From the cab you can see the whole business: the water, the market’s awnings going out like a hand of cards, the funicular’s two cars passing at the middle station, the dome, the monastery, and the other hill with its own crane answering his. Eleven years he has been the man in the cab. His wife says he has a job with a view. It is the only joke they still both like.
The building has no name and is referred to on every document as the works. Nobody on site has been told what it is for. There was a hoarding at the start with a picture on it, and the picture was of a building that was not this one, and the hoarding came down in the second year and was not replaced.
The rain here is contracted. Somebody bought weather for the far hill in bulk — the site is dry when the market is not, and wet at eleven on Tuesdays when the schedule says wet, and the concrete cures to a curve on a chart in an office. When there is a shortfall the men stand under the gantry with their tea and watch the dry sky owe them something.
The floors are the thing. He knows the count in his hands: the cable pays out so much for each, and he has felt the difference between the eighteenth and the nineteenth in his palms since the fourth year. The calluses at the base of each finger have gone smooth; on cold mornings the right hand closes a half-count before the left. In the fourth year the count in his hands was twenty-two. Two winters ago it was twenty-six. This spring the site notice on the fence said nineteen and the drawings in the hut agreed with the notice, and he stood in front of it with his tea and felt the number in his hands and the number on the paper fail to shake hands.
He asked the engineer. “Count them with me,” he said. “Not the drawings. Them.” The engineer, who is young and honest, checked the drawings and the survey and said nineteen, and then went up in the hoist with him and counted through the glass on the way, and came down and said nineteen, and did not look at him for the rest of the week.
In September the drawings were reissued. He went to the hut and pulled his own timesheets from the fourth year, the paper ones, to settle it privately. They had been reissued too. The hours are all there and they are all his and the floors they are booked against are floors he does not remember lifting to.
The lift log is the only book on site nobody was told to keep. Nobody agreed to keep it either. All of them keep it. It is a pad on a nail by the hoist and the men write the floor they are going to, and it goes back years, and the numbers in it are in the men’s own hands and they are the wrong numbers, which is to say his numbers. He has not shown it to the engineer. He looks at it most days, the way you check a stove.
He is still owed a shirt by a man who left in the spring — a good one, blue, lent for a wedding — and he thinks about it perhaps once a week and has never once asked for it back. The topping-out was in June. There was a small tree, which is traditional, and photographs, and a man from the counterparty who thanked them and left in a car. In July they were told to begin again at the ninth floor: the specification had moved, the client requires continuity, the works continue. They stripped the ninth back to the frame in eleven days. It was the best work he has seen his crew do.
The lads run a book on what it is, and the running of the book is the best hour of the week: the odds are chalked, the arguments are formal, and a man who proposes a hospital is fined a biscuit. The favorites for years were a hospital, a hotel, and the records. Lately somebody claims a cousin who says the whole thing is one machine and the floors are its cabinets, and the tea hut has stopped taking bets on that one.
What he knows: no windows have been ordered above the twelfth. The lifts are specified with no buttons inside them. There is a drain in the middle of every floor, and above the fourteenth there is provision for water coming out and none for water going in.
Eleven years is a long time to be paid to lift things into a shape nobody will name. He has stopped saying the number out loud at home. He is forty-eight and his knees are not the trade’s problem. He can retire in four with the site pension, which is a real thing and pays on the day, and the crane will go to the boy who is better than he was at that age, and the boy will feel the floors in his hands too, in time.
At the end of the day he sets the jib into the wind, as you must, and it swings loose and finds its own direction, which is always out toward the channel.
He climbs down in the last light. On the fence at the gate the notice is still there, and the number on it is nineteen, and he stops the way he stops every evening and counts the lit floors from the bottom, which is not how the drawings count them.
He gets twenty-three. He gets twenty-three again. He goes home.