Bebo

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	Chapter Three
	Monday 10:27 am. I feel like shit. Every thudding revolution of the burger machine is like someone hitting me on the back of the head with a hammer. My hangover sits, hovering just above my left temple as if nailed there. “Never again. Never, ever, again,” I mumble incoherently to myself. We ended up doing a Super Sunday. That’s what we call it in the local patios when you don’t stop drinking right the way through to Sunday night. A bad fish, a very, very, bad fish. Horrible dripping memories surface out of the murk that used to be my brain. Memories of snorting gin and of Combat Mike returning from the supermarket sometime around noon bearing two bottles of Grants vodka. I remember regarding the legend, The exciting vodka, printed round the bottle top with deep suspicion. I wonder, in a floaty dislocated way, how Stevie is feeling this morning. Mike, the cunt that he is, will still be sound asleep. I have little doubt of that. A college course in media studies means that he can afford to initiate a super Sunday, knowing that he will have adequate time to sleep it off. “Cunt, cunt, cunt,” I mutter between clenched teeth. The strains of Radio One blaring from the cheap ghetto blaster hung on the wall jangle against my taught nerves. I concentrate my mind (what little of it is present and functioning) on the task at hand. The burger machine I work on consists of a huge stainless steel box with a hopper on top and a slide out plate and punch at the front. The burger mix goes into the hopper on top and is mashed, processed and chewed through its steel innards until it emerges, rolled out to about an inch thick, on the white plastic plate. Twin punches snap down through twin holes and two burgers are born, pink and glistening in the weird artificial factory-light. This happens about once a second. From there the burgers trundle down a small chain link conveyer belt. Malky and The Grumpy Faced Bastard stand either side of this, sticking a white waxy square of paper on every burger. The idea is that these will stop them sticking together when as the next step in the process they drop down onto the main conveyer belt and Ian and Annie grab them and stack them in piles of two. Next up are Davie and Frank the Serial Killer. They stand at either side of the belt. Beside them are two small metal tables, behind them big stacks of polystyrene trays. Their job is to tray the burgers. Probably the worst job on the line. They have to grab the double-stacked burgers and fit five stacks into one of the white trays. The stacks of burgers are laid out like the spots on the five side of a dice. And they have to be neat or the packing department will send them back to be readjusted. Why the lazy fuckers in packing can't do this themselves is beyond me. If you make one little fuck up when you're traying burgers you're basically screwed. Stop for just a second to adjust a burger which is sticking up over the edge of the tray and you lose the rhythm, the burgers begin to slip away from your scrabbling blue gloved fingers and with alarming suddenness you're leaning backwards trying to catch the front runners, feeling like a man trying to halt the tide. Drowning in hamburgers. At this point the person who made the fuck up and was unable to recover screams out. "FUCKING STOP THE MACHINE!" Or words to that effect. Malky dives for the red button and the machine whines and clatters to a halt. Everybody looks at each other in that dazed way which will be familiar to anyone who has been working on a production line that has suddenly stopped. Once you have gotten your head into The Zone it is not immediately easy to get it back out again. Anyone who has worked on a production line or in any job that involves mind numbingly repetitive labour will be familiar with The Zone. The Zone is where conscious thought clicks over to autopilot. Where reasoned thinking becomes daydream. It is the brain's defence mechanism against the lack of any kind of mental stimulation provided by the dead end job, in which the body (its idiot cousin), has got it stuck. Without the mental cushion provided by The Zone I think I would have gone crazy a long time ago. Looking around me I think a lot of the people in here already have. Sometimes this place seems more like an asylum than a factory. It takes a few seconds before everyone has blinked themselves back to some kind of reality. Although, for at least a few minutes more, everything looks strange, the surfaces under your fingers feel distant and transient to the touch. By this time the Grumpy Faced Bastard is glaring over half-moon glasses perched on her thin fleshless nose and telling the offending member of our little team to hurry up. The G.F.B. is the burger line charge-hand, which means she is supposed to be the boss. In practice nobody takes the blindest bit of notice of her. We work to order, not to the clock, so there is really no point in stringing out these stoppages. Every minute the machine is stopped is an extra minute added to the day. We do it anyway though, glad of the brief respite. Everybody takes the opportunity to stretch and talk and stock up on the stuff they need. Malky gets a new stack of interleaves (the proper name for the little squares of paper that go on top of the burgers). Ian goes and gets two new sets of blue latex gloves from the dispenser in the store cupboard, one for Annie and one for himself. Frank the Serial Killer (who was at fault in this case) sulkily finishes clearing up the excess burgers, scattered pinkly, like sores on the white plastic of the belt. His strange yellow eyes all the time darting from side to side, challenging someone to say something about his mistake. And then with a clunk and a gnashing of machinery we're off again. The white polystyrene trays, pregnant with their cargoes of pulped cow flesh, make their