Harvey
He liked working with his hands – honestly he did. He'd done it all his life and there were no nasty surprises. Wood couldn't turn around with a questioning glare and ask 'why exactly are you doing this anyway?' or change its mind last minute so you had to start all over again. It didn't require lots of fiddly words and phrases, public speaking or a smart uniform. No...all in all, wood was safe - safe as houses, like they say. Like Carry On films on Christmas Eve and slippers laid out by the side of the bed – safe like that.
Harvey had tried hard at school – he really had: went to all the afternoon sessions when he'd been ill, did most of his homework and didn't ever chat back. His mother had once even called him her 'little angel' between swigs of brandy – the boy with the porcelain face and manners like from public school. He could have put in a bit more enthusiasm - he supposed - but Shakespeare sounded like of one them foreign languages to him: pretty sounding once you got over the unusualness of it all, but having no meaning without painful – almost surgical – extraction. He didn't have it in him to kill a book like that...or a play...he couldn't remember which one. Heard later that Shakespeare had been a poofter like all those men on telly ...explained a lot, really. He didn't have a mind for dates or sums, either. The History teacher had once told Harvey that he'd been dropped one too many times on his head as a baby – 'all yer brain cells got exploded and yer sense leaked out yer ears, boy'. With a mother like his, it was perfectly possible.
All in all, considering the bad luck he'd been served with, he thought he ought to be congratulated on his choice of profession: he was good at it, and for someone who wasn't good at much, that was all the encouragement he needed.
He tightened up the D-clamp with one hand, holding the dowel steady with the other – like making a sandwich. 'Harvey Samson, ' he said to himself, 'you are a lucky man.' Some people might have laughed at him for that – one of those giggles that rang like bells or coins in your pocket: a rich laugh. But that's one of the up-sides of working with your hands: with a bit of hard work, you could do it alone. Course you'd get visited a couple of times a month by fancy-schmancy set designers, going on about 'symbolic representation, 'lighting choices' , 'conceptual storytelling, daaarling' and other stuff that didn't actually mean anything. But Harvey didn't mind that so much. He'd just flash a few pearly whites and keep checking that all the nuts and bolts were screwed up alright: the trick was to look busy and happy about it.
Today was a visiting day, so he's brushed up a little round the place and even combed his hair back. He was beginning to think he should've used gel as it had gone all fuzzy, like next-door's privet hedge but sandy-blonde. 'Jesus.', he breathed, turning his head from side-to-side in the mirror. He ran his hand through the fluffy cat that had made a home on his scalp. 'What do you think you're doing to me, eh?' His reflection stared back at him blankly and he amused himself by pretending his hair did – at least – look a but less puffed up. He looked himself sternly in the eyes. 'That's better.'
