Bebo

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	Chapter Five
	Monday 8:04 am. The prickly rain runs a cold finger down the back of my neck, as cradling the assault rifle in the crook of my elbow, I peer cautiously over the wall. A damp grey wind flicks and tugs at the rubble strewn street. It moves none of the cement dust which, dampened by the rain, has become a grimy layer, lying over everything like a second skin. It carries a white plastic bag tumbling and pinwheeling across my field of vision. I watch as it floats like a lost child, alone in this ruined city. Up and up it floats until it disappears behind a building and is gone. Our C.O. is dead. Killed by one of the three snipers, holed up somewhere in the tortured landscape in front of us. He lies crumpled on his side in the open ground just to our right. He was hit twice in the chest. Sergeant Docherty too, and some nervous looking kid who smoked a lot and liked playing cards. He is lying facing me, eyes still open, rolled back in their sockets so they are gleaming white slits. The bottom half of his face is a congealed mess of blood. The thin air carries with it the sound of far away machine-gun fire. An eerie half-heard knocking on the wind. Across from us, across the open space where the bodies lie, is a row of shops. Broken windows stare like blinded eyes. Broken glass litters the pavement like jagged frost. In the recessed doorway of a butcher’s shop lies the body of a woman. Ragged-thin and filthy in a man’s overcoat and tightly bound headscarf. A child, a little girl, daughter or sister, sobs and tugs at her dead lapels. Only fifty yards away from us, from safety, or protection at least. It might as well be a hundred miles. An ocean of fatal distance. We have waited a silent hour since the last radio transmission, telling us to hold our position and await orders. Corporal Jackson takes up the radio handset with the grim expression of a swimmer swept into deep water. "Delta nine-three to HQ Actual. We are holding our position at grid," he pauses, consulting the plastic sheathed map held cradled against his knee. "Two-five, five nine. We are pinned down by enemy snipers. Three men down, please advise." For a few seconds the radio is silent, then a voice comes back, hard to read, clothed in static. "Fzzzzzrrr-Delta nine-three this is H.Q. Actual. Hold present position and await further orders. Out." For what feels like a long, long, time there is no sound, only the soft wailing of a little girl. And then with a jarring suddenness the radio stutters back into life. "This is H.Q. Actual to Delta nine-three. Pull back to grid position Two one, two zero. Airstrike is inbound, repeat, airstrike is inbound. E.T.A ten minutes." We look at each other. "You heard the order, get fucking moving." Corporal Jackson's face is set, expressionless. Nobody moves. Finally I point across the street. "We can't just leave her," I say. No one will meet my eyes. Ryder, a big man with stubble on his grizzled cheeks, removes his helmet and spits into the dirt. "Soldier," Jackson says in a gentle voice. "You try it and those snipers will shoot you to pieces." I shrug off my pack and heft my rifle across my chest. He raises his voice. "We are pulling back right now. All of us. That's a direct fucking order!" Suddenly Ryder speaks, softly, with conviction. "Covering fire," he says. The rest of the squad nod and take aim over the wall. "Jesus Christ!" mutters Jackson bitterly and joins them. Ryder claps me on the shoulder and gives me a worn out smile. "On three," he says. "One." "Two." The world explodes behind me and time slows down to a painful dragged out crawl as I rush from cover and into the open. My mind is keyed up to screaming point. So much so, that I am able to take in every minute detail. The staccato din of gun fire from behind me, the smell of smoke and damp earth, the kick of the rifle against my side as I fire from the hip. The whine and thud in the ears as something passes by my shoulder missing me by inches. And over everything else, the pale oval of a little girls face, black eyes frozen with fear. And then, all of a sudden, I am with her in the doorway. I grab her, screaming, around the waist. No time for comfort and compassion. I drop my gun and hoist her bodily onto my hip in its place. She weighs almost nothing. I am conscious immediately of how much slower I am with my howling passenger. I can see Ryder, arms outstretched, at the closest end of the wall, and feel the crunch of glass under my flying boots. A tiny pinprick of elation begins to spread inside me, as microsecond by torturous microsecond, he draws closer. There is a sudden jarring impact low down on my right hand side. It picks me up and spins me around, driving the air out of my lungs in a hard whooomp. There is no pain, only numbness and a growing ringing in my ears. Strong hands grab me and drag me under cover. With a sweeping wave of relief I see Ryder has the girl, cradled safe in his arms. He is saying something but his voice seems far away, unimportant. Then they are running, hell for leather, carrying me between them for a Jolting bumping forever, before I am laid out, flat on my back on a pavement, and they are ripping open my combat jacket and applying a field dressing. Dazedly I look down at my hands, fishbelly white. Speckles of red on ghastly skin. They can't be my hands, I think sleepily. They must belong to someone I knew once. I try to remember who. The last thing I hear before the blackness takes me, like a salmon rearing to take a mayfly flitting at the waters edge, is the sound of jet engines. There is tangled confusion and hot thumping pain, a thudding song of rotor blades. Voices and someone slapping my face, the sting of a needle, and then mercifully, nothing. I surface slowly and painfully out of the jumble, after what seems a very long time, although I really have no way of knowing. There is the feel of sheets on my body and fresh air on my face. And although there is pain, it is a dull quiet pain. A healing pain. Someone is holding my hand. Groggily I open my eyes. It takes a few seconds to blink away the blur. It's Cally. She leans forward, tears in her beautiful eyes and runs her hand down the side of my face. She hugs me gently and kisses my cheek. Finally she sits back and looks at me. She opens her mouth to say something but emotion robs her of her voice. She wipes away the tear running down her cheek with the back of a hand, and finally, looking into my eyes, finds her voice. "That's the end of batch four," she whispers. "Eh?" I say struggling upright. "The end of batch four!" Malky shouts again as I snap back to reality with a shudder. My head feels dislocated, spinning. My balance is fucked. Gone. I have to keep my feet squarely planted to keep myself from falling over. I fumble and almost drop my marker pen as I am drawing a big childlike number four on top of the batch. Every time I twist to place a tray on the ever-growing stack, my stomach clenches and I have to breathe in deep measured breaths to control the nausea. When the machine breaks down sometime around nine I lean back against the wall and put my hands over my eyes. My fingers with their coating of latex feel horribly clammy against my eyelids. My eyeballs beat like a pulse. I can feel them through the saggy skin and plastic gloves. Feel their sick heat. The world is muffled and far away. I sense everything through a thick fabric of alcohol poisoning. The grumpy faced engineer in his green boiler suit comes and goes, muttering darkly about drive belts. He gets the machine going but there is a new and unfamiliar note in the steady beat. Instead of going, ka-chung-chung-chung-kling, ka-chung-chung-chung-kling. It now goes, ka-chung-chung-chung-fadink-kling, ka-chung-chung-chung-fadink-ra-ra-kling­. This is not an encouraging development. I lean back against the wall at break time as I wait in line for the canteen. I talk to no one. My mouth is so dry my tongue keeps sticking to the inside of my cheek. I pull it away with a dry rasp that echoes in my ears. The eyes which look back at me from the grease smeared surface of the canteen counter are shot with crimson. My buttie feels unpleasant in my hand. I can feel sticky grease soaking through the napkin. I don’t want it. I really don’t want it. I eat it anyway, slowly, slumped on the edge of a seat, staring into space. I didn’t have any breakfast. I thought the buttie would make me feel better. But it didn’t. It