way two at a time down the belt towards me. At my end of the line there is a wide stainless steel table. At one end are my sheets of polythene, at the other, one of the polystyrene trays with my black marker pen sitting in it. On this is drawn thirty little circles. Seven of them are filled in solid black. At my back is a tall stack of reddish brown trays, on the floor just to my right are a set of blue plastic 'wheels'. Basically these consist of a big plastic number eight, like the one you get on a digital clock, lying on its back, with supermarket trolley style wheels attached to the bottom. A red tray fits neatly into each of the holes in the figure eight. As the trays of burgers plop off the end of the belt I grab one, twist round and put it in the tray sitting ready in the wheels. When there are three of these, I smooth a sheet of polythene over the top with quick, practised movements. Another three trays of burgers on top of that and I slot a fresh red tray on top (they are moulded to stack neatly together) and the process begins again. The trays are stacked ten high, so each set of wheels carries twenty trays. Sixty burgers to a tray, six hundred burgers to a stack, one thousand two hundred burgers on a set of wheels. "End of batch eight!" Malky hollers above the din of the machine. Our batches of burger mix are made up by Willie, a pale unhealthy looking guy of about forty with thick dark hair and broken capillaries high up on his cheeks. He weighs the meat out and runs the mincer in the corner with a permanent scowl which seems worn into his face. When the burger mix oozes its way out of the mincer and into one of the big white tubs it is a lurid pink colour, bearing little resemblance to the meat which went in. It has had rusk, flavourings and water added to it, and probably most important of all, two scoops of pink colouring powder from the pail next to the mincer. I got some of that shit on my hands once and believe me it does not come off. I scrubbed them every night for two fucking weeks and even now I still have a pinkish residue under my fingernails. What the colouring does is disguise the fact that almost all of the meat which gets used to make burgers is either dark brown or grey, and is frequently green. In other words, our burgers are made using all the shit they couldn't possibly get away with using for anything else. Each batch that goes through the mincer is numbered. A batch usually equates to about half a dozen of the big white tubs. An interleaf with the number eight scrawled on it comes down the belt; the batch marker, signalling the end of batch eight. I grab my marker pen from it’s tray and mark off the polythene on top of the last burgers with a large figure eight. Then I pick up the polystyrene tray from my table and carefully, taking my time, colour in another circle. "That makes eight." I mutter to myself. A batch almost exactly fills a set of wheels. Twelve hundred burgers on a set of wheels. Eight batches. This morning I have stacked nine thousand six hundred burgers. The G.F.B tells Malky not to bother starting another batch because it's time for morning break. "Eh?" says Malky who has already stripped off his gloves and is halfway to the door. I wheel the double-stack through the white walled corridor and down the little ramp into the packing department. I hate spending any length of time down there. After the Punishment Shed, it is my least favourite place in the factory. The thin smoky fumes from the melting the plastic they use to seal the tops of the white polystyrene burger trays make my head hurt at the best of times, but today just a few seconds leave me feeling like I want to vomit. I struggle out of my boiler suit and hang it beside the others on the long row of pegs in the little anteroom which separates the outside world from the factory proper. I call it the airlock although it's probably called a, ‘dressing and sterilisation room’, or something similar. Airlock seems to make more sense, it acts as a decompression chamber between the factory world and the real world. Calling these things what they really are and not what the owners have deemed them is a minor but comforting act of resistance. A shred of warmth in the wilderness. Like calling the, ‘Game Processing Shed’, the Punishment Shed. The Punishment Shed is where they send you if you do something they don’t like, or if they want rid of you but don’t want to have to pay you off. A couple of days in the shed, skinning maggoty rabbits or wiping the shit out of dead partridge's rectums while the plucking machines thunder on and on, loud enough to make your ears ring, is usually enough to bring anyone around to the company’s way of thinking. I walk past the hose with the brush attached to it, which is meant for washing boots (which I have never seen anybody use), wash my hands at the sink and clock out. It is a horrible day outside. Gusting wind blowing before it an unpleasant grey drizzle. The kind which soaks into your collar and runs down the back of your neck. People are walking across from the factory holding onto their helmets as the wind tries to snatch them away. Hunched over, bent like old people, they are eager for the little fifteen-minute snatch of their lives they are being allowed to reclaim. The warmth of the canteen is a relief after the refrigerated chill of the factory. We queue up against the left-hand wall, ahead of us is a hatch where you can buy bacon butties and cans of juice at hugely over inflated prices. I happen to know that one of those polystyrene trays sells in the shops for a fiver. Which means that each burger is worth fifty pence. So in the last three and a half hours I have stacked around four thousand eight hundred pounds worth of meat. And do you know how much they paid me to do it? No? My wages for this morning will come to fourteen quid. My morning black pudding buttie and bottle of Irn Bru