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Creative Writing: Using a Helmet While in The Building Site Essay

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It has all happened so stupidly, to my mind: one moment, Powel standing there, brushing from off his helmet the chalk-dust which has turned his face and stiff overcoat prematurely grey; suddenly, a shout from a welder a few stories up, a falling steel beam, and Powel stretched out on the concrete, his head split cleanly - segmented like a grapefruit. So stupid; there is no sense in feeling shocked or dismayed about it. You take your helmet off for five seconds and someone drops a steel beam on your head. We none of us knew Powel well. I was as close a friend to him as any man on the building site, and I didn't have any strong feelings for him. He was a difficult man; he had to provoke people. No doubt he didn't do it deliberately, but he …show more content…

There wasn't much of the Dobostorte left in any case, not enough to go around, so Brian beat Powel up, made him promise to bring more tomorrow, sent him home with his ear and his tongue bleeding and a couple of his teeth missing. He never took much of an interest in his work. I asked him what professional work he had done in Russia and he say "construction work, the same as here", so I suppose that he was merely lazy. His wife had been a professional cook but now she looked after the children. Two children, identical twins - both girls. He was always complaining about the twins. They used to run cat hair through his comb to make him think he was going bald, or turn on the washing machine while he was listening to the radio so that it would pick up and amplify the electrical signal. He would complain to his wife and she would tell him off for not being more assertive. Somehow their duplicity always frightened him, he would tell me; they were uncanny, there was some supernatural quality about them - something primitive or taboo. I used to think it was hilarious - he would work all day and be teased and taunted by a gang of men, then he'd go home and the teasing and the nagging would start up again, this time from a gang of women. On the train, he used to tell me, he could relax. On the train, to and from work - an hour and a half in each direction from Frankston to the central business district, another fifteen minutes by tram if

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