Concrete Triumphant

'Would you lift up, don't be stooping.' The craftsman leaned down and gripped the hawk over the white knuckles holding it up from below. He slapped and smeared the mortar, scooped a glob deftly onto the trowel. Hurled it at the eroded joints in the chimney breast, sealing it in before it loosened.

The loaded mortar board sagged, inch by inch, until it rested on the stringy black hair of the boy underneath. One hand left the hawk for an instant as the boy drew a sleeve across his nose. Then his fists gripped the board with renewed vigour. His face was streaked with grey stains from the cement, his nose red-raw from the cold and the brisk friction of his sleeve. Grains of sand ground into his fingers, working their way under an old plaster on his thumb. It didn't hurt now, but he knew it would later. He peered up from under the board and willed strength into his drooping arms. The master scooped the mortar onto the trowel in one fluid motion and turned to the work again. Again the hawk sank slowly, and again the white knuckles on one side released their grip as the boy scrubbed his nose. He shook the blood back into first one arm, then the other.

They were on a scaffolding erected at the gable end of a house. It was a Victorian redbrick in the old residential part of the city. The father was up on a trestle pointing the chimney base. He slapped the mortar into the empty joints, pressed it in with the trowel and smoothed it over. Each time he slapped on a trowel-full a good portion of it skited back, streaking the lower brickwork on the way down.

The mortar board became easier to hold up as its load lightened. The boy could spare the attention to look across at the upstairs windows, now at eye level. He could see the white lacy curtains, the empty window boxes, wet leaves on window sills. He could see through the lace, to the room inside. An assortment of bottles and spray cans stood on the inside ledge, or, now that he looked more closely, on a small table pushed up against the window. A bright orange wardrobe with a mirror set in front stood to the right. It had to be a woman's room. Little pictures, or postcards, were stuck all over the door. His eyes searched the crumpled bed clothes, trying to follow the shapes and forms of the discarded items on the bed.

'Is it heavy? I say, Is it too heavy for you?' The voice broke through like a fistful of gravel hurled at him. He strained his arms and raised the hawk again. If he hung his head to one side the strain was less. He counted slowly. The hawk shuddered briefly under the impact of a glob of mortar, excess from the pointing.

From this position he could see the rows of black roofs, the bushy crowns of trees, and all the little chimneys pushing out their smokes. It was a different country up here. You could giant-step from roof to roof, valley to valley, clamber across the round mound of a treetop and reach the flat expanse of the factory roof. From there you could make your way along the top of a high wall to reach more distant archipelagoes in the ocean of ground level. More of the city is roof than road, he suddenly thought. The roads are not roads, but are canyons between roofs. Back gardens are hollows and pits into nothingness. And in the distance the Himalayas of St. John's church and the black Everest of the spire. But to get there you had to cross too much nothingness; the tree crowns were sparse and no houses were near.

The houseman's wife appeared and stood cautiously to one side of the scaffolding. 'Are you ready for a bite to eat? There's some lunch on the table,' she called up.

It won't be long now, the thought idled through him, holding him steady, warming him, waiting for the lights to change, any moment now. But the craftsman was in no hurry, and besides, he would have disdained to be seen rushing in for lunch as soon as it was called. The woman stood below, looking on at the work in progress, as was her perogative.

The boy rested the hawk on a spud of the scaffold, relaxing in the security of her gaze for a moment. He resumed his game of stepping from roof to roof, and now built the tangle of telephone wires into his landscape. Over these precarious bridges you could reach the church, cross previously impassable expanses and attain new regions. The tiny three-runged ladders at the top of each telegraph pole provided temporary resting-places. But the wires should only be used for emergency use.

'Ah givvus a bit,' the voice intruded, but under the gentle gaze of the housewife not as harshly as usual. The boy lowered his head to take the strain and offered up the hawk. Looking down he saw the rough red face of the woman smiling proudly at him. She called again: 'Don't be letting it go cold on the plate.'

There was no reply but the bristle sound of a stiff brush on bricks. The wet grit skited down into the boy's face. He screwed his eyes half-closed against it. At last his father climbed down from the trestle and threw the trowel and brush into a bucket of water. He thrust the bucket into the boy's hands - 'Take this would you,' spoken through the nose and mouth together.

'You must be starving with the hunger. By God there's a bit of a chill out too, you must be freezing,' the woman said kindly.

'It's all right,' the boy said. It was awkward to be treated with such consideration.

