Yesterdayland

I go bye-bye Patrick, says Artur.

So I set the alarm on my phone and we all say, Bye-bye Artur. The chorus is a safety measure, so we’re all clear about who’s where on site, but from these guys it comes with an unmistakable warmth. They’re a young team but their basic training’s good and they’re remarkably skilled, and aware. None of them have earbuds in, not even out of hours come to think of it. 

Artur’s nineteen, Pawel and Piotr are twenty. Abdallah, twenty-two. Despite his grey hair, Tomasz is six years younger than me, soon 38. 

***** 

There’s a geologists convention in town and the rock lickers booked up all the hotels and B&Bs. We were lucky to land these three twin rooms in student accommodation. I haven’t shared a room in years, but it suits me because I have two loans and an overdraft. 

I’m sharing with Artur. On our first night he sits bolt upright and shouts, Guys, guys, guys, s’ok. I have the wifi code. He gets out of bed and stands in front of the wall for a moment, his palms raised in front of him. He mumbles something then goes back to his bed, starts snoring again almost immediately. 

*****

The gates open for a truck. A young border collie bounds ahead of it and into the compound, barking urgent open questions. We all turn. Pawel whistles a command. The dog stops in its tracks, gazes up towards him with one ear cocked, tongue lolling from the side of its mouth, woolfish and mischievous looking. The collie decides to proceed, but Pawel cuts in immediately with a short, insistent whistle. The dog sits, retrieves its tongue. 

Pawel says, She just needs to know what to do. He starts making his way down to the dog. 

We watch Pawel walk the dog back to a young couple, now yelling Gerdieeee through the gate. He calls the dog to heel twice on the way and she obeys. He watches the couple struggle to get the leash back on the dog on the other side of the gate. It bobs and weaves, ducks and bounces, barking excitedly. Pawel waves to them when they finally have her secured. 

No sign of security. Maybe this isn’t insecure enough for them. Maybe they’re watching slasher movies in their cabin. A dog would be a better option for us. I could be doing with one too, but who would take care of it when I’m gone? 

***** 

One of the first things we did when we had the support structure up was put a tarp over the mid-section, below where the dj’s going to stand. We store the day’s machinery there, timber, plyboard, drinking water, all that. That storage will move with our work. No point wasting time and energy going back and forth to the units. I send security a photo of our day storage every morning, and make sure they acknowledge it. I expect them to do their job, so we can get on with ours. 

Expect the best, fear the worst. Commute between the two all day long, with some long, slow outbreaths that are really important, but somehow always slip my mind. 

After the day storage was sorted, we tarped off another section, ten metres to the left and rolled out three ground mats for breaks. I brought in twenty-five minute afternoon naps the following week, but I keep them off the books. I have wipeable inflatable cushions for pillows. This isn’t standard practice but it is common sense. We’re a team of six, doable, eight would have been better. If you want people to work effectively, you let them rest. Summers are warmer with every year, and the job gets harder in the heat. We’re getting the work done, and well at that. No one can argue with that. Even I can nap. When I come back, everyone’s just doing what they should. Never had a more reliable team. 

***** 

We agreed to share the shopping and cooking. Every evening, when dinner’s on the table, Tomasz spends the first five or so minutes picking the onions out of whatever it is we’re having. No one’s mentioned this. As the days go by, I realise no one’s going to. 

*****

I send drone footage and photos every afternoon so it’s plain to see our progress. It’s not the naps holding us up. We’ve been out of binding wire since last Tuesday. More should’ve arrived the following morning. I sent the supply manager, Jan, a reminder on Wednesday, around noon. 

I got a sinking feeling that Jan doesn’t get his hands dirty the first day he met us up on site, wearing Valentino jeans. Not a good sign. It felt like he was agreeing to things that I wasn’t sure he’d actually heard, so I sent the important parts again as a recorded message. 

My mother’s eyes were smiling at me that day and for the first time ever, I felt we bear a striking resemblance. Paranoia. Later, I wondered where her happiness comes from, and then why I’ve never wondered about that before. 

