Chapter 31The Line on the Bottle

Five towers had already lit. This one lit on another night, after them.

At twenty past seven in the morning, Sol came off the night shift and went out.

His works number was written on the back of his hard hat brim. 0417, in marker pen. The figures had been soaked in sweat once and baked in the sun once, and had half faded. He sat on the steps outside the annexe, took the hat off and turned it upside down to look. The first stroke was still there, the second was broken, and the last was only a dot. The lining was wet. The hat held the smell of his night’s sweat, and he did not sniff at it. There was a footprint on the step, his own from coming down just now, and the dust at its edges had already dried.

Here he was oh-four-one-seven. The number had to be traced over clearly.

On the day he started, the safety officer talked for an hour in the portable cabin. Hard hats, chin straps, signatures, and he said each point twice. The back of the brim had to face out, so the man at the gate could see it from ten paces. The only point he remembered was the last one: you sign out to leave, and a day without a signature does not count. He asked what “does not count” meant. The safety officer said it meant it did not count.

He took the marker pen out of the pocket of his overalls, pressed the hat against his knee and traced the figures stroke by stroke. When the first pass was done he looked at it, decided it was not enough, and traced a second. On the third he pressed the nib into the marks of the first pass, pressing very slowly, and he did not stop until the edges of the figures had gone hard again.

At night he was on the eleventh floor of the annexe. The pump truck’s pipe reached up from below, and the concrete dropped from its mouth, grey-white, with a smell of wet stone. He pushed the poker vibrator in, pulled it out, pushed it in again. When slurry came up to the surface, he moved one step along. From seven in the evening to six in the morning, truck after truck, he walked step by step across most of that floor. The last truck came after six. He measured it with the slump cone. It was a sheet-metal cone with its top cut off, one hundred millimetres across the top, two hundred across the bottom, three hundred high. He stood it on the steel plate, filled it in three layers, rodded each layer twenty-five times, then lifted the cone away slowly and watched how far the mixed concrete slumped. What was poured had to be kept wet and cured for seven days, cured until it was dry right through, and then it was a floor slab and did not move when you stood on it.

The stairs were temporary, iron, and every step down rang once. He had walked down from the eleventh floor one step at a time. The sun was already up. It was white, with no colour, and it lay on the water on the service road, and the water flashed, again and again. The sun on the back of his neck was not hot yet. The bin by the road had just been painted, and the number on it was still wet; someone had brushed it with a finger and left a smear. A sheet of paper was stuck to the bus stop sign at the junction, and the wind lifted its corner and pressed it down again. The first wave of vehicles had gone along the road, and there were tyre tracks on the ground, one after another. On the other side of the road lay stacked rebar, bundle after bundle, the cut ends bright, not yet rusted. Most of the night shift had come from somewhere else, and no one talked along this stretch. He did not walk fast. His hard hat was under his arm, the back of the brim facing out.

The sign-in booth at the service yard gate was a white sheet-metal hut right by the fence, its window open. The glass had a crack running slantwise from the top corner to the frame, held with clear tape, and the edge of the tape had lifted. A flask stood on the sill. Its lid was open a crack, and steam came out of the crack in wisps that broke as soon as the wind touched them.

Duka sat inside. His hands were clean, his nails cut straight, no calluses on his knuckles. A pencil was tucked behind his ear. He never used that pencil to sign anything, only to count. He opened at half past six, and between seven and eight everyone signing out from the night shift had to come past this window. In this hour, the sign-out sheet already had over a hundred and forty lines. The sign-in pen was tied to a table leg with a thin cord. The cord was new, a little thicker than last month’s, long enough for the person writing to reach, too short for anyone to walk off with the pen. The man in front finished signing and put the pen back where the cord could reach. The nib touched the desk with a tap.

The sign-out queue reached out past the fence. One by one the men in front leaned up to the window, hats in their hands, the backs of the brims facing out. One man had his sleeves rolled to the elbow, and his forearms were dusted with cement; the dust had dried into a layer of white. Someone was on the phone, his voice kept very low, and when he finished he hung up and did not call again.

The man in front finished signing and nodded once to Duka. Duka did not look up. The pencil touched the sheet once more.

At half past seven, Sol passed his work badge in through the window. Duka did not look at the badge. His finger went down the sheet, line by line, not looking at names, only numbers. Somewhere past the hundred and thirtieth line, it stopped. He took the pencil from behind his ear and touched it once to the end of that line.

“Oh-four-one-seven,” he said.

