Touch (9 page)

 
I turn to go and a lobster waves its claws, troubling sediment and sand in the tank where it waits to die, wafting up tiny pebbles that sway and slowly sink again.

I've only told you half a secret, because the rest is unsayable, because no one else can really understand and perhaps they don't even want to listen. They pursue their own lives in the streets, in factories and shops and offices. In cars and in suburban houses where the curtains are drawn at night and televisions blare, blinking blue light at the walls of their living rooms. They go on, day after day, night after night. Immersed in sitcoms, reality television, in stultified marriages, in children who call out for attention from upstairs rooms. Look how the hall lights come on. Look how they leave half-hearted conversations, or the news half-watched, to go upstairs with soothing words and hands. No. They need never know what we know: the fishmonger and me and other water-breathing dreamers.

Dave squints along the beam, sets it straight on the saw plate, then gives it to the white band of steel, pushing from the hips. I wait on the other side to take it. The blade shears through steadily. Its racket rises then falls like a motorcycle circuiting a track. Scraps of blues songs rehearse themselves in my head, chasing round and round beneath the tumult of the mill. This is my third day: I know what to do. Catching the beam as it parts from itself, I hold it until Dave moves forward to take the other end. Holding the two halves together as if it was still whole we carry them to the crosscut where Chris sweats to keep pace, sawing these lengths into arm-long stumps and stacking them.

It's 1978 and I've just graduated from university, the first of my family to get a degree. I'm working in a sawmill in Nottingham, renting a flat in Radcliffe. I'm just another hired hand from the labour agency. Another mug. For three years I've been longing to get out into the world, to touch down, to get real, to escape from libraries and critical theory and the arid discourse around books. I'm a manual labourer, a throwback to my class. I'm living with a girl whose hair smells of cologne and apricots, a girl with hazel-brown eyes and freckled shoulders. We fetched up here for no good reason. Elaine works in a bookshop in town and has a degree in philosophy. Sometimes I wonder if that's why we argue so much. I wonder if she's thinking about me now as the flaking timber tumbles onto the pile beside Chris.

We return to the machine. Beside it stands a chest-high stack of railway sleepers from the country's torn-up tracks. We're making them into pit props now, steadily sawing up one part of the last century to support another. Dave's signalling to me. Words are useless in the din of the two saws. He is already part-deaf, a gesticulating, one-man mime show, nose flattened to one side, cigarette dangling from his grin, jerking in green overalls like a puppet on wires. Together we lift another beam onto the table of the band saw, picking up a hammer and chisel each to dislodge the stones that are jammed into its cracks and bolt holes. Dave grins with crooked teeth. He smacks a gloved fist into his palm, rolling his eyes in horror to show me what they would do to the blade. We lug the beam over to inspect its other side. All is clear.

Through the open doorway of the mill we can see the yard stacked with railway sleepers that still have iron fixings for the rails. Simon and Dan are at work in the pale sunshine, levering off the ironwork and stacking the stripped sleepers. They're both booted, broad shouldered and slim hipped. Simon has a long ponytail and a gold earring. Dan's head is close-shaven with glittering stubble and he walks with a pronounced limp. At the end of every day they climb onto an old Norton Commando and leave in a haze of blue fumes blasted from the backfiring exhaust pipe. Neither of them talks at break times. They glance through the
Sun
or the
Mirror
, impatient, as if they're waiting for something. Killing time on the killing floor. There's something ritualistic in the stark rhythm of their work. All day I watch them silhouetted against the light. They're both graduates of the local gaol, Chris tells me in a whisper.

 
Dave drags the sleeper across the rollers and lines it up in front of the blade's hiss, its constant flame of steel. He pushes the timber into its blur with a leering grin. In a rogue's gallery he would be the pickpocket, slight and quick, yet heaving the beams into position with amazing strength.

The blade bites in a flurry of orange sparks. It's a good beam and the old, sweet pine divides easily. I press down on to the rollers on my side to ease its passage. We hurry it over to Chris like the last one. He's hanging under his saw with a spanner, changing its circular, shark-finned blade. The next beam feels heavy and waterlogged. There's a fungal stench of decay. It sticks coming through the blade and Dave signals to me to send it back to him. I return the part-rotten halves and we saw each one into four thinner lengths.

