Monotypes.
My girlfriend currently has the builders in. This is not some obscene euphemism but a banal and commonplace fact. What makes the builders interesting is the way that every morning they listen to a unique radio station which is surely broadcast on a special builder’s frequency. It plays “Baby Love” by the Supremes. Every morning. Without fail.
I’ve seen the radio. It is suitably battered and plastered in plaster dust and has a single speaker from which “Baby Love” and a select playlist of other builder classics issue forth. My girlfriend hates the radio. She claims it is because it has, in the past, woken her up. However she is a woman of strong natural instincts, like a dog barking at ghosts (in a good way) and her mistrust and hatred of the device makes me strangely fear it as if it were some evil talisman.
On previous mornings I have found myself wondering if the builders use Builder Radio to shore up their identity, in the way that we all drift into cliche and stereotype to make social interaction bareable or even possible. Amongst strangers I often become more of a “filmmaker” than I ever need to be when with friends or alone. The job of domestic builder forces them to regularly intrude into the intimate early mornings of strange households and, perhaps, in some subconscious way the blare of “Baby Love” enables all parties to avert their eyes from the private horrors of the internal life.
But the mistrust of the actual radio, the way it squats on the table, makes me question this simplistic sociology. What if these men were not builders until they accidentally fell within the thrall of the radio? What if the station, along with “Baby Love” broadcast some deep controlling force?
With our usual mix of mutters and nods, I say bye to the builders and miss three buses and a train on the way back to my own house. Down the road from me another house has builders doing some drastic to the front which involves a middle aged man standing in the sunshine staring out across the road. He is topless, his beer gut bronze, his face oddly blank in thought. From a radio on the scaffold behind him comes a tune that chills me in the sunshine.