What Tiler? by Michael Holden

one truth refreshed in tumult is that uniforms come with expectations that are not uniform themselves. It had been a while since I thought I had worn one (boy scout, bad waiter), but any outfit calls to how one might address its occupant.

It took a pair of £15.99 overalls to bring this home. I imagined that shrugging off my daily regalia in favour of these would usher me directly from nondescript to invisible, but I was wrong. The demolition of a bathroom and the painting of a wall were all it took to add a patina of authenticity to the drill cotton, and I was suddenly in high demand.

“Know anything about kitchens?” asked my

new neighbour. His forlorn response to my confession that I did not, beyond the obvious, know anything about kitchens — “I’ve tried online” — confirmed what I had long suspected: the digital realm is a delusional space when you have something tangible to do. For all the undoubted value of Checkatrade et al, what we want, when things get real, is someone real to talk to.

Next door’s scullery crisis was one of many incidents to which I was fruitlessly alerted while masquerading as useful, and carrying sacks of rubble out of my front door. Whatever swagger I might have gained, my accidental casting as a man of action was soon replaced by a slouch, and the sense that I was now seen locally as little more than a corrupt official, dressed to help, but really just more bad news.

This works both ways. I needed help myself. It is one thing to smash a bathroom, another to tile it, and the truth of truly skilled people is that they tend to be busy. After joyless internet excursions of my own, I too took to stopping men on the street, and I too was rejected. Wat Tyler may well have led the peasant’s revolt, but he is also a great idea for a magazine.

There was one place that still loved me, or the idea of me the overalls misrepresented, and that was Wickes. The car park of my local branch is another example of what one reads about on screens becoming real in ways we don’t imagine. In this case, immigration. Sometimes there are 20 or 30 people here, literally begging for work. Depending on what kind of hard day they are having, these men, young and old, from weak to wiry, are beckoned into vans by builders or herded into them by the Home Office and the police.

The fact I come here alone on a bicycle is no obstacle to their ambitions. “You have work?” they ask. Again, I wish I were a better version of that which I appear to be.

In the end, I found a recovering sex addict plasterer on the internet who told me he once had a second home in South Africa but had surrendered everything to various exes to whom he bore no ill will since he was, by his own admission, completely lost to his own libido, “So here I am.”

He did have a lot of energy. He turned up at eight and was done by ten. As I helped him load his van, he asked what I did. I said I wrote, that it was unreliable but occasionally great work. “Like acting?” he said.

“Without the sex,” I added. He had a good laugh about that and then drove away quickly, perhaps to the nearest lay-by.

I have never met a writer with a second home in the southern hemisphere. Not for the first time, the world of workwear seemed to be saying I was on the wrong side of employment history. No one offers me work if I walk around my neighbourhood with a pen in my hand.

Then someone I knew died, and it took a while for LinkedIn to get the message. For weeks afterwards, his digital spirit was still calling out to me to join his professional network. When he was alive he used to email me his writing and ask me for advice. I did my best but he would have been better off asking me about kitchens. I didn’t go to his funeral because I was still working on the flat and covered in dust, but he had been a broadminded and informal man, so I went to the wake in my overalls.

People didn’t recognise me, thinking perhaps I had come to fix something in the building, and that was fine with me. These things bring up the past like food poisoning, and any invisibility becomes a superpower. I could see them, though, and this was the first passing of a peer I’d been to where I realised my generation wasn’t young anymore. We looked like we belonged there. All at once we were the funeral people, right on time. Again, the garments kept me just outside of a reality I was anxious to avoid. They were starting to feel like the best

16 quid I’d ever spent. Feel free to bury me in them when the day comes.

They remain a purchase that keeps providing. Minor drop in temperature: overalls. Increase in temperature: roll up sleeves of overalls. Wash day: overalls. I could go on… One day, someone told me that someone they knew had found a gun and some ammunition among a dead relative’s possessions. This spurred a lot of internal dialogue about what to wear if indeed you were prepared to kill somebody, as opposed to going to Wickes and asking someone in the car park to do it for you. Naturally, I considered overalls as the ideal cover for the jobbing assassin, but then I remembered something I heard once from an experienced shoplifter, one of modern life’s great operational ironies: if you truly want to disappear these days, what you need is a high-viz vest.

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