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of sand.
    ‘I come in with a decent jacket and tie, and then I change. I don’t come in with work clothes on. If people see you looking like shit they’ll take you for shit. I don’t know and I don’t care what the king of the monkeys wears but we who are Irish should always be tidy when we sit down to tea,’ he quoted in support from a forgotten schoolbook.
    ‘You and your fucking monkeys,’ I said. I kept a tight grip on the shovel as I remembered the lightning change of the face from its ordinary foolishness to viciousness when in horseplay Galway had knocked off the hat to betray the baldness. The blade of Keegan’s shovel just missed Galway’s throat.
    ‘King of the fukken monkeys,’ Galway guffawed as a breast leaned out of sight above her machine, but before Keegan’s attack had time to change to Galway, Barney whistled from the scaffolding rail on the roof. The bay was ready. The mixer, in smoke and stink of diesel, roared in gear.
    ‘Come on: shovel or shite, shite or burst,’ Murphy shouted above the roar.
    The shovels drove and threw in time into the long wooden box, tipped by handles at each end into the steel hopper when full, two boxes of gravel to the one of sand, and as the sand was tipped on the gravel Keegan came running from the stack with a cement bag on his shoulder to throw it down on top. Galway’s shovel cut the bag in two and the grey cloud of fallout drifted away as the ends were pulled free.
    The hopper rose. We could rest on shovels for this minute. When it stopped Murphy took the sledge to beat the back of the hopper, and the last of the sticking sand or gravel ran into the revolving drum where the water sloshed against the blades.
    As he hammered he shouted in time, ‘Our fukker who art in heaven bought his boots for nine-and-eleven,’ the back of the hopper bright as beaten silver in the sun.
    As the hopper came down again he shouted in the same time, ‘Shovel or shite, shite or burst,’ and the shovels mechanically drove and threw, two boxes of gravel to one of sand, and the grey fallout from the hundredweight of cement as the bag was cut in two, and the ends pulled free. It’d go on like this all day.
    Murphy ran the mixed concrete from the drum down a shoot into a metal bucket. With a whine of the lift engine the bucket rose to Sligo, a red-faced old man with a cap worn back to front, who tipped it into a cylindrical metal container fixed to the scaffolding, and then ran the bucket down again. The barrows were filled from a trapdoor in the container, and they ran on planks to toss the concrete on the steel in the bays. The best of the roof on a hot day was that wind blew from the Thames.
    In the boredom of the shovelfuls falling in time into the wooden box I go over my first day on the site a summer before.
    They’d said to roll my jacket in the gutter before I went in, and when I got on the site to ask for the
shout.
    ‘Who has the
shout
here?’ I asked. They pointed Barney out. He wore the same black mourning suit in wellingtons that he now leaned in against the scaffolding rail, watching the concreting on the roof, the black tie hanging loose from the collar of the dirty white shirt.
    ‘Any chance of a start?’ I asked.
    His eyes went over me – shoulders, arms, thighs. I remembered my father’s cattle I had stood for sale in the Shambles once, walking stick along the backbone to gauge the rump, lips pulled back to read the teeth; but now I was offering to shovel for certain shillings an hour: shovel or shite, shite or burst.
    ‘Have you ever done any building work before?’ Barney had asked.
    ‘No, but I’ve worked on land.’ They’d said not to lie.
    ‘What kind of work?’
    ‘The usual – turf, oats, potatoes.’
    ‘You’ve just come over on the boat, then?’
    ‘Yesterday … and I heard you might give me the start.’
    ‘Start at twelve, then,’ he said in his slow way and pointed to the wooden hut that was the office. ‘They’ll give you