Sol wrote a tick in the sign-out box on that line. The paper of the sign-out sheet was very thin, and the tick came through onto the page behind, reversed, a small blot, and dried quickly. The pen was pulled to the edge of the desk, and the cord went taut and then slack. He thought of what the safety officer had said: does not count means does not count. He looked at the tick. At its edge was a little ink that had soaked through.

Duka opened the register kept under the sign-out sheet to find a place for the stamp. Towards the back, a line was printed on the page, every letter the same size: LM-1-06 handover number “Acceptance not passed. Handover withheld.”

Sol saw that line from outside the window. He did not know the number. He knew the word “handover”. It was on the notice board at the site too, with the handover date for one block or another, put back several times, put back until now.

Duka stamped the sign-out sheet. The ink pad was black. He shut the register and put it back where it had been.

At half past eight, he got back to his room on the fifth floor of Block Two. There were four beds: two made up, one empty, one with its quilt folded into a square. The man in the top bunk was not up yet, his quilt pulled over his head, only one foot showing, hanging over the edge of the bed. His own bed was the bottom bunk by the window. The air conditioner was half broken. Only the side by the door blew, and the air died away at the window. A nail was driven into the wall at the head of his bed, and a metal ring hung on the nail. On the bedside cabinet stood an empty biscuit tin with a stretch of sea printed on its lid. From the window he could see a section of the tower’s base, silver-grey. From this angle he could only see the lower part.

He took the safety line off his shoulder. The line was grey webbing with a clip sewn onto one end. The webbing had worn lines along it, rubbed in by these few months of clipping on.

He pushed the clip into the metal ring. The first time it did not bite, and came loose. He clipped it again, and again it came loose. The third time, with a click, it bit. Only then did he take his hand away.

He lay down without taking off his overalls or his shoes. The dust on his soles had dried and would fall off at a single step. The quilt was one he had brought from home. It had been mended twice, and the stitching had always run very straight. The curtains were drawn, and the room was a layer of dark grey. A car went by outside, and its headlights leaked in through the gap in the curtains, slid a streak of white across the ceiling, and were gone. The air conditioner pipe in the corner was dripping. One drop, a pause, another drop. He counted a few. When he got to the seventeenth, he stopped counting.

※

At one, he woke. His arm had been under him and had gone numb, and he waited for it to come back on its own.

The light in the room slowly changed colour, from grey to white. It was afternoon light. A patch of the wall had been lit, and he looked at that patch for a long time without thinking anything.

He sat up and looked first at the head of the bed. The safety line still hung from the ring on the nail, the clip biting tight. He took the hard hat off the hook at the head of the bed, looked at the back of the brim and did not trace it. The phone under his pillow buzzed once, a group message from the crew. He did not look at it.

The water bottle by the bed was a plastic one-and-a-half-litre bottle he had bought at the shop in the service yard in his first month. The label was long since torn off. Only a ring of glue was left, and he rubbed at it with his thumb, and it would not come off. He had drawn a row of lines on the bottle with a marker, measured out by himself, from the bottom up, one division at a time. Each time he drank a division, he marked a stroke beside it. Every stroke, he drank first and marked after. If he marked first, his hand would go too fast and the count would go wrong. From going on shift last night until now, he had marked five strokes. He counted twice, and both times it was five.

He could not remember other numbers. Yesterday’s, the day before’s, they ran together, and once they were gone they were gone. This one number he remembered. The last truck last night, one hundred and five millimetres. Between eighty and a hundred and twenty: passed. He had lifted the cone himself, he had watched the concrete slump himself, and the number was one he had measured, not one someone else had read out to him. He said the number over once in his head, and when he had said it, he put it down.

He went to the basin and washed his face. The water from the tap was lukewarm. He did not wait for it to run cool, just scooped it up and washed. When he was done, he looked up at the mirror on the wall. The mirror was a sheet of metal with a dent in it, and a face seen in the dent came out crooked. He straightened his head, and then he could see clearly. Then he picked up the bottle and held it to the window to look at the light. The light went through the bottle and fell on the table, a small bright patch of watery shadow. He screwed the bottle shut and put it back by the bed.

He went downstairs, bought a boxed meal at the little shop by the door and ate it sitting on the steps. A cloth curtain hung in the shop’s doorway, its pattern faded. Opposite was a row of low buildings, their doors all shut. The paint on the doors was fresh, door after door, all the same colour. The food was cold. He ate it mouthful by mouthful, then threw the box in the bin.

At twenty past four, he walked from the dormitory to the service yard. There were no trees on the way, and he kept to the shade at the foot of the walls. A water truck went past, and the water it sprayed drew a wet line on the ground, and the line soon dried. The service yard’s cooler drum was an iron drum standing at the edge of the shade canopy, painted white on the outside, with a row of small dents along the edge of the lid where something had knocked it. The afternoon sun had been on it all day, and the drum was hot to the touch. The tap handle was hot too, and he wrapped it in his cuff to turn it. The water that came out was lukewarm, with a slight taste of rust.