comes to four quid exactly. So when you look at it like that, the fuckers have already recouped almost a quarter of what they've paid me. I’m about half way along the queue when Jack Benzies himself waddles into the canteen. He is a mean looking man, immensely fat and short with it. He looks this way and that around the room over his hooked nose, like a man surveying cattle. He wears a pair of dark suit trousers and a white shirt. A pair of spectacles hang on a gold chain around his thick neck. He lumbers forward to the head of the queue and demands a full breakfast, ignoring the timid, Hello Jack's, from the more sycophantic members of staff. As he passes me I feel an almost overwhelming urge to take a quick step up behind him and kick him as hard as I can in his quite considerable arse. Then spinning him around and grabbing him by his shirtfront, shaking him violently, screaming all the while. "WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE! JUST BECAUSE I WORK FOR YOU DOESN'T MEAN YOU FUCKING OWN ME! JUST BECAUSE YOU HAVE MORE MONEY THAN ME DOESN’T MAKE YOU BETTER THAN ME! YOU FAT PENGUIN FACED FUCK!" Just like my mental question to Cally, one day I will say this. But not today. He takes his breakfast off to a table and sits eating it, glaring at the world over his beak of a nose. As I collect my black pudding buttie from the hatch I am vehemently wishing a heart attack on the cunt. Normally I would eat in the canteen but the atmosphere today is too tense. Some of the people seated at the tables make an attempt at over-loud, brittle conversation but most are silent. Everyone is disturbed by the proximity of the boss. So I take my napkin wrapped buttie, my two sachets of tomato sauce and my bottle of Irn Bru out to the smoking hut. The smoking hut is the scabby hulking ruin of an old portakabin, round the back of the canteen. It is freezing in winter, leaks when it rains, and in the summer is usually full of bees but it's the only place on the premises where you can smoke and as a consequence is the gathering point for most of the workers in the factory. It's quite full today but nobody is very talkative. An old venison butcher called Jocky is reading a copy of the Daily Sport in the corner. Most are staring morosely at the rain dripping through the roof into a cracked blue mug on the table. Plop, plop, plop, it goes. An infinitely depressing sound. I lift the top half of my bun and squirt tomato sauce from both sachets inside onto the steaming black pudding. I bite into it with a sigh, savouring the feeling of the moist tangy mixture in my mouth. Have you ever had a black pudding buttie from the Benzies canteen? No, I don’t suppose you would have. They are the only good thing about working here. Malky appears as I'm lighting up my second post-buttie fag. He has been where he goes every break and lunchtime, in his car smoking dope. I don’t know how he does it. I've tried getting stoned at work a few times. It makes the hours drag unbearably. All you want to do is lie on a sofa eating toast and watching videos and instead you have to stand at a noisy conveyer belt. Fuck that for a game of soldiers. Malky's a strange boy, but if you could say I had a best mate here then I suppose it would have to be him. All the same it's a friendship born out of convenience and circumstance. He's the only person on the line about my age who's into roughly the same things. Well, there's Davie who is two years older than me but it has to be said, Davie is a bit of a dick. My relationship with Malky is one of situation. Someone to talk to while we wile away the endless days. We never see each other outside of work. Our friendship ends at clock out time each day and starts afresh next morning. I have no idea what he does or where he goes when he isn't here. All I really know about him is that he drives a rusty green VW Polo, sells a little dope to supplement his income and listens to shitty Judge Jules style Hard House/Trance. Our relationship is defined by factory life. Contained within long drawn unspoken boundaries. Well, now I've started I may as well tell you about everybody else. Ok, well… where to start. Davie as I've already said is a bit of a dick. He's a kind of anti-Malky. Whereas Malky is small and skinny with untidy blonde hair and an impressive crop of spots, Davie is tall dark and smooth faced. Malky doesn't give two fucks about this place. He will skive at any given opportunity and steal anything which is not nailed down. Maybe that's part of the reason I like him so much (despite his appalling taste in music), his fuck you attitude to managerial authority. Davie on the other hand, takes his job extremely seriously. Well actually, that isn't entirely accurate. He takes scoring brownie points with the foreman and the factory managers extremely seriously. The managers love Davie because they think he's hardworking and loyal, they hate Malky for exactly the opposite reasons. The real difference between them is that Davie sucks up to them and Malky doesn't. Watching Davie fawn and toady when Heart Attack Paddy (the factory foreman) or Heinrich (the factory production manager, named after Heinrich Himmler) are around is almost enough to make you sick. As soon as he spies them coming he immediately busies himself with the most industrious looking task he can find and starts yelling, come on, and, hurry up there's work to do, at anyone who happens to be around. He's also thick as shit, unbearably childish, and a grass. If Heart attack Paddy comes through and chews one of us out about a crate of burgers accidentally getting squashed or the batch numbers being all fucked up then we know exactly how he found out. Davie also can't bear the thought that he is unpopular or that we see him for what he is. He sulked for three hours last time he got Malky sent to the punishment shed and Malky told him that the best part of him ran down the