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Mud
The window faces a small field trimmed by sleek grey road. It was once common ground for the workers, but now the houses are split into flats and the field is private property. She watches as men begin to clear it. The few spindly trees and patches of brush don’t take long to crush into furrowed mud but the subsequent digging takes forever. In early summer the men arrive before the heat gets fierce and within an hour they are soaked with sweat. They drive a digger up and down for a week, and the earth piles up in mounds, crumbly and grey on top and dense and brown beneath. But then weeks will go by and the men won’t arrive and the digger will wait in the mashed earth and the kids will sit in the pit and drink and smoke and shout. Sometimes when it lasts all night the neighbours call the police and their flashing lights slash through her blinds, gutting the dark flat.
Autumn comes and the plot is still derelict. The wind picks up and cuts brutally cold through the glassy September sun. One night there’s a storm with lighting and the chestnut tree across the road looms and creaks and threatens to break. The weather warning passes and the days go by, and the wind alternates between mild and icy. As the leaves begin to drop, the men return to pour foundations. Alma describes the unbearable noise they made drilling into the earth with massive corkscrews. She says she could feel the sound through the soles of her feet, shaking the walls and making the glasses on the draining board clink. The ground is divided into neat trenches, stuck with metal rods and crisscrossed by walk boards. An orange cement mixer sits in the digger's spot. The men pour and shovel and then leave again and all winter the concrete base lies covered in holey white plastic that tears and whips in the wind. It's soaked, frozen, snowed on. In January a new group of workers arrive to spend a day constructing a fence around the site. She gets home in the dark to the smell of paint and it's as if half her vision is blacked out by the navy wall that gleams wetly in the streetlights.
After this, the build slows back down. Sometimes there are heavy sounds from behind the fence but nothing grows above it. It exhausts her, how it crawls and groans with colossal wealth. Twice a day she commutes down diverted pavements overhung by scaffolding and adverts for luxury apartment blocks —all hazy rendered edges and blue skies. It’s hard to get her head around how much it all costs and why. Hard to believe that the rendered highrises won’t rot like teeth if their insides stand uncovered and exposed to a winter's worth of rain. The puddles on the roads are milky brown from the dust. Rubble piles up in skips. For every block finished another two collapse and begin again.
And sometimes she feels excited and she runs through the city at night and the huge plastic sheets suck in and out of the empty windows of the half-built tower blocks like sails that crack and bellow in the wind, a force enough to slap her in the chest and blow through the arms of her coat.
The men come back and this time it's with the steel frame and the speed it goes up with is astonishing. Then it's still again, untouched and incomplete for another full year. Meanwhile, the local news runs a story about a huge crack in the foundations of a building by the same company. Residents get evacuated and there are petitions, fundraisers and protests. The story reaches national TV. Walking home one evening she catches a glimpse of the report on a screen in the new glass-fronted gym and she wonders if things might actually be changing but it drops quickly from the news cycle. She still gets weekly emails from the housing union who are trying to take the company to court but the city sits back in apathy. Work on the streets rolls on slowly as before. Her landlord informs them he’s putting up their rent and they can’t afford to keep the lease, even though there's damp in every room and the extractor fan in the bathrooms broken again and the washing machine keeps fusing and all the taps leak and the door handles periodically pull off in their hands . Alma picks up an extra shift a week and spends evenings on her laptop refreshing rightmove.
They put windows in the frames of the complex on the main road and it looms greenish on the horizon until four in the afternoon when it shines, burning orange in reflected light. Then the days get longer and she stops seeing the sunset on her way home.
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