made me throw up. I knew it was about to happen. I could feel my body rejecting it. I drank some Lucozade, taking long measured breaths in a vain attempt to keep it down. When my saliva glands went into overdrive I knew it was hopeless. My mouth watering like crazy, preparing itself for what was about to happen, I got up and walked quickly, with the back of my hand pressed to my lips, towards the changing rooms. I know the signs. I kneel, gripping the bowl with both hands and close my eyes. For a long minute it won’t come. The smell of chemical disinfectant, viscous and heavy in my nose. And then suddenly it does come, thick and dark and sour. I gag and retch, until there is no more to come up, then I gag and retch some more. By the time I lean my gasping face against the cold porcelain, two lines of tears have forced their way from the corners of my screwed up eyes. My lungs heave and rattle, snot hangs from my nose in twin runners. When I have got myself together a bit I flush the toilet and unbolt the door. My face in the mirror above the sinks looks like the face of a corpse. I am exactly seven and a half minutes late clocking back in. For the rest of the day time slows down to an unbearable crawl. Tick after tock. Minute after minute. Hour after cold glacial hour. Every moment is a sharp infinity, a snail crawling, slithering along the edge of a straight razor. Just like in Colonel Kurtz’s nightmare. I almost dose off in the smoking hut at lunchtime, until Malky nudges me awake and gives me half his egg sandwich. I ate it with my eyes closed. In the afternoon I find it difficult to get my head into The Zone. My skull seems to be pounding at exactly the same rhythm as the machine. After a while, I start to feel a bit better. The egg sandwich and the passage of time are doing their work. Eventually, by dint of pondering how hard it would actually be to pull off a bank robbery, I get my head into The Zone. I spent the remainder of the afternoon wondering about police response times and giving careful consideration to who I trust enough to be the get-away driver. On the way home I study my reflection in the rear-view mirror. I look bad. My eyes are bloodshot and the flesh of my face is white and loose looking. I don’t think I can ever in my life remember feeling uglier. I don’t smile at myself as I sometimes do. I just look away and keep my eyes on the road ahead. I almost feel like crying when I get home. I’d forgotten that there was a whole weekend’s worth of mess still to clean up. I sit on the sofa and stare wearily, despairingly, at the wreckage. I sit on the sofa and smoke a fag amid the price of our Super Sunday. Then I go to the kitchen, rip a black bag from the roll by the microwave, and drop the first of the bottles into its rustling embrace. After about thirty seconds the hairs on the inside of you nose have frozen. If you flare your nostrils you can feel the ice crackle. It’s a weird sensation. Your breath hangs suspended in front of you, white in the orange light like a suggestion of fog. Permafrost, inches thick, covers every surface. Stalactites of frozen moisture hang above me. The cold goes for your extremities first. Ears, nose, fingers. An industrial freezer is not the most pleasant place to be first thing in the morning. I hug myself tightly, hands clamped firmly under my armpits. “Fuck-it, fuck-it, fuck-it, fuck-it, fuck-it, fuck-it, fuck-it!” I mutter under my breath. I scan the rows of cardboard boxes, piled high on the steel shelves in front of me. The shelves are arranged close together across the width of the freezer, with about a two-foot gap in-between each. The spaces between them form long icy avenues that run the whole length of the freezer. I am at the far end of one of these. I read the labels off quickly, out loud through teeth which have begun to chatter. “Venison burgers, steak burgers, mock chops, chip-steaks, quarter-pounders, no, no, no, no.” Until eventually I find what I am looking for. I grab the box and leg it out of there through the little doorway with the frost encrusted plastic sheets and back into the (relative) warmth of the factory. I take a minute to rub my hands together and go brrrrrrrrrrrr before, prize in hand, I head back through to the burger machine. This morning we are making chicken burgers. “Where have you been?” scowls the G.F.B, “I sent you for those ages ago!” “I couldn’t find them, they were right at the fucking back,” I reply petulantly. I hate making chicken burgers. For one we have to fuck around for ages changing the plates on the machine. For another thing it means I have to put them into cardboard boxes instead of the red trays, which is a right cunt. They come off the conveyer belt in stacks of four, interleaves between each burger. I grab a flat folded cardboard box, unfold it and line the inside with one of the big sheets of polythene. Then six stacks of burgers on top of that, fold over the plastic, close the lid of the box and stick it on a pallet behind me. I can box six in about the time ten come off the end of the belt. This means they pile up. Fast. Every so often we have to stop the machine to catch up. Besides that, the mix has the consistency of glue and smells like vomit. They are still sloppy when they are boxed. They don’t firm up until they go in the freezer. The frozen burgers are spares. Added to the boxes to make up for the shortfall at the end of a run. They are rigid, frozen and complete beside their unformed counterparts, who await their time in the cold to harden them into permanence. The first rule of factory life is never look at the clock. This is something you learn in your first week. At your first glance the hands of the clock, centred high up on the wall, are at a right angle, marking half past nine. You busy yourself on the belt and the burgers begin to blur beneath your fingers, punctuated by the incessant gnashing breath of the machine. When you look up again you are hungry, ready for your break, convinced that at least an hour has passed. The hands read twenty to ten. Never look at the clock. I leave my watch at home now, curled on top of my television like a sleeping caterpillar. I have developed a special skill to combat the problem of the clock. Wherever I am in the room I instinctively keep my head and eyes inclined so it is never more than on the periphery of my vision. This clock blindness has served me well over the last four years, and gone a long way towards preserving my sanity. There is nothing worse than when you turn from some task and accidentally look straight at the clock. You spin away, desperately trying to tell yourself you didn’t see it, but you know you did. The position of the hands is fixed in your minds eye like a photograph. Of course sometimes you have to look at the clock. These occasions should be the result of a definite decision, i.e. you should know you are going to look at the clock in advance and you should prepare for it. You should begin this process of preparation by trying to work out in your head what you think the time actually is. Then you should spend the next five minutes trying to convince yourself that you actually believe that it’s thirty to forty five minutes earlier than your estimate. The thinking here is that when you do look at the clock you will get a pleasant surprise. So, I reckon it must be about ten o’clock. I spend the next two batches listing to myself the logical reasons as to why my first estimate was waaaaay over and why on second, more considered thought, it can’t much past quarter-past nine. I take a deep breath, I steel myself, I look. The hands extend in a more or less straight line, cutting the clock face in half. Nine seventeen. Fuck. This happens every time. By the time I get home, about half past five, my world is painted with the grey tones of exhaustion. Wearily, deadened, I dump my bag and kick off my shoes. With a heavy heart I eat a numb tasteless supper. I crawl, fully clothed, onto my bed. I don’t even have the energy for television or the computer. I lie on top of my duvet and hug the pillow against my cheek, the way I used to hold Amber, my teddy bear, when I was a child. Am I happy? “No.” I whisper, a tiny voice into the pillow. I can see my life stretching away in front of me and I’m afraid. I can’t live like this. This dead, gerbil-wheel existence, punctuated by the chemical sledgehammer of the weekend. I’m lonely and I’m scared. What scares me most is that I can live like this. This can become