Rob-a-Job
Graduating to a life of crime
A comedy
by
Paul Pilkington
Copyright 2011 Paul Pilkington
http://sites.google.com/site/paulpilkingtonauthor/
Smashwords Edition
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Chapter 1
The phone woke me at two o’clock in the afternoon. I had only been asleep for five hours. I gingerly opened my eyes, which appeared to be almost super-glued shut, and reached out towards the ringing phone. As I brought the receiver to my ear I caught a glimpse of myself in the bedside mirror. It didn’t look good. My hair was sticking out at all angles and black lines ran under both my bloodshot eyes. I looked like an extra from Dawn of the Dead.
‘Hello?’ I said, still looking in horror at the zombie-like reflection.
‘Andy, is that you?’
It was Jonathan, a friend of mine who had obviously forgotten I was working night shifts and should have been asleep at that moment.
‘Yes, of course it’s me,’ I replied, trying to talk while also breaking out into a hippo-like yawn.
‘It doesn’t sound like you.’
‘That’s probably because I’ve only just woken up. You know, what with working all night in that freezing cold warehouse.’
I stood up from my bed and, cordless phone in hand, walked towards the window and pulled back the curtains just enough to see through. Outside I could see a group of young children playing tick in the street. I watched them laughing as they ran after each other. They looked like they didn’t have a care in the world. No responsibilities. No pressure. That was the life, I thought. Ten years ago it had been me out there. But now, at twenty-one, I had responsibilities: finding a career and earning money, to name but two.
‘Oh, yeah, sorry, Andy. I forgot you’re working nights. Sorry about that,’ Jonathan said.
I pulled the curtain back across and turned back to face the bombsite that was my bedroom. It was bathed in a strange half-light, caused by the July summer sunshine that was soaking through my wafer thin, white curtains. The room was a complete mess. It looked like an earthquake had struck. My clothes and shoes from the previous night’s work were scattered across the floor, and my desk in the far corner was stacked high with my geography files from university. As I spied the notes, I wondered if I’d ever again need to know how a volcano was formed, or what an archipelago was. I had meant to file the notes away four weeks ago, when I’d first arrived back home after graduation, but had not yet gotten around to it. My parents hadn’t complained much about the state of my room, as they knew that I had a lot on my mind.
‘That’s all right,’ I said, kicking a stray pair of tartan boxer shorts off the floor and up into the air. I watched as they drifted, parachute-like, onto my bed. I scratched the back of my head and tried to flatten my wayward hair.
I’d started to wake up properly. Enough to realise that Jonathan didn’t sound his usual cheerful self. I sat back down on my bed, next to the shorts.
‘How are things?’ I asked, scrunching the boxer shorts into a ball and throwing them towards the mountain of dirty clothes in the corner of the room.
‘Not too good. Work is terrible…’
Jonathan was working throughout the summer in a chicken-stuffing factory. Like me, he was trying to earn money during the summer so that we could afford to go on a month long holiday to Canada in little under eight weeks time. Four of us were planning to fly to Vancouver, then travel across the country on the Trans-Canadian railroad to Toronto. We estimated that the trip would cost about two grand each. The problem was, that after three enjoyable years at university, we were skint. So, we had decided that as soon as we graduated, we would return home and find temporary summer work; preferably work that paid well. The plan was that by the end of August, we would all have the money to go away and enjoy ourselves on the holiday of a lifetime.
I noticed that my pillow was covered with lots of my dark brown hair. Was it possible to start going bald at twenty-one? When did Kojak start to lose his hair? I felt the back of my head.
‘…I’ve just been moved from the section where you stuff the chickens, to the section where you have to actually take out the insides of the chicken,’ Jonathan said. ‘My supervisor told me it was a promotion, but I’m not getting paid any more money. The only difference is that instead of getting covered in stuffing, I get chicken insides and blood all over me. I smell like a walking abattoir.’
Jonathan was certainly not in the best of spirits.
‘You wear overalls though, don’t you, while you’re working? When you get changed and go home you shouldn’t smell, should you?’ I pulled a clump of my hair from the pillow and examined it.
‘I thought that too,’ Jonathan continued. ‘But since this new position my dad keeps making comments about the possibility of putting a bell around my neck so that he can get advanced warning of when I’m about to enter the room. He’s even started putting a clothes peg on his nose, which he says he’ll have to make do with until he can find a gas mask.’
‘He’s just winding you up. Your dad is a bit of a joker, after all.’
‘I know but, even my mum has noticed. She hasn’t said anything, but she keeps opening windows in the house and spraying air freshener. She’s bought a bulk supply of Glade Spring Fresh. I’m sure it’s because of me.’
I didn’t really know what to say, so I decided to change the subject.
‘How’s life outside work?’
‘Not good,’ Jonathan bemoaned. ‘My gran was burgled yesterday. They took her antique clock, and a couple of other things. Luckily she’s okay, but she’s upset about the clock. She got it for her twenty-first birthday. It’s even inscribed with her name and birth date.’
I wished that I hadn’t changed the subject.
‘That’s terrible,’ I sympathised. ‘We’ve had quite a few break-ins recently round here. Our next-door neighbour was burgled a couple of weeks ago. They didn’t find out who did it. You’d think the police would be able to catch these people.’
‘Hmm,’ Jonathan pondered. ‘I can’t see them catching the people who did it.’
This conversation was not the most cheerful I’d ever had. Something had to be done to change the mood.
‘How’s the rugby going?’ I asked.
Jonathan was a keen rugby player. He had played right centre for his university (Hull), and now played for the local village team (Garston Green Goblins). Although he only managed to get into the second team at the university, he was still a cracking player. He certainly had the right build, being tall and broad shouldered. A man-mountain. But he was a real gentle giant, and saved all his aggression for the games. When he was younger he would often get teased for his ginger hair, but these days no one dared say a word.
‘It’s going okay,’ Jonathan said. ‘But even the team have noticed that I smell funny. And you know how bad they usually smell. So for them to comment, you can imagine how terrible it must be. Why do we have to go to work, Andy? I mean, work just gets in the way of living.’