No one here wants to sit on their hands and they should be grateful for that. I know I am. 

By Thursday, Jan was sending my calls straight to voice message. On Friday, I messaged my mother saying it beggars belief. Before that, I wrote the phrase all-time low, then thought better of it. I’ve no claim to that phrase. I’m six weeks out of rehab and not even for the third time, but still, this Jan guy’s having a laugh. Binding wire is one of the things you can literally always get. I could hop in the van myself and pick it up right now, but mum told me to stick to the protocols, so I have Tomasz and Pawel painting already, which is stupid with the sawdust flying. Can’t be helped.

***** 

I can see Piotr on his phone from the kitchen window at our digs. He wears his cap that strange way they do now, just on top of his head. He finds a football under a hedge. Rolls it onto the top of his foot and balances it there, flips the ball up, loops his foot around it and catches it again. His brow is furrowed. 

***** 

I wouldn’t usually get to see the drug test outcomes, but this time I did. There was nothing at all. Sometimes, they show up what’s probably intermittent partying and the references are the deciding factor. That’s certainly how I made it through for a time, until I started cheating the tests. Of course, there’s that, but I don’t think so. These younger crews are different. No one buys drink when we stop at the shop on the way home, not even beers. None of them are up past bedtime, and no one needs their bed frame kicked in the morning. 

***** 

On Sunday morning, I walk in on Tomasz listening to his son on his laptop. While I’m scooping coffee, I realise the boy’s making an account of himself. Tomasz pauses after the lad speaks before he responds. Then the lad’s mother comes on-screen. She’s worked up. Artur’s still sleeping. I walk down the road for pastries.

***** 

On Monday afternoon, Jan comes strutting up to us. He shifts his gaze between us all while he’s speaking, as if he really has no clue which of us is in charge. This could be the case, but he only needs to ask. He speaks at length, a meandering ramble, but the gist of it is that we listed the wrong item number on our inventory, though we weren’t to know because the supplier hasn't updated the website with the new codes. 

Of course, he makes no mention of it, but it’s obvious he’s received a call from my mother. She can make herself abundantly clear.  

Since he’s looking at Abdallah when he finally grinds to a halt, Abdallah answers him. He shrugs and says gently that we all find different things difficult. It is impossible to fathom whether kindness, or malice, or indeed complete indifference lies behind his words. Jan lifts his hard hat, scratches his head, then nods and walks away. Today he’s sporting white Versace denims. 

Abdallah says, I go bye-bye Patrick. 

Bye-bye Abdallah, we all say. 

*****

Have you ever been to anything like this? Pawel is asking while we eat lunch. I don’t answer. The others shake their heads, apart from Tomasz who misunderstands. Once, he says, I did a playground in Ghent with many jungle animals, a lot of angle grinder. 

Pawel says he means a big dance music party, like this will be. 

Tomasz raises his eyebrows. Says he can take his son on holiday for a week for the price of the cheapest ticket. This, he says, is for people that don’t want to think there’s a day after tomorrow. Abdallah says, This will be the best-looking thing I’ve worked on, when it’s done.

The others chime in agreement. 

I feel so proud of my mum. 

***** 

Usually, politics are off limits on jobs but even here we have a tacit agreement. Piotr who rarely says anything, watches a flash rainstorm pound the set and says, The problem with the climate is none of us really understand the science, so it’s about faith, like believing in hell alone.

Pawel says, Yes, no one wants to believe in only hell. 

Abdallah adds, That’s why we are building the ferry castle. 

I think at first he means the ark: a castle on a ferry. It dawns on me later that afternoon that he didn’t say ferry. He said fairy. 

The flash flood left a puddle the size of a municipal pond in the middle of the site. I ask Jan to organise a drainage contractor.

Two ducks move in that afternoon. Their forward and back quack casts them as the happy couple, hatching plans for a prosperous future. A rat swims across the edges of the puddle to land. By the time the drainage people get here, we’ll have a call centre of frogs. 

