Shape-Shifter by Pauline Melville

Author:Pauline Melville
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781846591822
Publisher: Saqi

McGregor’s Journey

‘I’M JACKING,’ SAID MCGREGOR.

It was ten o’clock in the morning. The other scaffolder hadn’t turned up. It had taken him half an hour to unload the freezing scaffolding tubes from the lorry, the ringing clang of tube against tube increasingly setting his teeth on edge. That done, he set about emptying the lorry of piles of metal fittings so that the driver could get away. He banged on the side of the cab. The driver raised his thumb and backed the vehicle off the site. McGregor looked up at a sky laden with snow. Then he examined the palms of his hands. They were a shiny, raw pink where the frozen metal had taken off the first layer of skin. They burned him. Flexing his hands, he walked over to the foot of the unfinished, eight-storey building and began to base out the scaffold. On his own, he erected the first level, using the heavy, twenty-one foot tubes as uprights. With deft, experienced twists of the podger on the metal nuts, he fastened the four foot tubes to the uprights, some slantwise and some horizontally so that they reached the wall. One by one, he heaved the wooden planks from the pile at the foot of the wall and laid them out along the structure. Then he decided to quit the job and go drinking.

‘I said I’m jacking,’ shouted McGregor to the site foreman, trying to make himself heard over the grinding roar of the cement-mixer. The foreman motioned to the hod-carrier, showing him where the bricks were to go. Then he turned to McGregor with drooping shoulders:

‘What’s up, Jock?’ Steam issued from his mouth.

‘You can stick your fucking job up your fucking arse.’ McGregor grinned. ‘I’m jacking.’ The foreman looked pained for a minute and then shrugged:

‘Go and tell them at the site office. Tell them to phone head office and send me down two more scaffolders.’

McGregor went over and unhitched his jacket from where it hung on the end of a piece of scaffolding. He undid his belt with a mounting sense of freedom and took off the leather frogs which held his half-inch Whitworth spanner and the seven-sixteenth A.F. He chucked the podger and the spanners into his canvas tool-bag and walked over the icy, rutted ground to the portocabin by the gates. He began to whistle.

Inside the portacabin, the air was fuggy from the calor gas heater. Mr Oates, the site manager, was on the telephone at a desk littered with papers. Pinned to a noticeboard near the door was a letter from a Mrs Kathleen Doherty, written in a loopy scrawl, thanking the men for the collection after her husband’s accident. McGregor read it idly as he waited. Mr Oates put down the telephone. A cigarette with long ash burned between his fingers. White hair with nicotine yellow streaks lay stiffly on either side of his head like bird wings. He looked at McGregor enquiringly.

‘I’m away,’ said McGregor. ‘Just phone the office and tell them to make up me cards and me wage packet.

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