第3章 What I Did Not Do

## Gordy I was not there. That is the first thing and I have said it four hundred times and I am going to say it again, and every single time I have said it somebody has asked me the next question, and the next question is always the same, which is: what were you doing. I was in Bay Four. I was in Bay Four from ten till two on the twelfth of January, and I will tell you why I was in Bay Four and I have never been asked why I was in Bay Four and I have wanted to be asked why I was in Bay Four for twenty-eight years. I was in Bay Four because that is where the men go who have not been given a shift. You do not say no. You do not get a say. They post the rota and if you are not on it you go where the work is, and on the twelfth the work was Bay Four, and Bay Four is the pit where the rejects go, and the rejects are the stuff that comes out of the mixer wrong, and you break it up with a sledge and you carry it out in barrows, and it is the worst work in the building and everybody knows it and it is where they put a man they are not using. So I was in Bay Four. Ten till two. And the shift foreman was Collard and I have no complaint about Collard and never have, and he will tell you himself what time he was where, and I would thank you not to go asking him about anything else, because he is seventy-four and he has got a hip and he has not been asked a single question about that week in fifty years until a man with a notebook turned up at his door in 2026 and my sister-in-law saw him on the road and it went round the street before he got back in. Twelve till two I was on the barrow ramp with a man called Prentice, who is not related to anybody in this story as far as I know, and we were taking the last four barrows of the morning reject out to the skip, and the skip was full, and the skip takes eleven loads, and I have had that number in my head since 1998, and I have never once put it in a document. At two I came off the ramp and I went and washed my hands and I went out through the C door into the yard and I went to the canteen, and the canteen is where everybody says the thing happened, and it is not, and I will tell you what is true about the canteen and then you can decide. There were about nine men in the canteen at ten past two on the twelfth of January and I know it was nine because there are nine of us and we used to count, because Collard counted, because you cannot have a canteen in a works like that without counting, and there is a rule about how many men you can have in a room. Collard was counting on the twelfth of January. I know he was counting because he was always counting. He is a man who counts. And he came in and he said, "Where's Pease," and Prentice said, "He's in here," and I said, "I'm in here," and Collard said, "You're not in the pit, you're on the ramp," and I said, "I did both, I've just come off the ramp," and he wrote something down on a pad he had, and he was writing, and that is the last thing anybody can prove about me and they have made it do more work than it can carry. I did not have an argument with Nerissa Aldercott. I have never had an argument with Nerissa Aldercott. Nobody in that works had an argument with Nerissa Aldercott in ten years, and I will tell you exactly what she was like because somebody has to, and then it is my problem that she is not here to check me. She was quiet. Not quiet the way you are quiet when you are hiding something. Quiet the way a person is quiet when they have decided what to be, and she had decided, and it was visible, and it was a kind of stillness that people read as cold and that was not coldness at all. I will give you three things and then I will stop, because every one of them has been used against me and I have never been able to make them sound different. She came into Bay Four at about half past one. Not to speak to me. She came in to get her respirator off a hook, because it was hers and it was on the hook by the door, and it was the fourth hook and everybody's was on the fourth hook and nobody minded. And she said, "Mr Pease, you'll be wanted on the ramp," which is the yard, and which is me, and which I did not want, because I had been in Bay Four since ten. And I said, "I'll go in a minute." And she said, "You won't. You're on till two, and then you won't, and I'll tell Collard, and you'll be the first one off." And I said, "You'd do that over a shift?" And she said, "I'd do that over a shift, and I've been doing it over a shift for two years, and you'd not know, and that's the last conversation I'll have with you, and you can make of it what you like, because I know what you'll make of it, and I've not got the time." And I said, "Don't do that." And she said, "Don't do what." And I said, "Don't decide things about my work. I'm not — I'd not do that to you." And she said, "You would. You've done it twice and I let it go both times and I've made my decision and I'm telling you so you can be angry at me now instead of on Friday." And she took her respirator off the hook and she went out through the C door and I stood in Bay Four on my own for about twenty-five minutes and did not do any work at all. That is what I did not do. There is no woman in this account. I have said it four hundred times. There is no woman. There was a foreman in a works and a woman in a hall and a wage packet and a boot with a cassette in it in a ditch a mile from my house, and the whole of the rest of it has been men saying the word *close* about a mile of riverbank in January. And here is the thing I have never said to anybody, including the man from the newspaper, and I said it to my wife in about 2004 and she has never mentioned it. I never asked her about the hour. Not once. Twenty-eight years. Everybody in the country has asked me about the hour, and about the coat, and about the boot, and about what I said to a girl in a boiler room on the twelfth of January. Nobody has asked me why I never asked her about the hour. And the reason is that if I had, then she would have told me, and then I would have known, and I could not have been not-guilty. Because a man who has not asked does not know, and a man who has not known is a man who has not got anything to carry, and that is the only decent thing anybody has ever done for me, and I did it on purpose, at the age of thirty-two, in a kitchen in Carbide Creek, and it has cost me every single thing I have ever wanted, and I would do it again.