by Frank Wynne
‘Thanks, Ms Koch,’ I said, and she smiled and said, ‘No problem.’
I saw her looking at my overall, but I’d lost my name tag and hadn’t got a new one yet.
‘Christian,’ I said and gave her my hand. ‘Marion,’ she said. She’d lent me her forklift because a customer had asked for a bottle of Wild Turkey just before closing time. I’d fetched the whisky pallet down from the shelf, given him the bottle and then filled up the empty compartment. Bruno was using our forklift over in the beer section. It was a Friday, it was summer, and people were buying beer by the crateload.
‘Shall we have a coffee? It’s on me.’
‘OK,’ she said, and then we went to the vending machine. There were two coffee machines in the warehouse, one at the delivery bay and one in front of the cold storage room, and that one was closer.
I’d come across her in the aisles a couple of times before and we’d nodded hello, and seeing as she was quite pretty I’d smiled every time.
She wasn’t there every night, she worked days as well; only me and five other guys were always on nights.
‘You did your test quite quickly.’ She sipped at her coffee, and then she blew into the little clouds of steam. She smiled; she’d probably heard about how much trouble I’d had with it.
‘Bruno was a good teacher,’ I said and looked at the name tag on her chest again. ‘M. Koch, Confectionery’.
‘Bruno’s a good guy,’ she said. ‘You can always go to him when you need help, or when you’re fed up and you fancy a coffee and a chat.’ She smiled and blew into her coffee, then she drank a few mouthfuls.
‘Get fed up often, do you?’
‘Don’t be so cheeky, rookie.’ She held her coffee in front of her name tag and tapped me on the shoulder with the index finger of her free hand. Then she laughed, and I couldn’t help joining in. There was something about her and the way she talked to me that I liked a lot. When I’d sat down in her forklift (‘But don’t make a tour of it, I need it back again’) I’d felt the warmth on the seat where she’d just been sitting.
She seemed to be a couple of years older than me, maybe in her mid-thirties. She had quite short hair that was always kind of messy. We drank our coffee and talked about this and that.
We stood at the vending machine for a long time, and I kept putting more money in and refilling our cups. We were standing behind the piles of crates and stock so the only people who could see us were people who wanted to take a coffee break of their own. ‘Be right back.’ I went to the shopping trolley containing food just coming up to the best-before date. Sometimes there were three or four trolleys, and sometimes it was my job to take the trolleys to the ramp by the delivery bay where the rubbish bins were. Bread, chocolate, meat, milk, all still good for a few more days, and if I was hungry I tried to sneakily stuff myself with as much as possible of the best things before I threw them in the bins. Chocolate truffles, ciabatta with Serrano ham, Kinder chocolate. If one of the bosses caught me I could take off my overalls and leave, but I just couldn’t resist it. The stuff was being chucked out anyway, and I think most of us took the odd sneaky helping.
I tore open the packaging of a chocolate cake, cut two large slices with my Stanley knife, put them in the pockets of my overalls and went back over to Marion.
‘I thought you’d had enough of me.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘not at all. Hold out your hand.’ She gave me a questioning look but then held her hand out flat, and I took a piece of cake out of my pocket and placed it on her hand. ‘Hey, rookie,’ she said, ‘you’re a bit of a daredevil, aren’t you?’
It wasn’t until later that I thought I’d actually put her at risk. If they’d caught us … but we were safe behind the crates, and anyway the big bosses had left ages ago and the boss of ‘Shelf-filling/Night’ was pretty relaxed and often disappeared to the toilets for a quick smoke, even though it wasn’t allowed, and I’d seen him with his mouth full and a big salami in his hand before. And Marion seemed to have gauged the risk; she smiled at me and said thanks and ate the cake.
‘Got a bit of a thing about her, Lofty, have you?’
‘No, rubbish! I’m just asking, that’s all.’ It was after eleven and we were stacking large cartons of juice packs on the juice shelf. Bruno leaned against the forklift and said, ‘She’s married. He’s a bastard though. Met him a couple of times, at work parties and the Christmas do. He used to be a nice guy, I heard, but he’s been a right bastard since he lost his job. There’s your chance, Lofty.’