‘I know what you mean,’ I said, feeling the back of my head for any bald spots. ‘But if we want to go to Canada, we’ve got no choice, have we?’
‘I blame the government,’ Jonathan said, ‘for introducing all those tuition fees. Maybe they’ll pay for my dry cleaning, to help get the smell out of all my clothes. Otherwise I don’t think Canadian immigration will let me enter their country; they’ll think I’m a hygiene risk.’
‘I wouldn’t get your hopes up,’ I said, bringing my hand away from my scalp: I hadn’t spotted any bald patches, yet. ‘Hey, I’m off work for a couple of days from tomorrow. Do you fancy going out somewhere tomorrow night? We can see a movie or something. I’ll speak to the others and get it organised. We can go for something to eat before it too. Make a night of it.’
‘Yeah, Andy, sounds great. As long as you can handle the smell of rotting chicken innards.’
‘I’m sure we’ll manage. Anyway, we’ve had to put up with Tom’s B.O. for years, so we’re used to it.’
Jonathan laughed, and I was grateful that the conversation was at least ending on a positive note. We said our goodbyes, I put down the phone and climbed back into bed. Five hours until work.
‘Andrew!’
I raised my head wearily from the pillow, straining to read the blurred time on my clock radio. It was a quarter to three. The phone had just stopped ringing.
‘Andrew, phone for you. Are you awake?’ My mum was hollering from downstairs.
‘Yes. I’ll get it up here,’ I sighed.
I reached out, straining to grasp the phone. But I overbalanced, slid out from under the covers and landed on the hard wooden floor with a thud.
‘Shit,’ I said, peering up at the bedside table with my right cheek squashed against one of my steel toe-capped boots. I lifted my head up, and rubbed my right knee, which had smacked against the side of my bed.
‘Shit.’
‘Andrew, are you there?’ my mum shouted.
Staggering to my feet, I stumbled over the other boot that I’d left by my bed. Fortunately I managed to steady myself against the bedside table before I again hit the deck. Taking a couple of deep breaths, I grabbed for the phone, nearly knocking it off its holder. I mumbled the word hello.
‘Andy, is that you?’
It was Martin, another friend of mine who seemed to have forgotten that I was now a nocturnal being.
‘Yeah, it’s me,’ I slurred, still trying to catch my breath, and wake up.
‘Are you drunk?’
‘No. I’ve only just woken up.’
During the pause that followed I could almost hear his brain ticking on the other end of the line. I again examined myself in the mirror. The extra hour sleep since I had last looked obviously hadn’t done me any good. If anything, my hair looked even more messy (if that was possible), and my eyes more bloodshot.
‘Oh, I forgot about you working nights. Sorry.’
‘It’s okay. I’m getting used to it. Jonathan rang about an hour ago and woke me up.’
Martin ignored my comment.
‘I rang because things aren’t going very well. I lost my job at the greyhound track last night. One of the dogs, well the favourite in the eight o’clock race, I sort of lost him on the way from the pen to the trackside.’
‘Lost him?’
‘Yeah,’ Martin replied in a despondent tone. ‘I mustn’t have tied the leash properly. One minute he was on the end of the lead, the next he was running away across the field. I tried to chase him but he was too fast.’
‘Well, he is a racing greyhound,’ I said.
‘Yes…well…he was a racing greyhound,’ Martin continued.
‘What do you mean?’
‘After he disappeared off up the field I told the owner, who went looking for him in his car.’
‘And…?’
‘Well, it seems that the greyhound made his way onto the motorway. He got run over by a truck.’
‘Oh.’
That was all I could manage to say.
‘So I got the sack. Don’t you think they were a bit unfair to sack me over that? It was an easy mistake to make.’
I tried to think of some comforting words, but it was too difficult. I walked over to my desk, and picked up the library book that had lain there, unread, for a week. I turned it over and read the blurb on the back cover. Pity I’ve got no time to read, I thought; this book looks good. There’s nothing better than a good comedy to lighten the day.
‘Did they tell you how much the dog was worth?’ I placed the book back on my desk and moved to the pile of clothes in the corner of the room. I crouched down and began trying to put them into some sort of order, balancing the phone between my shoulder and cheek.
‘The owner did say something about seven thousand pounds,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t really hear him though because when he shouted it I was too busy running in the opposite direction, trying to avoid being shot.’
‘He tried to shoot you?’ I folded a pair of four-day-old dirty socks and placed them on top of the other six pairs.
‘With a tranquilliser gun. He had the gun to shoot the dog, but obviously didn’t need it, what with, you know, the lorry and everything. I got away though, just. I never have any luck with jobs. I never have any luck with girls either. And those little kids down the road keep called me Harry Potter; just because I wear glasses and have dark hair. They keep asking me where I keep my owl.’
Martin’s voice was breaking up. I gave up sorting my laundry. It could wait until tomorrow.
‘Do you fancy going to the cinema tomorrow night, and for a meal?’ I said, studying the time on my clock radio and calculating the hours left until I would have to set off for work. ‘Jonathan’s coming, and I’m going to ring Tom.’
‘Yeah, that sounds good.’
He was sniffling.
‘Right, tomorrow night it is then,’ I said cheerfully, ignoring the snotty sounds on the other end of the line.
‘Tomorrow night, yeah, that’s good. Help me take my mind off things,’ he sniffed. ‘Oh, I nearly forgot,’ he said, as I was about to put the phone down. ‘You are still able to go on Peter’s stag weekend to Blackpool, aren’t you? The minibus and guest house are being booked today.’
‘Yeah, definitely,’ I said. ‘I’ve booked the weekend off work.’
Martin’s mood seemed to lighten slightly when he heard that I would be able to go to Blackpool: it was a good point at which to end the conversation.
I returned to bed, and pulled the covers up over my head to try and block out some of the bright sunshine that was streaming through the curtains.
‘Andrew. Phone again for you!’
