Free (2003) Overtaken by Alexei Sayle

found
everything I’d been expecting art school to be. In a pasteurised, safe world I
found the sites to be the last refuge of the true individualist: the wild
characters I met on the building made my fellow art students seem as
distinctive from each other as sausages. I hadn’t known, behind those hoardings,
how fucking clever and funny and kind everybody was. Everywhere I worked I
encountered inarticulate men who could hardly write but whose thoughts were in
such a profound form of 3D that they could solve the most complex problems
without resorting to any kind of drawing or plan.
    Then
there is the work itself: think about it, what we builders do is nothing less
than we reshape your world. Where you are now, where you are right now this
minute, reading this, stop. Look around you — a builder made it. Wonderful men
conspired to put it together: labourers you dismiss as thickos built it; guys
you step over in the street now they’re old and fucked up solved all the
problems you didn’t know were there; a developer you consider as only one step
up from a maggot conceived of it, fought to get permission for it, destroyed
rare archaeological artefacts, covered up dangerous chemical spoil to get it
constructed on time. Now doesn’t that seem as profound as making cakky marks on
squares of canvas? And what’s more the money is fucking fantastic. At first I
was a general labourer. Those outside the building think the labourer is the
lowest rank on the sites but it’s much more complex than that; the other
trades, sparks, chippies, plumbers, come and go when their task is completed
but the labourer is there right throughout the job from beginning to end so if
he wants to, the labourer, he starts to take responsibility for things when the
foreman isn’t around, deliveries, minor problems, that sort of thing. Then if he’s
clever he starts to see the opportunities: with my wages I bought a derelict
house in the South End of Liverpool, did it up and sold it, made a tiny profit.
The next one I split into flats using guys I’d met on other jobs to do the
work. The return I made on that place gave me a profile with the .bank, which
meant they were happy to lend me some money. That money meant that the
buildings I bought could be bigger, the risks greater, the profit larger.
    Even
before I’d gone to London I had
learned to drive in my dad’s old 1973 Vanden Plas Princess 1300 and could soon
afford my own car, a black Volkswagen Golf GTi I bought at a bankruptcy
auction.
    Colin
said to me, ‘Kelvin mate, you should think yourself lucky you didn’t get a
higher education. I mean studying for an English degree has put me off fucking
books for life, but you, because you’re self-taught you love reading, man, you
devour it all voraciously — classical literature, detective fiction,
biographies, comic books, modern feminist writing — you don’t shove stuff in
artificial boxes, you don’t worry whether its ‘good’ or not, you’re just wide
open to new ideas, man.’ Patronising bastard.
    One
weekend in what I guess must have been towards the end of her third year, on a
Saturday morning when I was supposed to be doing some repairs for an orphanage
near Manchester , I instead
stayed on the motorway and drove my black car to Bristol , having got Siggi’s address from Paula, with whom she still
fitfully corresponded.
    When I
rang at the door of the grey terraced house which Siggi shared with two other
girls from the drama school, it was answered by a pretty little redhead, still
in her dressing-gown though it was the afternoon. She seemed recently to have
been crying.
    ‘Hi,’ I
said. ‘I was wondering if Siggi was in.’
    ‘She’s
at a tap class,’ snuffled the girl. ‘She’ll be back in half an hour, wanna come
in and wait?’
    ‘Sure,
I guess.’
    The
girl showed me into the living room, which I noticed with a silent internal
shudder was the usual student landfill site; in this case it was made even more
untidy