It was a morning shift. Like a lot of morning shifts it had an early start. A house had to be roofed. The occupants had agreed to be away for 48 hours. Pete’s alarm went off at 5.45am. Daylight was throwing a mantle over the receding night. Daylight savings was in place. The clocks had been turned back. Spring forward in spring and fall back in autumn.

In 15 minutes, with the practised routine of one who has been shift-driven, Pete was in his utility truck turning on the ignition. Two minutes later he tooted the horn briefly as he drove past a house in Chandos Lane. He looked out the window as his vehicle drove by and noticed the light in the kitchen. Good. Hassan was awake already. That’s great, Pete remembers thinking, for Hassan had a problem. It had to do with responding to an alarm. He had a tendency to sleep through the ringing.

Well at least this day he’d be on time for work. Today of all days work there was aplenty. Rows and rows of tiles to be removed and replaced, an entire roof reborn. Plus there was the little matter of their disagreement. It had to do with wages. Pete had inadvertently left his salary slip behind on a work depot changing room table. Hassan had picked it up and given it to him but not before noticing the discrepancy in their pay rates.

“You don’t get paid more because you’re ten years older or you’ve worked longer,” was the theme of their disagreement. “We do the same work after all. For 7.6 hours. You do tiles. I do tiles. You don’t do more. I don’t do less.”

That was the sub-topic in the debate, which threatened to venture into uglier depths before both men withdrew to saner levels of cold silence.

Friendly, cheerful greetings thereafter metamorphosed into a brief impersonal, ‘Hi’ and nothing much else, except maybe a request to pass a tile or fetch an implement while the two worked on a rooftop. This day’s shift, to top it off, was a two-man venture.

“I can’t spare a third hand. It’s going to have to be you and Hassan,” said the foreman, “I have to use the other two guys on another assignment.”

The foreman was referring to Mark and Caleb, a pair of freshmen.

“Give me Mark or Caleb,” suggested Pete, “I’ll help train one of them,” to which the foreman replied, “No, I want two experienced hands on this project, Pete, I have only 48 hours to deliver.”

And that was that.

And there they were, Pete and Hassan, one hunched over on top of the roof replacing a tile, the other just climbing back up a ladder bearing more tiles. Pete tests the open framework of the girders. In places where the tiles have been removed, he can see down into the living room. He steps gingerly across. He passes by Hassan, back bent, fitting a tile into a slot. He takes a step up, then another and is about to take a third, his forward momentum on the front foot, when something under his shoe gives in. Pete loses stability, the tiles slip out of his grasp. One of them falls right through a hole and hits the ground inside with a smashing crash. The other tiles scatter over the roof. One or two disintegrate at the edges.

Pete falls forward. He reaches desperately for the roof top edge to cling to. He cannot. He begins his slide down. Hassan is no longer hunched. Reacting instinctively he digs his feet into a girder space and clasps Pete’s outstretched hand. Pete’s slide has one leg dangling over the edge.

A neighbour passing by ten minutes later comes to the rescue. In that desperate handclasp somehow the debate, suspicion, competition and cheap monetary edge is dissolved by the sweat of fear and anxiety, and replaced by the stronger super bonding glue of humaneness.

Kevin Martin is a freelance journalist based in Sydney, Australia.