‘I don’t believe this,’ I muttered, again pulling myself out of bed and towards the phone. ‘I’ve got it!’ I shouted.
‘All right, mate!’
It was Tom. At least he sounded happy.
‘Do you know what time it is?’ I asked, slumping back onto my bed with a thud. I lay on top of the dishevelled covers, facing the ceiling.
‘Yeah, of course I do. It’s four o’clock in the afternoon.’
‘Yes,’ I said tersely.
‘Haven’t you got a clock in your house?’
‘Yes, but I’ve just been asleep.’
‘Having a duvet day, eh?’
‘I’ve been working all night. I have to sleep in the day, remember?’
‘Oh, yeah. Now you come to mention it, I did know about that. How’s the work going?’
No hint of an apology.
‘Okay I suppose. Nightshift work in a building where it’s so cold you have to wear a coat, hat and gloves in the middle of summer isn’t exactly fun, but the money’s pretty good.’
Tom didn’t appear to have listened to my answer.
‘I’ve just quit my summer job.’
He sounded pleased with himself.
‘Another? You’ve only been there a week.’
I heard shouting from outside, so I got up from the bed and walked towards the window.
‘Five days actually. Didn’t like the supervisor. He asked me to sweep up the toilets and I told him that cleaning toilets wasn’t part of my job description. My talent was being wasted in that place. I mean, given the chance, I could have really done something there. You know, restructuring the company and all that. I think my future lies in management. I am a people person after all.’
‘Hmm, yeah…I guess you could say that,’ I said, watching the next-door neighbours chasing their pet rabbit up and down the pavement. Their rabbit was always escaping. They had nicknamed it Houdini, as no matter how many safeguards they designed to keep it from getting out of their garden, they still couldn’t contain it. The rabbit had an elasticised back, and could flatten itself before crawling, sniper-style, underneath the smallest of gaps. ‘But that’s about your fifth summer job in three weeks. Don’t you think it would be better to stay in one place for a while? How will you ever afford the holiday if you spend more time looking for work than actually working?’
The neighbours’ rabbit had taken refuge underneath a parked car, and the children who had been playing tick were also now trying to catch it.
‘Variety is the spice of life,’ he replied, ignoring the issue of his personal finances – which were I might add, in a worse position that any of us. ‘Anyway, soon I won’t have to work, as I’m going into the movie business,’ he said. ‘I’ve got an idea for a film. It’s a love story set on board a nuclear submarine that gets torpedoed. Kind of like Titanic underwater, but with less romance and more blood and guts.’
I saw that the neighbours were crouched around the car, trying to coax the rabbit out, with what looked like a limp piece of lettuce. Okay, maybe in normal circumstances a rabbit escaping wasn’t the most exciting of happenings, but in our home village, I was prepared to grab any piece of excitement I could get.
Our village, Garston Green, was a once-mining town and now commuter settlement situated in the heart of Lancashire. Located in green belt land, it had been protected for decades from the dangers of urban sprawl. The factories of the neighbouring towns were held back some miles away. The result was a village enclosed by rolling farmers’ fields, interspersed by woodland and lakes. The popular Northern image of dark satanic mills did not apply to Garston Green. The village itself, hemmed in by the same green belt regulation that kept other development out, was tightly packed with estates of semi-detached 1960’s and 1970’s housing. There were the usual village amenities: the local supermarket and newsagents, the butchers, hairdressers, post office, a park, even a few pubs. We also had a train station.
But Garston Green, for all its charms, was not the liveliest place on earth. It had been a real culture shock to return from city living at university in Birmingham to life in the village. Coming home for holidays had been fine; it was a nice change to spend a few weeks with family in such a relaxing place. But the reality of returning for good was different. Garston Green was an ideal place for bringing up children, but not for new graduates. There just wasn’t enough to do. Nothing exciting ever happened there. The city might have had its dangers, with the threat, or perceived threat, of crime never far away, but at least there were things to do: cinemas, nightclubs, decent pubs.
However, since my return I’d noticed an unpleasant side of the village that had developed during my three years away at university. And it wasn’t just the spate of burglaries that had brought fear in recent weeks. Gangs of teenagers increasingly roamed the streets, hanging around on street corners, drinking from huge bottles of cheap cider outside the shops or whizzing around in high performance cars using road humps as launch pads. It seemed that the lack of opportunities for social activity had created this problem. The scruffy-looking gangs and their cars reminded me of the Mad Max films. All that was missing was Mel Gibson and Tina Turner singing, “We don’t need another hero”. The police didn’t seem to be doing anything: about the gangs or the break-ins.
I continued watching the action outside.
‘I’ve been thinking about Martin,’ Tom said, sounding contemplative. ‘He’s been a bit down recently. Did you hear about the greyhound incident? Terrible. I heard that the fire brigade had to use a spade and a high velocity water cannon to peel it off the motorway. Such a waste of a good racing dog. Anyway, I saw a job in the local paper today that might suit Martin: a driver to make special deliveries. Also while I was looking at the paper I noticed that Lonely Hearts column they have. Well, I rang in for Martin. Gave them his details, vital statistics, likes and dislikes, interests. Obviously I had to make up some things so that he’d sound a bit more interesting.’
‘Like what?’ I was getting concerned. Tom’s plans often resulted in chaos of one kind or another.
The neighbours had caught the rabbit, and were now carrying him back down their drive. The legs of the rabbit were kicking out playfully.
‘Well, I said he was a keen athlete, who worked out regularly. I also said he was six foot two, aged thirty, worked for an insurance company, and had a confident personality.’
I shook my head. The nearest Martin had come to exercise in the past twelve months was while running away from the greyhound owner with a tranquilliser gun pointed at his backside, he was about five foot three in shoes, was twenty-one years old, was now unemployed, and was one of the shyest lads I had ever known.
Tom’s description wasn’t exactly accurate.
‘Oh, and I also said he enjoyed bungee jumping, freefall unopened parachute jumping and swimming with sharks.’
