“It’s Friday,” I pointed out.
“That’s what I meant,” he said around a mouthful, hand-waving with the remainder of his breakfast. “Force of habit.” He swallowed. “Pay-day, at any rate.”
I nodded enthusiastically. Half my pay was telegraphed straight to my account at the Caledonian Mutual Bank; out of the remainder I had to pay for my lodgings, food and drink, and a modicum of carousing at the weekly fair. By Friday mornings I had just enough cash to get through the day. Pay was high, but so was the cost of living —the project had pulled up prices for miles around it.
Jondo was a man about my own age, his beer-gut already as impressive as his muscles. His long red hair, now as usual worn in a pony-tail, and his pale eyes and eyebrows gave him the look of a paradoxically innocent pirate; inherited perhaps from his ancestors who’d gone a-viking, and come to this land to pillage and settled down to farm, and to whom the Christian gospel had come as good news indeed, a welcome relief from heathendom’s implacable codes of honour and vengeance. He spoke with the soft accent of Inverness, where—rumour had it— there were Christians still.
I tried to imagine Jondo drinking blood at some dark ceremony. The momentary absurd image must have brought a smirk to my face.
“What’s so funny, Clovis?” he growled. Then he smiled, balling up the waxed paper and chucking it, wiping the grease from his hands on the oily thighs of his overalls. “Ach, I know. A good night with your tinker lass, was it?”
“You could say that.”
“Aye, well, each to their own, I suppose,” he said, in the tone of one making a profound and original observation. “Here’s the bus.”
The bus, already half-full, drew to a halt beside us in a cloud of wood-alcohol exhaust, its brakes squealing and its flywheel shrieking. I hopped on, paid my groat to the driver and settled down in a window seat. Jondo heaved his bulk in beside me, gave me another lewd grin and a wink, released an evidently satisfying fart and went instantly to sleep.
Some passengers busied themselves with newspapers or conversation, but most dozed like Jondo or stared bleary-eyed like me. The discrepancy between the time-honoured four-day week and the project’s more demanding schedules reduced Friday work to a matter of clearing up problems left over from the past week and preparing for the next. Not even the inducement of double time could make more than a handful of the labour-force encroach on the sanctity of Saturday and Sunday, although it could make most of us work overtime through the week. No amount of patient lecturing from managers with clipboards and redundant hard hats could persuade us to adopt what they considered a more rational work pacing.
The bus lurched into motion. I lit a cigarette to dispel Jondo’s intestinal methane and laid my temple against the welcome throbbing coolness of the window. As we crossed the Carron and passed New Kelso I gazed beyond the suburb’s neat bungalows to where morning smoke rose from the tinker camp. A vivid image of Menial asleep— the tumble of black hair, the white-sleeved arm across the pillow—lit up my mind. I wondered what my chances were of seeing her through the day. I didn’t even know which office she worked in, and a desultory fantasy took shape of finding some fantastic excuse to visit them all: of working my way through the administration blocks and drawing-offices, spurning the flirtations of giggling girls and pensive older women with hunky pin-ups above their desks, until I finally walked into an engineering lab to find Menial alone and in a day-dream of her own, about me, into which my real arrival would be a passionately welcomed incursion…
Probably not.
My head swung away from the window as the bus turned left on to the main road along the northern shore. I jolted upright, making sure my head didn’t swing back and crack against the pane. Even at this hour in the morning the road was busy with commuter traffic and heavy trucks. The bus chugged slowly along, picking up yet more passengers in Jeantown, another village that the project had expanded, its packed buildings teetering perilously up the hillside. Out on the loch a pod of dolphins sported, their leaps drawing gasps and sighs from the less jaded or dozy of my fellow-passengers.
