Working Men

I once inadvertently shouted at a workman. Technically, I wasn’t shouting directly at him, I was just raising my voice in his vicinity for reasons of my own, but even though it came about through a combination of misunderstanding and bad timing, with no malicious intent on either side, the guilt I felt at the time was so profound that it plagues me still.

Because it was so unlike me. I don’t know whether it’s my natural milquetoast nature, my ignorance, or the weird social disability from which I’ve suffered to a greater or lesser extent all my life, but I’ve never managed to strike the right note when dealing with anyone with deep arcane or technical knowledge far beyond my ken. Whether it’s a plumber or a carpet layer or a refuse collector or a window cleaner or a gardener or a radiator installer or even young Jacko who to this day keeps dropping notes through my letterbox offering to come round and ream out my guttering, I never know how to play it. I’ve developed this ridiculous, instinctive kind of ‘hail-fellow-well-met’ approach that doesn’t fool anybody, least of all me. I think what lies at the root of it is this weird conviction I’ve got that unless I’m ultra-nice to them they might beat me up, added to the very real fear that, whatever emergency has made me have to contact them in the first place, I’m now completely at their mercy, and if I don’t bend over backwards to accommodate them, all they have to do is refuse to help and I’d be fucked.

It’s not even as if this default position is based on any kind of bad experience from my youth. No electrician or roofer or decorator we ever had in the house when I was growing up was ever anything other than professional and helpful at worst, or generous and sweet-natured and happy to help at best. And fast? I know how long it can take to wallpaper a room. I have spent weeks wallpapering rooms. Our neighbour from over the road, a professional painter and decorator, once did out our whole living room one evening after work. He didn’t have to. And I was still hovering at his elbow every ten minutes saying things like, “Would you like a cup of tea? You sure that little pouffe isn’t in the way? I’m just making myself a coffee, can I get you anything? Big old pair of scissors you’ve got there, but then I suppose they come in handy don’t they, ha ha ha?” Pathetic.

The only unpleasant moment I can remember was that time Sam or Bill or Albert – anyway, the other local handyman my parents frequently got in to deal with anything domestic – was replacing a downstairs sink in the utility room. He told me on no account was I to turn a tap on anywhere else in the house while the piping was disconnected. It would only be half an hour, he said, but this was very important. Well, I have a very regular constitution and it so happened I needed to use the lav halfway through the very half hour of which Sam or Bill or Albert was speaking. And there is such a thing as muscle memory. One does one’s business, hoicks one’s kecks up, flushes, then one instinctively washes one’s hands doesn’t one? On this occasion, one suddenly heard a wail of anguish from two storeys down: “TURN THAT RUDDY TAP ORFF!” (‘Ruddy’ was the word of choice in those days. It was a kinder generation, and oaths were invariably more minced.) I sheepishly crept downstairs to discover a drenched old man in paint-splattered overalls sitting half in and half out of a sink unit, his sere old head in his hands, drenched to the skin. “I’m so sorry,” I said, faintly but sincerely, “I forgot. Would you like a cup of tea?” “DON’T YOU BE TURNIN’ THAT RUDDY TAP ON AGAIN!”

Outside the house, of course, the one mysterious professional most of us are likely to encounter on any kind of regular basis is the mechanic at the local garage. I know women often feel at a disadvantage here because I suppose the ambience and the culture is so naturally geared towards sexism and patronage, even in this day and age, but in this one area of life I can certainly empathise with them. Certainly the local garage under the railway arch that me and the lads used to pass on our way home from school every day was an exotic cave aglow with forbidden delights – if you slowed down just enough at the right moment and glanced quickly left through the open doorway, you could catch a glimpse of an entire wall awash with glossy flesh-coloured pictures torn from girlie magazines and garish calendars bursting with topless models and leggy hoydens. If it was enough to make our heartbeats quicken, God knows how the vicar’s wife would have taken it. Though then again, maybe getting the car serviced was one of those annual chores the vicar might not have resented too much, given the tantalising visual entertainment there was to be had while he waited…

But even if those Penthouse walls are now largely a thing of the past, the relationship between clueless layman (me) and the apparently know-it-all mechanic remains heavily loaded in his favour. These days, in the interests of transparency or whatever, they’ve got into the habit of sending you a video of your car while the technician wanders about beneath the wheels, rattling off figures which they assure you have something to do with the braking system, and prodding gauges into your tyres telling you how far within the legal limit the treads are. Mate, you could be reciting the recipe for blanquette de veau crémeuse au citron, it would make no more sense to me. But you sound like an honest man – just tell me the damn thing is still roadworthy enough to get through its MOT and I’ll not only believe you, I’ll even pay you the extortionate fee and then we can all get on with our compartmentalised little lives in peace for another eleven and a half months until the next inevitable appointment.