‘Don’t you think the women will realise that the description of him in the newspaper isn’t right?’ I said.
‘Yeah, but by then it will be too late. They’ll have already turned up for the date. Everything will be fine, don’t you worry.’
Tom’s blinkered optimism always filled me with dread.
‘Anyway, got to go now, Andy,’ he said, as if I had been the one to interrupt him with a phone call. ‘I’m off to the hairdressers to have my hair bleached.’
‘Bleached?’
‘It’s all the rage you know,’ he said. ‘Later.’
‘Cinema, tomorrow night,’ I said, but the line was already dead.
I decided that it wasn’t worth going back to bed, so after Tom’s call I went downstairs and made myself something to eat. Night shift working had done strange things to my body clock; it was nearly half past four on Thursday afternoon and I was eating cornflakes.
I searched around the kitchen for something to read. The only thing I could find, apart from a Jehovah’s Witness pamphlet, was a copy of the local newspaper – presumably the same one in which Tom had found “Martin’s job”. Our local town paper was about fifty pages long, but out of those only about eight contained news stories. The remaining pages were filled with advertisements, and letters from angry readers, who were usually complaining about the amount of dog muck on the town’s streets.
The front-page story featured a robbery that had taken place in the town centre the previous weekend. It was a ram-raid robbery, but this wasn’t your typical “let’s drive an armoured truck through the front window” crime. According to eyewitnesses a Dixons store was ram-raided by an old-age pensioner in her motorised wheelchair. After ramming the store window and grabbing a DVD player (complete with copy of Lord of the Rings -the Director’s Cut) she proceeded to make her escape at a steady five miles per hour up the high street. One shopper described how the blue-haired old lady disappeared from view after turning into a side road. The police statement was short: they were continuing enquiries and looking for more witnesses to come forward. I shook my head. All those television programmes showing the police taking part in high-speed chases, complete with helicopters fitted with infrared cameras, and they couldn’t track a pensioner in an electric wheelchair? Weird.
‘Can’t sleep?’
My mum entered the kitchen and placed a comforting hand on my shoulder as I sat hunched over my bowl at the breakfast bar.
‘No,’ I said, turning over the page of the newspaper with a snapping sound. ‘Everyone keeps ringing me.’
‘It’s not easy, is it?’ she said, opening the cupboard and taking out a plate.
‘What?’ I said.
‘The world of work. It’s not easy, is it?’
‘No,’ I said, rubbing my hair. ‘It’s not.’
‘Well, look on the bright side,’ my mum said. ‘In two months you’ll be enjoying Canada.’
She smiled at me and I smiled back knowingly. She was right. Although I was currently doing a job that I didn’t enjoy, the end result would make it all worthwhile. I’d always wanted to go to North America. At university, I’d bought a poster to decorate my student room; it was of the Canadian Rockies, and showed an impressive landscape of lakes and mountains bathed in sunshine. For three years, in three different locations, I’d kept that poster on my wall. That’s when I’d decided that that is where I wanted to go. I wanted to stand on top of the mountain in the photograph, and gaze down on the lakes. Everything in that photo just looked so perfect, I couldn’t help but feel that to actually be there would be a fantastic experience. So it was my idea to travel to Canada, and I convinced the other three, Martin, Jonathan, and Tom, to defer looking for graduate jobs. We’d been friends since the first year of primary school, so it seemed only natural for us all to go together. My parents weren’t happy at first. They wanted me to apply for graduate jobs and start in September. But eventually I convinced them that this was something I really wanted to do, and that on my return I would start looking for a “career job”.
‘Is that a bruise?’
My mum touched my arm lightly. I hadn’t noticed the bruise before now. It was already turning purple, and looked pretty nasty.
‘I must have done it when I fell getting out of bed,’ I said, as she examined it.
‘I thought I heard a bang before. Are you okay?’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Can’t feel a thing. I’m too tired to feel pain.’
‘You are in the wars, aren’t you?’
She kissed the top of my head.
‘Come on, let’s get some ice on that bruise.’
I’d been home for just under a month and already I had started to regress to being a ten year old. Just a few weeks ago I had been totally independent, living in a student house in the middle of Britain’s second largest city. But now, here I was, allowing myself to be totally, and completely mothered. It’s amazing how quickly us humans can adapt to our surroundings.
After holding a packet of frozen minted peas on my arm for a couple of minutes, until it was throbbing with the cold, I returned to my bedroom. I glanced up at the Canada poster that now hung over my bed and smiled in anticipation. Within minutes I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I remembered was being woken up by my mum. It was seven- thirty and I had half an hour to have a wash, get changed, and travel to work.
Chapter 2
‘Welcome to Hell!’
I was only two hours into my job, being shown around by one of the bosses, when someone shouted this to me from across the distribution centre floor. At the time I had tried to ignore the comment, although it was hard not to be influenced by such a positively negative statement. Three weeks later, as I descended the thirty-one steel steps that led to the cold working area, I pondered on what that perceptive worker had said. I decided that he had been right; the place was like Hell, but without the comfort of heating. I now realised that the worker’s comment had been less of a welcome, and more of a warning of things to come.
‘What time do you call this, lad?’
‘One minute past eight,’ I replied, glancing at my watch.
‘Are you trying to be funny?’ the stocky man, dressed in matching blue trousers and jacket said, raising his eyebrows and cocking his head to one side as he did so.
‘Er, no.’
‘Hey, Derek!’
The man, a team supervisor called Wayne, swivelled his head, looking for Derek, the head supervisor. Derek liked to think he was management, but the truth was that real management never visited this part of the building. Firstly, the distribution centre floor was too cold for their liking, and secondly, management realised that sitting in a nice office upstairs and communicating by phone was preferable to walking around a gigantic distribution warehouse that smelled of all the refrigerated food you could ever imagine, all rolled into one. The smell could be sickening, especially in the early hours of the morning.
