OLD SOFT HANDS

‘Have you ever done a day’s work in your life?’ Her fixed glare, tunnelled through a shallow quarry of black mascara saw my naked mind, crouched over, trying to cover up its shame. She was less-than-half joking. The way her red-wine tongue lashed it through cupped hands, over the swimming baths delirium echoing around the Friday night pub hit my arse with a brisk smack of unwelcome truths. For whatever reason, I’d gone for a handshake when introduced to a slightly older friend of a friend. Not a quick hug. Not a nod. Not even the simple peck of pursed lips on the cheek I’d been dangerously exposed to as a small-town Yorkshireman in bigger places. Nobody had ever told me I had soft hands before. Probably something to do with spending too much time around arty people, all wearing our velveteen skin gloves in pristine galleries and that,

“They’re just so soft!” She gasped, pressing my fingertips and prodding my palm. I stood there looking at them, my friend pissing herself laughing, knowing how this would skittle me for weeks. Me: of inescapably little masculinity despite ten years playing rugby league on frozen pitches. I have done many days of work, but I knew what she meant. Valid currency for work work must involve power tools, bricks or big machines and result in lizard-skinned, army hands. Fag breaks. Tea you could trot a mouse on.

I fell asleep on a pub toilet once. I headbutted a stranger out of blind panic when he tried to attack me, unprovoked, when I was 16. I like football and chant things at rival teams. I’ve done temporary jobs for weeks at a time in factories, basements, emptying council estate bins, in fact! It didn’t matter. Not here. None of it. I had already lost the moment I touched her skin; any masculinity badges that had been sewn onto my jacket were pried off by her acrylic nails in an instant. It was too late. She’d seen my pride die and doubled down, shoeing the corpse with rhetorical questions about how hard it must be, picking up pens and tapping on keyboards all day.

That was Yorkshire and I was used to it. But soft hands! It was an observation only a builder’s wife could make. Surely. Years later, now in Wiltshire, I hid my lack of strength for my 6”2 height as my father-in-law dragged the tree stump into the light. It scraped a trail through a layer of sawdust. Then he handed me an incredibly dense, heavy brass coloured thing about the size of a large apple. Now I was out of the shallows, hauled out in a riptide, soft hands sweating at the palm.

‘Ever used one of them?’ He asked out the side of his mouth.

‘Don’t think so…’ Of course I hadn’t.

‘Log grenade. This end goes into the wood.’ He said, rolling his tough, battle-hardy digit over the golden point of this thing. ‘Try avoid the knots; they’re buggers if you catch ‘em. Then drive it on the top, just there.’ He pointed to the centre. I nodded quietly as he trundled back inside his massive shed, clattered around a bit and returned moments later with a real sledgehammer. The closest I’d come to one of these was the fourth row of a professional wrestling show and I’m sure that one was gimmicked so it wouldn’t fracture someone’s skull.

‘OK then. Just come down in a straight line, like this.’ At 75, he brought the thing down with ballerina grace and the log gave way, splitting down the middle. Each half swayed side-to-side on its back for a few seconds. Mercifully, he handed the sledgehammer to me and busied himself while I huffed, puffed, and managed a few passable efforts. The next day, my shoulders didn’t work and my arms screamed when I lifted an ink nib.

I tried whisky again, to get in his good books and to my surprise, liked it. A masculine win. Not toxic; just biological, inescapable in its existence, and important for some to display, especially in mating seasons. For a while I could name two Japanese brands, But I’ve since forgotten one. There’s a bar in Manchester called The Whisky Jar. I got cocky and tried to use the knowledge to look clued up and asked for a single Yamazaki. The bartender asked if that was 12 or 18? I grinned vacantly, found out, and asked what the difference was.

‘6-years!’ He thundered back at me, cracking up, turning the heads of his colleagues, raising smirks. Old soft hands jangled back out of the closet and shook my pink, shea butter lathered, Egyptian-cotton soft hand. It took four swings and a nearly torn rotator cuff to break the log, but he seemed happy and let me marry his daughter in the end.

Truth is, the creative industry doesn’t tend to gush testosterone. I know a painter who genuinely upset his grandfather by asking if Blackburn Rovers were the ones playing in the pink costumes. We share a lust for the stories our effeminate qualities bring about in our native communities. The small-town characters it lures out. The monkey whoops and the flexing. Now, with at least 8 blokes on ladders, fixing and cutting things visible across the street from my makeshift lockdown office window, I sip coffee, drawing, hunched over my crossed legs. After half an hour or so my wrist aches, so I put down my pen and wonder if my hands really are that soft. How do you measure that? She’s probably right whatever the metrics.