I carry these over to the crumbled stack beside Chris. They drag my arms down with their damp, dead weight. I hurry back for the next four, catching them just as they arrive, shedding fragments onto the floor. One of the lengths breaks as I carry it, unbalancing me.
Fuck, fuck!
I'm staggering, kicking the broken halves from underfoot, flinging them onto the heap of rubbish that is piling against the far wall of the workshop. Somewhere down in the city Elaine is pushing her hair from her face, attending to a customer in the shop, keying an order into the till, counting the minutes until her lunch break. She's there in the world of books that I've tried to leave behind. Last night when we made love she tugged at the short hairs on my neck. I can still feel the cool stealth of her fingers.

 
The minute hand jerks forward on the clock that hangs above the restroom. Dave turns on his heel, touching my elbow to bring me back to the saw. Later in the afternoon we'll begin to saw up this pile of thinner lengths on the crosscut, stacking them on pallets in bundles of four. We work together at this: I lift the wood onto the machine, four lengths at a time, sliding them back up to the blade each time they are cut. Dave operates the saw, handing the bundles to Chris who ties them on a wire binder and stacks them. Dave and Chris work furiously at this since they earn a bonus on each pallet filled. My wage is fixed but I must sweat to keep up with them. That job comes later in the day, in the last hour before we switch off the saws and the mill falls into sleep and we return to our lives.

I get back to the machine, panting, sweat basting my hands. We heave the next sleeper onto the saw. All day, beam after beam, dividing them up relentlessly. As if one might contain a secret. As if we're searching for the living heart of a tree, or a century. We cut through a fragment of stone we've over-looked. Then there's a snick and sparks snap from the blade. It's enough. Dave's face is the tragic mask of a pantomime clown. He holds out his hands, palms upwards and shrugs. His cigarette flicks up sharply, once.

We stop the machine; it slows in a diminishing howl. I tug on a lever on the side that cranks down the tension on the blade. Dave removes the planks covering the sawpit then opens the green metal casing. We ease the blade off the two wheels it rides on: one above our heads, the other below our feet. It's a springy, razor-toothed band of tempered steel, four inches wide and eight feet high. We carry it to the workshop next door and fit it to the automatic grindstone. The foreman shakes his head, tips his cap, and throws a switch. The blade travels, sparking in little jerks as the file puts a new edge on each tooth.

The new blade has a welding scar where it has been repaired. We lift it from two pegs on the wall and fit it to the saw. Now that our machine is silent we can hear the shriek of the crosscut behind us. There's a hiss from the compressed air of the foot switch. Then the blade comes snarling through the slit in the platform, a howling piranha-wheel. It screams into the wood above it, high pitched then diminishing as it drops away. Above the blade is a hoop of girder for a guard. Each night before sleep, I see myself stretched out on the platform, trapped under the hoop as the blade rips up towards my spine. Tonight, I'll sleep with my fingers tangled in Elaine's, listening to traffic die in the streets, to the little catch of breath in her throat. Tomorrow, I'll rise early to work at the portable Olivetti and the stack of poems I've written as she sleeps, her hair massed against the pillow, the dawn stoking itself up beyond factory chimneys and tower blocks. The typewriter was a present from my father, just before I left for university. I'd never seen him cry before.

We fix the blade on to our machine, tension it, and begin again, working more quickly to make up lost time. The foreman drives in with more sleepers stacked on the tines of his forklift. Later the manager appears in his dark suit. He watches us for a few minutes, counting the beams in our stack, flicking his fingers through receding hair, calculating how long it takes us to saw each beam. Dave and Chris quicken their pace. The manager nods to the foreman and leaves, but we don't slacken off. Dave jerks his head, mouths
Bastard!
at me and grins. Jim arrives with more sleepers and drops them beside our heap. Chris and Dave confer over a cigarette, gesturing at the work, at time passing. I think of the blade in the workshop, the snick of the file, each tiny cascade of fire, each tooth ground to a fine edge.

By lunchtime I'm sweat soaked and staggering to keep up. We stop the saws dead on twelve and I take my sandwiches out of the mill, walking through a wilderness of stacked railway sleepers to the canal. I'm deafened by the noise of the saws and everything seems preternaturally silent, even traffic passing on the road. It's a mild day in autumn and I sit by the water to eat my lunch. Yellow poplar leaves are falling all around me. Early this morning the canal had been a ribbon of steam, its water misted with cold. Now it's a calm reflector; murky and placid it heads for the city.