Carpenters Distribution, my place of work, was a chilled and frozen food distribution centre, situated on an industrial estate on the edge of my village. The building was huge, and from the outside resembled an airport terminal, it was so massive. But instead of aeroplanes, there were hundreds of articulated lorries arriving and leaving, twenty-four hours of the day. And with an inside temperature of five degrees, it was like working in the world’s biggest fridge. Just a little of the heat from Hell would have been welcome.
The temperature of the distribution centre floor never failed to shock me. For three weeks I had worked in the Greenland-like climate, and I still couldn’t get used to the sheer numbness of it. Back in the outside world the country had been experiencing a heat wave for the past fortnight; clear, deep blue skies with temperatures of up to thirty degrees Celsius. But I hadn’t been able to enjoy any of it. I was nocturnal, leaving the distribution centre at about nine am, getting home, sleeping until five (up in time for Neighbours), having dinner, then going out to work again at nine pm. So I saw little daylight. Some days I would wake up momentarily, by children playing in the street below, or by especially loud cars driving past. But for the most part I was sound asleep. When I had first started night-shift work I had wondered how I would manage to sleep during daylight hours. I quickly realised however that after a ten or eleven hour shift of hard manual labour, I could quite easily have slept on a bed of rusty nails.
One of the worst parts about the shift working was that I left work and returned there on the same day. There was no natural break in days, as when working during the daytime. Psychologically this was hard, as I felt like a mere visitor at home. The distribution centre owned me.
A thin, tall, stony-faced man, wearing a shirt and tie covered by a huge padded coat, approached, clipboard in hand. It was Derek. The sound of his shoes hitting the polished floor echoed around us. I watched as the bright lights from the warehouse roof reflected off his slicked down, black, side-parted hair. Derek’s hair always looked wet. He must have gone through tonnes of Brylcreem each week in order to maintain the effect. He had enough oil on his head to lubricate the engine of a small car.
‘So, we have a comedian here, do we?’ Derek said as he stood uncomfortably close to me. The remnants of stale tobacco on his breath contaminated my air supply as he spoke. He straightened his Fred Flintstone tie and smirked. I had always been told that people who wore cartoon ties did so to portray the image that they had a sense of humour. But in Derek’s case, I thought that extremely unlikely. He wasn’t exactly a laugh-a-minute man.
I looked down at my warped reflection on the floor, waiting for the inevitable comments from him. He was rocking on his heals with his hands clasped behind his back like a member of the Gestapo.
‘Late again. That’s the trouble with employing university graduates. No sense of pride in their job. You graduates, you don’t know you’re born. No common sense. You have life too easy. I did hard labour from the age of fourteen, lifting corpses into coffins at my father’s business.’
I hoped that Derek’s dad had in fact been an undertaker, rather than just someone who kept dead people around his office, but I didn’t like to ask.
‘You need a lesson from the University of Life, son,’ Derek said, smacking his bony hand down hard on my shoulder. ‘Tell you what. I’ll be your teacher.’
Derek smiled through his black and grey moustache. It was the kind of smile that you knew wasn’t a nice smile, a smile of happiness. No, it was a smile that resulted from a nasty thought. I’d been working at the distribution centre for only three weeks, but I knew that Derek had plenty of nasty thoughts. He was, in short, a complete bastard.
‘Where are your gloves?’
I looked at my bare hands. He was right; my gloves weren’t there. I thought back to half an hour earlier, when I had been woken by my mum and proceeded to race around my bedroom getting dressed. Jumper, coat, hat, scarf, steel-toe boots, I had picked up all of them. But gloves, no. They were probably lying on my desk at that moment, right next to all my university notes.
‘I must have forgotten them. I was in a rush to get out,’ I said, biting my lower lip and shaking my head in genuine anger. I was careful not to look Derek straight in the eyes, in case they started turning red and burned a hole through my face.
Derek smiled again, revealing his yellow, tobacco-stained teeth. The teeth looked just like those you see on the posters at the dentists, used to scare little kids into cleaning their teeth: “Brush regularly, and help keep your smile white and shiny!” Unfortunately for Derek’s teeth, they looked as though they needed a lot more than a good brush. Maybe two coats of emulsion would have helped. His smile froze for a good ten seconds and his piercing blue eyes fixed on me like a tractor beam. He looked crazed, as if in a trance. This was going to be bad.
‘Forgotten your gloves. Wayne, he’s forgotten his gloves!’
Derek released me from his stare and his face seemed to fill with life, like someone who had just been snapped out of hypnosis.
Wayne smiled knowingly while shaking his head.
‘Well, Mr Andrew. Forgetting your gloves is a stupid thing to do,’ Derek said, clapping his hands together. ‘Especially with the temperatures in here. What are they, Wayne, five degrees at best?’
Wayne nodded. He almost looked intelligent, but looks could be deceptive. Wayne was not exactly the Brain of Britain, or in fact the brain of anywhere. Wayne must have had a brain; after all, he could walk and talk, just. But from what I could tell, it wasn’t used very often. If he’d got Air Miles for every intelligent thought in his head that he’d ever had, I wouldn’t have thought he’d have had enough saved up to fly Economy from Gatwick to Heathrow.
‘Well, Mr Andrew…’
Derek had an annoying habit of calling me Mr Andrew, rather than just Andrew.
‘…I think that by the look of you, you can handle some hard work. You’ll be working tonight in the meat room.’
Oh shit.
This was not good. The meat room was a separate part of the distribution centre where meat and fish were stored. The temperature was at freezing point, and the cartons containing the food frequently iced up. Even with gloves your hands could get cold. Without gloves it would be a nightmare. Imagine swimming in the Arctic Ocean, wearing only a pair of skimpy bathing trunks. Derek, of course, knew how bad it would be.
I set off dejectedly towards a row of blue LLOPs, leaving Derek and Wayne drinking instant machine coffee. The LLOPs (pronounced Lol-lop), which stands for Low Level Order Picker, were small, motorised forklift trucks. Ridden in a standing position, they were used to pull up to three metal cages. The cages themselves were used to carry food, collected from around the vast distribution centre.
