Free Blue Collar by Danny King Page A

on risking his in stocks and shares rather than sticking it in the bank
     and living off the interest like the rest of us planned to do.
    ‘Jesus, isn’t it five o’clock yet?’ grumbled Jason.
    I didn’t do much on Friday night. I had a couple of pints in the Lamb but went home early so that I’d be fresh as a daisy
     for Charley the next day.
    I texted her when I got in but no reply came back, which meant she was either playing it cool, was too drunk to notice or
     had taken her own life because I’d not texted her for the whole of the evening.
    Or she was too busy getting banged in the bog by those two blokes I went on holiday with twelve years ago, of course, which
     was equally possible.
    When her reply did finally arrive, Saturday morning, it was heavily encoded.
    wnt2 cum ^ 2 cnbry + mt 4 drx 2nite :-)
    ‘What the fuck…?’ I muttered, trying to decipher it, before giving up and simply phoning her.
    ‘What do you think? Are you up for it?’ Charley asked, after the initial ‘oh hi, how are you?’s.
    ‘OK, let’s do it, I’ve got the microfilm. Let’s telex HQ and get out of here.’
    It turned out what Charley’s text had actually said was this:
    ‘Do you want to come north to Canonbury (^ being north London, you see) and meet for drinks? Such a thing would make me smile.’
    I played it cool and told her I might wander by if I had nothing better to do, then put down the phone and rushed into the
     shower, shaved, trimmed my nails and flossed, and spent the next seven hours throwing shirts about the bedroom and shaking
     the clock.
    Nine hours later I pulled up at a nice little pub in a Canonbury back street, got myself a pint and pulled a newspaper out
     of my back pocket. If nothing else, I’d at least learned from our earlier date.
    Charley arrived a respectable fourteen pages later and shed her grin for a couple of seconds to plant a breathless and excited
     kiss on my lips before shaking herself out of her coat.
    ‘I’m not late, am I? I couldn’t find my keys anywhere,’ she explained, pulling the arms inside out and dumping the whole lot
     over the back of her chair.
    ‘Not a bit of it. White wine?’ I offered.
    ‘Actually, can I have a beer? The same as whatever you’re having.’
    ‘Half?’ I double-checked. Charley laughed like that had been a joke so I pretended it had and got her a pint.
    ‘How have you been? Tell me about your week,’ she said, when I sat back down.
    My week had been much like the previous five hundred. Jason had called around in the van, picked me up, driven us both over
     to some half-built housing estate and together with a load of other blokes, we’d finished a little bit more of it. The only
     things that ever changed about my job were the blokes around me and the weather above me. It had rained at the start of the
     week, dried up towards the end and we’d finished half a dozen gables, a couple of footings and four murder lifts, which are
     what us brickies call the brickwork around the upper storey of a house for reasons no one’s ever been able to explain to me.
     All in all, it had been a spectacularly ordinary week, though I did put something of a gloss on it and scared her to her toes
     with a story about how Robbie had overloaded the boards again and how the scaffolding had plunged right beneath my feet, though
     in truth it had only plunged by about two inches. And it had happened to Big John, not me.
    Still, Charley looked suitably blown away at my action-packed week full of danger and dare-doing and made me promise to be
     careful in future. I half thought about telling her that danger went with the territory, darling, then realised that if I
     did, everyone in the pub would be quite within their rights to throw their drinks over me, so I simply assured her that, the
     odd overloaded scaffolding board aside, most sites were pretty safe places these days.
    ‘And how about you? How’s the campaign going?’ I asked in return.
    Some progress