crack of his mother’s arse and became a stain on the back seat of a lorry drivers cab. Even the G.F.B smiled at that one. The Grumpy Faced Bastard, or G.F.B for short, is the original spinster. She lives on her own in a little cottage just down the road from the factory with two West Highland terriers called Fred and Fluffy (which she goes home every lunch time to feed). Tall and straight-backed with a beaky fleshless nose and dark hair shot through with grey, she is exactly the kind of woman that three hundred years ago would have been burned as a witch. She dislikes people in general and is not shy about showing it. She doesn’t seem to mind Malky and me too much. She seems to regard us as wayward children who have to be tolerated. She terrifies the rest of the workers in the factory. Most people don’t like her but I think she's ok. Actually I feel a little sorry for her. I don’t think I've ever in my life met a person as lonely as she is. Annie and Ian really have to be taken as one item so to speak. For about a year after they arrived I thought they were husband and wife, a reasonable assumption since they spend all their time together. Turns out though (I was informed one grey afternoon break by one of the gossipy office secretaries) that Annie is married to a retired mechanic who, at this point the gossipy secretary made the drinky drinky motion, and Ian is a widower who moved here from somewhere down near Glasgow. It has often puzzled me as to just what Ian is doing working here. With his neatly combed white hair and his courtly bearing you would be more inclined to think of him as an ex school teacher than a meat factory worker. He seems to know a lot about a lot of things, history especially. I once spent a fascinating afternoon listening to him talk about the battle of Mons Graupius, between the Picts and the Romans, which happened on some hill around here. Annie only started working here to earn some extra money after her husband retired but they both started on the same day (which is why I assumed they were married). They spend every break and lunchtime together in the canteen, sitting at one of the tables by the window, talking quietly. So that brings us to the last member of our merry little band, Frank the Serial Killer. Frank's age is extremely difficult to work out, he could be thirty, he could be sixty. He arrived here about two months ago in a fawn coloured Vauxhall Cavalier, towing a dirty looking caravan. I can remember his arrival very clearly because it was me who directed him to the office to ask if there were any jobs going. I was down at the traywash, on the scrounge for extra red trays. Something I always enjoy doing because it means you get to go outside. I remember he had a big evil looking fucker of a dog sitting in the passenger seat. All I remember of my first impression of him really, is the fact that when I spoke to him he really creeped me out. That and his mouthful of rotten teeth. I have often caught myself looking at his teeth when he's talking. To be honest they make me feel fucking sick. The kind of thing you have nightmares about. Black and green and yellow. One of them in the top row has decayed so badly that all that's left of it is the root, hooked and fang-like. His teeth aren't the worst thing about him though. The worst thing is his eyes. They are very, very, pale brown but I'd call them yellow. They flit about coldly, never any humour or emotion in them, and when he's talking to you he always lets his eyes linger too long, as if he were sizing you up. He lives in his caravan with his dog on a patch of waste ground out in the middle of fucking nowhere. Last week he came up to me and gently grabbed my arm. "The farmer lost a sheep last night," he said. "Oh yeah," I said eyeing his hand on my arm nervously. "Did your dog get it or something." "No!" he hissed. "I killed it!" "Oh." I said, backing away. There didn't seem to be much else to say. He is the only person I have ever met who actually enjoys being in the punishment shed. He spent half an hour once telling Malky about how he liked to cut the dead rabbits’ eyes out. The same day he told me about the sheep he also asked in a polite conversational tone where I lived. I gave him Combat Mike's address and quickly changed the subject. When we get back after break we are told there is to be a factory inspection before lunch. If Benzies were an army this would be our equivalent of a parade. We are told to shut down the machine half an hour before the inspection and get the place spotless. "So I can see my fuckin face in it!" was the exact expression Heart Attack Paddy used. So like good children, we do what we are told, and scrub and wipe and mop. Then Paddy comes round to have a last look and tells us to stand in a line. We shuffle moodily into a rough slouching line, all apart from Davie that is who stands chin up, chest puffed out, hands thrust stiffly down by his sides as if he was about to receive an OBE. Eventually the managers arrive, pushing their way through the hang down plastic strips which divide our room from the next. They are wearing brand new factory coats, bright white, with their names embroidered on the breast in red letters. Heinrich and Paddy are there, as the people directly responsible for running the factory. Jack Benzies is leading the way but these are the only faces I can put names to. All the others are sales and marketing types from the office that I recognise but can't name. He stops in front of our line looking us up and down. To my left Davie actually stiffens up if that were possible. "This production line has not been meeting orders," Benzies says in his whiney accusing voice. "Can any of you tell me why?" I raise a hand. "I can." He swaggers (if a man that fat can be said to swagger) slowly over to stand in front of me. He stands too close, trying to violate my personal space, squaring up to me. I can smell