This was my job, to collect items from a printed list, stack them carefully inside the cages and deposit the cages at a point where they would be loaded onto a lorry. The lorry then delivered the cages of food to Carpenters supermarkets throughout the country, in time for the morning shoppers. The whole warehouse, and everyone in it, was devoted to the task of collecting food and getting it onto the lorries as fast as possible. Maybe it was because I had only been there a few weeks, but I thought that the emphasis on speed was completely over the top. Workers were treated like robots, and rated on their “pick rate”, which referred to the average number of individual items that had been collected in an hour by each person. Derek especially was obsessed with pick rates. He regularly prowled the distribution centre floor, armed with a calculator. He reminded me of a lion, stalking its prey.
‘Keep that pick rate up, Mr Andrew!’ I heard Derek bawl as I mounted one of the LLOPs whose battery hadn’t run down. I sighed, blew out a blast of cold breath and set off towards the meat room at a steady five miles an hour.
As I travelled through the main area to the meat room, a cold breeze brushing against my left cheek, I was careful to watch out for other vehicles. It was always busy here. Up to forty LLOPs could be seen whizzing around the aisles of the distribution centre at any one time, all ridden by workers worried about how fast they were going. If they went too slow for too long, then they were fired, or at least forced out of the company by intimidation. The fear of slowing down meant that it was a dangerous place to be. It was like Piccadilly Circus, but without the traffic lights. Only a couple of days earlier there had been a multiple pile up, involving three LLOPs and a forklift truck. Fortunately no one had been hurt. A stack of bread had acted like a makeshift buffer zone as the vehicles crashed into the aisle. But it had been serious nevertheless.
I reached the entrance to the meat room and ducked as the plastic flaps coming down from the roof, which separated the chilled and frozen areas of the warehouse, brushed against the front of the LLOP. The blast of ice-cold air stung me like a slap in the face. I glanced around at the workers, who were too busy loading frozen food into cages to look up and acknowledge my arrival. Everyone was wearing gloves. I pulled my black woolly hat over my numb ears and wondered what the hell I was doing in this God-forsaken place.
I wiped the cold mist from my watch face and shuddered. It was three o’clock in the morning and my hands had turned blue and orange. It reminded me of an old Blue Peter episode in which they had documented the last journey of Scott of the Antarctic. The presenter, Peter Simon I think, had described how at extreme cold, limbs could just snap off in your hand – if your hands hadn’t already snapped off, that is. Looking at my multi-coloured hands, I imagined trying to drive a LLOP with only stumps at the end of my arms. I decided it would be very difficult, especially to turn right or left. The LLOPs were hard enough to drive anyway. I had three hours of lessons, after which I was free to drive around, trying to avoid the towering structures around the building, weaving in and out of the aisles dragging cages full of food stacked dangerously high.
Working at Carpenters wasn’t pleasant, in any way. But it was good money. Overtime, plus unsocial hours payments, meant that in the first three weeks, I had brought home nearly seven hundred pounds after tax. The impressive pay convinced me to stick the job out, despite the poor working conditions. The fact that we were paid weekly, rather than monthly, also helped to motivate me. At least I could see the results of my efforts. Efforts that would hopefully take me to North America.
I picked up another blue plastic container from the shelf with my numb hands and placed it inside one of the cages behind my LLOP. It contained a huge frozen rainbow trout, complete with wide eyes, which seemed to be looking straight at me. I stared back at the frozen fish.
‘You look damn cold,’ the fish seemed to mouth with its thick fishy lips.
‘What?’
‘I said you look damn cold.’
‘You’re a fish.’
‘And you’re two sandwiches short of a picnic, Mr Andrew.’
I spun round and there was Derek, calculator and clipboard in hand.
‘Let’s have a look at your pick rate then,’ Derek said, smiling and beckoning with his free hand. He took my order sheet and began to type numbers into the calculator. I watched as he tapped away for what seemed like minutes. He was grinning and shaking his head as he did so.
‘Seventy-five picks per hour,’ he announced, again shaking his head. ‘It’s just not good enough! I have men here on one hundred and twenty-five picks per hour. You’re letting this team down, Mr Andrew. If we don’t keep up with the other teams on the shop floor then top management will come down hard on you.’
The only reason Derek was so obsessed with speed was that the faster we went, the more money he got.
‘I’m going as fast as I can,’ I protested, again trying to avoid his demonic eyes.
‘Well, go faster!’
‘How do I do that when I’m going as fast as I can?’
‘Just do it!’ he bawled. So loud, that the whole distribution centre must have been able to hear. His face had turned scarlet, and cold air was coming out of his hairy nostrils like fire from a dragon. At this point I became convinced, if I needed any more convincing, that Derek was nuttier than a packet of Planters.
Derek began to open his mouth again, but as he did so a commotion nearby caught his attention. He turned his head slowly to his left, mouth still wide open. The similarities between him and the rainbow trout were not lost on me.
‘No, I’m not working overtime, sorry.’
It was Colin, another temporary worker. He too had recently graduated, and was saving money to travel to Thailand. It seemed that Carpenters was a popular place for hopeful travellers. Colin’s voice was carrying across the stacks of frozen fish, coming from the adjacent aisle.
‘Well I’m sorry, but you have to, mate.’
That voice was definitely Wayne’s.
‘I can’t. I’ve got to get home for nine. My sister needs the car to go to work.’
‘Do you want to progress in this company?’
‘Not really. I’m only here for the holiday money.’
Derek crept round the aisle towards Colin and Wayne. I could hear him join in the conversation as I listened through the piles of frozen cod.
‘So, we have a rebellion on our hands eh, Wayne?’
‘Yeah, boss. Says he won’t do overtime.’
‘Why’s that, Mr Colin?’
‘I have to get home for nine: it’s my sister, you see. Needs the car.’
‘This is your home.’
‘You’re mad.’
‘You’re fired.’
‘Good. Here, have this.’
‘Ouch!’
I peered through a small gap in the fish and was just in time to see Derek heading for the floor headfirst, like a prize fighter floored by a knockout punch. Colin was standing over him with a large frozen haddock in hand, while Wayne stood open-mouthed and wide-eyed.