At rehab, years ago, this counsellor told us about an old experiment at Harvard. They put a rat in a big test tube with water, so all it could do was tread water. It gave up and started drowning after a quarter of an hour, but they grabbed those rats just before they drowned, dried them off, let them catch their breath. After that, they swam for hours on end. 

The counsellor said it sounds cruel, but that’s how we learned about hope. I learned that I’m a rat, but sure better to be the rat than the hand. 

***** 

After Neverland, who would have imagined a commercial venture would risk a similar name? It just seems so ill-fated. I said this to my mother when she told me she got this job. She said fate has no hand in the matter. Maybe it was my anxiety shouting down my medication again. 

They couldn’t risk having a set designer after last year. The crowd surged en masse, climbing the facade. Four were taken to hospital. One was paralysed from the neck down, one was transferred to a psychiatric hospital. The other two were released with minor injuries later that week. The media were all over it, of course. Could have been much worse, but the organisers realised they need an architect that can sign-off on the set structurally, no matter what the small print says in the terms and conditions. 

***** 

Abdallah returns from the laundry room holding a white sports sock that’s three times bigger than usual. He looks like a fisherman posing with his catch. We put Piotr’s green baseball cap on him and my grey rain jacket. His three-day stubble completes the gone-fishing look. He bares his teeth in a grin, becoming exactly the character I had in mind. Says, This ole fella must’ve been in the creek since Jimmy Carter left the Whitehouse, not a good day I can tell you.

***** 

So this art nouveau palace we’re building was mum’s longshot. She was ready for them to knock it back, for obvious reasons. She laughed when she showed me the drawings, called it Yesterdayland. But she said she might as well design something she wants to actually build, in a city centre somewhere, like a boutique hotel. She never thought they’d actually go for it. 

She had another version drawn up in waiting, an elaborate sandcastle with flowering desert plants and bedouin weaves, but they were delighted with the nouveau palace, with its dj box in a clamshell, giant water reeds forming the turrets, the entire structure rising from the faux stained-glass dragonfly wings at its base. 

*****

Everywhere else, I have to try to be a better person, which involves pretending I am one in the hope that it sticks, but at meetings I acknowledge that I’m worthless. My name is Patrick, I say, and my addictions lead to the death of my partner Lijsbeth and our unborn child. 

The guy in the other car also tested positive for drugs and alcohol. I never got to hear his version of events because he took his own life before the case came to court, but he’d had his driver’s license for thirteen years, and I’d taken six lessons, so case closed. 

***** 

Artur says, What I am only saying is that my mother adds salt and pepper at the end, and also my grandmother. 

He’s half my age, so a year older than I was when I committed manslaughter. I only mastered the microwave at that age. 

It’s my turn to cook. I’m genuinely amused by his intervention. 

Are you dissing not one but two generations of women in my family, Artur?

No, he guffaws so his head bobs up and down, not at all, he says, gleefully. It’s just that when you are coming closer to the end of the cooking, then you can know what is the taste that you are adding the salt to. 

There is no arguing with that, Artur. 

And there really isn’t. Maybe it’s a metaphor for life, though what can you season life with? That’s what got me in trouble in the first place. Seasoning life. Diluting life.

***** 

So when the design was agreed, Mum saw an opportunity to take me under her wing. We don’t have the same surname. I don’t sound nearly so Irish either. I grew up in Bruges, speaking mostly Flemish until my father left. We got along fine until I started having my own opinions. The day I came home in a Liverpool shirt, Dad broke my wrist and I knocked out his front teeth, with a left hook that I had only imagined before that. I’d never been in a fight before, and though I’ve made shitloads of mistakes, I haven’t been in a fight since either. That’s something. 

The hospital called social services but they needn’t have bothered. By the time we got back, Dad had cleared off. We went over to English, more or less overnight. My friends signed my cast, then high-fived my left hand, a strange situation to celebrate, but we were fifteen. We had three concepts to go by: win, lose or draw. 

