Page 97 of Undefined Terms

We eat cake in the portacabin at seven fifteen in the morning. Gaz has two slices. Thomas picks the icing off and eats it separately which is a crime. Dave cuts a thin slice, eats it standing up, goes back to the report. Jay licks the knife. I tell him not to lick the knife. He licks it again.

‘How old’s the niece?’ I ask.

‘Four,’ Dean says. ‘She wanted a dinosaur cake. Mum did a dinosaur cake. Got the spikes and everything.’

‘Your mum’s class,’ Gaz says with his mouth full.

‘My mum’s terrifying,’ Dean says. ‘But yeah. She’s class.’

We eat. The portacabin smells like chocolate and thermos tea and wet hi-vis drying on the radiator. The radio’s on low. Capital, some song I don’t know, the one where the bloke keeps saying baby like it’s the only word he learnt. Rain outside, light, not enough to stop you working but enough to make everything slower and heavier and grey.

Nobody talks about anything. Gaz shows us a photo of his dog in a hat. It’s a small dog in a big hat. We look at it for too long. Dean says ‘that’s a hat’ and Gaz says ‘that’s a dog’ and that’s the end of it.

I finish the tea, wash the mug. Put my hard hat on. Monday.

The number is wrong.

I mean, I feel it. The way you feel a footing that’s settled wrong, before the level touches the surface. The pencil on the page and the line where the line should be and it’s not. Forty millimetres, that’s the gap.

Block D, the tie rods, East elevation, I’ve done this setting-out. I’ve done this specific measurement in twelve different variations on nine different sites in six years and I could do it pissed, I could do it with a hangover that’d kill a smaller man, I could do it at three in the morning with Dave shouting numbers from the cab of the excavator and the rain coming sideways.

Today I did it thinking about Celyn’s mouth.

Last night, sat on the bed, the laptop on the knees, the glasses they only wear for screens that I didn’t know about until two weeks ago. The bottom lip caught between the teeth. The concentration. The glasses sliding down the nose and the finger pushing them back and the nail, yellow, catching the lamplight.

Forty millimetres.

Dave finds it in the report. Course he does. Dave finds everything in the report. Dave reads it with his hands, with his gut, with the part of the brain that does not forgive. How I read a site. Same method, same nothing-gets-past.

‘Ron.’

I look up, the site office, the prefab with the heater that rattles and the desk that’s two sheets of ply on trestles. The coffee’s gone cold, the hard hat’s on the desk, Dave’s got the printout.

‘This measurement’s off by forty mil.’

I know. I know before he says which one. The tie rod, East, Block D.

‘Let me see.’

He puts it down and points. The number, my handwriting. The wrong number in my handwriting that hasn’t written a wrong number since. When. The apprenticeship. The first year, the shaky hands, the bloke who checked my work and said you’ve got good eyes, son, use them.

I’ve been looking at the wrong things.

‘This isn’t like you,’ Dave says. That’s worse. Angry I can handle. Angry is a bollocking and a pint and it’s done. This is, the chair leaned back. The arms crossed. Eleven months of trusting me to be the one who doesn’t make mistakes. ‘You’re the one who catches MY mistakes. What’s going on?’

‘Nothing. Won’t happen again.’

‘It better not.’ The chair comes forward. The printout under his finger. ‘Forty mil in a tie rod is a structural failure in two years. You know that better than I do.’

I know that, I’ve said that. I’ve said that exact sentence to apprentices on three different sites. The words in Dave’s mouth that came from mine.

‘I’ll redo the setting-out.’

‘You’ll redo the whole section. And I want the pour delayed until I’ve checked it myself.’

‘Right.’

Dave looks at me, doesn’t ask.