‘I’m off!’
Colin dropped the fish and jumped onto his nearby LLOP. He raced out of the meat room at top speed, and I could hear the cages on the back of his machine clang as he rounded the corner without applying the brakes.
It was a good fifteen seconds before Derek lifted his head off the floor. His recovery was helped by Wayne, who had been shaking his boss while shouting things such as, “Wake up, Boss!” and “He’s been battered by a haddock!” Eventually Derek had opened his eyes, and, apart from looking slightly dazed and confused, appeared no worse for his ordeal.
I decided not to approach Derek and Wayne, so continued collecting the stock on my list. I grabbed hold of a tray of mackerel, grimaced at the cold sensation that ran from my hand up my arm, and dropped it on top of the talking rainbow trout. Concentrating on the next item on the list, I tried to block out the temperature by thinking of a saying Tom’s dad had once told me: “Cold is only a state of mind”. His dad used to be a hippy during the sixties; he had actually gone to San Francisco wearing flowers in his hair. Now he was into complementary medicine and was a trained Reiki expert. He even did some private classes. I had never quite understood what Reiki was, despite observing a session at Tom’s house once. To me, it just looked like someone warming his or her hands on someone else’s body while muttering some words. His customers paid a lot for the privilege though, and swore that it helped with their ailments, so where was the harm? But no matter how many times I told myself that cold was only a state of mind, my senses kept reminding me that I was bloody freezing. My next plan was to comfort myself with the thought that this wouldn’t last forever, so I could put up with a bit of pain. If Scott lost limbs, what was a bit of numbness, eh? I had five hours to go, and then could look forward to a few days off. The idea of having time to enjoy the thawing effects of the summer heat seemed most appealing.
Chapter 3
‘You’ve done what?’
‘I’ve registered you with the dating agency from the local newspaper.’
‘I feel like I’m going to be sick.’
‘Why? I thought you’d be happy.’
‘I’m not designed for blind dates. I’d get too nervous. How could you do this to me?’
‘That’s gratitude for you!’
Four minutes had passed since Tom’s revelation to Martin and nobody had spoken since. I took another sip from my glass of ice, which also allegedly contained some cola, and glanced over in Martin’s direction. He was reading the restaurant menu, well, pretending to read it anyway. I could tell he wasn’t really reading it, as he was holding it upside down. Tom meanwhile had begun to type out a text message on his mobile phone, while Jonathan kept looking over his shoulder, presumably in an attempt to attract the attention of a waitress. He wasn’t having much luck. The four of us must have looked the picture of unhappiness, sitting round the small table in a well-known pizza restaurant in complete silence.
I hadn’t been surprised by Martin’s reaction. Who wouldn’t be shocked to find out that any moment complete strangers could be phoning up for dates? Tom couldn’t see what the fuss was about. He had got Martin into trouble with the opposite sex many times in the past, but seemed to forget these incidents quicker than a rocket-propelled cheetah.
I looked around the busy restaurant and tried to spy a member of staff who could come and serve us. But it was no use. There were plenty of blue-clothed teenage staff around the place, but they all seemed too busy with other things. Some were taking orders, some were cleaning tables by using a dirty-looking cloth to transfer food from the table to the floor, while others looked to be merely chatting to fellow staff. We’d been sitting here for over ten minutes without being seen to, and the smell of food was making my stomach rumble louder than a London tube train. I looked over at the buffet bar, which radiated light via the bright heater lamps, shining down provocatively on the spread of food. The buffet bar was piled high with a variety of different pizzas, a selection of pastas, and lots of salad. A man and his son were making their way around the buffet, filling their plates high. Would anyone notice if I grabbed a slice of pizza, I wondered. My mouth was watering. I took another sip of cola, clinking the ice cubes against my teeth.
‘You always get me into trouble.’ Martin had decided to resume the conversation.
‘Like when?’ Tom responded innocently.
‘What about the time when you set me up with the girlfriend of that wrestler?’
‘Oh!’ Tom proclaimed with a note of despair, throwing his hands up in the air. ‘You always go back to that, don’t you? One little mistake and you get punished for the rest of your life. How was I to know her boyfriend was a wrestler?’
‘You knew his nickname was The Crusher.’
‘I thought he worked in the construction industry. And anyway,’ Tom said, ‘he was only an amateur wrester, it’s not like he was The Rock you know, or some other WWF superstar.’
‘I was in hospital for days. That wrestler was about nineteen stone. He sat on my head.’
‘You were all right in the end though.’
‘Only because he let me go; said I wasn’t worth killing.’
‘Well then.’
The uneasy silence resumed. A baby in a high chair, sat at the table next to us, began shouting and waving his red plastic spoon wildly in the air.
‘Come on, lads,’ Jonathan said, looking at Tom and Martin in turn. ‘It’s no good falling out over this. Martin, I’m sure that Tom did it with the best of intentions, didn’t you?’ He turned to Tom.
Jonathan had always been a master of diplomacy. He never liked to see people fall out, and would often try and patch up arguments between Tom and Martin, who frequently got on each other’s nerves. Being such a physically strong person himself, it was funny how Jonathan possessed such a mild and gentle nature.
‘You’ve been saying that you want a girlfriend,’ Tom said.
‘But nobody would want to go out with me,’ Martin complained.
He returned to looking at the menu, which he was still holding upside down.
‘Of course they would,’ Tom said. ‘I know…well…there must be lots of…well…some girls who would love to go out with you. For example, this waitress; she looks like your type.’
We all twisted our heads to watch the young waitress, who looked about nineteen, as she approached the table.
‘It’s busy,’ she said sharply whist taking a notebook and a well-chewed pencil out of her top pocket.
‘Pardon?’ I said.
‘I know you’ve been waiting a long time to be seen to, and that’s why you were all staring at me like I had some deadly disease, but it’s been really busy in here tonight.’
Jonathan glanced at me and raised his eyebrows. The waitress did not look happy.
