Hard Days, Good Days
Something different for Volumes.
Almost a decade ago, when I first created Volumes, I worked a day job for one winter to summer as a handyman for a care home. The work was hard, both in the sense of being physically demanding and that it was often difficult for me to wrap my head around. I might be able to distill ideas to first principles, but seeing the world in terms of mechanisms and measurements is like being one of Edwin Abbot’s two-dimensional creatures attempting to see the world in three dimensions.
I had, however, a guide to this unfamiliar terrain: a man in his seventies named Mike, who could navigate the world of physical breakages and tangible solutions — he could look at wall or listen to a pipe and know exactly what was wrong and about twelve ways he might fix it — and who obviously saw me as no less alien. Somehow, he and I found ways to communicate, to work together, and to become friends.
I wrote many notes while I worked that job, and over the years they’ve been rewritten and collated into various versions of the following essay. When I rediscovered those notes, I decided it was time at last to put them in a final draft for you to read.
This is a very different kind of essay than what I usually publish on Volumes, but I’m committed to trying new things. Please do let me know what you think and if you’d like to see more like this.
Matthew
“What’s he like?” they ask, and I don’t know how to answer.
On the first day, a hand reaches around from behind me and tugs sharply at the bristles on my chin. I turn around and meet Mike. “Hello, Beardy,” he says. His own beard is white, as is what remains of the cropped hair on the dome of his head. I learn later that he shaves it himself. This proclivity for personal DIY extends to dentistry — he once took pliers to an infected tooth to save himself the cost and hassle of a dentist. His grin displays well-worn and wobbly teeth, and his eyes suggest sincerity.
Mike shows me the way from the reception, through the nursing home where (as of this morning) I work alongside him. He is seventy-two, I am thirty-one, and we are the two-man team of caretakers at a nursing home for people with dementia.
He leads me through a recreation room where an elderly figure rocks to an unheard lullaby in a faded armchair, while others have conversations with ghosts or line up for tea and soft biscuits. Mike reaches out to a large woman clutching a soiled teddy bear, holding her hand as she emerges from her trance to beam at him. He returns the smile, tells her to stay out of trouble, their hands part, and she vanishes back into her middle-distance stare. “Totally mad, that one,” he says as we leave the room. “Bless her.”
On the other side of the home, we pass through a small kitchen where two Polish women are frying bacon (they tell Mike his will be ready in a minute, and how would I like mine?) and then we go through a door to the garden where we have instant coffee and get to know each other.
“I’m a simple bloke,” he tells me. “I worked here on maintenance the last twenty-one years now. Twenty-two? Twenty-two. I were on roofing before that. Hot work, roofing, let’s just put it like that. Anyway, mate, how do you have your coffee?”
I tell him I take it black, no sugar. Proudly, he tells me, “I have mine no milk, two big coffees, three big sugars, and —” he pinches his thumb and forefinger together, then pulls them half an inch apart “— only that much water.” Once he’s made our coffees, he throws his back in two gulps before rolling a cigarette. When I note that his drink must have scalded his throat, he frowns and shakes his head seriously.
“Coffee’s best like that, almost boiling.” He smiles and closes his eyes, reliving the flavour from a moment ago. “At home, I don’t even wait after I pour the hot water in, straight down me throat it goes!”
As we drink, Mike describes the day’s work in detail.
“We won’t be swinging the lead!”
He stops when he notices my puzzled frown. I ask, “Why would we swing lead?”
“Sorry, mate.” He leans closer, turns sideways, and brings his ear up to my face. I’ve heard of cauliflower ears but his are more like leaves of lettuce. Mike is mostly deaf, on his way to entirely deaf. He somehow hears his phone ring over the scream of power tools, but he can’t hear the person on the other end. He can hear me shout a question to him from another room, but misses most of what I say when I’m standing right next to him. “Say again?”
“Why would we be swinging lead?”
He bends across his stiff spine, clutching his stomach, laughing. “Sorry, mate! Swinging the lead — it’s a saying. You never heard that one before?”
I shake my head.
“It means dodging your work, being lazy.”
Over the next few weeks, I notice how Mike builds his speech out of pieces of received phrases, which he tacks together to serve the purpose of the point he wants to make. (This reminds me of the way he uses a piece of wooden dowel and the head of a screw to fit this bit to that bit and improvise a fix for some breakage. He often looks at his handiwork and mutters, “Bit of a botch job,” while I wonder how he managed this minor miracle of maintenance. He sees the puzzle put together before I have even seen all the potential pieces.)