***** 

There’s no living room at our digs. When Piotr’s phone rings in the evenings, he leaves the kitchen. We see him pacing in the garden. If it’s raining, he stands in the doorway to the laundry room. When he returns today he looks helpless. He sits at the table. He says his sister is starving herself to death. She’s not allowed to leave the hospital. She’s 13 years old. 

Artur and I, the only two not sitting round the table, pull out chairs to join the other four. Abdallah shuts his laptop.

Some people, Piotr says, love themselves for no good reason. Others hate themselves, for no good reason. 

There are, I think, more categories. Those that hate or love with reason. Those that cannot reconcile the past. Those that cannot reconcile the future. I can, at least, live in the present, but now is not the time to say that I am grateful for their company. Now’s the time to just be here, knowing there’s nothing to say that’s an answer. 

I think about the prisoners that starved themselves during the Troubles. Neither love for themselves nor their children, nor anything else could save them. That was the form the protest took. Then there are almost certainly people that only live to see another day to spite some enemy. 

***** 

The next time we saw my father, he was on his deathbed. His family were sitting outside the hospital room, eating kebabs. There was a kind of delayed-at-a-bus-station atmosphere. They scowled as they chewed, but then I’m certain our faces were not smiling. His wife gestured that we could enter, like we’d reached the changing rooms at a clothes store, where the day was dragging its heels. 

He was on a ventilator, so I couldn’t see his teeth. I told him I remember him fooling around at the car wash with the blue keys. He had on his sheepskin coat, so it was probably winter. I don’t remember what he did exactly, but I remember we were all in fits, even the guys that worked there.  

I don’t know if he really heard me. Mum gave his hand a squeeze. 

I stopped smoking after that and I can thank him for that much. I will never eat another kebab either. Small mercies. 

Mum had me help her take the soft-top down for the drive home, though it was October. She had the radio blasting and started singing along to Islands In The Stream, but coming in right from the start, as your man with the beard. I googled the words, and had a right good go at singing Dolly’s part. 

***** 

When we’ve taken everything back down here, Abdallah and Tomasz will work at the big graveyard in Hamburg for six weeks, one of the biggest graveyards in the world. Abdallah will level gravestones. Tomasz will be blowing leaves around on windy days, as he puts it. He puts on a dumb face and mimes waving a leaf-blower from side to side. Noisy pointless work, he says, but well paid. 

Pawel will help his father on the farm. 

The rest of us don’t know yet. I am relieved to not be the only one without a plan. It’s the evenings that make me most nervous.

***** 

During the trial, they heard that we were on our way to the hospital because Lijs was bleeding in week thirteen. She had also bled in weeks nine and ten. News to me. They asked me if she’d pain in her abdomen. I said she thought she had danced too much. They found all counts inconclusive, except for driving under the influence and without a license. They were ready to forgive me anything, even Lijs’ parents. They didn’t know what I would do with their second chances.

***** 

Someone needs to stand on the fibreglass clamshell base while it’s being maneuvered into position and swing the connection cables to the people waiting to receive them. Everyone needs a harness of course, but the person on the clamshell’s taking the most risk. Piotr’s annoyed at me because I insist on doing it myself. This is the first time in all these weeks that there’s been any kind of atmosphere among us. Piotr won’t speak English. He walks away, scowling. It’s Artur that explains that he wants to send the film to his sister, and so it’s decided, though I feel a cold sweat coming over me. For a moment, I think I might bring up my lunch. 

Pawel agrees to check the harnesses, then launch the clamshell. Artur will film. I’ll stand in the middle of the gap with Abdallah to my left and Tomasz to my right, ready to catch and secure the cables. 

Piotr rides the clamshell, one slender arm outstretched in the style of an opera singer, and everything goes according to plan. Afterwards, he hugs me, kissing the top of my head. I can feel his heart thumping in his chest, his elation like a force rising from his body. Conversely, I’m totally drained. My eyes want to close of their own accord. 

I say, It’s just old-fashioned carpentry from here on in. 

He’s still grinning ear to ear. Says, fine by me. 

I say, I go bye-bye. Call if you need me. 

I set the alarm on my phone. 

They say, Bye-bye Patrick.

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