The Secret Journal

We had thunder last night and the sound is no different this morning, as the demolishers grind their way further into the building.

The dinosaur is jack-hammering somewhere inside the youth hostel. It begins with a sound like rolling thunder and continues in short bursts of destruction. From time to time, the room trembles around me.

Two yellow-vests drift down through the silent worksite. One slips through the gate with a twist but the second must widen the gap. He’s a mountain. With a gentle touch, he slides the gate back in place.

Monday.

Boy Engineer and Long-Trousers seem pleased to be doing something practical. They’ve carried the metal frames that arrived this morning into the garage and have used them to build something. They back up to contemplate their work, then Boy Engineer moves in again and pounds with a hammer. He moves in a circle, following something that turns as he beats it, while Long-Trousers and a trusted orange-vest observe.

Finally, with a virtual back pat, all three swagger jauntily round a wall of bricks and vanish into the ruins.

Foreman supervises the opening of the gate and turns to make some of his favourite gestures across the forecourt, arm straight and palm open.

Boy Engineer walks over and gestures in the same direction. Foreman gestures again. Boy Engineer responds.

The gate-opener joins in and Homer, walking past on the footpath, turns in at the last moment and lifts his arm to point. For a moment, no one has the upper hand; then Boy Engineer performs a snappy double chopping movement with his right arm, and nobody has a answer for that. Not even Foreman.

So Boy Engineer wins.

A new construction rises in the garage doorway, standing three frames high on little feet. Long-Trousers emerges from the far depths of the garage with a small sledge-hammer in his hand. He’s been banging. I’ve heard him. He mounts the rubble slope and does not appear on the other side. More banging follows.

Boy Engineer stands framed in the double glass doors of the middle level, banging fasteners into place on another stretch of not-quite-scaffolding. He creates these pieces in concert with Long-Trousers, the other engineer.

Their structure is like a virus, spreading everywhere inside the flats.

The rebar spotter ducks just in time, and rods of rusty metal swing through the space where his shoulders would have been.

The rebar spotter freezes, one foot in the air and the other wobbling on a chunk of concrete, as Elsie’s jaws plough through the step he was about to take.

Elsie trawls the broken bricks and rubble, turning them again and again as the pile grows. Inches from her jaws, teetering on shifting ground, a young man pounces on spikes of rebar and tosses them down into the car park.

A second baked beans tin has appeared in the carpark, and both are becoming submerged in the puddle surrounding the portable toilet. Also new, the shell of a hard-boiled egg lies sprawled on its back.

A woman walks up the hill beyond the demolition, pushing a trolley and nibbling an ice cream. On site, an engineer trots into view but turns, wipes his mouth and skips back out of sight. Nothing moves after that. Everything lies baking in the heat.

Two pigeons walk together down the lane, but one ducks under the temporary fencing and bobbles across the car park. It pecks once at something on the ground, arrives at the broken wall and turns back. At the edge of the puddle it pauses, considering; then it plunges through, ducks beneath the fence again and hurries after its companion.

Foreman is playing with a vast tangle of rusted metal rebar. He’s using Elsie, lifting the knot in her jaws and dropping it, then smashing her face down on top of it.

A big man in funky high-viz leans right down, lifting double-handfuls of water to his mouth. His base colour is orange, but his massive shoulders and sleeves feature bold black stripes that give him a kind of fluororescent zebra look. As he stands and walks out the gate with hulking arms, he displays a tiny, gratuitous patch of horizontal black stripes at his waist.

The vertical bricks that trim the top of the balcony wall have shifted. Light appears between them.

Two men walk past Elsie, directly beneath jagged sheets of metal hanging from the dinosaur’s mouth. One man has a hard hat, the other not. No one calls out, nobody raises the alarm, and neither man looks up.

A man climbs into the back of a dump truck, bends and raises a long, wrapped bundle against the side. He steadies it, then ducks again and lifts, tipping the bundle up until it rests on the edge. With a final push and a guiding hand it slips down over the side and disappears. He climbs out after it.

A drink bottle is trapped in a pile of temporary fencing, angled like a diver and frozen in the moment it breaks the surface.

Elsie remains upside-down, staring gobsmacked at the sky. A raven appears out of thin air and lands on Elsie’s twisted neck, turning this way, turning that, then parachutes onto a take-away food container.

I can see there are different cliques on this building site. Two blokes just stormed across in yellow jackets and really shiny black hard hats. One of them came out again with a kettle and hurried onto the footpath.

Two scaffolders are repacking loose blue poles that had been distributed against walls and fence. They are piling them onto two of the square bases that carry them from site to site. One man is removing specific fittings from the messy pile which no longer sports a yoghurt container. He carries the fittings and drops them on the concrete between the scaffold piles. Then he lifts them one by one and lines them carefully on the carrier. Two thirds of their length is inside and the rest hangs out the end. This leaves room for a duplicate line on the other side.

7.57am: First clatter from the site, and someone hammers a nail.

The bottom halves of two people stand inside the garage on top of the rubble. One bottom half is light blue jeans and is certain to be an engineer. Engineers wear jeans. The two halves emerge at last and the blue jeans are topped by an open yellow vest bearing the builder’s name on the back (nailed it!), and a head with a very white, new-looking hard hat. But it’s not Boy Engineer. This one is older and doesn’t have a beard.

The second bottom half is Foreman.

With a single bite, Elsie lifts the entire roof free and turns, looking for somewhere to drop it.