the sour odour of sweat which hangs around him. "We can't fill the orders," I say. "Because this line is short. We need at least two more people to tray the burgers. We keep having to stop the machine because two people can't keep up with the belt. We need four." He takes a pen out of his breast pocket and taps the side of my helmet with it. "What is that written on your head gear?" He asks. "It says 'Born to Kill'," I reply. He taps the other side, the pen making little thock-thock noises against the plastic. "And what is this?" "A peace sign." "Is that supposed to be funny?" I can see the anger building in his eyes. "I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man," I say with a completely straight face. "Get, it, cleaned, OFF!" He punctuates his words with prods of his pen. The last word is shouted. He turns sharply on his heel is gone, his little group of underlings in tow. He may not have managed to solve the problem of the burger line under performing but he has managed to make himself feel powerful in front of his subordinates. Which after all, is much more important. They have all gone on to the next room, with the exception of Heinrich. He approaches me, his eyes flashing and dangerous. "They need someone down in the game shed," he spits in a tone of barely leashed fury. "You will report there directly after lunch." And then with a squeak of shoes on the wet concrete of the factory floor he is gone, following the others. As we troop out for lunch I begin to regret trying to be smart. Not because I will probably have to spend at least the rest of the day in the punishment shed, but because, as the rest of the line hang up their boiler suits their eyes are downcast. They understand that there will be no one to replace me. The line will now be three short instead of two. My big mouth has probably added a couple of hours to their day. Suddenly I feel very, very, guilty. Long green strings of shit-mucus dangle from my right hand. Even though I'm wearing a pair of thick Marigolds I can still feel, or at least imagine I can feel, its slimy wetness on my skin. I am standing at a long metal table with two scratched blue chopping boards built into it. To my left are the twin bird plucking machines whose unholy demonic roar deadens not only your hearing, but after a while, all your other senses as well. The constant vibration through the tables and the floor numbs your sense of touch. You feel insulated from the world by a thick layer of unpleasant padding. When at break times you emerge from here, dazed and stupid back into the daylight, conversation feels strange, unnatural. Your mouth feels uncomfortable forming itself around the words you are trying to say. There is no talking in the Punishment Shed, the ever-running machines see to that better than even the hardest prison screw ever could. If you're in here all day it means that you have the opportunity to talk maybe one hour out of eight or ten. Solitary confinement, that's what this place really is. I am working on partridges. It takes four people. Firstly there are these two strange, ugly old men, who work the plucking machines. There is a box next to each of them full of headless, footless, birds. They take these, one at a time, and hold them against grinding wheels on the pluckers, which rip all their feathers out. Sometimes they accidentally hold a carcass too close to the wheel when they're doing the belly and it tears open spraying them with cold black guts. When this happens they roar with trollish laughter. A distant sound over the cacophony of the machines, like something half heard in a dream. They pass the naked remains on to me. My job is to pull off any feathers which are left and then take a piece of rough blue (why is everything in this fucking place blue?) paper from the roll in front of me, wrap it around my finger and scoop all the shit-mucus out of its anus. For the first twenty minutes, every time I shoved my finger into that cold dead, vagina like opening, and extracted the mess from inside I was sure I was going to be sick. But after a while I began to become numb. And now, apart from a sense of general low-grade nausea, I can almost handle it. When I have finished, I stick the mangled birds onto the cutting board next to me and Morris smiles at me with his idiot’s smile, and with a practised stroke of his knife splits open the belly and scoops the guts out and flings them into a pail at his feet. When they have been gutted they are placed in a tray from where they are taken away, washed and packaged for rich bastards to buy and eat at dinner parties. I wonder if the rich bastards would still want to eat them if they had to scoop the filth out of their dead bodies with a blue piece of paper. I wonder if they would still want them if they had to perform this obscene last rite themselves. I am glad though, with all my being, that I'm not doing rabbits. Eventually on partridges I can get my head into the Zone and everything blurs and disappears. I can't do that with rabbits. Even the Zone is fucked up down here. On the burger machine, you drift away and dream impossible dreams, plan impossible plans. Some of which you tell yourself could happen. Like going travelling or saving up for a new car, some of which are pure fantasy, like putting six past the Huns in the Scottish cup final at Hampden. Malky once admitted to me that he plays a version of space invaders. The burgers coming down the belt are enemy space ships and every one he gets a square of paper on is blown out of orbit. But the Zone down here is a sweaty, rabid, half brother to the Zone I know. It's the kind of ringing blank place, where instead of constructed linear thought, your mind bubbles with single phrases or snatches of song, which become a mantra in your head. For what I think must have been over an hour I had the lyric, and that is why I gotta keep runnin, from the Oasis song, I