Done
by Ronnie Smith
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: One mild one only.
Description: Labouring in the construction industry takes its toll on the human body. One man gets closer to the point of no return in this telling incident.
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It was pouring with rain. I mean torrential rain falling from a dark grey sky with no sign of it stopping in the near future. It was one of those frequent days on the site when, if we closed our eyes and turned round three or four times, we wouldn’t know which was north and which was south.
Still, Eddie the Ganger and I stood on the stark concrete roof of building number three in our untailored green oilskin rain jackets, green wellies and white safety helmets, watching. As we watched we had to keep wiping the water from the end of our noses, water that dripped continuously from the skips of our helmets. This made smoking very difficult, as I’m sure you can imagine. Wet cigarettes are of little use so we watched in fascination, with our arms folded, without smoking.
We’d been watching Tam for the past fifteen minutes as he wrestled with a long and tangled compressed air hose. He was trying to free it from a complex mesh of sharp reinforcing steel that was sticking up all over the concrete roof. The purpose of this exercise was to set the compressor up on another part of the roof to allow us to drill a new hole for a drainage pipe in a piece of concrete that we had set last week. I was annoyed that we hadn’t created the hole in the concrete as we’d set it but Eddie and Tam were unconcerned. Nonetheless, it remains a fact that neither a compressor nor a pneumatic drill are any use without an air hose. In fact they are as much use as a wet cigarette. So Tam was trying and failing to free the hose.
Time and again he freed and pulled a short piece of it only to see another section become re-tangled in the steel. Time and again… And even though Eddie bawled at him, through the rain, ‘Leave for now, Tam!’, he refused to give up even though he had no rain jacket or helmet or wellies and every part of him was completely soaked.
Tam was a stocky bull of a man with a full red face and bloodshot eyes. He told me that he used to play in the Juniors but, like many of the men on the site, he was now permanently hunched from years of shovelling concrete, wrestling with air hoses and digging holes in the rain, and hoarse-voiced from a lifetime spent dedicated to the consumption of cigarettes and whisky. Then, utterly without warning, he lost his temper, threw the hose on to the concrete, stood up straight and roared in a voice that carried across the site and above the harsh sound of the falling rain.
'Holy bastards!’ he yelled. Giving full vent to his frustration, impatience and a profound, deep-set anger that he'd carried around with him for most of his life.
Eddie shook his head and, in spite of the rain, took a packet of Embassy Regal King Size out of the pocket of his jeans and offered me one. I took it and we cupped our hands together as he lit it for me. We stayed bent over against the wind and to protect our cigarettes from the rain and took a long thoughtful fill of plaster-tasting smoke...
'The fact is', said Eddie, 'the man's done. He was a beast but look at him now. He used to play in the Juniors.’
Swearwords: One mild one only.
Description: Labouring in the construction industry takes its toll on the human body. One man gets closer to the point of no return in this telling incident.
_____________________________________________________________________
It was pouring with rain. I mean torrential rain falling from a dark grey sky with no sign of it stopping in the near future. It was one of those frequent days on the site when, if we closed our eyes and turned round three or four times, we wouldn’t know which was north and which was south.
Still, Eddie the Ganger and I stood on the stark concrete roof of building number three in our untailored green oilskin rain jackets, green wellies and white safety helmets, watching. As we watched we had to keep wiping the water from the end of our noses, water that dripped continuously from the skips of our helmets. This made smoking very difficult, as I’m sure you can imagine. Wet cigarettes are of little use so we watched in fascination, with our arms folded, without smoking.
We’d been watching Tam for the past fifteen minutes as he wrestled with a long and tangled compressed air hose. He was trying to free it from a complex mesh of sharp reinforcing steel that was sticking up all over the concrete roof. The purpose of this exercise was to set the compressor up on another part of the roof to allow us to drill a new hole for a drainage pipe in a piece of concrete that we had set last week. I was annoyed that we hadn’t created the hole in the concrete as we’d set it but Eddie and Tam were unconcerned. Nonetheless, it remains a fact that neither a compressor nor a pneumatic drill are any use without an air hose. In fact they are as much use as a wet cigarette. So Tam was trying and failing to free the hose.
Time and again he freed and pulled a short piece of it only to see another section become re-tangled in the steel. Time and again… And even though Eddie bawled at him, through the rain, ‘Leave for now, Tam!’, he refused to give up even though he had no rain jacket or helmet or wellies and every part of him was completely soaked.
Tam was a stocky bull of a man with a full red face and bloodshot eyes. He told me that he used to play in the Juniors but, like many of the men on the site, he was now permanently hunched from years of shovelling concrete, wrestling with air hoses and digging holes in the rain, and hoarse-voiced from a lifetime spent dedicated to the consumption of cigarettes and whisky. Then, utterly without warning, he lost his temper, threw the hose on to the concrete, stood up straight and roared in a voice that carried across the site and above the harsh sound of the falling rain.
'Holy bastards!’ he yelled. Giving full vent to his frustration, impatience and a profound, deep-set anger that he'd carried around with him for most of his life.
Eddie shook his head and, in spite of the rain, took a packet of Embassy Regal King Size out of the pocket of his jeans and offered me one. I took it and we cupped our hands together as he lit it for me. We stayed bent over against the wind and to protect our cigarettes from the rain and took a long thoughtful fill of plaster-tasting smoke...
'The fact is', said Eddie, 'the man's done. He was a beast but look at him now. He used to play in the Juniors.’
About the Author
Born in Glasgow, Ronnie Smith has lived and worked in Romania for the past eight years and is getting back into the writing of fiction after a long break. He publishes in Romania, in English and Romanian, and hopes to be published more in Scotland in the future. He is currently working on a novel set in post-independence Scotland.