my life. I can become one of the shuffling factory undead, who have known no other life for thirty years, but the factory and the pub. In time I will be absorbed and lobotomised by life. The ever grinding pitiless routine will spread in my soul like cancer, until one day I’ll wake up and I will be looking forward to the company barbecue. That night I have a dream. I’m in a wide pool with high metal walls. Overhead, cruel fluorescent strip lights burn, their hard light thrown back in a thousand crazed points on the waters black skin. A walkway runs around the top. Pressed steel, painted grey, and rusting. People are standing on it. Some with elbows leaning on the guardrail, all with solemn faces and sorrowful eyes. Stevie Dead and Combat Mike are there. My parents are there. Cally is there. The inmates of the factory are there, in regulation whites. Heinrich, Heart Attack Paddy and Jack Benzies are there, high above me, eyes hard like black glass. In his hands Heinrich holds a clipboard and a ballpoint pen. As I watch he casts his eyes down and writes something. Smiles. The water is cold, so, so, cold. My body throbs with it. My clothes are heavy with it. Desperately, I splash my way to the side, to scrabble at the heartless metal. The watchers on the walkway lean forward. The walls of the pool are sheer and slippery, shiny in the overhead neons. Without any sense of time or movement, in the deep resonant beating of a heart, I am back in the centre of the pool. The zero point for a hundred eyes. My breath comes laboured, loud and rasping, amplified by the steel walls as I tread water. Slowly, slowly, a sweet dreamy lethargy begins to creep into my soul. My struggling limbs slow and my lungs relax. I look up at Heinrich on the walkway. He nods and makes a tick on his clipboard. I wrench myself suddenly upright, my feet tangled in sheets, breath ragged in my throat, brow oily with sweat. I blink, my eyes fighting to adjust to the darkness after the glare of my dream. I hug my knees, shivering and naked until I have control of myself again. My breathing slows and becomes easier. I stare blankly at nothing for a time. Eventually my gaze strays to the left to the ruby numerals of my alarm clock. Five twenty nine. As I watch the nine flips over and becomes a zero. The grating electronic shrill of my alarm fills my ears. By the time we go for lunch the machine has broken down three times. Mick the engineer says the drive belt has gone again. He disappears down to his cluttered, hobbit hole shed, and reappears with a long black snake like thing. He removes a side panel and lies on his back with his head in the innards of the machine. Davie stands importantly beside him and hands in spanners of differing sizes. A gaggle of old women forms to watch the proceedings. They nudge each other and cluck like a flock of old hens around a limber young rooster. Heart Attack Paddy blows a gasket when he sees them. Screaming, red faced, at them to, “GET BACK TO FUCKIN’ WORK.” When they have departed Paddy takes their place. His face is a deep plum colour. Not for the first time I wonder about the state of his ticker. Eventually Mick emerges, oily and triumphant. He reattaches the side panel and with a flourish, like somebody famous opening something important and presses the green button. The machine clatters back to life. He looks as if he was half expecting a smattering of applause. He departs, all smug smiles, everything right in his world. Fifteen minutes later the machine breaks down again. Mick is once again summoned from his shed. He gives us the third degree. The implication is that we are at fault, not the machine. That we abuse the machine to such a degree that it is continually breaking down. “What were you doing when it broke down?” he glares at me and Malky in particular when he asks this question. He does a bit of bad natured tinkering then stumps off again. The machine lurches on until around twelve. Then it makes a bad noise and whinnies to a halt and we are sent for an early lunch. What Mick doesn’t realise is that no one is at fault for the breakdowns. That machine is at least twelve years old. Its insides are a mish-mash of running repairs and cannibalised parts. I briefly imagine mice on treadmills and elastic bands. The only way to solve the problem would be if the tight fisted bastards over in the office, counting the money we make them, decided to shell out for a new one. The chances of this happening are so small it’s almost funny. Almost. There is a bright and brittle sun riding high in a powder blue sky. On the wind is that high reedy coldness, the forerunner of autumn. Malky and I sit, backs against the wall of the smoking hut, and compare sandwiches. I have ham and Malky has peanut butter and mayonnaise. He asks if I would be interested in a trade. As politely as I can, I decline. We sit in companionable silence for a while, eyes closed, letting the sunlight play on our faces. “You ever think of getting out of here?” Malky asks, squinting out of one half-open eye. “Sure,” I say. “Only about three hundred times a day.” “Seriously though, not just day dreaming.” “Of course,” I say, wondering if I ever really had. “I’m thinking of getting an apprenticeship.” “Yeah,” I say flicking at a fly which had landed on my knee. “Doing what?” “Dunno,” he said. “Joiner, sparky; something. Get out of this shit hole, get some qualifications, make decent money.” “Sounds like a plan.” I reply, wondering if this is just one of those wishful fantasy conversations, or whether he is actually serious. “I’m still young enough too.” I nod in vague agreement. “It’s not just the money either. Don’t you want to do something more with your life than make hamburgers? In fifteen years time, I could be driving down the road and think, fucking hell I helped to build that house.” I grunt noncommittally. I don’t want to get too deep into this subject because I know what he is saying is true, and I hate it. When I die what will I leave behind me? What effect will I have had on the world? If Malky gets his apprenticeship and becomes, say, a builder, then there will be houses, places where people live, that exist because of him. If you are the person who has built the house a family live in, then although they never knew you, you have had a profound effect on their lives. You have created the backdrop against which the intricate threads of their existence weave themselves. You created the set in which the actors play out the great melodrama. The hate, the fear, the love, the sex, the death, all take place in the box of wood and stone you made for them. Because of me there are a few more hamburgers in the world. Shitty ones at that. The most profound effect I have ever had on anyone’s life is probably by giving them food poisoning. By the time we get back from lunch the machine is working again. Well sort of. As a result of Mick’s repair job the machine has developed a strange new fault. When the plate slides out of the front of the machine, burger mix has begun to leak out from underneath it, instead of just on top where it is supposed to be. As the machine rattles on and on, it bubbles out and builds up like a pink cancer. When we mention this to Mick he gets all pissed off. “What more do you want?” he asks, throwing his hands up in exasperation. “The fucking thing works doesn’t it?” He is right of course. The only thing for it is to keep going. Every so often Malky, who is closest, has to reach under the moving plate, and scooping up the handful of gunk which has collected, toss it back into the hopper on top of the machine. I don’t like what he is doing. He is putting his hand into the gnashing, fang-ridden mouth of the machine. Surely on a piece of industrial machinery you shouldn’t be able to do that. Surely there should be safety guards. I don’t like the burger machine. I never have. In fact, if the truth be told, I’m downright scared of it. There is something sinister about it, almost alive. Not long after I started here I read a short story called ‘The Mangler’ by Stephen King, about an industrial sheet-folding machine that kills people. What horrified me most about the story, was the way in which it drew my attention to the mindless potential to maim and kill inherent in all industrial machinery, waiting just below the surface for a loose fold of clothing or a careless hand. Since then I have never been able to look into the steel belly of a mincer or at the blurred blade of a bone saw, without imagining