I Wouldn't Climb the Scaffold

I have done high work for fifteen years. Scaffolds are furniture to me; I trust a tagged, inspected rig more than most ladders, and this one was tagged, inspected, and had held six men all morning.

My job after lunch was simple: up two lifts, an hour of pointing work, down. I put my hand on the ladder and my hand refused to close around the rung properly. It shook. I looked at it the way you would look at a tool malfunctioning — I actually flexed it a few times, annoyed. Tried again. My whole forearm went porridge-weak, and a wrongness settled over the entire structure above me, the way a word goes strange when you stare at it too long. The rig looked normal and read as wrong, both at once.

Foreman thought I was winding him up. I have never refused work — it became a whole scene, lads leaning out to watch, someone doing ghost noises. I stood there red-faced and immovable and asked, formally, for a re-inspection before anyone else went up. That is a right we have on paper that nobody in living memory had invoked over a feeling.

The scaffold inspector came out cranky and went up the far standard with his torch, and about four minutes in he stopped being cranky. A coupler on a main ledger — load-bearing, two lifts up, right over where my hour of pointing was chalked — had a hairline fracture through the casting. Paint had hidden it at the morning check; it had opened during the day's loading. He said the word 'catastrophic' quietly, to the coupler itself, not to us.

The lads bought my drinks for a month and still call me the witch. I laugh along. Then sometimes at night I flex my right hand, remembering how it knew before I did, and wonder what else it is keeping track of.