‘Hey, leave it out,’ I pushed two cartons onto the shelf. ‘I just think she’s nice, that’s all.’
‘Oh yeah, she’s nice all right, Marion is.’ He nodded. We carried on working in silence until twelve, then I had to go over to Processed Foods; there was only one woman there, Irina Palmer, and the twenty-kilo flour sacks were too heavy for her. Irina was very nice and she showed me around the processed food aisles once we were done. She smelled quite strongly of cold smoke and she coughed quite a lot, and while I was lifting the flour sacks off the pallet and lugging them to the shelves she’d disappeared in the direction of the toilets.
‘Right,’ she said and led me along the pasta aisle, ‘it’s all a question of practice, you’ll see for yourself after a while. It’s important if a customer asks you.’ She coughed and stroked the lapels of her overall. She was about the same age as Bruno and just about as stocky too, and I’d seen them heading for the toilets together a few times; Bruno liked a quick smoke now and then, but not as often as Irina, and he didn’t cough like she did either.
‘Right, here’s the normal spaghetti, then comes chitarra, that’s kind of straight pasta, we only have one brand though and hardly anyone ever asks for it.’ She was moving quite quickly to and fro in front of the shelf, touching the packets and cartons with both hands. ‘Here’s the fusilli, they’re like spirals, penne lisce, penne rigate, tortellini, tortelloni, macaroni, macaroncini, pappardelle, wide fettucine, then here’s the trenette, the same only thinner, rotelle for soups, orecchiette, they look like little ears, and if someone asks for vermicelli they want spaghetti and they’re from Sicily.’ She pronounced the names of the pasta like a real Italian, moving faster and faster in front of the shelf and showing me all kinds of pasta varieties that I’d never eaten and never even heard of. And then, when she showed me the ‘farfalle’ and the ‘rigatoni’, she suddenly said in the same tone of voice, with the same roll of the R: ‘You like Marion from Confectionery, don’t you?’
I couldn’t help laughing. ‘All I did was get her a coffee.’ And when she nodded and rocked her head like an Italian mama and opened her mouth to reply, I said, ‘Yeah, she’s really nice.’
‘Listen, Christian,’ she took a step closer to me, and because she hadn’t called me ‘Lofty’ like most of the others – funnily enough they’d often called me that on the building site as well, even though there were a few guys there even taller than me – well, anyway I knew right away there was something important coming now. ‘Listen, Marion’s very fragile, I know she doesn’t look like it, I mean, she’s, how can I put it, she’s never at a loss for words, but you mustn’t hurt her, do you get me …?’
‘No,’ I said, not laughing any more. ‘I don’t want to.’
She nodded and said, ‘It’s none of my business, but I like young Marion a lot.’
Then the boss’s voice came over the loudspeakers, telling us we could clock off now; actually he was only the boss when the other bosses weren’t there. I walked over to the staff exit with Irina Palmer, coughing even as she held her cigarettes in her hand ready for the next one, and then we went to get changed.
A couple of weeks passed until I next saw Marion from Confectionery. She’d been working days for a while, but when I didn’t meet her in the aisles or at the vending machine after that Bruno told me she was off sick. ‘Anything serious?’ I asked.
‘Don’t know,’ he said, but I could tell that wasn’t true.
‘Come o
n, tell me.’
‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘If you like her, don’t ask.’
And then we stacked six-packs of alcohol-free beer on the shelves.
Twenty minutes before the end of our shift – we were on our last round of the beverages aisles – he said to me, ‘Come on, I want to show you something.’
I followed him. We heard Irina coughing in the pasta aisle but Bruno carried on until we came to the fish and shellfish and then he stopped.
We called this section ‘The Sea’. There was a large sales counter behind a roller door. Next to it and behind it and all around it were tanks and small pools of live fish, live crabs and prawns, and crates filled with ice and cooled with the dead fish and shellfish in them. The roller door was already halfway down and we ducked underneath it. Inside, the lights were dimmed, only a few strip lights glowing yellow on the ceiling. He took me over to a large tank with a couple of tubes running in and out of it. ‘The water has exactly the same salt content as the ocean they come from,’ he said. ‘Just a tiny bit more or less and they’d die sooner or later.’