a human being battered into pulp or missing a hand. I used to have nightmares about the machine. Those horrible dreams, I’m sure you’ve had too, when pursued by something dark and hellish, try as you might you can’t run. Know the ones I mean? In my version of the dream, the pursuing demon is the machine, all gnashing steel and burning eyes. I used to wake up, sweating in the dark with that roaring, rattling, clatter, still ringing in my ears. The machine runs smoothly after that. A glassy two hours in the Zone until afternoon break. I imagine myself as a fighter pilot during world war two. Flying a Spitfire in the Battle of Britain. In my head I dodge imaginary Messerschmitts, while my wingman screams, 109’s six o’clock! I land to a hero’s welcome from cheering aircrew and a beautiful, tearful girl with dark eyes. The sun is out, high up and watery, as I drive home. There is a strange feeling of resignation about the world today. The growth spurt which began in spring and reached its apex in August has run out of steam. No more do leaves stretch and grow. No new green cells are produced to replace those that fade away. No replacement material. No reinforcements against the relentless passage of time. Only bastions of existing matter fighting desperate last stands. Stalks, reed thin and brown against a milky sky. Sparrows hunch on telephone lines, exactly brown as the corpses of the first dead leaves. Dan is back when I get home. He is in the living room dusting and polishing. He gives me a snotty look and grunts a brusque hello. I ask him how the course went and he grunts again and nods. He is clearly put out with me about something. From the pointed way he is cleaning he clearly thinks I have messed the place up while he was away. If he thinks ‘messed up’ means the coasters on the coffee table not being straight and a few toast crumbs here and there, then he should have seen (and smelt) this place on Monday. The fact is that nothing pleases Dan. He is just one of those people. Especially when it comes to cleaning. He would sniff haughtily and pronounce a hospital operating theatre ‘grubby’. I note with some amusement that he is growing a goatee. I watch Neighbours, then take a shower. After this I sit damply in my comfy chair, wrapped in a towel, eating The Worlds Greatest Sandwich and playing Championship Manager. I have a game against Rangers at Ibrox so I change from 3-5-2 to a 5-3-2. I haven’t been doing so well this season, and with the Huns only two points behind me in the league, I feel it’s better to play it safe. Two wingbacks will give me a stronger defence and still be able to make forward runs, and hopefully, get a few crosses into the box. The weather forecast predicts heavy rain and a damp pitch, so I go for a defensive direct style with hard tackling. This will hopefully intimidate, what I have to admit, is the best Rangers team I have seen in years. Right from kick off things go horribly, horribly, wrong. My captain, a big defender by the name of Mark Chambers, is red carded for a two-footed challenge on Gregorio Matalan, Rangers big summer signing (7.4 million from Inter Milan, in case you’re interested). To make matters worse, although my full back totally halved him, the Italian striker continues with no apparent ill effects whatsoever. “Fuck sake Chambers!” I shout at the monitor. “If you have to get yourself sent off you could at least have broken the cunt’s ankle!” I am now faced with a difficult decision. I have only two central defenders on the pitch. With the score nil-nil do I pull off one of my strikers and put on a defender, thus essentially playing for a draw. Something inside me rebels. No, I think, I will not run scared of these blue-nosed, orange bastards. My team, I decide, is good enough to score away from home. I’ll wait until I’m a goal up then make the switch. Defend a lead, force the fuckers to attack and hit them on the break. Feeling like a master tactician, an Alex Ferguson like genius, I click continue game. Exactly nine minutes later, Matalan scores. A thirty yard screamer into the top left corner. I swear and change Defensive to Attacking on the tactics menu. No point holding back now. Matalan adds another before half time. A simple tap in, gifted to him by a defensive fuck up. In the second half things go from to bad worse. I concede another goal almost immediately and when I check my player ratings David Bantu, my Nigerian star striker, is playing a four. I make a couple of half hearted substations in a futile effort to turn things around. I sub Bantu and bring on a replacement forward. I also pull Tom Johnston off and bring on Romeo Vivash in his place, hoping his high level of creativity will result in a few extra shooting chances. Vivash hasn’t been on the pitch five minutes before he scores an own goal and then proceeds to get himself sent off following a shoving match with Rangers captain Daniel Hoess. Matalan bangs in another in Injury time, completing his hat trick and adding a great big dollop of insult to a jumbo portion of injury. The score at full time reads, RANGERS – 5 ABERDEEN – 0. Rangers now lead the Scottish Premier League by one point and I get a really snotty message from my board, expressing their disappointment. Fuck it, I think, It’s only a point. Even the greatest teams have off days, I’ll get it back. But I don’t get it back. In fact, quite the opposite. I get gubbed at Dens Park, and the week after, draw two all with Motherwell at Pittordrie. The following Saturday I suffer a humiliating defeat at home to Arbroath. The week after that I lose to Hearts. I am now fourth in the league. But worst of all, my board issues a press release stating that they have absolute confidence in me; a sure sign that the end is near. I sit, hunched forward with my head in my hands, one despairing eye peering through the gaps in my fingers at the glowing league table on the monitor. How could this have happened? In a defeat induced rage, knowing that my only salvation lies in keeping a clear head, I save out and play European Air war instead. The doorbell goes around eight. Thinking it might be Mike or Stevie I get up to answer it. I realise with a little stab of guilt that I haven’t talked to either of them since the weekend. Actually I haven’t talked to anyone outside of work since the weekend. But it isn’t Stevie Dead or Combat Mike. It’s Cally. When I see her through the spy-hole I have a moment of blind panic. My throat tightens and to my intense embarrassment I find I am blushing. I experience a sudden irrational impulse to run away and hide in my cupboard until she is gone. I don’t though. Instead I open the door. “Well hello there!” she says winking, her smile lop sided and conspiratorial. My mind goes utterly blank. I can’t think of anything to say. All grasp of the English language has suddenly and entirely been vacuumed out of mind. To my eternal gratitude, my subconscious leaps heroically into the gap, wielding the first stock in trade greeting it could lay its hands on. “How’s it going?” I say. “Not bad,” she says. “Recovered from the weekend yet?” I laugh and motion her in. “Just about.” I say, smiling. There is a moment, a strange uncomfortable moment, as we stand in the hallway facing each other. It was weird. Like each of us was half-dreading, half expecting, the other to say or do something. It can only have lasted for a second or two but it seemed longer. For the first time in my entire life I felt gratitude towards Dan. “Who is it?” he calls from the living room. “It’s me babe,” she calls and the awkward moment has dissipated, leaving the world much as it was before. Dan comes out of the living room and grabs her around the waist and picks her up. She makes a strange high pitched squeal, cut off abruptly when he kisses her. I look away, a bitter stab of something low down in my guts. “So what did you get up to at the weekend?” he asks. I open my mouth but something in her expression makes me close it again. “Oh nothing much,” she says. “Just went round to Gail’s and watched TV. How was your course?” “It was ok. Just technical, man stuff, nothing you’d be interested in.” So she hasn’t told him about Sunday. Why not? The answer, I realise, is probably simple. She’s embarrassed about hanging around with his loser flat mate and doesn’t want him to know. Simple. I give Stevie, and then Mike a phone. Stevie, Mrs D informs me, is working late at the golf course. There is a big tournament on. She tells me that it is