hope I think I know, stuck in my head. Echoing and repeating over and over again. It was only when I snapped out of it I realised what I'd been thinking. But that is the nature of the Zone, the deeper you get the more distanced you become from the real. To enter the Zone you must be able to ignore what you're doing, let your subconscious do the work, allow your forebrain to drift and wander. Skinning rabbits is not something I can ignore. It’s the snap of bones as you have to break their legs to get the skin over them, the horrible tearing whispering sound, which is really felt because surely you can't hear it over the din, as skin parts from flesh. In front of the table where two old women stand gutting and skinning is a small skip where the skins, heads still attached go. I can't look into it. A sea of blank staring black eyes, teeth bared as if in a last act of pleading or defiance. The ears, which once twitched and were alert, matted stiff with blood. The smell of death hangs over the shed. It lies on your skin making it feel loose and filthy. It is all pervading, draped over everything like a vagrants dirty sleeping bag. It gets into your clothes and your hair, even after a long steaming hot shower you still imagine you can smell it on yourself. The people who work here, the three old men and the two old women, must be infected with it permanently. Half deaf from the noise, they've been here so long they probably don't even notice it anymore. Permanent exposure to this shit has damaged their brains. You tend to find that most of the factory inmates who have been here longer than ten years have gone peculiar in the head. They become institutionalised, dependent on the factory to define themselves. They have lost any hope of ever escaping. Worse than that they come to love it, to want to work Saturdays, to look forward to the company barbecue (where the company gets rid of its out of date produce). And that's the saddest thing of all. I am thinking bleak thoughts as I wedge my yellow foam earplugs more firmly into my ears with my wrists, so as to avoid touching them with my disgusting gloves, and, wrapping a sheet of blue paper around my fingers, reach for another partridge. We get finished around half past three, which is technically what time the whole factory is supposed to finish. I breathe an audible sigh of relief as the plucking machines are finally turned off and the last tray of partridges disappears. We scrub down the tables with stiff bristled scrubbing brushes dipped in buckets of scalding water and disinfectant. When we are finished we throw the water over the tables to rinse them and the water gurgles its way down a drain set in the centre of the concrete floor. Outside it has stopped raining but the sky holds the promise of more to come. Low grey clouds, their bellies pregnant with water, move restlessly across the sky. People are streaming across the tarmac from the factory entrance, headed for the changing rooms. Most of the factory's population, but from far away, muffled by white wipe clean walls, I can still hear the burger machine’s steady beat. I feel a momentary urge to go over to the factory and lend a hand. But visions of home are too strong, quickly drowning any notion of noble solidarity. Besides I've spent my time in purgatory for today. There is no elation as I wedge my boots into my locker and collect my jacket from it’s peg, only a blank tiredness and the weary knowledge that I will have to do it all again tomorrow. Mark and Lard are on Radio One as I drive home, which knocks me right out of kilter. I mark time by the change of D.Js. Each D.J represents a different time period, a different phase of the working day and consequently a different mood. The Breakfast Show with Sarah Cox = Driving to work, the beginning of the day, up until morning break. A sense of despair at first but then when I'm in my whites and clocked in I actually begin to feel Ok, I'm here now so the only thing to do is to get on with it. Simon Mayo = Morning break to lunch, the worst time of the day. You're tired enough to be pissed off but you can still see the rest of the day stretched out before you, long and bleak like a jail sentence. Mayo's show however is a relief in a way because he doesn't stick to the Radio One play list. The time between morning break and Joe Whiley, depressing as it is, is a welcome break from all the usual crap that gets played on Radio One. I'm not saying that the stuff Mayo plays isn't crap. Just different crap. Although he did play that old Utah Saints tune the other day. You know the one. Utah Saints YOU-YOU-YOU-UTAH SAINTS. Joe Whiley = The time just before lunch and the time just after. Pre-lunch irritation at waiting for the hands on the clock to creep round to the appropriate time, and post lunch irritation at the inadequate half you're given to eat your food and smoke as many fags as humanly possible. For some reason Joe Whiley annoys me immensely. Mark and Lard = The day coming to an end. A renewed sense of optimism, coupled with a growing paranoia about being hassled into overtime. Chris Moyles = Cleaning up and going home. I love the sound of his voice, to me it's the sound of freedom. To be going home listening to Mark and Lard is a rare and unexpected pleasure. I park outside the flat at ten to four exactly. Despite the fatigue in my legs there is a spring in my step as I mount the stairs. The first thing I do when I get in is strip off my clothes and sling them into my dirty washing basket. The second is to spend a good twenty minutes in the shower, repeatedly scrubbing myself down, first with soap and then with Dan's complete range of bathing products for 'athletes'. Because he plays rugby for some shite local team and is the manager of the local leisure centre, Dan seems to think he's some kind of Olympian. While I am towelling myself dry I briefly consider sticking his toothbrush