Some of my favourite of his cobbled together idioms:
You’re pulling me bell.
Like a dog out of Hell.
There’ll be Hell to play.
A picture is better than fancy words.
One day, I ask him where the drill-bits are. He says, “God knows,” pauses to consider this, then adds, “and he’s not telling.” I drop my hammer, shuddering with laughter at this unexpected delivery. Mike looks blankly at my amusement, not understanding what’s so funny about what he said. When my laughter doesn’t stop, he joins in, laughing just to be laughing.
“What’s he like?” my wife asks, keen to know how the new job is going and what my workmate is like.
I tell her about how, as we sit on a bench outside the kitchen, Mike’s eyes target someone beyond the garden fence, a young someone on her way to work or college. His body stiffens, his widened eyes track her stroll. When she’s gone, his paralysis lifts and he says, “I been told I’m not supposed to stare at girls. We used to whistle at them, can’t do that either, but I never meant anyone harm. They took it as a compliment.”
I pick at some dried paint on the sleeve of my work fleece. I’m somewhere between a scornful riposte and a desire to avoid an argument. After all, I find myself thinking, I have to work with this man. Not the most noble of motivations for diplomacy; I’d rather say that I stay civil to better reach him, to change his mind. That’s also true, but it comes second.
“How can you know,” I finally ask, “they didn’t mind your wolf whistles?”
“Who doesn’t like a compliment?”
“Lots of people, depending on the compliment, who it comes from, why they’re getting it, whether they even see it as a compliment ...”
“All the women I’ve ever known liked it.”
I start to recite something about respecting another person’s autonomy, and he thinks I’m talking about robots. Automatons. He knows what automatons are but doesn’t know the word “autonomy”. I fumble with an explanation, which stumbles over every other sentence when I cannot find words from Mike’s lexicon to make myself clear. I don’t have words that will connect.
Mike’s whole body communicates when he speaks — his hands, his feet, his posture, they all act out what he’s picturing and trying to find words to express. As he talks about a person he once knew, he shows me with his hands their height, tall or short, and their size, skinny or fat. If the person had long hair (from an anecdote about “me days on the roofs” and an apprentice who tipped hot bitumen over his own head), then Mike’s hands stroke imaginary locks falling over his shoulders.
Talking about a bucket he once carried (a subject that occupied half a coffee break), he acts out the laborious dragging of the tub, complete with groans and short breath. He is, for those few seconds, actually heaving that bucket again.
If he mentions a vehicle or a tool, he knows all of its specs, his narrative briefly interrupted by a stream of labels and numbers that mean something to him: “... it were a John Deere 3140, the 5.9 litre, 6 cylinder ...” And when he talks about a lorry, he squats, turns an invisible wheel with one hand, and pulls the unseen cord to sound an unheard horn, the way children do when playing.
“What’s he like?” friends ask me, and I don’t know where to start.
Mike has worked around many Polish migrants. They have always been, in his estimation, “good workers, hard workers,” which is the highest praise a man like Mike confers. He’s had good experiences with several Poles, so all Poles are good people — a fortuitous inversion of the racist paradigm.
Mike has been married three times. Three times he’s felt abandoned, three times the simple life he longed for, one of quiet love and steady work, has eluded him. The last time involved the loss of his house to his ex-wife, after she cleared out their savings account. “I had no idea what was going on with that money. I trusted her, so my wages went in and I told her to take what she needed. Ended up taking it all.”
He sees conspiracies everywhere now. When his computer runs slowly, it must be a virus, probably a company hacking his emails, maybe invading the whole system. The papers he misplaced have been taken by a mischievous mind, or a careless cleaner, or a maleficent ghost. And women, much as he loves to love them and act like a silly schoolboy in their presence, are simply not to be trusted.
“Petty, women are,” he tells me. The seriousness in his voice and the way he leans in close suggest he’s saving me from making his mistakes, from being “taken in” or “for a ride” as he has been before. “Women’ll stab you in the back soon as they need to.”
I realise, after a subtle shift in tone, that he’s not telling me this at all. He is telling himself, reminding himself: Don’t be hurt again.
A fortnight later, he reminds me that women are not to be trusted. I remind him (as if this is not the third time) that his anger towards women is misplaced. He’s actually angry at his ex-wives. It isn’t fair for all women to pay the price for those wrongs. He nods thoughtfully, the way he did the first two times, and says, the way he did those first two times, “Aye, suppose you’re right.”
For Mike, new memories are difficult to form. Perhaps his mind is too full of scenes from long ago.