important work and that she is proud of her boy. This makes me sad in some deep and fundamental way that I can’t define. Mike indignantly wants to know why I didn’t return his phone call last night. The exact phrase he uses is: “Useless fucking shitebag!” Dan, the cunt that he is, didn’t bother to tell me that Mike had phoned. He is making a habit of this. There is no point however in confronting him about it. I mean, what’s he going to say? Yes, I don’t relay your messages on purpose. Ha Ha! I think not. This is merely an escalation, the latest development in our cohabitation cold war. I arrange to go for a pint with Mike tomorrow night and hang up. I feel at a loss as to what to do with myself. Stevie is working. Mike has college work to do. I briefly consider phoning Andy, Wild Thing, or The Discopistol but something stops me. They are weekend acquaintances. Seeing them, talking to them through the week, would somehow feel wrong, as if I were violating some unwritten social rule. I pace moodily around my room for a few minutes unable to settle. Eventually I take myself through to the living room to watch television. Dan is on the sofa, an arm around Cally. There is a game of football on telly. “The ones in red are Manchester United,” he is saying. “They’re trying to get the ball into the other teams net. The other team are Bayern Munich. They’re from Germany.” She looks pissed off and bored almost to tears. I’d forgotten all about this game, even though the build up has been all over the papers all week. Too tired to care I guess. I don’t stay long in the living room. That nasty little spike of bile has returned with a vengeance. Wearily I return to my room, turn on the telly and fire up the computer. I load up Championship Manager, click on my saved game, and with half an ear on the match, try to do something to arrest my seemingly inevitable slide into oblivion. The machine talks to you. If you’ve been here long enough it talks to you. There are words in the endless field of white noise. Words formed from thudding static, throwing the contents of your mind back at you. A psychic mirror. An aural Rorschach test. Ka-chung-chung-chung-kling, ka-chung-chung-chung-kling, Ka-chung-chung-chung-kilng, ka-chung-chung-chung-kling, ka-chung-chung-chung-kling, ka-chung-chung-chung-kilng, ka-chung-chung-chung-kling, you’re-chung-chung-chung-kling, you’re-here-chung-chung-kling, you’re-here-for-chung-kilng, you’re-here-for-ever-kling, you’re-here-for-ever-cunt, you’re-here-for-ever-cunt, you’re-here-for-ever-cunt, you’re-here-for-ever-cunt, you’re-here-for-ever-cunt. You’re-here-for-ever. I look up, my ears ringing, the nonsense noise of the radio far away and irrelevant. It is lunchtime. I eat my sandwiches (tuna today in case you were interested) in the smoking hut. When I am finished I lean back, one white booted foot on the table, and read the football news in the back of the Daily Record. Thursday lunchtime is when a sense of optimism returns to my world. Once you have cleared Wednesday you are over the hump. The worst of the week is over. The weekend (although still hazy and indistinct) has pulled into view on the horizon. I feel like a sailor on a long voyage whose destination is uncertain must feel when there is the shout from the crows nest: Land ho! As I tap a cigarette out of my packet the Doors song of the same name plays madly in my head. Everybody seems happy and relaxed today, the weeks work almost being done. There are smiles and jokes in the smoking hut. Even Davie is being almost human. The words, only a day and a half to go, are practically written on the faces below the white helmets. That is, until we get back from lunch and they drop the bombshell on us. It happens as we’re preparing to switch on the machine. Malky, with the help of Frank the Serial Killer, has dragged the white tubs comprising batch ten out of the cold store, and has slung the first of them into the hopper on top of the machine. Everybody has new gloves and the line is well stocked up with trays and interleaves. Everybody is in position and ready. Malky is about to hit the green switch when Heart Attack Paddy pushes his way through the plastic drapes. “Just hold on a second,” he shouts to Malky. We wait, faces turned towards him, wondering what the fuck he wants. Knowing, as every menial worker does, that when the foreman says, just hold on a second, nothing good will follow. He waits for a second before he speaks, tapping a pen against the notebook he has in his hand. “You’re all working this Saturday,” he says, not a request, a flat statement. I look around me at the glum, accepting, faces of my colleagues. “No,” I say quietly. “No?” says Heart Attack Paddy. “No,” I reply. “I can’t. I’m busy this weekend.” Paddy stares down the line but no one will meet his gaze. Then he stares at me. I don’t look away. When the silence becomes uncomfortable and he sees I am not going to fold, he writes my name in his notebook and walks stiffly away, tossing a brusque, Get this machine running, Back over his shoulder. As the machine shudders back to life and I begin to grab and stack, I am inwardly seething. You are all working this Saturday. An order not a request. A fucking order. An assumption of ownership. An assumption that you have no life outwith this place. That whenever they want they can take away what remains of your freedom. I am grinding my teeth in mute fury as I mark the end of batch ten. Heart Attack Paddy reappears at about half past one, a smug look plastered all over his ugly face. “Mr Henderson wants to see you in his office.” He has obviously been a busy little bee. Heinrich's office is not really an office. It is a portakabin sort of stuck on to the side of the factory building. I knock on its weatherworn door, two dull raps. After a moment Heinrich's muffled voice. “Come in.” He doesn’t look up as I close the door behind me. I am made to wait as he finishes writing something in a big book on his desk. I get the definite impression that this is a performance, put on for my benefit. It would not surprise me to discover that he wasn’t actually writing anything in that book. I stand against the wall (the only chair in the office is the one Heinrich is sitting in) and fidget nervously, like a school kid who has been called up to see the headmaster. I stand for almost a minute listening to the wind whistling around the corners of the factory. The point of all this, the lack of acknowledgement, the standing, the waiting, is to establish from the outset exactly who has control of this situation. Eventually Heinrich puts down his pen, closes the book with a dull snap, and puts it carefully aside among the stacks of paper and framed photos which litter his desk. There are photos all over Heinrich’s office. I know from previous visits that most of them are of Heinrich in his younger days, grinning from the ranks of various football teams. In a cabinet behind him are an array of trophies. You know the sort of thing, tacky keepsakes for coming runner up in some crappy five-a-side tournament. Little gold painted men kicking little gold painted footballs. On the back wall hangs a green and white pennant which reads, Celtic F.C. Away the Bhoys, and a signed photo of Kenny Dalglish circa nineteen seventy something. All these things are dust free, recently cleaned, in sharp contrast to the rest of the office, with its elderly coffee-cup rings and cobwebs. “Look,” he says, removing his glasses and rubbing his eyes, two shiny red spots sit either side of his nose. “You’re behind on the burger orders for this week. We need everyone in at the weekend to catch up.” This is not my fucking problem. By saying you’re he is implying that somehow the shortfall is our fault. Even with the machine breakdowns taken into consideration, this is clearly bullshit. The line is not under-producing, the fact is that the sales people, in their never-ending quest for profit, have sold more burgers than we are capable of making. Instead of cutting the orders to a manageable level, or employing more staff to cope with the demand, they screw more work out of the staff they have. He continues, switching to emotional blackmail mode. “You know of course that the burger order is the biggest the factory has. If we were to lose that order we would have to pay people off. A lot of people, and not just from the burger line either.” He looks tired and old as he speaks, I feel a sudden and unexpected tug of sympathy for him. He is just as fucked as