Transit(11)

‘If you can call it thinking,’ he said, ‘lying in bed at night panicking for the thirty seconds it takes you to fall unconscious after a day at work.’

The faltering sounds of a trombone were coming through the kitchen wall, as they always did at this time of day: it was the daughter of the international family next door, who did her practice with such monotony and regularity that I had even come to learn her mistakes by heart.

‘It’s these single-skin buildings,’ the builder said, shaking his head. ‘Every sound goes right through them.’

I asked him when he had left the army, and he said it was more or less fifteen years ago. He’d seen some things in service, as you could imagine, but no matter how twisted up those situations became – even in his periods abroad – their component elements were basically familiar to him. What he’d seen in his years as a builder, on the other hand, was pretty much a foreign country.

‘Without wishing to imply anything,’ he said, turning and looking out of the window with his arms folded, ‘you get to learn a lot about people’s lives when you’re in their houses every day. And the funny thing is,’ he said, ‘that no matter how self-conscious people are at the start, no matter how much they begin by keeping up appearances, after a week or two they forget you’re there, not in the sense that you become invisible – it’s hard to be invisible,’ he said with a smile, ‘when you’re knocking out partitions with a claw hammer – but that they forget you can see and hear them.’

I said it must be interesting to be able to see people without them seeing you. It seemed to me that children were often treated in the same way, as witnesses whose presence was somehow not taken into account.

The builder gave a melancholic laugh.

‘That’s true,’ he said. ‘At least until the divorce proceedings start. Then everyone’s after them for their vote.’

In a way, he went on after a while, he felt his clients sometimes forgot that he was a person: instead he became, in a sense, an extension of their own will. Often they would start asking him to do things, like people used to ask their servants, things that were usually trivial but sometimes were so presumptuous he’d begin to doubt he’d heard right. He’d been expected to walk people’s dogs and collect their dry cleaning, to unblock their toilets and once – he smiled – to take a lady’s boots off her feet, because they were so tight she couldn’t get them off herself. He hadn’t literally been asked – if I would excuse his language – to wipe someone’s arse for them, but he didn’t doubt it was a possibility. Of course, he added, you got that in the army too. Once you put people in a position of power over other people, he said, there’s no knowing what they’ll do. But here the power balance is different, he said, because as much as your clients might hate you and resent you they also need you, for the reason that they don’t know how to do what you do.

‘My grandmother was in service,’ he said, ‘and I remember she used to say that the thing that always amazed her was how much people couldn’t do for themselves. They couldn’t light a fire or boil an egg – they couldn’t even dress themselves. Like children, she said. Though in her case,’ he added, ‘she never even knew what it was to be a child.’

He was acquainted with several builders, he went on, who had reached a position of fundamental disrespect under such circumstances: it could make you a dangerous person, the loss of fellow feeling. Someone like you, he said to me, doesn’t want to be falling into those hands. But there was an indifference, almost an ennui, that was dangerous too and that came from too much realising of other people’s visions and dreams: it was exhausting sometimes, to be held at the fine point of his clients’ obsessions, to be the instrument of their desire while remaining the guardian of possibility. He would get home after a day spent removing a set of brand-new tiles he himself had laid only a few days earlier because the client had decided they were the wrong colour, or after hours constructing a wetroom that was meant to replicate the experience of standing outdoors under a waterfall, and find that he barely had the energy to look after himself or his own affairs. He had removed entire kitchens that he himself would never have been able to afford and thrown them away; he had installed wooden floors of such costliness that the client had stood over him while he did it, telling him to be careful. And then sometimes he’d have clients who had no clue what they wanted, who wanted to be told, as if his years of labour had turned him into some kind of authority. It’s funny, he said, but when someone asks me for my opinion, or asks me how I’d do a place if it was up to me, increasingly I imagine living somewhere completely blank, somewhere where all the angles are straight and the corners squared and where there’s nothing, no colours or features, maybe not even any light. But I don’t usually tell clients that, he said. I wouldn’t want them thinking I didn’t care.

He looked at the chunky watch on his wrist and said he had to be going: he’d left his van parked outside and he knew what the traffic wardens around here were like. I accompanied him out to the street, which was quiet in the grey afternoon. We stood for a moment at the bottom of the steps and looked together at the house, which from the outside was the same as all the other houses in the terrace. They were compact three-storey grey-brick Victorian buildings, each with one set of steps rising to the front door and another going down to the basement. The door to the basement stood directly under the front door, so that the steps formed a tunnel-like space around the entrance, like the mouth to a cave. The houses had bow windows at the raised-ground level that projected slightly out from the building, so that when you stood there you had the feeling of being suspended in space above the street. A woman a few doors away was standing in hers, looking down at us.