Per & Associates — Night Shift
Crow & Associates Construction. Est. Whenever. We’ll get to it.
Nobody hired them.
That was the first thing the man in the fourth-floor flat noticed when he moved in. He’d assumed the crows were just passing through — the way you assume any new neighbour is temporary until you find their shoes in your hallway and their opinions at your dinner table. But Per and the crew weren’t passing through. They had a site. They had a sign. They had, as far as anyone could tell, absolutely no intention of finishing anything.
Per himself operated out of the small patch of lawn next to the truck leasing company on Ejby Industrivej. He was there every morning when the man left for work. He was there every evening when the man came home. Per stood in roughly the same spot both times, one foot slightly forward, head tilted at the angle of someone who has considered the situation very carefully and concluded that the situation will have to wait.
“He’s not doing anything,” the man’s wife said one evening, watching Per through the kitchen window.
“He’s assessing,” the man said.
She looked at him the way she always looked at him when he said things like that.
The crew operated with a division of labour that was, in its own way, deeply professional.
Björn handled blueprints. He could be found most mornings on the scaffolding outside the unfinished building on the corner, holding what appeared to be a discarded pizza box at arm’s length, tilting it slowly, methodically, as if cross-referencing it against something only he could see. Nobody questioned this. You didn’t question Björn.
Erik was on coffee. Permanently. Erik had long ago made peace with the fact that his contribution to the project was morale, and he brought to this role an almost heroic commitment to stillness. His hard hat was always slightly tilted. This was not an accident.
The fourth member — young, unnamed, stationed on the upper scaffolding — was listed in no official capacity but appeared to function as a lookout, or possibly as an intern, or possibly as someone who had simply wandered up there one afternoon and found the view agreeable.
And then there was Per.
Per was the foreman. Per had the shovel. Per had not used the shovel since the third of September, two years prior, for reasons that remained internal to Per and were unlikely to be disclosed.
The problem — and there was always a problem in any good construction story — was the operation fifty meters to the north.
The catering depot.
The gulls ran it. Of course they did. Twenty-three crates of yesterday’s decisions, available from approximately eleven PM until the structural integrity of the bin bags gave way, which was usually around two in the morning, which was usually when the noise started, which was usually when the man in the fourth-floor flat gave up on sleep and stood at his window watching the whole chaotic enterprise with the exhausted fury of someone who had absolutely no recourse.
The gulls did not have a sign. The gulls did not have a division of labour. The gulls had volume, and aggression, and a near-religious conviction that 3am was an excellent time to debate the allocation of a leftover prawn.
Per was aware of the gulls. Per was aware of everything. Per simply chose, with great deliberation, not to be rushed by any of it.
It was on the forty-third sleepless night that the man made his decision.
He added unsalted peanuts to the grocery list.
His wife found it in the morning, between oat milk and washing tabs, and looked at him across the kitchen with an expression he had come to recognise as the one she deployed when she was deciding whether to ask.
She asked.
“It’s for the crows,” he said, without looking up from his coffee. “We’re forming an alliance.”
There was a pause of considerable length.
“Against the gulls,” he added, as if this clarified things.
She left for work. He went to the window. Per was already on the lawn, standing in his spot, one foot forward, head tilted.
The man raised his mug.
Per did not acknowledge this. Per did not need to. The alliance had already been decided — quietly, incrementally, over forty-three nights of parallel insomnia — in the way that all the best things are decided.
Not forced. Not planned.
Just arrived at, eventually, by two creatures with nowhere better to be.
The peanuts are still going out. The gulls are still at it. The project remains, per current estimates, ongoing.
Per has no comment.