Free Last Days of the Bus Club by Chris Stewart Page B

in the mess hut there was a silence as everybody thought over the awful thing that had happened.
    ‘Poor Scottie,’ somebody said. ‘Fuckin’ awful thing to ’appen to a bloke.’
    Some heads were nodded, then a brief silence, until Frank said, echoing everybody’s unspoken view, ‘Yeah, but ’e didn’t oughter of screamed.’
    ‘Nah,’ everyone agreed.
    ‘That’s right,’ concurred Terry. ‘It wasn’t manly.’
    I wondered if my own nascent manhood would stand the test of a ten-ton tree trunk rolling towards me, without uttering a sound. I knew now that you were not supposed to scream, but it wouldn’t be easy.
    The pouring went on all day long; there were hundreds of tons of concrete to fill each lift. For Dave and me it was the most mind-numbing repetitive work hour after hour, with barely a break, but you didn’t need to think much, so we amused ourselves by telling stories and jokes and horsing about. The pain in our hands and the pull on our muscles were fearful, but if you’re young and well fed your body puts on muscle very quickly and after a couple of weeks I was hard and tight as a drott.
    We poured every third day. On the other days Dave and I had it a little easier, down in the hole bottoming up with the vile Jim Reilly, or helping out with the shuttering and steel-tying. The day after the concrete was poured, we would break out the shuttering, the plywood mould that gave the poured concrete the desired form, according to the plans for the bridge. Then we would spend a day and a halfperched precariously above the railway lines, constructing the steel skeleton that would form the next lift of the pier of the bridge. This was a complex web of steel reinforcing rods that we would tie together, armed with pliers, tape measure and a roll of tying wire. And then finally we oiled the shuttering boards with fish oil, so that they could be broken out easily for the next lift, and lashed, nailed and bolted them into place, ready to hold the hundred tons or so of sloppy concrete from the next pour.
    I cannot remember ever feeling so vital and alive. I was a teenager, of course, and that had a lot to do with it, but there was something about the fiercely hard physical work out in the open air. It felt good to be tanned and muscular and powerful and dirty, and always, seemingly, teetering on the verge of laughter.
    The men were raunchy and funny, utterly unselfconscious , and always ready with a scurrilous story or joke. Money was tight: their cars were wrecks, not one of them owned his house, but they were neither wretched nor miserable. I loved being with them, and was happy as a hen when they accepted me – almost – as one of them.
    One morning, the foreman carpenter came into the mess hut rather the worse for wear. He sat down with his mug of tea at the wooden table and said, rather enigmatically, ‘I pissed on me own teeth las’ nite.’
    The assembled company looked up quizzically from their mugs and crumpled copies of
The Sun
. Terry burped loudly to make sure he had everyone’s full attention.
    ‘We was down the Angel an’ I’d ’ad a dozen beers or so, too much really, so I ducks out to the toilets to barf it all up. I leans over and shoots the lot into the gutter, but fucked if I don’t shoot me teeth out with it. Just that moment a loadof blokes comes in, they was well gone, and one of ’em says, “’Ere look, some fucker’s lost ’is teeth; let’s piss on ’em!” I wasn’t going to let on they was mine, was I?, so I keeps me mouf shut an’ joins in wiv ’em, an’ there I was grinnin’ away an’ pissin’ on me own teeth as they floats past. I ’ad to go back in there later on an’ fish ‘em out.’
    ‘Scrubbed up nice, though, ain’t they?’ he concluded, flashing us a pearly grin.
    Terry was a natural storyteller, and by the time he finished telling this appalling tale the whole hut was heaving with laughter.
    And so the long days of summer passed and the hideous