I throw bread pellets for the fish. They sink through the water undisturbed. A barge passes slowly, painted bright red and yellow, making a swell slap up against the canal banks. A man with a huge belly, a white moustache and a chequered cap raises one hand ceremoniously, the other wrapped around the tiller. Below decks, a woman's face passes the steamed-up porthole. The engine putters out black diesel smoke and the barge toils away from me until it's hidden by a slow bend. Today is Wednesday. Half-day in town. Elaine will have finished work now, heading home with carrier bags of food or books. In return, she'll work on Saturday when I'm crashed out in bed or mooching around the flat listening to Junior Parker or Buddy Guy.

The surface of the water has settled back into a dusty stillness. A moorhen comes bobbing out from the reeds. Half an hour has gone. I get up from the iron bench that has numbed my arse and legs and stroll back through mellow sunshine. The mill is strangely still. Dan and Simon pass me, nodding grimly, pulling on their leather gloves. Dave and Chris step through the doorway to start the machines.

Our overalls are black with dust and tar. Our faces are smeared from wiping sweat with filthy gloves. I have no hat and my hair is full of the scent of tar and sweet pine dust and dirt. I sweep up the sawdust and fragments of wood that have fallen around the machine. Dave presses the red button, cranks it into life.

 
The long afternoon has begun. That lost afternoon in the first summer of my life with Elaine. It starts badly with a stack of rotten beams that look like the decayed hulls of long-boats. Heaped carcasses with their bellies caved in. Some are covered with white fungus that gives off a sickly stench of corruption. When Dave finds one of these he grins, pretends to fart, then looks round in surprise for a culprit. In his overalls and peaked cap he's lively as an acrobat.

Rotten fragments of wood fall around the machine. I can't believe that these props are meant to hold up the roof of a mine. Only one in four of them is truly sound. I imagine the fury of the colliers as they discard them in the close darkness underground. I watch Dave closely, trying to read his mood. His broken-nosed face is inscrutable behind the fixed grin: a puppet mask, a mechanical toy. Divorced and with a gambling addiction, he could be the hero of any blues song. Away from the machine, half deaf and stammering, he's an easy target for the horseplay of the other men. But the machine jerks him into life, articulates him, transforms him into the nodding, winking demon of the saw. He carries out its will, his body eloquent through its wall of noise. He's a good workman, quick and accurate with love of the machine, guiding the timber through its blade with the steady pressure of his hips.

We work on, making the same moves. Making the same moves, beam after beam. The Lord's prayer comes back to me from childhood assemblies in school:
for ever and ever,
amen
. Light falling through the slatted blinds of the school hall onto children's heads, finding copper threads in their hair.
Thy will be done
. The rotten wood is hard going; it slows us down, makes us falter and sweat. Most of it has to be cut into narrower lengths and stacked for later. The afternoon has hardly started when the blade shrieks through a piece of bolt embedded in the wood. We have to change it again, reclaiming the sharpened blade from the workshop, fitting it to the saw.

Dave is working too fast, hurrying to finish this last stack and begin on the crosscut. He lights a cigarette, blows a perfect smoke circle, shrugs, then re-starts the saw.

We lift another sleeper onto the platform, chipping stone ballast from its coating of tar. Sweat stings my eyes. We heave it over; inspect its other side. My arms ache at the elbows as if the joints are pulling apart. My wrists are raw from carrying armfuls of wet timber. Dave nods: thumbs up, all is well. Buddy Guy is crooning in my head.
Five long years
and one lonely night and she had the nerve to throw me out
. Dave leans down on his end of the beam and drags it towards himself, resting one end on the roller set to the saw plate's height. He spins a wheel to adjust the width of cut, locks it, flicks fragments of rotten wood from the slit where the blade whistles. A guitar solo peels off into the air, brittle as shattered glass. All is ready.

Dave takes the beam and feeds it to steel, cigarette at an angle, his eye set to the line. Slowly he moves it through, thighs pressed, leaning in still concentration. The beam surges towards me, then sticks on the blade. Dave lifts it, the way you'd lift a lover by the hips. It frees for a second, jerks towards me then sticks again. Dave shoves it forward. This time the beam bucks up the blade and twists it. There's a terrific bang, then a high, high screeching that's uprooting my teeth from the bone of their sockets. The white band of the blade leaps free of the machine and catapults away from me, a twanging blur of light. The saw roars, ungoverned, shaking itself apart, enveloping me in its din. Chris runs up behind me and even through that pandemonium of noise I hear his quiet exclamation.