kilalea
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2018-07-16T16:00:00+00:00

Morning arrived and I opened my eyes, pushing the notebook slowly to one side. It wasn’t light yet. I could measure the distance of things by their color: those nearest were bright and vibrant; those furthest away were gray, as if covered in ash. It must be Sunday, I thought, because the building site was quiet. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I saw Hannah Kallenbach leaning against the radiator, looking down on me with her special piercing gaze. What are you looking at? I said. And she said, I like watching you wake up. I like the way that, for a few moments, you’re OK. Because for a few moments everything was calm and then it began to shake. I thought there might have been an earth tremor, or that a washing machine somewhere was on spin cycle, but the glass of water beside my bed had no ripples on its surface. For a moment (since each night in dreams I reversed Mim’s leaving so that in the morning it happened all over again) I had the notion that the bed was moving because Mim was beside me, sobbing maybe, or masturbating. Then I heard the sounds of something dropping, and again the house shook as a crane offloaded a stack of bricks from a van parked on the street into a large metal dumpster. I couldn’t see the crane in its entirety, all I could see was the apex of its bent elbow as it lifted the bricks, swiveled, and released them with a loud crash.

Gradually, the tower had begun to resolve itself into a form I could recognize. On top of the square podium the skeleton of the building had been erected—a dozen or so round floorplates supported by thin columns. There were no outer walls or windows yet, just these evenly spaced floorplates rising up around the large columns for the lift shafts, with staircases zigzagging between them. I could see the stairwells and the corridors, and the rooms leading off them. The electrics had gone in and bits of wiring poked from where the plug sockets and light switches would be. Touw had arrived on site in a pair of maroon britches and leaned a tall ladder against the wall of the apartment tower. He was fitting a bright-green flag onto a flagpole made from a piece of timber. TOUW STUDIO said the flag. MAKING EXTRAORDINARY PROJECTS HAPPEN! The builders, watching as he tightened the rope of the flag around the makeshift flagpole and, turning his hands, fastened it, looked to be experiencing collective bemusement.

All the while, it rained. The sea was flinging up brown sand and lifeguards had raised red flags to keep surfers off the huge waves coming in, each one beginning almost before the previous one was over. In the months since I’d arrived, the building site had been animated by changing noises. In the early days, while the builders were breaking ground, I’d mostly heard loud drilling and jackhammers breaking up rocks.

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