'Go in and eat the food while it's still warm.' The boy looked up at his father still scouring the wall and hesitated, unsure of which authority applied. But then his father gripped the scaffold bars and felt with his foot for the first rung. The boy went on ahead inside.

The sink was in a room next to the kitchen. He went through and washed the cement from his hands under a strong gush of warm water. There was a bar of soap and a bottle of detergent but he didn't want to interfere with her things. Outside he heard the woman scolding, urging his father to use the good warm water inside. The boy shook his hands vigorously, the life now fully seeped back into them. Too fully. They were two fleshy lumps of red stained with paler blotches, and now the pain seeped back into them too. He wished he was back at school, though there was nothing he had hated more than school. Maybe next year he could go to London, earn good money by painting people's railings, get his own flat.

'Dry your hands in the towel,' the woman called. He rubbed them on the cloth without taking it from its hook. They drew chairs out and sat down to the meal. She had prepared a simple stew, served not with potatoes but with stacks of bread. Through the window they could see the lawn, now with tracks of mud through it where they dragged the scaffold pieces.

'That's a powerful stew,' the craftsman said.

'Tis only a bit of meat and carrots, you need something warm on a day like this, and the pair of ye way up in the wind and rain.'

'That's all you need in a stew, carrots and a slip of onion. You know an onion keeps off all kinds of colds and flu's. There's a power in an onion.' They guzzled the soup from spoons and dipped the bread.

'There's a father Jacob in the monastery at Cloone that made an onion poultice for a sore arm,' said the woman, 'that's where I'm from. Is that the rain at last God bless us, and he swore by it.' She looked drearily out the window at the dreary sky, gazing at the grey sky, looked too long like in a trance and the boy grew uncomfortable. Madness had entered the room. The father was engrossed in the meal and didn't notice. The boy coughed loudly, rattled his plate. She closed her eyes tightly then returned to the stew.

The father reached out for another cut of bread. His thin hands were appallingly abused. The thread remains of a bandage clung to the middle finger. At the knuckles the skin on the sides was cracked in a radial pattern. Dark grey concrete stains lined the ancient cracks; one of them seeped blood, but as though welling up from a great depth. Veins and tendons interplayed on the back of his hand, stained with paint and now with a chalky roughness from the lime drying into them. The fingernails looked like worn saw teeth, or a cracked trowel. They were alive, but had the appearance of things, of abandoned tools. Each nail was broken and cracked in its own way. One nail was almost like a hoof - it was testament to the power of flesh to regrow and close itself over wounds. Another was split in two from the quick to the fingertip, and a hard growth filled the space between. A bulbous texture like the organic growth of a tree bark over a rusty nail. That human flesh should become so plant-like repelled him. They were thin fingers despite this, thin and betraying their lack of strength as the man the crust off a piece of bread.

'What part of the country is it you're from again, up near Drumshanbo?' asked the man. The woman looked down from the window again.

'Not that far, Sunnagh if you know it. I suppose you've seen a lot of the country yourself?' The man didn't reply. The woman looked at him expectantly, awaiting an answer, and eventually he conceded a murmur of assent. He could be like that sometimes. The boy wondered if his father was annoyed at the implications of her question.

'What kind of meat is that in the soup?' his father asked.

'Just a bit of an old lamb is all, and carrots.'

'Lamb is a great meat. People long ago used eat a lot more lamb than today. I don't like pork. The Jews never eat pork, that's a fact. There's nothing better than a lamb roast. When I was young we'd have to kill the lambs ourselves. Sometimes we'd steal a wild lamb: run after it in the fields with a knife and cut its throat. We'd do all the butchering ourselves, and me only twelve years old. And then we'd have lamb for the dinner that same day. A very healthy meat, so they say.'

'That's right, that's right,' said the woman, who had stopped eating and was looking at him intently. She had not been unaffected by his reminiscence of the lambs. If she found the topic unpleasant she didn't show it.

'That's a great gossoon you have there,' she said. The boy shifted on the hard chair. The teapot gurgled pleasantly tea into the cups, and for a long while the spoons clinked round and round, stirring in the sugar thoroughly so none would be wasted. The boy glanced furtively at the woman's beaming face, then he dunked his head back among the crockery. The woman blinked and caught his father's hand.

'Look at the state of your hands. Let me get a plaster for your hands.' The man looked at his hands as though puzzled by them and drew them out of view under the table.

'It's as well to let the air at them. You could have plasters on them for months and they'd never heal over.' He picked at one tattered plaster and let it fall to the floor. The woman padded on heavy feet out of the room.

