THE SS OF THE COUNCIL

‘What you doing?’ I said to the man pulled a cable from the corridor into the quadrant on to which my front door opens.
‘Stripping the tiles,’ he said.
‘You’re replacing them?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘just stripping them.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘You’re taking the top layer off.’
‘Yes,’ he said.
I went out for a couple of hours. When I got back the man, using what looked like an industrial floor polisher on the tiles, was being watched, as he did so, by two other men, who, like him, were wearing council tee-shirts.
‘That’s how you do is it?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It takes a while. See the grey bits?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s what it looked like when it was first laid.’
‘It’s the first time it’s been done,’ said one of the other men. ‘Ever.’
‘First time for forty years then,’ I said. ‘Almost to the day.’
‘We don’t go down too far,’ said the first man, ‘because they’re asbestos.’
‘The tiles are?’
‘Yes,’ he said. They’re sealed though, or we’d be wearing suits and masks,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to know what we’re doing.’
‘That’s right,’ said the third man who was stood in front of the lift. ‘We’re specialists.’
‘Oh yes?’ I said turning to face him.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We’re like the SS of the council.’