The Secret Journal

Elsie marks the verandah, sinks her teeth in and pulls, juddering and jerking on her tracks as the concrete fights to escape.

Light struggles through the dust. Elsie has broken through. A great, dark shadow trawls the depths and withdraws. Bricks crumble. Elsie thrusts again, and half the side wall folds in to shatter on the floor.

Meanwhile, on Friday … Elsie is ripping down one side of the flats, grinding and banging and scraping and thumping. A man stands hosing the immediate destruction, but clouds of dust rise from the garage. Water drips from an outlet above the door.

Saturday morning. Elsie stands alone, head turned upside down, catching raindrops in her mouth. The portable toilet, like Piglet, is entirely surrounded by water.

Sometimes Foreman tells the dinosaur to do stuff, like drag its teeth across the balcony, or turn that snarl upside down and hold that pose. It leaves the dinosaur gaping.

Day’s end. The nut brown man props an orange hard hat on top of a pole. He leans deep over a barrier, moving his head back and forth as a spray of water catches the light. Straightening, he gestures at the scaffold and his beard points sternly, just as it does on that 50 drachma coin. We’ll call him Homer.

A portable toilet descends into the car park on webbing straps. Boy Engineer hurries to supervise, placing one hand on the toilet’s side just as it settles in the concrete depression where rain water gathers. Satisfied, he strides out into the lane and looks at the truck.

Girl Engineer lacks a face. Sun-shading extends for miles from the front of her hard hat, and acres more of it drape her neck. The rest is high-viz bulk and workboots, but you know it’s Girl Engineer because of her voice, and from the long black stains down her jacket that turn out to be hair.

Boy engineer is on site. He’s a young man with a beard and hard hat, and the builder’s name on the back of his vest. He buzzes back and forth between the buildings with Girl Engineer in tow. Girl Engineer carries a black plastic box.

Two men on the balcony resemble praying mantises, in their hard hats and pointy face masks with a dot in the middle. But praying mantises wouldn’t pick things up and feed them to a dinosaur.

Working with the mantoids is a hatless, bald-headed old man. Though he lacks a mask, he employs a broom with diligence and quiet dignity.

Day’s end. The nut brown man props an orange hard hat on top of a pole. He leans deep over a barrier, moving his head back and forth as a spray of water catches the light. Straightening, he gestures at the scaffold and his beard points sternly, just as it does on that 50 drachma coin. We’ll call him Homer.

Aimless lifts a tangle of PVC and wire, offering an end to a second hard hat who looks, touches, hesitates. Hatless the Foreman arrives to supervise. He gestures. He moves his mouth. He looks, hovers, follows, finds broken things for the hard hats to pick up off the ground. It’s an important job.

It’s quiet on site. Nothing is happening. No machines are working. No trucks are loading. Elsie and the dinosaur are sound asleep, heads down. A hard hat stands alone, bending a piece of metal back and forth until it breaks. He tosses it, lifts both hands to his hips and stands there.

Later, inspired, he picks up a piece wood and flicks it away.

A man in a hard hat sits with Elsie. He scratches his ear. He drops his hand and slumps. He looks around. He leans forward and twists his neck, peering up beneath the windscreen’s edge. He sits back again. He waits.

The dinosaur squeezes its prey against the bricks, drops it and pounces again, shaking it in its jaws, crushing it all over again, over and over. Finally it presses the remains against the bottom of the wall and straightens, lifting its head and reaching deep inside the ruins to emerge with a new mouthful of screeching metal sheets.

A man with short grey hair and a white beard is breaking walls at the top of the flats. He wears shorts and work boots with yellow socks, an orange vest open at the front and nothing on his head. His skin is brown from the sun. The scaffolding makes it hard to reach the wall so he clambers and twists and contorts, reaches and stretches, loosening the bricks with a short-handled sledge and tossing them down in ones and twos.

Five men in high-viz and hard hats crowd around the back of a work lorry, and another stands in the back of the vehicle, which is draped in black plastic that hangs down over the sides and back and reaches the ground. He’s taping the seams, making it airtight, and not sparing the tape. Why do they need an air-tight seal on this load in particular? They’ve closed the gate so no one can see.

“I want to get this finished by …” The site foreman scrambles bare-headed up the slope of fallen bricks, through the crumbling wall to the summit at last, where he turns and heads towards Elsie and the dinosaur. He nearly falls at one point, misjudging his step on the rubble and spreading his arms for balance.

The car park swarms with yellow-shirted scaffolders, ants that have found a vast blue corpse and are moving it piece by piece. Above them, picks and hammers smash the top levels of the flats, and workers dismantle the roof with a crash and tumble of sheet metal. The scaffolders wear no head protection; but then, neither does the site foreman.

A man stands by the stack of bright blue scaffolding poles, lifting one and setting an end on the ground near his feet. Holding it in place, he reaches for a second pole and adds it to the first. He seems to want to continue all day. There’s a ripple beside him as blue poles cascade down but he’s unperturbed, and lines up another pole. When he has five, he tips them onto his shoulder and walks out of sight.