Two other men were filling up at the drum. Neither spoke. When they had filled up, they went their separate ways.

He filled the bottle and screwed the cap tight. Lukewarm, about the same as his palm. The bottle rocked a little in his hand, and the water swayed along its side and levelled again. All the lines were under water now.

He went back under the shade canopy. The canopy was a sheet of shade cloth with concrete laid underneath, and the cloth cut the sun into pieces. Beside it was a row of steps, concrete too, three of them, the top one a little lower than the rest. The shadow of the shade cloth fell on the ground. At the edge of the shadow was light, so white it glared.

Seen from the edge of the canopy, the tower was right there. The section at its base was silver-grey, window after window, and nothing was reflected in the windows. From the bottom up, floor after floor, it drew in and went into the haze. The service yard’s hoarding was white and hid the ground beyond the tower’s base. South of the tower there was a stretch of water. He had never been there. Work on the tower was not his. He had been on the annexe for three months, and every night he stood on the annexe’s floor slabs.

At half past four, a woman came walking from the junction.

She carried nothing but a straight blade. The blade lay along her right forearm. Her hands hung at her sides and swung very little. There was no dust on her soles. She walked up to the window of the sign-in booth, stopped, and said nothing.

Duka pushed a form out from inside onto the sill. The form had three columns: name, company, purpose of visit. She picked up the pen. The pen was tied, and the cord did not reach her. She reached out and pulled the cord, drew the pen closer, and only then began to write.

In the name column she wrote one word: Mitsuki. Sol, some way off, could make out that word clearly. In the purpose column she wrote: To see the tower. She left the company column empty. She looked at that column once, and did not write, and did not ask.

Duka looked at the form and did not read it out. He tapped the end of the pencil twice on the desk, very lightly. Then he picked up a stiff card from the desk, printed V-06 on the front with a line beneath that read “Arrived: New York, last night”, and pushed it out through the window. Sol, some way off, could make out that line clearly. The card had a folded corner. The back was white, with nothing written on it.

“Wait over there. The person meeting you won’t come till evening,” Duka said.

She put the card into the pocket of her short top and turned round.

※

She walked towards the shade canopy. She did not walk fast. She sat down on the steps, on the lowest one, her back against a post of the shade cloth. The shadow of the cloth had shifted a little east, onto the second step.

Both her shoulders were bare. Below the neckline of her short top, both were uncovered, with nothing over them. Her lips were dry and pale, and she did not lick them. Under her left eye was a very faint cyan mark, curved, short. A small knot was tied at her wrist, the cord cherry-pink, no bigger than a fingernail. Her wrist was very thin, the bone standing out, the knot pressed on top of it. The straight blade had no sheath. When she sat down she lowered it from her right forearm and laid it across the step beside her. The cherry-pink cord wound round the hilt faced up, the same kind of cord as the knot on her wrist.

Her hair was tied back, tied very tight, one strand sticking up at the end. There was no sweat on her face. Everyone here sweated. She did not. She put both hands on her knees, spread her fingers, and closed them again. A little dust from the step had settled on her knees, and she did not brush it off.

She sat there and did not look at the tower. She looked at the ground below the steps. A black beetle crawled out of the shadow of the shade cloth, crawled to the edge of a crack in the concrete, paused, and went round it. The shadow of the cloth shifted a little further east, to the edge of her shoe. She did not move the whole time.

Vehicles went past the junction one after another. Her eyes followed each one until it turned in, then came back. A bird landed on the edge of the shade cloth, tilted its head and looked at her for a while, and flew off.

Sol stood on the step above, the bottle in his hand. He looked at her for a while. Then he held the bottle down to her.

She looked up at the bottle, and took it. She unscrewed the cap and drank a mouthful. The water was lukewarm, and she did not frown. Her throat moved twice. She screwed the cap back on without finishing it. The water level in the bottle had dropped a little, not yet down to a line.

“Thank you.” She said it very low, the end of it falling away. He nodded once and said nothing more.

She did not give the bottle back to him. She set it by her leg, against the edge of the step, mouth up.

Just then a man from the crew came under the shade cloth carrying a lunch box. The lid was not on properly, and the food inside was still steaming. He glanced at her, then at Sol, did not stop, and walked off to the far end of the service road. The wind came from the junction carrying cement dust and blew across both her shoulders. She did not flinch.

