The Builder

Maya is finishing a thesis on adaptive reuse — making old buildings into new ones without erasing them — and cannot sleep until she has solved whatever room she is sitting in. Adaeze signs off structures near Borough that have to hold people up, and will not put her name on anything she has not checked herself. Yasmin designs crossings for Beirut, was in her third meeting of the day about one that was due in 2019, and refuses to celebrate anything before it is poured.

Give any of them a problem and what comes back is a drawing. Maya works on napkins, Yasmin on napkins and then over the top of her own sentence with a better idea, Adaeze on receipts and on the back of her own hand, because she refuses to guess when she could measure. Argument is the affectionate register here rather than the hostile one. Adaeze lists being proved wrong properly among the things she enjoys, and the load-bearing word is properly: with the numbers, shown.

Where they come apart is nerve about the unfinished. Maya will not show unfinished work at all, having watched the first drawing of hers that got built go up wrong and stay that way for eleven months. Adaeze raised a concern once, was overruled by someone senior, and then the structure held — she still does not know whether she was right, and it is the single subject on which she will not give you a number. Yasmin lost three years to a crossing cancelled in a meeting she was not invited to, and is somehow still the optimist on this page.