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Before I became a shelf-stacker and spent my evenings and nights in the aisles of the cash and carry market, filling shelves, fetching pallets from high on the storage shelves with the forklift, now and then helping one of the last customers of the evening and getting to know all kinds of food, I’d been working on building sites for a couple of years   I hadn’t given up of my own accord but I wouldn’t have kept it up all that long, even if the boss hadn’t fired me I was a builder’s mate, lugging sacks of cement and plasterboard, gutting flats – that meant I knocked the plaster off the walls, tore out fireplaces and chimneys with a big sledgehammer we used to call ‘Rover’, until I was covered in soot and dirt and spent hours getting the soot and dust out of my nose at home The firm didn’t even pay well and the boss was a bastard The guy came from Bavaria; I’ve met people from Bavaria who were actually OK though   I can’t remember exactly when all the fuss with the boss started, but I do know we were demolishing an old roof that day We found a big pigeon’s graveyard, two pigeons still alive and perfectly still in among all the bones, piles of feathers and pigeon shit and decomposing and mummified corpses, and we could only tell by their eyes and their heads, moving slightly every now and then, that they were waiting We fetched the Portuguese guys and they killed them with a blow of a spade Then we tipped lime over the pigeon graveyard and shovelled it all into buckets and tipped them down the rubbish chute fastened to the scaffolding outside   And after that we didn’t feel much like hard work any more; the pigeons had got to us We took the tiles off another section of the roof, not exactly motivated, removed the roof battens with wrecking bars, and then we took a lunch break   We usually had our lunch break at eleven thirty, and when the bells of the church just round