the rest of us. Maybe more. He is trapped in the impossible position of administering, of being responsible for this farce. The salesmen oversell like sharks in a feeding frenzy and then dump the impossible production targets on him. I almost feel sorry for this man with the bags under his eyes and the threads of silver in his beard. There is, however, no fucking way I’m giving up my weekend. “So,” he says. “I’ll put you down for Saturday?” Starting to write before I have even replied. “No,” I say, quieting the gentle scratch of pen on paper. “Why not?” he asks angrily. The understanding is gone, the old hostility and resentment rising inside me like a corpse floating to the surface of a river. Why not? The harmonics within the voice say. What else could you possibly be doing? Do as you’re fucking told! In the corner of my eye I can see one of the photographs on Heinrich’s desk, faded with sunlight and age, in a cheap wooden frame. “I play football at the weekends,” I say. “Training on Saturday, a game on Sunday.” He puts down his pen and looks at me. “Sunday league is it?” There is a little warmth in his voice now. “Yeah,” I say. “That’s the one.” As I close the door I am angry. Angry with Heinrich, angry with myself. I got out of working at the weekend, and probably every weekend forevermore for that matter, but that’s not the point, not what I’m angry about. Why couldn’t I just refuse? Why did I have to lie? It feels like I am reduced to stealing pieces of my life back from my employers. It makes me feel small and dirty and I fucking hate it. We eventually hit the stop button on the machine at quarter to seven. I am hungry and tired, boot and helmet sore, aching feet and red welt marks around my forehead. But we are not free yet. Malky drags the power hose out of the store cupboard and connects it to the waterline. I look at the clock; 6:45. It will be at least an hour before I get out of here. We take the machine apart bit by bit, until it stands before us, a skeleton, stripped and bare. Hot soapy water cascades over it, dripping from its steel superstructure in steaming runners, until you are convinced that it is about to rear up and shake itself dry like some huge dog. We scrub and scrub to get off the encrusted lumps of burger meat, half cooked and turned grey by the hot water. The smell of the cooking meat, hot and rancid is enough to turn your stomach if you’re not used to it. Malky uses the power hose to blast away the worst of the crap and then the rest of us use the scrubbing brushes to get into the nooks and crannies. Each person on the line takes a different part of the machine. Today I am doing the punch plate and the blades. Annie and Ian doing the big steel hopper from the top of the machine. The GFB has the conveyer belt dismantled and is swiping at the rollers, an expression of vicious bad humour cut into her face. Davie is listlessly wiping the floor with the squeegee mop (imagine a thing that looks like a huge version of those T shaped things for washing windows). I glare at him. He always fucking grabs the squeegee mop because squeegeeing down the floor is the cushiest job imaginable. Frank the Serial Killer is cleaning the tables, scrubbing unnaturally hard and fast, beads of perspiration are clearly visible on his forehead. He looks up, making sudden unexpected eye contact and grins, rotten teeth making him look for all the world like a child with a mouth full of Mars Bar. Malky, because he has the power hose, has been lumbered with cleaning the insides of the machine. To do this you have to clamber up and actually stand on the machines metal back. Six feet above a hard concrete floor, you stand in rubber boots on a mirror smooth steel surface, puddled with soapy water. On this precarious surface you must manoeuvre the bulky nossle of the hose so it points straight down into the belly of the machine (in practice this means holding the trigger end above your head with your right hand and jamming the business end into the hole where the burger mix goes, bracing it with your left) and hope to fuck the recoil doesn’t knock you flying to shatter you pelvis on the cruel floor below. I can hear Malky swearing over the noise of the hose. He is being blinded and soaked by soap, steam and spray, and splattered with clods of meat, thrown up in the air by the powerful jet of water. We shouldn’t really be doing this. The company, however, is far too fucking tight to employ cleaners. We clean our equipment as best we can but at the end of a long shift it is hard to do a thorough job. It is not unheard of to find maggots in the grease traps of the mincers. Once when there was a crack in one of the piston seals, we found a huge nest of fat white maggots inside the machine itself, living on the rotten burger mix which had been working its way through the gap. Fuck knows how long they had been there. When Heart Attack Paddy found out, he told us to get rid of them and the batch went out as normal. When we are finally finished, when all the parts of the whole are clean and (allegedly) sterile, we put the machine back together with quick, practised movements. All but Davie who takes his time wiping the last of the dregs down the drain in the floor. The power hose, scrubbing brushes, and the radio, go back into the store cupboard and then, at long last, we are free. Click, Thurs -: PM. - 7:27. There is nothing in the flat to eat. I remember this just I pull up to the kerb and switch off the engine. I review my options. I can tell by the light in the living room window that Dan is home, so stealing his food is out of the question. Fuck. A chipper it is then. As I walk I notice what I nice night it is. Pale sunshine and birds twittering in a garden somewhere, smell of cut grass on the breeze. I did the drive home on autopilot and am vaguely worried to discover that I actually can’t remember most of it. I turn right at the end of the road and walk towards the high street. My bag, slung over one shoulder, keeping time against my thigh. I cross the road in a gap between the endless parade of crap cars. Novas, Fiestas, Escorts, Capris. Some old and rusty, some old and tarted up. Cheap spray jobs, oversized spoilers, alloys, body kits, extra headlights and pointlessly large exhaust pipes. All contain a cargo of gaunt faced young men smoking cigarettes, hats pulled right down so only hard eyes show beneath. Snatches of thumping music, brief and fleeting as they whip past open windowed. Always shitty hard house or trance. I catch Zombie Nation blatting from the open door of one parked car. Jesus Christ. Half way down the high street, I pass two girls pushing baby buggies. They don’t look more than sixteen. “Hiya,” one says, smiling. My mind strains to put a context to the face I vaguely recognise. Flash. Huge saucer eyes and protruding jaw. Talking complete shit at some party. Compulsively twisting the top on and off of a bottle of water. Talking shit while little spots of white foam collected at the corners of her mouth. Is it her? Could be. Could be a lot of people. “Alright?” I say as I brush past. I turn and watch them, pretending to look in a chemists window, as they walk away up the street. They are trapped here, chained to this place forever. I can see the bars of their cage of circumstance as clearly as if they were made of steel. I look at my reflection in the plate glass window and am unable to meet its eyes. About a hundred meters before you get to the chippy there is a lane which runs off to the right, forming a T-junction with the high street. There is someone leaning against the corner. Black bomber jacket, white Adidas popper trousers, shaved head and a cigarette clamped between thin lips. He looks up and I make eye contact. Dinnet. I hold the contact longer than is probably advisable, long enough for him to stare. I drop my eyes sharply. I am conscious of his head turning to follow me as I pass. I am thankful of the fact there is a queue in the chip shop. Hoping that by the time I am walking back up the road Dinnet will be gone. The teatime rush gives me time to ponder my choice. I become so absorbed in comparing the respective merits of a haggis pudding supper as opposed to a cheeseburger, that I hardly notice any time passing at all before a spotty young man in a stupid hat is asking to please take my order. Surprised into a snap decision, I go for a fish supper, which was the last thing on my mind. I hand over my money, push my way to the door and out into the early