They were large crabs, lobsters or something, lying next to each other and on top of each other in the tank, packed so tightly they could hardly move. I went closer up and saw that their pincers were held together with rubber bands.
‘They stay in here,’ said Bruno, ‘until somebody buys them.’
‘But their pincers,’ I said, and I saw a particularly large crab moving its arms with the tied-up pincers and touching the glass.
‘So they don’t hurt each other, you see, and so they don’t hurt anyone who wants to take them out.’
I squatted down in front of the tank, my face directly in front of the glass. They had strange long eyes, dark telescopic eyes that came out of their little heads like tiny fingers. The lobsters moved around in the water that flowed in and out again through the tubes, but they didn’t have much space and some of them looked as if they were dead already or just about to die, lying still between the others. Their long, thin eyes; I don’t know why, but their eyes really did my head in. ‘Jesus,’ I said, standing up again.
‘Yeah,’ said Bruno. We stood in silence by the tank for a good while then, looking at the water bubbling and the big pile of lobsters.
‘Look at that one,’ I said. ‘The one right at the back, the big bugger. He’s got one arm loose.’
‘Where?’ asked Bruno, and I went round the glass tank and showed him the lobster, which kept opening and closing the one pincer it had managed to get free from the rubber band, opening and closing. It wasn’t moving anything else, as if only its one arm was still alive. ‘If he’s clever …’ I said.
‘You mean he could cut the others …’
‘Imagine it though,’ I said. ‘They’d have their work cut out tomorrow morning …’
Bruno laughed, then he shook his head. ‘I told you, Lofty, they’d just hurt each other.’
We heard the boss’s voice over the tannoy – the end of our shift. We ducked out again under the half-closed roller door, Bruno took the forklift to the recharging station, then we went to the staff exit and the changing room. ‘Shall I give you a lift?’
‘OK,’ I said, ‘if you don’t mind the detour.’ I usually took the last bus but Bruno gave me a lift home now and then, even though he actually had to go in the other direction. We hung up our overalls in our lockers, put away a couple of other things, had a bit of a chat with the others, most of them looking tired, we swiped our cards through the machine, and then we walked past the boss, who shook everyone’s hand goodbye, down to the staff car park.
‘About Marion,’ he said in the car.
‘No,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to tell me.’
‘She has it pretty tough sometimes,’ he said, but I just nodded and looked out into the night.
We were standing outside my house. We’d already said goodbye and as he started to get back in the car I said, ‘How about a beer – you’ve got a quarter of an hour, haven’t you?’
‘Yeah,’ he smiled, locking his car and coming back over to me. ‘My wife’s asleep anyway.’ We went inside and sat down in my little kitchen. I took two beers out of the fridge and opened them. ‘Lugging beer around all night,’ he said and clinked his bottle against mine, ‘makes you thirsty, doesn’t it?’
‘I get hungry as well sometimes with all that lovely stuff we carry around at work.’
‘You were pretty daring, that thing with the cake. That impressed her, that did.’
‘How do you know that then?’
‘It does her good, Lofty, someone treating her nice like that.’
The kitchen window was open slightly and I heard a train crossing the bridge. ‘Help yourself to an ashtray if you want to smoke.’
‘I will, thanks,’ he said. I went over to the fridge and put the ashtray on the table, and he lit up. ‘When you get home from work, can you go to sleep right away?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘not usually.’
‘Me neither. I’ve got this bench, out the front, and that’s where I sit then, even if it’s cold out. I have a wee drink there and I can look at the fields. I like looking at the fields. It’s never quite dark, all the lights from the city, you know?’
‘Have you got kids?’
‘No, we haven’t.’
‘Sorry. It’s none of my business.’
‘It’s OK.’ We fell silent, drinking and both looking out of the slightly open window into the night. He stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray and drank up his beer. ‘I’d better go.’
‘I’ll see you to the door.’
We said goodbye out the front. ‘We could do this again, eh?’
‘Yeah, let’s,’ I said. ‘That’d be good.’
He nodded and walked to his car. ‘See you tomorrow, Lofty.’
‘See you.’
