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The grass is not quite green but the soil in the hill is black. To begin with, the incline was hewn into with knives and scrapers, chiselling out flat planes to support and, in supporting, each make level the base of one pole in a scaffold structure that needs to be 60m tall. Testing the levels of these small plateaus, men stand with the tall poles held upright in their arms like slow dancers, trying to gauge if they have gotten it right. One man would have stood far away in tall, dry grass watching the angles, shouting no, it’s leaning, stop — one hand by his side flicking at the cracked stalks that reach his hips, with his fingers black with grime, and the other up at head height held horizontal, shading his eyes, his shaved head behind it red and alive with sweat in moving beads too fat to evaporate fast; his cranium rolls down towards his back and then forward once again. His stretched neck’s skin’s pulling tight over his jugular forces a gulp in him. The sun globs the whole of his head with light that is exhaustive, he is exhausted. The soft stubble in his scalp is alight; his head is a dandelion before wind or slightest motion. He shakes it from side to side, he shouts no, do it again, it’s not right.

His arm goes up - he starts to step forwards and at the same time the same arm slaps to his knee, slapping a fly, and tall dead grass crackles and bows below his landing foot, steel-capped, splitting a crescent of yellow spines which flick up in the air and spark the light. Scales of florets fall backwards, landing on his shin and boots. He holds up a small protractor to the sky and squints, turns his head. It is hot. The scaffold ascends in height at an angle far sharper than the incline of the hill below it to form one side of a sport stadium’s spectator seating stand. At its centre brightly is a green grass playing field double-ringed by barrier fencing nervously gridded lengthways from the ground up to head height, tittering on the concrete, always falling over and, because of the heat, too hot to touch. The gangways fill with them patiently tangling a tinnish weedbed that traps the feet and imbibes irretrievably dropped screws and detritus into its deep scratch, layered slugs of cheap welding at every edge and corner torquing bladder-like into nervous nets that appear, from the scaffold’s top, or any distance at all, immense. To avoid it where it blocks their path, men swerve into the stand, cutting lines through the folding chairs. The toe’s tip grips the chair’s upper edge and pulls or presses it down to land on it, before lifting into another step, letting the seat slap after the leaving foot with a happy bite. The sun above is a disc shooting spikes of yellow-white.

The platforms cut from the hill are haloed each by a spray of the soil that was torn up from the hill to form them. The granular stain of sparse black on black and greenish black is perceptible not quite by sight in the scaffold’s dense shade, but on contact it leaves its grainy image as a stain. Someone sent to forage for things in the scaffold’s floor is bent low to the ground with a torchlight. Because soil seems to get everywhere, and because the hill’s surface buckles beneath the workmens’ feet, is lax and baggy, pressing always to be inside or out, poring holes in itself in places that a moment ago were smooth and perfect, puckering dryly like smooth muscle ending;

It is hot. Shirtless men range the exposed shell of the scaffold facing west, harnessed to ropes that never cross. The colour in their skin turns and complicates, no longer reddening or darkening, just moving, melanin past its threshold to change anything, all of it at the surface, stirring but not replacing itself as the sun belts in. Seeking relief from the heat, sometimes someone will swing inwards, feeding themselves through the frame into the shade. As they move in, the light gets dampened by darkness and turns yellow and then green and blue before it feels black. They can go on and on, the scaffold is so deep. 200 rows of folded chairs ascend on steel bars rising from the bottom to the top on the other side, tulip-like, orderly and endless, very dark green. Because there is nowhere to lie down, many have found a place to clip their harness and, ready, just drooped, sleeping like that, clipped, loosening, becoming limp first in their feet and hands until slowly their stomachs furl into their hips and close— they point downwards like sexless flowers in the dark. Tools hang from their belts and bother themselves like a wind chime would. Or impress themselves in relief upon the inside of a pocket’s outer panel. Some don’t sleep or even linger long, only pass through slowly, mute: complicit in one secret. Goosebumps fluff up under sweat thinning as they cool. A mistake was made and a forklift lowers to the ground a crate of sparkling water in bottles and the men waiting and the driver sigh. The sleepers hang undisturbed by the buzzing of tools from nearby, the noise of the scaffold bars being banged and distorted, still humming with the accumulated clamour held in them from the thunder of their assembly. Days— of tapping of hammers and screwing and of unscrewing, of piling and of unpiling; accumulating height, heat, cutting and turning have poured sound into the rising mesh of scaffold poles, softly feeding them disquiet which has been kept live in them by their hollowness and their length. The fizzy water fights its bottle. The noise of the scaffolding fills up. No one talks. People are thirsty but they don’t come down for the water yet, they haven’t heard.

The scaffold is constructed in grids. At intervals vertically, large, cubic white tanks have been hoisted in, each filling a cube. These water tanks are only whitish, half-clear. Light from the sun, clipping worn marks in the metalwork with shine, slices in through different gaps at different times to illuminate at the tanks’ tops the ghostly scum-lines of past settled and drained water levels ballooning backwards into a fog of bacterial breath; at their bottoms carpets of algae, green thickening all the time. The tanks are all, to varying extents, slightly inflated, each one once unscrewed will breathe out one long tankful of warmish air that will shush for a moment the stand.