Earlier in the month, Shane had caught me in a quiet corner of the site making a tower out of pale blocks that'd been lying unused around the place. At the base of the tower I'd criss-crossed two fluorescent lamps. I was walking backwards to admire the construction when I heard him step from the shadows, giggling. I spun round.
'How long have you been there?' I said.
He laughed, 'Oh about half an hour! What are you up to?'
'Dunno. I was bored. It's just messing.'
He eyed the thing glowing in front of us.
'Don't say a word, will you?' `I'll say nothing,' he replied, and ambled off.
A few mornings later, beside my computer, I found a tall mysterious stack of washers sitting in the middle of a square of mirror. I smiled; I knew he'd put it there. So in response, that afternoon, I leant six sweeping brushes in a line down a wall whose plasterboarding Shane was overseeing. And later the next day I walked past eight scaffold planks leaning against a wall on the lower ground floor, each plank six inches farther from the wall than the previous, making a strange octave of inclinations. The next morning I arranged a set of laser levels to project a perfect red square into the corner of a room he was working in.
We never acknowledged what the other was doing. It was a wordless language game we were building into the framework of the site.