evening air, the clean coolness a relief after the greasy, steamy atmosphere of the chip shop. I look ahead to the lane and see, with a sinking sensation, that Dinnet has not gone. He is still there, now flanked by two of his dipshit colleagues. “Fuck,” I mutter under my breath. This is bad. Now he has an audience. I keep my eyes focused on a no parking sign in the distance, avoiding any and all eye contact, but I can still feel his eyes on me. As I draw level he takes a step forward. “What the fuck are you looking at?” he shouts. I say nothing, look straight ahead, keep walking. He gets in my space, shoving me with his shoulder. His hands are still in the pockets of his bomber jacket but I can see they are balled into fists. “Aye? Aye? Keep fuckin walking!” I am past him now and he doesn’t follow. He just stands there, and though I’m not stupid enough to look back, I know he’s staring after me, chin jutting out. He says something to his companions that I don’t catch and they all laugh. “Aye, away home and get shafted by your two boyfriends!” he calls after me, his voice mocking. He is obviously referring to Stevie and Mike. I walk away, with this ringing in my ears. My ears and cheeks burning. My fists clenched and my teeth gritted. At quarter to nine I walk up to Mike’s. Sunset hangs over the hills, red and gold, frozen fire in the sky. Midgies dance in lazy dusk clouds, the occasional bat darts overhead. Smoke from my cigarette hangs in the motionless evening air in a sweet smelling haze. I take a last drag and flick it away, as, without breaking stride, I turn left into Mike’s driveway. I am about to ring the doorbell when I hear voices. One loud one muffled, floating from the kitchen window. I pause with my hand half way to the bell push. The raised voice, I realise, belongs to Mike’s father. “God Michael! I despair, I really do!” There is the sound of someone pacing on linoleum, dishes being set down heavily. “When are you going to grow up, eh? When are you going to start doing something with your life?” The quiet voice says something, too low to catch. “What? C’mon Michael don’t make me laugh. You know as well as I do that college course is nothing more than a piss about. Why can’t you be more like your brothers?” Mike has two brothers, Gary and James. Gary is a car salesman and James works for the same oil company as Mike’s dad. Another Mumble. “They were both out earning money at your age! Not lazing around the house sponging off your mother and me! Going out every bloody weekend getting up to god knows what with your druggie friends!” This is an argument I have heard many times before. I ring the doorbell. “Go on,” the loud voice says, quieter now, weariness replacing anger. “Get out of my sight.” Mike is unusually quiet as we walk to the pub. The Wanchor is almost empty. A couple of old men at the bar, a woman of about forty slotting a seemingly endless supply of ten pence pieces into the bandit and hammering out a futile tattoo on the buttons. I take a deep breath as I push open the door, taking a lungful of that sour smoky smell that never scrubs out. The ghosts of weekends past and of weekends yet to come. Forever and ever, I think. Until death us do part. I stick fifty pence on the edge of the pool table. Mike racks up while I go to the bar. I hand him a pint of lager and he hands me a pool cue. By the time I am playing a laughably bad shot on the black, which sees it not only rattle down the wrong pocket (we always play last bag) but also sees the white follow it down, Mike is a little more talkative. By the time we get our third pint in, he seems almost like his normal self. “So what’s the plan for the weekend then?” I ask. He shrugs. “Well,” he says. “I was speaking to Wild Thing. He said some guy called Craig Lewis was having a party tomorrow night. Some fucking farm in the middle of nowhere. Know him?” “Yeah, vaguely,” I say. He was in the year below us at school. An alright kind of a guy as I remember. I wonder if he’s happy at the prospect of his house being invaded. I wonder if he realises what he’s letting himself in for. “So I was thinking Starski’s for a bit, then back there,” He pauses, swilling the dregs around in the bottom of his glass. “I’m meeting Maggie at seven.” “Yeah, how many you getting?” “Lots. Count you in?” “Fuck aye!” I say. A big flashing sign saying WEEKEND has just lit up in my head. He grins. “Thought you might say that.” We get another pint and sit reminiscing for a while. Talking about climbing trees and summers long past, primary school and sports day five a side football tournaments where our team was so bad that Mr Henderson the P.E teacher insisted on giving us a six goal head start. Hurling snowballs at cars and being chased by enraged motorists. The first time we got drunk. Camping with a ratty old tent and a bottle of cheap whisky, watching Stevie throw up into his sleeping bag. Secondary school discos when we used to go round the back of the technical department and spend the evening buzzing lighter fluid. We laugh helplessly at the memory of Stevie standing in one of the Techie classrooms doing an impression of Mr Ironside, the most feared teacher in the school, completely unaware that he had quietly entered the room and was standing right behind him. When we eventually stop there is one of those odd silences you get after a really good laughing fit. Where you make that odd post hilarity sighing noise. An Oasis song, rocking chair, plays gently on the jukebox. “You ever miss it?” Mike asks. “Miss what?” “Being a kid.” “All the time,” I say. He smiles sadly. “Yeah me too.” You’re free when you’re a child. You build up this picture, this sense of how the world is. A place of snowball fights and summer holidays. Only to find out that you are wrong. One hundred per cent wrong. They let you be free and then, incrementally, between the ages of twelve and twenty they take it all away. Slowly, so you don’t even notice, childhood becomes chains, and you discover how the world really is. A place of income tax and terminal illness. We’re all just lost children, wondering where the fuck the time went. And although he’d never say it, this is what Mike means. I don’t like seeing Mike gloomy like this. Don’t like seeing the cracks in his fuck the world act. It makes my own act harder to keep up. I change the subject. The light is strange on this Friday morning. Lying leaden and oppressive over the still countryside. Mottled clouds are piled up on the horizon, sullen and bruised. Thunder storm light, I think to myself. There is no breeze, the only things that move are the feathers of the occasional road-kill crow. I see them in my rear view mirror. Black fingers reaching up from flattened corpses stamped into decaying puddles on the tarmac, stirred by the passing of the car. I open my locker and pull out my helmet and boots, exchanging them for my bag and jacket. The knowledge that this is Friday takes a little of the edge off the despondency. I rummage in the laundry for a boiler suit and a clean hairnet and clock in at six fifty-seven exactly. I nod to the others, who apart from Malky, are already in, preparing the line. I gather stacks of red trays, hauling them over to where they will be within easy reach, and go to fish around in the cupboard for a pair of gloves. Stan by Eminem blasts out of the radio. Malky arrives just as I am drawing my day’s circles on a polystyrene tray. He gives me an exited grin as he dashes past into the cupboard to get gloves and interleaves, the GFB glaring at him for his lateness. “Got something to tell you,” he calls over his shoulder. There is, however, no time. Break time! He mouths as the GFB hits the green button and wakes the machine. I nod. Over the years I’ve worked here, I’ve come to regard what comes down the conveyer belt as nothing more than pink goo. Giving about as much thought to it as you would to shapes moulded from Play-Dough. But sometimes the truth sneaks up on you. Sometimes, when you least expect it, you find yourself thinking about it. Now is one of those times. Ka-chung-chung-chung-kling. I watch the burgers being punched out and sliding down. Some creature, some living thing, lived its whole life, was born, had a mother who fed it, nurtured it, loved it. Maybe had offspring of its own and nurtured and loved them, lived its whole life, thought its thoughts. And for what? So it could go Ka-chung-chung-chung-kling and slide down a conveyer belt. When you think about it though, is that