“So, what’s the old boy like?” my father asks me one day. I tell him about the way Mike talks about his childhood.
“Best days of me life.” He sums up those days in a single word: Freedom.
“We used to run around, get in all sorts of — well, I suppose some’d call it ‘trouble’, but it were just fun really. Kids being kids. You’d have a catapult,” he pronounces it catty-pult, “in one pocket and a handful of musket balls in the other.”
I hand him his coffee-and-sugar mud and take my seat, a little away from where he’s smoking his tenth (twentieth, who knows?) cigarette of the day. I ask, “Where did you get musket balls from?”
He gives me one of his all-purpose shrugs, this one to say that I’m asking about an irrelevant feature of his story.
“It weren’t just catty-pults neither. I used to make bow and arrow, with a sapling, you know. I was the best at them, too. Them arrows would sail right across an orchard. And I were often in them orchards, even though I shouldn’t have been. Apples. And farmer’s fields. Carrots, spuds, whatever you could find.”
“Why?”
“That was life back then. Mum got 10 shillings a week for her and three kids.”
I look up the conversion for shillings to contemporary pounds when I get home: Mike’s family tried to live on roughly £11 a week.
“That’s why I got arrested for chopping down a tree. I were hacking away at that tree, must have been ...” He points to a nearby oak rising high into the blue above our heads and says, “... It were bigger than that one. I went at it for about a week, kept coming back. It came down, I looked across, and there was the copper just watching me on his bike. He nodded because he had me, and he cycled off to me mum’s house.”
“I don’t understand — why did you cut the tree down?”
“Firewood! We was cold in our house, it was freezing. Only had one fireplace for the whole family, and that tree would’ve kept us warm for ages and for nothing. It were just what you had to do, you took what you could from what you found.”
I discover that Mike was often in trouble as a “young ’un”. He was sent to a remand home for three weeks because of his pathological truancy from school. He joyously remembers running into the woods with the wobbling, beetroot-cheeked truancy officer in pursuit. “He gave it a good try, to be fair, but he couldn’t catch us.” The triumphant child beams out through the wizened-if-not-wiser face of this old man.
Mike summarises these stories first with a stern scowl and saying “They was hard days,” and then with a grin and declarative nod, “but they was good days.”
I realise too late that I’m romanticising his nature. I’ve been reading Steinbeck, noticing only the best aspects of his working-class scenes, and I see Mike on every page. He lives in a place like Cannery Row, his closest companion is canine (a coddled Jack Russell named Tilley), he’s fuelled by aggressive coffee and rough whiskey. I pay close attention to his instructions to keep every offcut of copper piping and the best methods for cleaning tools; I’m seeking metaphor within these practical lessons, shining his coarse, coal words into the glittering diamond of wisdom.
This is when the trap set by my own condescension springs shut. I’m caught unaware by a comment about the vindictiveness of women (“bitches”), or snared by a sudden dispassionate use of the n-word. I land on the ungiving ground of reality with such force that others must hear the thump.
Another breaktime over coffee, Mike paints me a picture in words and with the shapes his hands make.
“I remember this one memory, a time when I were a boy.” His flattened hand pats an imagined head no higher than his knee. “I were sitting by the fire, and me grandparents were there. Me grandad made a fork out of a bit of wire. Coat hanger or summat. We was always doing stuff like that, you made what you could with what you had.”
A weary, no-use-moaning shrug.
“He was making toast, bit of bread on the fork, into the fire.” He licks his lips, which are stretched into a sinful grin, pleased with the thought of such indulgent pleasure. “Me nan was in the chair in the corner where she always sat. She were knitting summat, can’t remember what now.”
A contented, nothing-to-complain-about shrug.
“I always remember that picture. Thought about it a lot when I were growing up.”
His fade into silence indicates that the topic might change here, so I ask before the moment is lost, “Why does it stand out in your memory?”
His coffee, still many degrees above safe for human consumption, is tossed into his mouth, swallowed in one. “How d’you mean?”
“Why did you think you about it so much?”
One more shrug for the road, the one that leads away from nostalgia and right back to work. “I always wanted that for me own life. Simple. Just that picture, that little scene. For ages, I thought that’s how my life would be. Never got it, though.”
“What’s he like?” they ask me, so I say, “How long have you got?”
Really enjoyed this, reminds me a lot of conversations with my Grandfather. It was always so nice to hear about stories of when he grew up and all the mischief that went with it
I really enjoyed that! More would be welcome Matthew.