up my bum, but in the end I decide against it. Instead I steal a chicken and mushroom burrito from the shelf marked 'Dan' in the fridge and a teabag from the jar marked 'Dan's tea' on the counter. The jars around it are marked 'Dan's coffee', 'Dan's Sugar' and 'Dan's salt'. He has one of those little things for making your own labels. I sit at the kitchen table eating 'Dan's' burrito, drinking 'Dan's' tea and reading the Daily Record. It wouldn’t surprise me to find a little red label stuck to the front of it, proclaiming in white writing exactly whom this particular paper belongs to. When I am finished eating I dispose of the evidence by shoving the burrito wrapper right down under the other rubbish in the bin. Then I go through to my room, sink gratefully into my comfy chair and turn on my computer. It's a PC of some kind, I don't know anything about computers, I think it's a pretty good one though. It runs the latest Championship Manager and that's all that really bothers me. I only bought the thing to play games on. I got it dirt cheap from a mate of Andy's so it's probably stolen. Computer games are just like the Zone apart from one very important element. In the Zone the stimulus is internal, when you're playing computer games the stimulus is external. To make the Zone really worthwhile your imagination needs to do all the work, to create other places, other events in your head. When it comes to computer games you still switch off but instead of your brain having to create fantasies for you, they are already there. You are a football manager (Championship Manager) or a fighter pilot (European Air War) or a Jedi Knight (Dark Forces II) or God (Populous/Age of Empires/Sim City). The point is that in the Zone at least a part of your brain is working. When you're in front of your computer it isn't, not in any useful way at least. So instead of doing something fruitful and productive with my few hours of freedom I sit in my comfy chair gazing at the glowing monitor, the only part of me moving is my mouse hand as it points and clicks, lost in unthinking, unfeeling, idiot contentment. Computer games are my opium. I am currently in my twelfth season as Aberdeen manager. In the early days is was hard going, but in my fourth season, after a hard fought league campaign, I took the Scottish Premier League title, finishing a skin of the teeth two points clear of Rangers. Since then my team has dominated the Scottish game, regularly finishing well clear of Rangers in the league with Celtic finishing in embarrassing (ha ha) mid table obscurity. My current dilemma centres around an upcoming game against the Huns at Ibrox, and whether to replace my veteran midfielder Tom Johnson (who's performances have been slipping of late) with Romeo Vivash, the talented young playmaker I recently bought from Derby County for a bargain one point five million. Hmmm... Johnson has the experience but Vivash is a talented youngster… decisions decisions. I click on 'coach report' seeking some extra analysis to help guide my decision. My coaches feel that Tom Johnson has a lot to offer at this late stage in his career while they are satisfied that Romeo Vivash is a useful member of our squad. "Thanks guys," I mumble out loud. "You're a lot of fucking help." And so I pass my time until Neighbours. Dan arrives home as I am eating a plate of beans on toast and watching the six o'clock news. He is wearing a rugby kit and is covered in mud. "Alright?" he sniffs wiping his glasses on the sleeve of his shirt and disappears into the kitchen. He disapproves of me eating in the living room, just like he disapproves of most other things about me. This will probably be the extent of our conversation for the evening. I don’t hate Dan, it's more that I have absolutely no connection with the guy. We have no common ground to meet on. It's not like I even knew him before we moved in together. A mutual acquaintance of ours happened to mention to me one night in the pub that this guy Dan was looking for a flat mate. I was looking for a place to stay so he put us in touch. Now that I know Dan, the fact that we even had a mutual acquaintance astounds me. Dan is from some island (Skye or Lewis or some shit like that). His parents sent him to some really fancy private school near Inverness when he was eleven. He can't have been that bright though because instead of becoming a lawyer or a doctor or something like that he ended up down here doing business studies/leisure management at university. He's been the manager at the leisure centre for a couple of years now but he's also doing night classes in French. Presumably so he can go and manage a leisure centre in France. Like most people who don't have the required intelligence, he throws himself into academia with a relentless determination which is actually pretty funny. He has about a hundred different folders all neatly labelled and filed and a whole rainbow of coloured pens to highlight things with. All this doesn't stop him getting, at best, average marks. Probably the most irritating thing about him though, is the rugby, and the whole wanky/superior/rich/public-school boy thing that goes with it. It's at its worst when there's a group of them, like when all his mates come round and drink Boddingtons wearing their rugby shirts and watch the six nations or whatever the fuck it is. I listened to them through the wall once as they became progressively louder and drunker. One guy (I presume it was the fat ugly cunt in the South Africa shirt) went off into a rambling monologue about why blacks should be kept out of the political system in his country, which was eventually drowned out by cries of 'Good try!’ As I was making a sandwich in the kitchen they started talking about drugs. "Bloody druggies! They give little kids free ecstasy tablets to get them hooked and then make money out of them!" One of them growled, no doubt red faced with self-righteous indignation. "Fucking up little kid’s lives like that! They're as bad as bloody paedophiles! Just look what happened to that Leigha Betts," chipped in the South African accent which was moments earlier advocating the reinstatement of apartheid. "And have you heard the music they listen to? Please!" At this point one of them jumped to his feet and began to gyrate wildly stamping his feet and making a 'Wakka-Wakka-Wakka' noise which was supposed to sound like dance music. Ok, ok, so you've got me, I hate the fucker. I can't stand the middle class wanker. There, satisfied? Not just because of that little incident though, I'd be the first to admit that Combat, Dead and I have said equally as blinkered, nasty things about them (the difference is of course that we're right and they're just a bunch of wankers). It's more of a culture clash than anything else, we were just never destined to get on, it's really nobody’s fault. People are after all only products of their environment. I understand this. Doesn't stop me thinking he's a shit head though. The doorbell goes around half past seven, right in the middle of a tough champions league clash with Roma. I let Dan get it, engrossed in the match commentary flashing up on the screen. Vivash has the ball on the right of midfield. Vivash continues with his run. Vivash has to get past Gillianotti. Vivash uses his skill to go past Gillianotti. "In there, just go through," I hear Dan say through the door. Vivash continues into the penalty area. Vivash cracks a low drive at goal. I stop breathing, concentration zeroed on the screen. Willing the ball into the back of the net… GOAL FOR ABERDEEN! The text flashes red and white on the screen and I leap out of my seat, fists pummelling the air, the tinny roar of the crowd coming from the speakers echoing in my ears. "What are you doing?" asks Stevie Dead sticking his head round the door. I laugh and motion him in. Stevie sits on my bed skinning up, a look of intense concentration on his face. I am rooting around behind the telly trying to figure out where to plug in which wires to get the N64 Stevie brought with him working. Eventually I manage and we sit smoking a pre Goldeneye-two-player joint while Stevie tells me about his day at the golf course. Apparently he almost got hit by a golf ball and chased by two oyster-catchers and a weasel. The score is tied at nine all, this kill is the decider. I wipe my right hand on my jeans to get a better grip on the controller. This is it. I pick up a KF7 soviet and the two green boxes of ammo to go with it. There is a satisfying double click as I arm myself. I flit across the end of a corridor, ready to unload on anything that moves. The little yellow dot on my radar tells me he's straight ahead and close, very close. I glance quickly down at Stevie’s half of the screen. This brief glimpse tells me two things. I know exactly where he is, and, more importantly, he hasn't got a gun. I feel a swell of triumph as, moving fast, I go in for the kill. I steal a look at Stevies face wanting to savour my victory. He's smiling. Why the fuck is he smiling? "Oh no," I breathe. I see the grenade launcher in his hands just as I round the last corner and in the few milliseconds before the explosion I know I have been suckered. I howl in frustration and throw my controller on the floor. Stevie merely smiles lopsidedly and pulls a cigarette from his inside pocket. He leaves at about half past nine having comprehensively thrashed me about six times. I watch him weave off up the street on his rickety old shit heap of a bike. Stevie bikes everywhere, probably why he's so thin. I did offer him a lift but he refused, shaking his head and saying he enjoyed it. Fucking nutter. I wash my face and brush my teeth with Dan's baking soda tooth whitening toothpaste. I set my alarm clock and get into bed. I try to read Watership Down for a little while but my thoughts keep drifting back to bared teeth and blank dead eyes. I click off my bedside lamp and lie awake staring at the red glowing didgets on my clock. I think of tomorrow and with a shudder close my eyes. My breathing slows and with surprising speed my brain fogs and then sinks down into black dreamless oblivion. I do two more long hellish days in the shed before they let me back to normality. Or at least to what passes for normality in this place. When I get back to the line it seems as though I've been gone years, and at the same time never been gone at all. Everyone looks pale and tired. I know they've been working long hours in my absence, I checked the GFB's clock card. Seven o'clock on Monday, six o'clock on Tuesday and seven thirty last night. Not for the first time this week I feel a tug of guilt about that. Malky sidles over with a lopsided grin and asks me how the shed was. His attitude is that of a convict in the exercise yard asking a fellow con about his time in 'the hole'. I almost expected him to offer to trade me some dirty books for a pack of smokes. I laugh and tell him it was shite. "Nightmare," he says, still grinning and moves away to assume his customary position beside the machine. Davie appears to think he is stealing my job. I tell him in the simplest possible terms to fuck off back onto trays where he belongs. He goes and remains there glaring at me for the rest of the morning. I am so glad to be out of the shed that I am very nearly in a good mood. The burger machine’s endless throb and clatter and the radio’s prattle seems warm and comforting after the plucking machines. About midway through the morning Malky instigates a chorus of, We hate Jimmy Hill. He's a poof, he's a poof, and I join in with enthusiasm. A couple of the lads from despatch who are passing take it up and even Ian sings a few lines. This goes on until Heart Attack Paddy comes through and shouts at us to stop it.
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