‘Well?’ she asked, holding the pencil as close to the notepad as possible, in readiness to write.
‘Well what?’ Tom said, looking blank.
‘Are you ready to order?’
‘Yes,’ I began, but was quickly interrupted by Tom.
‘We were wondering, whether you would date this fine figure of a man here. Our good friend Martin.’
Martin lowered his head and placed the menu across his face. The waitress looked shocked.
‘Er, no, er, because, because, I’ve got a boyfriend,’ she spluttered.
The baby at the next-door table had stopped shouting, and was now looking over at us. He was wearing a white cardigan and a red bib, which was covered with dribbles of yellow coloured food of indistinguishable origin. I caught his eye and was sure he gave me a slight toothless grin. He pointed his little arm at Martin and laughed.
‘But what if you didn’t have a boyfriend,’ Tom pressed, flashing a smile at the waitress. ‘Would you go out with Martin? He really is a good lad you know. Good to talk to. Don’t know about his kissing technique, but I’ve heard girls talking about his talents in the bedroom, if you know what I mean.’
Tom winked slowly and deliberately at the shocked waitress, who was blushing with embarrassment.
The baby launched a spoonful of the yellow coloured mush in Martin’s direction. It splattered over the menu that was still covering his face. The baby laughed out loud again, before his mum suddenly realised what was going on and yanked the spoon out of his tiny hand. She gave me a disdainful look and shake of the head as if to say that I’d been encouraging him. No one else seemed to have even noticed what the baby had done.
‘But I do have a boyfriend,’ the waitress said. She didn’t look amused and threw a scowl in Tom’s direction. He however was not deterred.
‘Just imagine though.’
‘I don’t want to imagine any such thing, thank you. Now what do you want to eat?’
‘Okay, no imagination then, but do you find him attractive?’ Jeremy Paxman would have been proud of Tom’s persistent questioning.
‘Get stuffed, you freak!’
The waitress turned and stomped towards the kitchen door without taking our order, nearly knocking over another member of staff, who was carrying a tray full of pizzas, in her haste.
‘Well that was great, Tom,’ I said, watching the kitchen doors swinging back and forth. ‘We finally get service after ten minutes and then you scare off the waitress. Brilliant.’
‘She didn’t have a sense of humour,’ Tom grumbled.
‘And you embarrassed Martin,’ Jonathan pitched in. Tom looked across the table and Martin nodded in agreement.
‘Oh I’m sorry,’ Tom said insincerely. ‘Sorry for trying to help. I just thought that Martin would welcome the chance to meet some nice girls, that’s all. Some real babes go for that dating service thing you know.’
Martin looked to be thinking about what Tom said, but remained silent. He had noticed the yellow mush splattered on the other side of the menu, and was examining it quizzically.
‘So, do you all like my hair?’ Tom said, suddenly changing the subject. He gently patted the top of his spiky bleached blond hair and twisted his head around to provide a view from all angles.
‘It’s different,’ I said, examining his head with mock interest.
‘You’ll certainly stand out from the crowd,’ Jonathan said.
‘I knew you’d like it,’ Tom said, trying to use his laminated menu as a makeshift mirror. ‘I think it goes well with this white T-shirt, and my designer stubble. Very rock star-ish.’
He stroked his chin, from which sprouted sporadic, mousy brown facial hair. He hadn’t shaved for over a week now, as he was trying to grow a beard. But in fact, if he didn’t shave for the next twelve months, I wouldn’t expect he would grow one, as his facial hair just wasn’t thick enough.
‘I’m thinking of getting one of my nipples pierced,’ he said, as an aside. ‘Maybe you should have a makeover too, Martin. Then those kids might stop calling you Harry Potter.’
I looked at Martin and he pulled a face. He took off his black-rimmed glasses, and carefully placed them in front of him on the table.
‘And you, Jonathan. What about dyeing that red hair of yours? Don’t get me wrong, I like it, but maybe green would suit you better. Just kidding. But maybe a change of clothes would do you good.’ He reached over to Jonathan and pulled at the collar of the rugby top that he was wearing. ‘The rugby look is out.’
Jonathan shook his head and began rearranging the red and white top. He always wore rugby shirts. Martin meanwhile, had developed a liking for Hawaiin-style shirts after his cousin had brought him a selection back from a holiday in Florida. The shirt he was wearing at that moment was lime green with pictures of red palm trees and blue parrots. And that was one of the more conservative designs.
I massaged my temples and stifled a yawn.
‘You look pretty tired, Andy,’ Jonathan said, with genuine concern.
‘Tell me about it,’ I said, playing with the saltshaker. ‘This job’s wearing me out. I think I might be starting to go bald.’
Tom raised himself from his seat next to me and began to inspect the back of my head, like the Nit Nurse used to do at primary school.
‘Looks okay,’ he said, sitting back down and wiping his hands on a napkin.
That was good news. Ever since I had seen the clumps of hair on my pillow I had been worrying. It was nice to know that I didn’t have a bald patch at the back of my head, like a monk.
‘Jobs are bad for your health,’ Tom said. ‘I’m not ready for work yet. We’re only twenty-one, we should be enjoying ourselves.’
‘But we need the money,’ I said.
Tom pulled a face, that both acknowledged his acceptance of my point and his dissatisfaction with the situation.
‘Andy’s right,’ Jonathan said. ‘We’ve got to start earning money sometime. Especially if we want to go to Canada.’
‘At least you three have a job,’ Martin said despondently.
‘Well on that score, I’ve got some good news for you, Martin,’ Tom said. ‘But I’ll save it until later.’
Martin looked confused, but didn’t press Tom further.
‘So how is the job going, Andy?’ Jonathan asked me. ‘Apart from making you lose your hair?’
‘Not bad I suppose,’ I said. ‘My boss is a complete nightmare, but apart from that, not too bad.’
‘I reckon driving those trucks would be cool,’ Tom said. ‘Sounds like a great job to me. Not like the jobs I’ve had.’