※

At twenty to six, he came back to the gate. The gate was the fence. On the other side of the fence was the road to the tower’s base, lined with young trees that had not yet taken, their trunks tied to stakes. At the end of the road was the door at the tower’s base, two great glass doors, with stone slabs laid inside, laid all the way back to where he could not see. Beside the fence stood a sign in large letters: Hard hat on to come in. Sign out to leave. Below the sign was an electronic screen, and there was nothing on the screen.

He leaned on the railing and stood still. There was over an hour until the seven o’clock shift. Tonight’s pour was the twelfth floor. He went through the pour sequence once in his head, and when he had gone through it there was still a lot of time left. He held his hard hat in his hand, the back of the brim facing out.

A young worker crouched by the fence, untied his laces and tied them again. When he had tied them he untied them again and tied them again, and only on the third time did he stand up.

Sol looked across from the fence. Under the shade canopy a figure sat, not moving. He looked once, then looked back at the hat in his hand.

The crew foreman came over. He was a middle-aged man with a sheet of paper in his hand, tonight’s pour sequence written on it. He showed the paper to Sol, then took it back. “Pump truck’s half an hour early. Flush the pipe first,” the foreman said. Sol nodded once. The foreman left. Sol’s palm was wet, and he moved the hard hat to his other hand.

The flask on the booth’s sill had stopped steaming. Its lid was shut tight.

The night shift came over one by one, and stood on the inner side of the fence. Each of them held his hard hat in his hand, the back of the brim facing out, all holding it much the same way. No one spoke. Someone was looking at his phone; the light of the screen lit his face, then went out. One man turned his hard hat over, looked at the back of the brim and turned it back. Someone came over from the dormitories, his soles on the gravel, step after step, very loud.

At half past five, while Sol was still under the shade canopy, a crew pickup had driven in and stopped by the cooler drum. A man got out and lifted a bag of ice down from the back. The plastic bag was furred with frost. The man tipped the ice into the cooler drum with a crash. The cubes slid to the bottom of the drum and then floated up one by one, knocking against its sides. He dusted off his hands and left.

This was added for the night shift, one bag at this time every day. Sol had worked here three months. He knew.

In the booth, Duka was counting the sign-in sheet. He took the pencil from behind his ear and touched it down line by line, very slowly. He did not look at the names on the sign-in sheet, only the numbers. At ten to six, he finished counting. He looked up at the sky outside the window, then looked down again and put the pencil back behind his ear.

“Two hundred and fourteen,” he said.

※

At six exactly, the tower lit.

The lights came on from the base. The lowest row of windows lit one pane at a time, lit very fast, as if someone were switching them on one by one. The lit floor moved upwards, past the first band, past the second. By the time the light reached the second band, the lowest row was fully lit. The window frames were white, and the lights in the windows were white. The bands were dark, a shade darker than the silver-grey of the tower. He had counted the lower four. There were too many windows to count the panes, so he counted floors. When the light reached the fourth band, it went into the haze.

The haze pressed the distant buildings into the same grey. He could not see the lights above the haze, only the light coming through it, white, cold, without a trace of any warm colour. The colour of the haze changed a little, whiter than before, then slowly went back to grey.

The site crane stood on the other side of the tower’s base, its jib raised, a lamp hanging from it. The lamp was not lit.

The noise on the site stopped for a beat, then carried on. In the booth, Duka’s pencil stopped above the paper and did not come down.

The sun had already gone down behind the haze and could not be seen. There was still a little light at the edge of the haze, very low. The sky was not yet fully dark. It was lead-grey, with a cold white showing through beneath the grey.

None of the men inside the fence looked up. Sol did not look up either. He looked at the figures on the back of his hard hat brim, lit by the cold white light. Where he had traced them three times, they were a little brighter than the rest.

At the corner of his eye, to the north-east, a rim of pale violet in the sky flashed once. He did not look at it.

Just then, she came over from the shade canopy. The straight blade hung at her side, its point down.

She had the bottle in her hand. A fine film of moisture had formed on it, and drops slid down its side onto her knuckles. She walked to the fence, stopped, and held the bottle out.

The bottle was cool.

He reached out and took it. His fingers did not touch her hand.

The side of the bottle was curved, and it took in a small piece of the north-eastern sky: a rim of pale violet, and inside the rim white cloud, in clumps, not moving. He did not look up. He saw only the sky in the bottle, curved, small. The side of the bottle also reflected a section of the fence, and one of his own hands.

She said nothing, and turned and went back. Both her shoulders were still bare.

The coolness went from his palm to his wrist.

The lines on the bottle were still there. Not one of them had been wiped off.