Day 136: Men

It's hard work pretending to be a man. You put on heavy work boots and thick work pants, pockets covering pockets which are in turn filled with more pockets, and in all the pockets there are screws, and you have a drill hanging from your belt, and you're bending down and stretching up and lifting things and carrying things and climbing ladders and screwing and hoisting and plugging and taping all the long day long.

And there are so many men, other men in work boots and work pants, their bellies hanging over their belts, thick arms and leathery hands; belching, joshing, ribbing; talking about cricket; asking you to check the transformer, like you have a clue what a transformer is, or does. And the end bit of your drill keeps falling out and you don't know how to make it stay in, you sit there trying to hide what you're doing from the view of the men as you fiddle with your drill, but you know they can see you, and your end bit falls out again, and it doesn't matter that you've read Camus or that you appreciate the abstract impressionism of Mark Rothko or that choosing between "who" and "whom" is the easiest thing in the world to you, because you can't drill with a drill, and you're not a man, and you want to give up and cry.

And you go to the toilet and there are men shitting in all the stalls. Men coughing, men shifting their weight, men playing Jewel Quest at full volume on their phones. Men shirking responsibility, men taking moments to themselves. All sat bowed, vulnerable, separate but together, communing with the gods. Plops, grunts, the unrolling of roll. The lighting harsh. The blues and the greens. The echoes of the room. And you go in a stall, and you shit, and it is good.

And the day passes. And you graft. You do everything there is to do. And after a day of grafting you get in the van and Steve drives you up the motorway, and you are empty in that glow of honest exhaustion, and you smell the sawdust in your hair, rub the blisters on your hands, feel the ache in knees and thighs, and the sun goes down, and BBC Radio 2 plays, and you are a man, in a manner of speaking, and you are fine.