He was very quiet the next day and the days after; we worked in silence and he disappeared straight away after our shift, and I took the bus home. I was usually the only passenger; the bus drivers knew me by now and said hello or ‘Home time at last, eh?’ And if I wasn’t tired already I got tired on the way, leaning my head against the window, and sometimes I even fell asleep but the drivers woke me; they knew where I had to get off. Then at home I perked up again and spent a long time sitting on my own in the kitchen, drinking beer and looking out into the night and waiting to get tired again.
‘So you’re doing OK are you, rookie?’ She stood in front of me, hands planted on her hips, and gave me an angry stare, two small creases above her nose. Her hair seemed to be even shorter now, and her face had somehow got slightly less angular, but perhaps it only seemed that way to me; I hadn’t seen her for three weeks.
‘How long do I have to work here until I stop being a rookie?’
‘If you help me for a minute I’ll think about it.’
‘Marion …’ I said.
‘So are you coming or not? I asked Bruno but he’s busy.’
‘I’ve got things to do as well, but …’
‘I can ask someone else.’
She turned away and went to leave, but I was standing behind her and said, ‘Don’t run away, Marion, I’m coming, this crap can wait. I’ll always help you if you want, you know that.’
‘Rookie,’ she said, turning to face me. She pressed her lips together, so firmly that her mouth was a thin line. ‘Marion,’ I said. ‘You talk too much,’ she said. ‘There’s work waiting for us. Well, come on then.’ She looked around but the aisle was empty, then she took my hand and set off. She held my hand quite tightly pressed, and I felt her warmth, remembered the warmth on the seat of her forklift, then she suddenly let go and I walked along next to her.
‘Bruno says you’re doing well.’
‘Oh, does he?’
‘If he says so it must be true. Irina was singing your praises too.’ I wanted to turn off into the confectionery aisle but she took my hand again for a brief moment and pulled me further along. ‘I’m standing in on D
elicatessen and Frozen Food today.’ We went through the open roller door to the cold storage room. I saw her looking over at the vending machine. But when she saw me looking at her she turned her head aside. ‘We’ve got to go to Siberia,’ she said. ‘We’d better wrap up warm.’ She went to one of the lockers and came back with two thick padded jackets and two hats. I helped her into her jacket, then put one on myself. She handed me one of the hats and I put it on her head carefully, pulling it over her short hair. ‘Hey,’ she said, and I tugged the hat down over her ears. ‘I need to see, you know. I’ve got a list, we have to get loads of stuff for the freezers.’ She tugged at her hat, then pointed at a couple of trolleys. ‘You go and get two trolleys, or better three, we’ve got quite a lot to fill up outside.’ We put gloves on too, and once we were wrapped up as warm as Eskimos we couldn’t help laughing.
And then we were in Siberia, twenty degrees below freezing, our breath came in clouds, and we took large hunks of frozen pork and beef and threw them in the trolleys; it sounded as if we were throwing stones.
‘Imagine if they locked us in here, by accident I mean.’ I was standing on the little ladder, handing down a large venison loin to her. I could feel the cold even through my gloves.
‘You wish.’
‘Hey, now you’re the cheeky one.’ I climbed down from the ladder, folded it closed and leant it against the wall. ‘Hmm,’ she said, ‘I guess we’d have to lug meat around all night to keep ourselves from freezing.’
‘I guess we would.’ We pushed the three trolleys over to another spot. We’d already filled two of them. Our faces were red, our skin felt really tight, as if it were about to tear. ‘Brass monkeys in here,’ I said.
‘Don’t be so soft, we’re nearly finished.’ We were standing close together, the tiny clouds of steam mingling between our faces, and as we were piling crates of frozen pizza in the trolley she suddenly turned to me and looked at me, her hat down to her eyebrows. I didn’t say anything, just looked at her. It seemed as if I could feel her breath through the thick padded jacket. ‘Nice,’ she said, ‘it’s nice of you to help me.’ We stood there like that for a while in silence, then I said, ‘Do you know how Eskimos say hello?’ And I was surprised how quiet my voice sounded in the big cold storage room, as if the cold was swallowing it up. She looked at me, and I bent my head down to her and rubbed my nose against hers. She stayed still and quiet, not moving, and after a few seconds I felt her nose moving too.