'Will we have to build another level for the chimney?' asked the boy. The father paid him not the least attention.

'Put this on you - give me your hand,' said the woman on her welcome return.

'Don't be bothering, it'll come off again soon enough.' The woman took his hand and held it steady on the back of the chair. The father's eyes caught the son's and were swiftly averted. The woman patted the hand, finished. 'Now you're fixed. It'll hold together until five o'clock.' She winked conspiratorially at the son.

'Thanks for the bite to eat,' said the man, and pushed the chair back into place under the table, a concession to the female domain of the house.

Outside the grey clouds had sealed together. The rain had slackened off into a drizzle. Maybe the woman will really make us finish at five o'clock, the boy was thinking. Maybe she'll come out and watch them working - that way he wouldn't be shouted at too much. Maybe his father and the woman would talk and laugh about olden times. Imagine if his father and the woman got married, and she'd be always there to say nice things and she'd be seen on the streets talking to the neighbours, and calling up to the school to argue with the teachers, and going shopping on a Saturday.

'Clean that filth off the lawn, and that, and that mortar off the wall. We can't leave it in that state for these people. These kind of people are used to having their homes tidy, not like a pig sty.'

The boy picked up the yard brush and started scrubbing.

'HOW WOULD YOU USE A YARDBRUSH ON A WALL?' his father bawled. 'Take that scrubbing brush there, and are you listening? Don't finish it until it's finished. Get all that filth away and give it a good scrubbing. Get those things out of your way first - DON'T PUT THEM ON THE LAWN, for jaysus' sake! What are you doing putting the irons on the lawn? To tear up the decent people's good lawn. Of all the stupidity I've ever seen. Put them there on the concrete path. Can you move a little faster? Did you not get enough to eat? Take a grip on the brush and move yourself.'

Perhaps there was some good reason why the small handbrush had to be used instead of the long-handled yardbrush, but the boy only passively perceived that the easier option was forbidden. He dipped the brush in the grimy water and scrubbed the wall, dipped and scrubbed and found a rhythm, and then he was away, thinking of nothing, and was lost inside the pattern of the brickwork and the angles of the scaffold framework. Time passed, any amount of it, cloud-lengths of time, rolling on to five o'clock. Time is measured in effort, and now it was flowing away painlessly.

The rain held off, though the sky remained heavy and sealed. The boy was called again, and he had to pass planks up to his father. So they were going to build another level. This was a welcome change from the scrubbing. When enough planks and poles were on the second level he climbed above his father onto the top level. His father in turn passed the materials up to him. The boy noticed the clenched-jaw effort his father had to make every time he pushed up a plank, and the way he had to squint his eyes against the hail of grit that tumbled down. Finally his father climbed up beside him and they began to attach the lengths of pole. Already they were at the height of the gutter, but they had to reach the chimney from the gable side and repair the pointing. Up at this height the scaffold didn't have the same solidity as on the lower levels. It took some time to get used to it. It would be nice if the woman came out, the boy thought, and saw the way he was able to clamber about at such a height, with the whole construction swaying at every step, and shouted at him to be careful and mind himself. It was getting late, he could see from the way the clouds were tinged with colour close to the horizon. They secured the poles provisionally, screwing the bolts home with finger and thumb.

'Get me a number sixteen spanner, would you,' his father said.

'Is it in the car or in the toolbox?'

'Sure you'll find it anyway,' said his father. The boy descended the ladder, watching the world change to normal again. He searched quickly through the tool boxes, found nothing, and went out to the car. The sun at the ends of the day broke through the clouds and lit up everything horizontally. The car was warm inside, like a greenhouse, with a warm luxuriant scent. All the little glowing houses, hundreds of gable ends, all in need of pointing. He rummaged through the back, suddenly aware of the passage of time again, and finally found the hammer.

His father was busy fixing in the new poles when the boy reached the top, and seemed not to notice either his absence or his arrival.

'Here,' said the boy, holding out the hammer. His father looked at it and hesitated, and then in little more than a whisper: 'Is that a number sixteen spanner?'

The boy looked at it and his lips wavered, but he answered in a firm voice, 'Yes,' and held it out. His father reached out slowly and grasped it, looking into his son's eyes for signs of defiance, or stupidity. There was only calm certainty.

Touched on some raw nerve of superstition, the man felt foreboding creep over him. Old feelings and intimations of other worlds came back to him. There was a wedge driven into reality and it was threatening to crack apart. Slowly he fitted in a section and hammered it home, and then shook his head and muttered, For Jaysus' sake, a hammer! and snorted. But there was nobody to hear this appeal to common sense, and he found that, after all, he didn't need the spanner. The next time he spoke to the boy it was in a more subdued tone.

