Blue Collar by Danny King Read Free Book Online

mobile phone on the draining board. I was an angry man
     that day, I can tell you.
    Still, that was then and this was now. And for the moment I was inside, clean, dry, fed and suddenly very, very bored.
    I hated being rained off when I had nothing else to do. Losing the money’s always bad enough in itself, but spending the day
     rattling around inside your flat while the rest of the world’s at work can leave you depressed to the point of tears by the
     time CBeebies comes on. It’s OK if you’ve got jobs that need doing or there’s some snooker on the box that needs watching
     but I had neither today so by one o’clock I had the fridge out of its hole and a bottle of Ajax in my hand just to give myself
     something to do.
    Of course, the other reason I was so restless was because Charley’s number kept taunting me from my mobile.
    I picked it up every now and then just to check that I still had it and even wrote it down on a piece of paper in case my
     SIM card decided to commit suicide just for a laugh. Her 0s and 7s and 5s and 6s looked so inviting from where I was standing
     that I keyed them in just to hear the sounds they made, then tried the same thing on my landline to see if they made the same
     sort of beeps. Naturally, I hung up before I got to the last digit, as it was only Monday and you didn’t phone a girl up on
     Monday if you’d only met her on Friday. Not unless there was a war on. Even I knew that. So I weighted down her number with
     a cup so that it wouldn’t get blown through the gap under the door and down a drain when my phone exploded and wandered back
     into the kitchen to look for something else to do.
    As luck would have it, my kettle needed descaling and I remembered seeing a descaling block in the box of cleaning products
     when I dug out the Ajax, so I killed another half an hour defurring its element before finally losing the will to live.
    This was ridiculous. Why couldn’t I phone a girl on the Monday if I’d only just met her on the Friday? Who had made up that
     stupid rule? All weekend long Jason, Tony and old Stan had been telling me I had to wait until at least Wednesday before calling
     Charley and I’d nodded like a pigeon and promised them that I wouldn’t even think about it. But seriously, why couldn’t I?
     And why the fuck was I listening to old Stan?
    I marched back into the living room and picked up her number like I meant it. It was now almost twenty past two and if I had
     to twiddle my thumbs for another forty-eight hours before I could even phone her and listen to her racking her brain for excuses,
     I was going to go off my chump.
    I recalled her number and pressed the green button and instantly felt like runner-up in a cream-cracker-eating competition.
    It started to ring at the other end, so I took a quick belt of water before she answered and brought it all up through my
     nose when it went down the wrong way.
    ‘Fuckig… urgh… ug… guurr,’ I told Charley when she said hello.
    I coughed out the worst of it as urgently as I could and half thought about asking if it was OK if I rang back on Wednesday,
     but the ball was now rolling so I had to go for broke. ‘Sorry about that, fucking swallowed some water down the wrong way
     just as you answered,’ I explained. Hang on, did I just say ‘fucking’ or was that in my imagination? ‘Er, anyway, I just wanted
     to give you a quick ring and see how you were. How are you?’ I asked.
    ‘I’m fine, thanks,’ Charley replied, dropping her voice a little. ‘Much better than Saturday anyway. I stayed in bed the whole
     day.’
    ‘Oh, really?’ I pondered, then wondered if that sounded pervy, like I had my hands down my pants as I was talking to her or
     something.
    ‘So, how are you?’ Charley then asked.
    ‘I’m good. Rained off today,’ I explained.
    ‘What?’
    ‘It’s raining today. Can’t work when it’s raining.’
    ‘Why? Are you made of sugar or something?’ She chuckled.
    I