The Crooked Frame

Nial Triffett carried the first armful of pre-cut battens into the container while Marco Ferraro swept the steel dust from the morning's grinding work out through the open doors. The interior was clean-edged now but still entirely industrial — corrugated steel on three sides, bare floor plates, and the two rectangular window openings staring out at the river clearing like empty eye sockets. The ceiling vents admitted narrow columns of light that striped the floor in pale bars. Everything smelled of hot metal and dust.

The battens would be fixed horizontally across the corrugated walls, screwed directly into the steel peaks at regular intervals. Each batten needed to sit level and true, because the plywood panelling that would eventually be fixed over them would telegraph every error — a batten out of level by even a few millimetres would produce a visible ripple in the finished wall. Nial explained this once to Marco and then demonstrated on the first run, holding a batten flush against the corrugation while driving a self-tapping screw through the timber and into the steel with a battery-powered drill. The screw bit, the timber pulled tight, and the first batten sat flat and level against the wall.

Marco took the drill for the second batten. The self-tapping screws required firm, steady pressure to bite through the steel, and Marco's first attempt skated the screw tip across the corrugation peak and gouged a bright scratch in the surface before Nial caught his wrist and repositioned the angle. The second attempt seated properly, but Marco had to drive each screw with a deliberate concentration that Nial could manage on muscle memory alone. What took Nial thirty seconds per fixing took Marco close to two minutes, and the first three battens on Marco's side sat fractionally less true than Nial's.

They worked opposite ends of the same wall, Nial setting the pace and Marco following. The container was narrow enough that they frequently had to step around each other, passing tools back and forth in a space barely wide enough for two men and a stack of timber. The drill battery ran flat after the first wall and they swapped to the spare, which held less charge and spun with an audible reluctance that slowed the work further.

By early afternoon they had battens fixed across two full walls — the long rear wall and one of the shorter side panels. The work was solid on Nial's sections and passable on Marco's, though Nial quietly repositioned two of Marco's battens when Marco stepped outside for water, driving fresh screws beside the originals and pulling the timber into line. He said nothing about it. The correction was faster than the explanation would have been, and Marco was already frustrated enough with his own pace.

The window framing was harder. Each opening needed a timber surround — a header across the top, a sill across the bottom, and vertical studs on either side — that would hold the eventual window in place and provide a clean edge for the panelling to terminate against. Nial measured the first opening and cut the four frame pieces from the remaining straight timber, checking each for square with a combination square borrowed from the settlement's shared tool store.

Marco held the header in position while Nial drilled pilot holes and drove the fixings. This was where the trouble started. The header was long enough that it needed support at both ends simultaneously, and Marco's bandaged left hand made his grip unreliable. He shifted his hold partway through the second fixing and the timber dropped at one end, pulling the first screw sideways in its hole before Nial could react. The screw held, but at a slight angle, and the header now sat a few degrees off level.

Nial considered pulling it out and redrilling, but the screw had already enlarged the hole in the steel surround and a fresh fixing in the same spot would not hold as tightly. He opted to shim the low end with a thin offcut wedged between the header and the container wall, packing it until the level read true enough to work with. The shim held, but the fix was inelegant and Nial knew it would be visible behind the panelling if anyone ever pulled a panel off for maintenance.

The vertical studs went in more cleanly, Marco bracing each one from the outside of the opening while Nial fixed from within. But the sill — the bottom piece of the frame — inherited the header's slight misalignment and sat with a barely perceptible lean that the combination square confirmed but the naked eye could almost forgive. The finished window frame was functional. It would hold a window. It would accept panelling around its edges. It was also visibly off-true if you knew where to look, and Nial knew where to look.

The second window opening remained unframed. The afternoon light was dropping and both men were tired — Nial from the sustained precision of work that demanded constant checking and rechecking, Marco from the physical and mental effort of performing tasks his body had no memory for. They had used more timber than Nial's original plan had allowed for, partly from Marco's saw cuts in the morning that had cost usable lengths, and partly from the shimming and repositioning that the window frame had required. The remaining batten stock would need supplementing before the second window could be framed and the final two walls battened.

Nial stacked the unused timber against the interior wall and collected the tools. Marco swept the sawdust and screw shavings out through the container doors for the second time that day. The interior looked different now — still raw, still industrial, but the timber grid across two walls and the rough frame around one window gave it the first faint suggestion of a room rather than a box. The suggestion was premature, and Nial would not have described it that way. But it was there, for anyone inclined to see it.