The trouble is, your average car mechanic is on his own territory, isn’t he, he has home advantage, he’s with all his mates, and it’s them against you, the sole customer standing there in his sheepskin carcoat and his string-back driving gloves not understanding the first thing you’re telling him about torque differentials up the big end and the coefficient of linear expansion as it relates to the flywheel on the cornucopia at speeds over thirteen knots. Of course he’s going to feel superior, especially if you make the mistake of showing fear or weakness. Which are precisely the emotions I tend to show no matter how much I try to rationalise the situation otherwise. For God’s sake, they are serving you, it’s their job to give you what you, the paying customer, want. If it wasn’t for you, they wouldn’t be able to spend four weeks in Tenerife every other month. But even then, however instinctively, intellectually and practically I know all this, I still sound like an idiot in the initial phone call, a mouse in thrall to an anaconda:

“Hello there, ha ha ha, the old jalopy is coming up for its MOT, I was wondering if you might be – Thank you, yes, it’s a Ford. Blue. – Oh sorry, yes, do you think, I was hoping you might be able to fit me in sometime later this week perhaps, Wednesday morning would be absolutely – Two weeks next Thursday? That’ll be perfect, thank you. Morning would suit me best actually, if you could – Afternoon after four? No problem. You sound really busy, I’ve obviously come to the right place, ha ha ha. And sorry, would you be able to do it while I wait or – Yes, I can certainly get it there by nine o’clock in the morning, and I’ll be able to pick it up by close of – Following morning any time after ten thirty will be fine. No, brilliant. Thank you. See you then. Bye. Bye now. Thanking you. Yes, byeee.”

Which is ridiculous, but at least it’s a bit more polite than what I yelled at this other poor sod that time I inadvertently bawled him out. It must have been in the early eighties. I was working alone in our house in the downstairs room looking out onto the garden. But the room was set back in a kind of lee, with the bulk of the utility room obscuring the view across at least half of the tiny lawn and the low back wall. Our cat, good as gold, had been out early to empty her honest feline bowels, and had jumped up, as usual, onto the window sill to wait patiently for me to take notice of her. The procedure was that once I’d reached a suitable point in my labours I would briefly break off to nip round to the back door, open up to let her back in, then get back to work. (She didn’t like to come in the window; being a cat, she liked me to go round and let her in – you know, expend a bit of energy on her behalf. And being a mere human, that’s exactly what I did.)

Anyway, this morning, the cat hopped up, gave her single plaintive mew to announce her presence, and I eventually came to the end of a sentence. But I must have broken off too soon, or I was still pursuing some thought I didn’t want to lose, anyway, I hurried down the corridor, crossed the utility room, threw open the back door and instead of doing my usual combination of “Here, puss, come on then, there you go, sweetheart,” I simply yelled, rather sharply, “Oi!” At which point this working man, who had been sitting on the low wall at the bottom of our garden taking a breather from erecting the scaffolding at the back of the house over the way, gave a sudden jump and in the same movement, started to turn round.

I never saw him complete the manoeuvre because, equally responsive to the sudden shock and alarum, I immediately slammed the door shut, locked it, hastened quickly and soundlessly up the stairs, and spent the rest of the day cowering in the living room with the curtains shut and the TV on mute.

The speed of my reaction had also, of course, locked out the cat who, not expecting any alteration to her daily routine, had been making her nonchalant way round the back of the outside coal shed to meet me. In fact, I think I even got a flash of her baffled face as she came into view a split second before the door banged shut. And I’d locked it in case the scaffolder took it into his head to come after me, striding angrily up the garden path to hammer on the glass and demand what the bloody hell I thought I was playing at.

Would he have done anything like this? I suppose from his point of view my action must have seemed rude and uncalled-for in the extreme. Perhaps, he thought, I, the aggrieved householder, had taken umbrage at him using our convenient wall to rest his worthy buttocks and intended to give him a piece of my mind. Mine was not, after all, the property on which he had been engaged to work. As far as he understood the situation, I had obviously witnessed his anal trespass, as it were, instantly adjudged it to be inappropriate, and elected to give him a single, pointed, vocal expression of my annoyance, immediately retreating so I could claim victory before battle could even be joined.

Then again, perhaps, he might have reasoned that I had come out all guns blazing ready to escalate things with all the fervour of righteous indignation and moral right on my side, and launched my opening salvo, only to realise too late that I had obviously bitten off more than I could chew. With the enemy now plainly in sight, rather than half glimpsed through a dingy net curtain, I had quickly calculated our relative heights, weights, innate toughness and likely experience, and on the balance of probabilities had decided I was the one most likely to come off worse in any show of fisticuffs. Upon which I had slammed the door shut as quicky as I had opened it, my single, exasperated vocalisation simultaneously marking the first and final shot in our one-second war.

If I had it to do again I’d like to think that now, in the tranquillity and confidence of advanced years, upon realising my faux pas, instead of retreating, I would instantly go the other way and physically approach the flagging scaffolder, uttering heartfelt apologies the while, explaining about cats and routines and momentary inattention and expressing honest admiration at his expertise and effort: “Look, I’m terribly sorry, old man. I was talking to the cat. Good lord, look at your magnificent erection over there, that must have taken it out of you, ha ha ha. Look, I’m just about to put the kettle on, would you and your mates care for a cuppa at all? Sit ye down, sit ye down, I’ll only be a minute…” And so on ad infinitum.

Of course, the other thing about being so obsequious is that it always makes you sound so fucking gay. But that would be another story.