Meeting Mr Kurtz

We sat in the cockpit waiting for the tide to turn before we could slip our moorings and slide out into the deep water channel. All four of us had worked in the building industry for more years than we cared to remember. I saw the QS and the plumber quite regularly, but I’d not seen the site agent for a long time. The agent – his name was Marlow – was sitting opposite me with his arm over the tiller.

To pass the time I leaned forward and asked him what he had been doing since the last time we’d met. In the main channel a floating gin palace was heading towards the sea. The wake caused our boat to swing against the anchor chain and Marlow waited until it had steadied before he replied.

“I was out of the industry for years. But then I was out of work for a while and I called a company I used to work for. I asked them for a job and, for my sins, they gave me one.

“They asked me to take over a site that had gone wrong. The manager there was known as the best in the company and had been destined for great things … Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.”

As the wind picked up the halliards began to rattle against the mast, making it hard to hear what Marlow was saying. I had to lean forward to catch his next words.

“The job was an office block in Hounslow. To help me get started the manager had agreed to talk to me before he left for good. His name was Kurtz and he had his site office on the top floor of the building. When I arrived I made my way through the street hoardings and on to the site. The rooms on the ground floor were still not completed and the finishes were poor.

On the next, the floor was covered with a litter of beer cans, cigarette stubs and discarded clothing. On the third I had to climb over heaps of rubble and edge past unprotected holes. Higher up, the building partitions had been ripped down and broken up and the walls were covered by a kind of graffiti that appeared to show scenes from a primitive religion.”

Marlow stopped and we all looked up from the boat as a skein of geese from the marshes passed low over the mast on their way to the inland reservoirs.

“When I reached Kurtz’s office he was sitting at a desk facing the door. Against the wall were several carrier bags stuffed with papers and many more emptied over the dirty blankets that, I surmised, had constituted his bed. Between the door and the desk the floor was covered in empty pizza cartons, whiskey bottles and planks of wood from which he had attempted to construct a crude barricade.

“On the desk was an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts. Another smouldered between his fingers and he was occupied with the attempt to light a third using a burned match. I sat down at the desk facing him. ‘What went wrong?’ I asked.

I asked him what he thought I should do with the people he had working on the site. 'Sack them,' he replied. 'Sack them all'

“He leaned forward and I saw he was struggling to bring my face into focus. ‘Tell them … tell them none of it was my fault. It’s been like a nightmare. Nobody in their right mind comes into this industry so we get the ones with wrong minds … and they’ve brought in cheap labour from Eastern Europe and most of them don’t speak English. Those people coming out of the training agencies don’t know their arse from a hole in the ground.’”

Sitting in the boat, Marlow stopped to look at the shafts of sunlight that broke through the clouds and coruscated on the surface of the sea.

“Once he’d started I couldn’t stop him,” he continued eventually. “He said that the big contractors had cast the rest of the industry adrift to sink or swim. The tyranny of the lowest bid had driven prices down to rock bottom. There were so many levels of subcontractors that nobody gave a damn about the work. He even said the industry runs on a culture of fiddling everything, that the number of people being killed was rising.

“He sat at his desk with his head in his hands. I asked him what he thought I should do with the people he had on the site. ‘Sack them,’ he replied. ‘Sack them all. It’s just been horrible, horrible.’”

Marlow gazed at the horizon without speaking for a moment, then turned up his collar against the cold wind.

“Kurtz staggered out of the room. I don’t know if he reached the ground floor, but I never saw him again. I moved around the desk and sat in his chair. After locating his phone in one of the drawers I called the company and told them that I wouldn’t be starting work after all. That afternoon I got a job with a mini-cab firm.”

By the time Marlow had finished speaking we had missed the first of the flood tide. I moved to the front of the boat and roved the anchor chain short. The QS unreefed the foresail while the plumber waited on the tiller. Marlow was still sitting there, staring into the distance.

As the anchor was lifted clear, the wind, which had been backing from the north, started to move the boat forward into the channel and down towards the point where the leaden sky met the flat molten sea.

John Smith is a clerk of works