Then, with a great clashing of gears and screeching of flywheel as the auxiliary electric motors kicked in, the bus turned right, on to the road up into the hills between the two mountains, An Sgurr and Glas Bhein, that dominated the northern skyline of the lochside towns. To me, this afforded an inexhaustibly fascinating view of further ranges of hills and reaches of water. Everybody else on the bus ignored it completely. Someone opened a window to let out the smoke and let in some fresh air; a bee blundered in, causing a ripple of excitement and much brandishing of rolled newspapers before it bumbled out.
Above the last houses, above the meadows, the trees began: twenty-metre-tall beeches, then pine and rowan and birch, all the way up to the crags and the scree. Centuries ago these hills had been bare of all but rough pasture and heather, cropped by the infamous black-faced sheep. But these same bare hills had somehow sustained the sparse guerilla forces of Jacobite and Land Leaguer and Republican. Far below I could see the rocky peninsula known as the Island, a sheltering arm around the harbour, still with a small bunker on its top. During the First World Revolution a thirteen-year-old had written herself into local legend by bringing down a stealth fighter with a nuclear-tipped rocket-propelled grenade. In Jeantown’s poky museum you can see an ancient photograph of her: the grubby, grinning cadre of a Celtic Vietcong, posed with the rocket tube slung on her shoulder, beside unrecognisable wreckage on a scarred hillside where to this day nothing will grow.
Over the top of the saddleback and down into the long, dark glen where the Pretender had evaded Cumberland’s troops, where the Free Kirk had preached to the dispossessed, and where, later, the Army of the New Republic had cached their computers, the hardware of their software war against the last empire. The grim glen opened to another fertile plain of woods and fields and recently grown town, Courthill. Beyond it, at the edge of the sea-loch, lay the great scar of the Kishorn Yard. There was a trick of the eye in interpreting the sight—everything there, the cranes and the platform and the ship, were much bigger than their normal equivalents, like the Pleistocene relatives of familiar mammals.
The bus pulled up at the works gate. The stockade around the yard had been constructed more to protect the careless or reckless from wandering in than to safeguard anything it enclosed. I nudged Jondo awake and we alighted in a dangerous, fast-moving convergence of buses and cars and bikes. We strolled through the gate just as the seven-o’clock klaxon brayed. Hundreds, then thousands, of workers streamed through the gate and swarmed out across the yard. The place looked like a benign battlefield, crater-pocked, vehicle-strewn, littered with the living. I clamped the heavy helmet on my head, and with Jondo puffing along behind me, plunged in; ducking and dodging along walkways, over trenches, under cables; leaping perilous small-gauge railway tracks and over waterlogged trenches and dried-up culverts (drainage here had always been a bit hit-and-miss); past haulage vehicles and earth-movers, air-compressors and power-plants, portable cabins and toilets set down as if at random in the muck, until at length we reached the immense dry-dock that was the focus of the whole glorious affray.
The dry-dock was a giant rounded gouge out of the side of a hill where it sloped down to the sea—hundreds of metres across, tens of metres deep. Its rocky cliffs were old and weathered; it looked like some work of Nature, or of Providence—even of Justice, the smiting of the Earth by a wrathful God; but in fact it was the centuries-old work of Man. (It is their civil engineering that most impresses, of the works of the ancients, but this is perhaps because so much of it endures—greater works than these have gone to the rust and the rot.) Iron sluice-gates, on an appropriately Brobdingnagian scale, held back the sea—though pumps laboured day and night to counter the inevitable seepage and spill.
Within it towered the platform, a—someday soon—floating bastion of concrete and painted steel, and within that towered the ship. The
By now I was tramping along in the middle of my work-gang, Jondo and I having been joined by Ma-chard, Druin, the Lewismen—Murdo One and Murdo Too—Angelo and Trike. We descended a zig-zag iron stairway, down and down again, and walked across the floor of the dock, splashing through puddles of rainwater and seawater (some of which were so long-established that they had their own ecosystems) to the door at the base of the platform’s southwest leg. It was like going into a lighthouse: up and up, around and around the winding stair. The air smelt of wet metal, hot oil, damp concrete. Every surface dripped, every sound echoed.
