Decay Inevitable

“Any form?” Rapler asked.

“No. I’m disappointingly clean.”

Rapler laughed. “You’ll be fine. We need a few more meatheads about the place. All we get are students sniffing around for a few weeks’ work in the summer. They usually cry off after a couple of days. Think they’re going to turn into Lou Ferrigno – ‘Aye, boss, no trouble. I could carry bricks all day’ – and before you know it they’re walking around like they’ve just had a hernia.”

“What was this place?” Sean asked.

“Built in the 1970s. Nobody knows what it was meant to be. Hotel most probably. But it was also an office block, with a private residential quarter and a leisure facility. You could have been born inside and never had a need to go out. Maybe if they built it down south it would have worked, but up here?”

“Interesting.”

“Yeah, up to a point. Guy who designed it, Peter de Fleche, hanged himself. Dutch. After it was abandoned and the demolition orders went through you’d see him in this fucked-up Jag, giving it the slow drive-by. Felt as if he’d failed, they reckon. Did a couple other buildings in a similar vein. Then nothing.”

“He doesn’t need to know any more.”

Sean turned to see the barrel-chested man from the funeral standing in the doorway. He had so much neck it resembled a collar for his head to nestle in.

Rapler said, “This is Ronnie Salt. You’ll answer to him on the softstrip. He runs a good team, does Ronnie.”

Ronnie nodded at him. Up close, his eyes were unpleasant splashes of cement-grey either side of a nose that might have once been used as a blacksmith’s anvil. The two men walked across the sunken, blasted forecourt to the condemned building as another man turned up. He nodded at them and Rapler clapped his hand on the new man’s shoulder. “Marshall?” Rapler asked, “Jamie Marshall?” They disappeared back inside his Portakabin.

“Why is it being knocked down?” Sean asked, as they approached the de Fleche building.

Salt regarded him with what looked like a wince, as if he had expected Sean to be mute and was now resigned to having to converse with him. “Well, it’s completely shagged out. I mean, look at it. Nobody has lived there or worked in it for years. Sick building. Air conditioning system never right. Couple of people died. Airborne disease.”

“Great. Must be a pleasure to spend your days in there.”

Salt sneered at him. “It’s a job.”

The front of the de Fleche building soared away from them like the prow of a ship. The entrance was a fly-blown revolving door ten feet high with so many cracks it looked like a feature. Behind the fogged barrier of glass, a bank of shattered TV screens hung from the ceiling over a horseshoe desk. Sean tried to imagine what the lobby must have looked like.

“Let’s have a closer look,” he said.

The doors gritted and squealed as they pushed through. The air in here was a urinous melange; a deep scar in the far wall showed how vagrants might have gained access. Squatter evidence lay around them: empty tins, shit-streaked toilet tissue in a bin sack, newspapers bearing dates from half a decade previously.

Salt stood by the door, his hands in his pockets, toeing something small and shrivelled that owned claws and a tail.

“Has work started on this place yet?” Sean asked.

“Yeah. We’re going top to bottom. Just a couple of floors done so far. Slow job.”

“Where’s your team?”

A blunt thumb jutted upwards. “Wordy bastard aren’t you? Do you ask so many questions all the time?”

Sean spread his hands. “Just being friendly.”

“Keep friendly for your knitting circle, or whatever it is you do when you leave us. Work is here. Hard fucking work. And I will come down on you like the knives at a knacker’s yard if you step out of line. Hear me? Don’t like it? Hard-hat off, fuck off. Simple as that.”

“I understand,” Sean said.

Salt regarded him for a few seconds longer, then jutted his thumb north again. “Let’s go.”

HE FELT LIKE a zoo animal in a new kind of viewing experience, one in which the attractions are led around a static public. Smoke and the smell of over-brewed tea hung sourly in the room. On one wall, a calendar depicted a topless woman sitting on the bonnet of a Ferrari eating melting ice cream.

Salt said, without any attempt at pointing out the owners of the names: “Robbie Deakin, Tim Enever, Lutz Singkofer, Nicky Preece, Jez Cartledge. This is... tits... forgotten your name. Steve?”

“Sean. Sean Redman.”

“Right then, I’ll let you get on. Show him what’s what. Maybe start him off on the loose wall in the bathroom.” Salt left, grabbing a fish paste sandwich from a wrap of foil on one of the men’s knees. “I’ll be back in an hour,” he called, as his boots began their descent.

An embarrassed silence fell. Sean broke it: “Have you worked together as a team long?”

“’Bout six month,” replied the man with the fish paste sandwiches. He offered one to Sean. Sean accepted. “I’m Robbie. Salty’s a miserable old bastard. Ignore him. We hardly ever see him anyway. He normally fucks off to the pub when Vernon’s not around.”