really so far from our own lives? We live our whole existence, think our thoughts, tormented by hope and disappointment, and for what? All to go Ka-chung-chung-chung-kling (metaphorically at least) and be thrown in a hole to rot and be forgotten. In the end no one cares who you were or what you thought, who you loved, dreamed about or believed in. All you are is another mouldering gravestone. A piece of cemetery scenery. It’s all just a matter of time. I fill in another circle. “End of batch two!” I shout. Malky sidles up to me in the queue at break time, just as I’m ordering my black pudding buttie. “Guess what?” he says. “What?” I say, handing over my money to the sour faced woman behind the counter. “You remember that apprenticeship I was talking about?” “Yeah,” I say, cradling my newly purchased bottle of Irn Bru awkwardly in the crook of an elbow and taking my buttie with the other hand. It takes a moment before what he is saying sinks in. “Fuck off!” He smiles. “Yup,” he says. “That’s fucking great! Where?” My face splits into a wide grin. “Well, there’s this friend of my uncle’s who owns his own building company. He’s taking me on as an apprentice joiner. I start next month.” I slap him on the back with my free hand. “That’s fantastic news, well done!” He lowers his voice. “Here, don’t tell anybody though. I’m not giving the cunts notice till the last minute. You know what they’re like. If they know your going they’ll try and stiff you on your back pay.” I nod and mime zipping up my mouth. “Man am I gonna enjoy telling that fucker Heinrich to stick his job up his arse! And I’ll tell you something else,” he says as we are walking to the smoking hut. “There’s no fucking way I’m working Saturday now!” “What are you going to tell them?” I ask. “Tell them?” He snorts, “I’m not going to fucking tell them anything! I’m just not going to turn up!” He starts laughing, high as a kite at the prospect of his salvation. “What the fuck are they going to do? Sack me?” He does a little dance, still laughing. And suddenly, I find I’m laughing with him. Back on the line I find it is difficult to sort out my feelings about Malky leaving. Happy and depressed at the same time. Happy for him, happy he has his ticket out of this shit hole. Depressed for me because I don’t. What am I going to do without him? Eventually I get to watching the burgers again. The dead on their final journey. Lunch is a long time coming. I am standing in the queue, waiting to add a packet of crisps and a bottle of Bru to the sandwiches I have brought with me. I am thinking about nothing In particular, daydreaming, staring at the wall opposite. Feeling good, the words, only half a day to go, echoing in my head. I am not the most observant of people at the best of times, but when there is a change in the tone of the hubbub of conversation of the canteen I can tell you what it means right away. I have been working here long enough to be able to tell you that when there is a tiny pause in the din, like everyone in the room catching their breath at the same time, followed by a slight increase in noise, an extra forced tone in the myriad conversations; it means the boss has entered the room. I hear heavy clicking footfalls, made by expensive shoes and a timid, Alright Jack, behind me. I don’t look round. I don’t have to. The boss man cometh, I think sarcastically. At that moment I have one of those weird precognitive flashes. Like when you are singing a tune in your head and you turn on the radio and it is actually on. I can see exactly what is about to happen a split second before it does. Dejavu in reverse. I see the chip, dropped from someone’s lunch tray. I see the foot as he barges past me. I see his shoe come down hard on the chip mashing it into the lino, have time to note the leather’s high shine. And then suddenly the right leg, robbed of its purchase, shoots off at an awkward angle and Jack Benzies, with a surprised grunt, comes crashing down on his rear. I stuff my cuff into my mouth to suppress my laughter, but I am the only one. There is a sudden deathly silence. “Who the fuck dropped that chip?” he roars, hauling himself to his feet by grabbing a fistful of the clothing of the closest worker. When the man offers an outstretched hand it is smacked away with such force that the sound is like a gunshot. The silence has become a void now. An absence of sound so complete that it actually has a sound. A hollow, ghastly, ring. No one moves, no one breathes. The room is a sea of wide eyes, mouths frozen in Os of surprise. Benzies stalks to the centre of the canteen. White faced and shaking with rage, he sweeps a fat, accusing finger around the room. Wherever it points people actually lean out of its way, as if it were a gun. When he talks again his voice is a tight, ragged whisper. “If whoever dropped that chip owns up now, they will just come out here and get a punch in the face.” Blazing eyes sweep the room. People shuffle, look at their feet. No one will make eye contact. After a moment he continues. His voice rising steadily. “When I find out who is responsible for that chip they can fuckin well sling their hook! Understand? They are out the fuckin door!” He stands, glaring for a second or so more, then turns on his heel and stalks out. For a tiny stunned moment, the white painted walls ring with the ghosts of his bellowing, before they are drowned out by a sudden tidal wave of chatter. Thing is, I know who dropped that chip. I watched them do it. I look over to a table at the back of the room, at an old lady called Noreen who works in the packing department. She is trembling. A friend pats her hand, mouths reassurances which I have no hope of hearing over the din in here. Her plate of chips, which she had been enjoying so much, sit forgotten on the table before her. Thing is, if I saw her drop the chip, so did everybody else. I see it happen. We are doing chicken burgers. A group of people from packing are ferrying the cardboard boxes with their freight of sloppy burgers through to their own department for labelling and stacking. One of them is Noreen. I give her a wink and she smiles back nervously. Some time later, out of the corner of my eye, I see Heinrich come up to her and say something. Deafened by the racket of the machine I strain to make out words. It is, of course, hopeless. Heinrich repeats whatever it was he said to her. She puts down the boxes she is carrying. She has suddenly gone very white. She shakes her head and Heinrich says something else to her which I don’t catch and puts his hand on her shoulder. She is crying as she is led away. Her fate is confirmed, late that afternoon, by a woman called Big Mary, two places in front of me in the clock queue. “Hear about Noreen?” she says, turning and talking to the queue at large. “Sacked. Some cunt grassed on her for dropping that fuckin chip.” “That’s terrible, that is!” somebody gruffly observes. “We can’t let the bastards away with this!” Big Mary growls again. “Some cunt ought to do something about it.” “Like a walk out or something?” I say. “Aye,” she says. “Something like that.” There are mutters of assent from the rest of the queue. This is, of course, bullshit. There will be no walk out, no strike, not even an official complaint from the workers. This kind of talk is our way of trying to convince ourselves that we have some control, some influence over our situation, our lives. All that will happen is there will be a couple of days worth of grumbling in the smoking hut. Then the whole incident will be added to the long mental list of petty grievances which we carry around in our heads everyday of our working lives. Petty, that is, to everyone but Noreen. I find though, that as I am pulling my jacket and bag from my locker and clumsily but forcefully replacing them with my helmet and boots, that I am becoming detached from the whole issue. The Friday feeling, which has been hitherto been kept damped down, is kicking in with a vengeance. By the time I am walking across the car park thoughts of Noreen have been replaced by a vague wondering about what kind of pills Mike will get off of Maggie. I slide into the drivers seat of my car and stick my Doors compilation tape into the slot. Pay check in the bank, staring straight down the barrel of a Friday night. I am singing along with the music as I floor it out of the car park. Let it roll baby roll, let it roll baby roll. Let it roll, All night long.
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