KELLY, SCAFFOLDER by Erika Babbage

DNM Fiction® EDITED BY A.MICHAEL

For interview with Erika's husband, Errol, and other DNMF writers, see Interviews post in February.

Kelly’s first day as a stand-in scaffolder had her huffing and puffing within two minutes of starting to load a wagon in the yard. It was barely eight am, a time she only ever saw if the dole had her on Jobclub, and the bosses – two posher-than-thou nerds – stood over her like hawks. Her Pathways to Work advisor had wangled her a day as a stand-in for somebody, could have been Steve the Scaffolder from Somerset for all she knew, and the day, from this position, was looking longer than a month of Sabbath Sundays with nothing but confessional wafer bread to eat. The poles and planks were ridiculously heavy to manhandle, jesus tonight, and her skin seemed to bruise upon mere contact with all the knobbly fixtures and fittings. After five minutes she’d cut her finger, after ten she’d ripped her Moschino jeans, and before the passage of half an hour she’d learned a valuable life lesson – that she would never be undertaking any kind of manual labour ever again. Not ever. This was even worse than The Turkey Factory, when she’d upchucked her breakfast onto a conveyor belt of flapping headless turkeys after not five minutes. Well no, actually, there was no worse than that.

When she saw a big plug-ugly pensioner pointing at her and laughing, Kelly didn’t know whether to say something or ignore him. Why a man who looked so downright weather-beaten and utterly ass-rough should ever have the right to laugh at anyone was a mystery, but there was no mistaking what was happening; Kelly was getting the mick taken out of her because she was new here. And it was a private joke, which was much more offensive than being laughed at by a group of people, in her book.

“Hurry up lass!” the oh-so plug-ugly pensioner told her. Shouting like that, he was obviously deaf as well as gormless. Cheeky twerp. Where did an over-the-hill bum like that get the right to tell her what to do anyway? The dude was filthy and he hadn’t even started work properly yet; Kelly was reminded of a mechanic who had swindled her for five hundred notes and put her off driving for life.

Glancing about, everyone here apart from the snooty bosses looked like they’d turn bathwater black just by taking their clothes off next to it. She couldn’t see from here, but she was willing to bet her Yves Saint Lauren belt and her Pringle socks that those chum balls didn’t have black fingernails. Is that all they did, stand there like generals while everyone else busted a gut lifting this and shifting that? She reckoned they would just shake their heads if she asked for a plaster to wrap over her finger. Either that or point her towards the office where it would take her ten minutes to hunt down a first-aid kit and make her look like a waste of time.

So much for The New Deal. More like THE BUM DEAL.

© Errol & Erika Babbage MMX