'Can you hold up the cross bar?' They worked together almost wordlessly, the boy just following the movements of his father. Only when he didn't do something right would his father speak to him, his commands gradually returning to their normal degree of abrasiveness. Reminded by the pile of sand on the boards, the boy thought of holidays on the beach in the time before his mother went away, the little hill at the end that was all theirs for two weeks. It was a sand hill with a circle of marram grass, like a ring fort. Whenever a strange boy or girl crossed onto their hill they would be challenged and forced to acknowledge the true owners or beat a hasty retreat. Between themselves they'd had small battles to see who was the current king of the hill. One interfering mother had complained to his mother about how her little boy had been made cry. He and his brothers were then barred from the hill, and their mother told them not to play with the posh people's kids, who would call the police and have them all thrown off the beach if they made any of their children cry ever again. They kept well clear of those children after that. There were other kids to play with anyway. They had buried each other up to the neck in sand and gone way over the rocks to explore other beaches. It had been a laugh when dad had made a camp fire behind the caravan and they'd roasted potatoes and burgers and boiled up tea.

The bruised and battered hand reached out and tightened the fitting where the poles crossed. One pole was damaged and his father had to go down to ground level to cut a clean end with the hacksaw. He reached the earth and stood still a moment as though in a mood of meditation. Then the nature of his thoughts broke out in speech; 'Is that the way you washed the wall? Can you not do anything right? Is that the best you could do?' He stooped to the tool bag and pulled out the hacksaw. The blade was well worn, the sawing would take some time. The boy had a few moments rest up on the top level, out of sight of the ground.

At last his father wedged the pole against a kerbstone and lifted it into a vertical position. The boy pulled and dragged it up, levering it slowly to the horizontal. He looked quickly at his hands as his father climbed up the ladder. He noticed with dismay the whitened grooves cut by the grit were filling with blood.

He wiped them on his trousers. If it happens often enough they won't bother to bleed, he thought. Then they'd be just like his father's.

Up on the top level his father jumped agilely enough up onto the slates and clambered around to the other side of the chimney. He demanded the slate rip and a bucket, and told the boy to fasten down the planks in the meantime, handing him the hammer.

This surprised the boy. His father had never asked him to do such a challenging job before. Usually he was given the most simple repetitive tasks, just washing and cleaning up. He looked up and down the platform, figuring out what length of plank would fit where. Most of the planks from the platform below had been lifted up and stacked vertically, so their ends could be reached from the next higher level. He pulled a plank up and laid it out, pushing it firmly against the end bars. He began working steadily, pulling up a plank from below, hitting it into place, and hammering through the long metal pins. They stuck out the other side and he hammered them to curl back and grip the plank, like he'd seen his father do. He laid a few more planks in place and sat back to take a break. From here he could see the ragged scraps of clouds lit up in red along the horizon. He licked his abraded fingers and spat. Down at ground level things seemed darker, though up at that height it still seemed bright as midday. With a feeling of contentment he realised that time was limited. The day was drawing to a close; soon there would be stars. In the room across the street a light was on already.

'IS IT ALL FINISHED, IS IT?' the gravel voice assaulted him. He jumped up with a shock and tapped at the nearest metal pin to hammer it home.

'Is that fast? Is that something you could stand on and work?' his father said, pointing at an edge plank. The boy quickly grabbed one of the end clamps and slapped it on and pulled it closed. One turn of his fingers tightened the nut. His father clambered down from the chimney and stepped on the plank. The clamp slipped a little.

'Is that fast, is it?' his father repeated, 'And this one, and this one, is that well-fastened?' His father bickered hoarsely, pointing at another plank. He made his way towards it. The boy grabbed another clamp and ran to slap it on the pipe to hold the plank. Too late. His father jumped onto the plank with his full weight.

'DO YOU SEE!' he roared in triumph as it slipped from under him, 'YOU CAN'T DO ANYTHING RIGHT!'

He'll land on the lower platform, the boy thought quickly, as the figure keeled over and down. But there were no planks below. The figure fell and fell, and the head slapped with a resonant clang against the bar at the second level. The boy stepped cautiously up to the edge of the platform and looked down at the small crumpled corpse lying across the dark grey scrapings of the mortar. The grey greasy strands of hair were clotted together, and a thickening ooze of blood spread over the cold damp concrete.