by Weldon, Fay
The door was flung open by a boy with a white face and orange hair who was hung with chains. There were rings in his nose and his ears. Laura looked through to a sodden mess of old blankets, clothes, electrical equipment, squashed cans of lager and graffitied walls. A thin dog came out to sniff up Laura’s skirt. She had noticed that since she had children dogs seemed to do this all the time. Or perhaps it was only that now she came in contact with dogs more often than she had in her pre-domestic phase. Who’s to say?
The boy first denied that Carmen lived there, then admitted it, or at any rate if she didn’t exactly live there, at least that she squatted there, and said she was working nights, she wasn’t in. ‘Working nights?’ asked Laura in alarm, but the lad, who called his dog off and even offered her a cup of tea, explained that she was a wage slave up at Peckhams, and on night work, and it was to Peckhams that Laura proceeded, declining the tea.
These days they take school parties around Peckhams. The chicken works have been in the forefront of the lateral diversification movement in light industry: nowadays one division breeds chickens, lovely little fluffy things: another produces free-range eggs (more or less), smooth, brown and perfect, from these chicks, once grown. The food product facility processes the eggs into ‘extruded egg’ – yard upon yard of cooked and reconstructed yolk encircled by cooked and reconstructed white, so that when your ham and egg pie is sliced everyone gets a perfect, even, properly presented section of egg in the middle of that slice, never the little unfair end section of white with no yolk you might very well get if you trusted to nature and chance. School children love to see ‘long egg’ being made, oozing out of the extruding pipes. The great steel drums in the Overall Product Faculty (sic) that churn night and day to meld chicken and herbs and flour properly to make the famous Peckhams Patties are another great favourite: the plop, plop, plop as patty after automated patty falls into its neat little polythene home, ready for freezing, seems to hypnotise. PR, I hear, is thinking of changing the name from Peckhams Poultry to something that smacks rather less of feather and the farmyard, to, perhaps, simply Peckhams Products. Sir Bernard, having diversified into food products, is now a major shareholder of Peckhams Poultry: integral cog in the machine that’s the Bellamy Empire. The road beneath your feet, the patty on your plate, the pillow on which you rest your head – Bellamy’s, all Bellamy’s.
The only part of the process which is off limits to the school children, and not shown in detail in the Info Pack which so helps them in their essays on the food industry, is the slaughtering sheds, where the birds move gracefully from a state of life to a state of food. With the best will in the world, blood, feathers and entrails get everywhere. The creatures will struggle; it is impossible to have them adequately tranquillised and still keep the food chain free of unwelcome drugs. Whatever’s in the hen ends up in the human. There is a big enough problem with oestrogen and the other hormones which, when used in tandem with bright lighting and careful breeding, encourage the eating birds to grow plump and soft, and the laying birds to produce five or even six eggs a day, but can interfere with the fertility of humans.
‘Only a happy bird lays eggs,’ says Peckhams’ PR, but I’m not so sure. My Enquire Within on Everything (1789) suggests otherwise: ‘If you want to keep a hen laying all winter,’ says the author, ‘don’t let it run with the cock.’ But we have other things to worry about beyond the happiness of hens.
At the time we talk about, Peckhams had only just begun its progress into lateral diversification. Shanty Cotton, with his views on worker participation and profit sharing, had only recently taken over as Managing Director. He was not of the new lean managerial classes, not at all. He was a vigorous, portly, handsome, red-faced, cigar-smoking, dandruffy businessman of the old school, though he’d recently learnt a new trick or two, which the Peckhams Board of Directors thought might come in handy. The firm, though already a major employer in Fenedge, at the time I speak of occupied a two-acre site only. Later a couple of acres of old wood were razed to build the Patty Plant. But what’s a couple of acres when you consider the plight of the rainforest?
(We’ve had a further batch of reference books turn up at the Handicapped Centre: these ones are all stamped ‘Conservation Library’. One day I will discover who our benefactor is.)
Nevertheless, the Peckhams factory at the time had enough to occupy it to remain active night and day: the appetite for frozen chicken in the nation was keen and getting keener as who but Peckhams under Shanty Cotton led the way in competitive pricing. If you make employees work harder and longer for smaller wages in a time of high unemployment it is not difficult thus to lead the way: you just have to be more ruthless in these matters than the factory next door. The fish finger as the favourite convenience food for children was giving way — as the seas became depleted, and fish scarcer and more expensive – to the crumbed chicken leg. At one end of the plant at the time Laura visited Carmen and set the next set of events rolling, living chickens were delivered, crated up by breeders all over the land to be transported thither by road; at the other, via the slaughtering sheds, frozen chickens, either whole or sectioned, with or without giblets, emerged in packs ready for the refrigerated vans which would distribute the white fibrous flesh throughout the country. Laura found Carmen in a loading bay, at the cold dead birds end rather than the living squawking one, and was grateful for that at least. It is hard to feel sorry for dead fowl – all too easy for one about to die. Carmen was working in a supervisory capacity. You could tell: she had a clipboard and looked pained. Her hair was tied up in a white Peckhams turban. She looked up when Laura approached, and was startled.
‘My God,’ said Carmen. ‘This is no place for a sensitive soul like you. Where are all the kids? You seem kind of half finished without them.’
‘They’re at home,’ said Laura. ‘I’ve got a baby-sitter in.’
‘I’m really sorry about your mother,’ said Carmen. ‘I’m trying to get time off for the funeral, but they’re being very sticky. There’s a new management. You have to get a chit from the officiating priest to say you’re entitled to go. I may just have to be ill and forge a sick note. There’s a doctor working here who signs them for twenty-five pence a time. He was struck off years back, but his signature still has that certain something.’
She wasn’t quite looking at Laura. She seemed tired and flattened. She ticked off boxes as the forklift trucks moved them from one place to another. She wore gloves and a scarf but still seemed cold.
‘So why have you come?’ she asked. ‘To gloat?’
‘Of course I haven’t,’ said Laura. ‘I just thought I’d warn you. Sir Bernard’s chauffeur is back in town and looking for you.’
‘Is he indeed!’ said Carmen, and put down her clipboard and to Laura’s dismay sat down on a crate and looked as if she were about to cry.
‘Hey, Miss!’ shouted a forklift operator, ‘you’re holding us up.’
The reproach revived her. ‘Hygiene problem,’ shouted Carmen, on her feet again. Her voice was surprisingly loud. The moon seemed to shake in the sky. She blew a whistle. She clapped her hands. ‘Stop the line,’ she cried. The moving bands slowed and stopped. Laura thought it was wonderful to have so much power. Motors were switched off; hands went into pockets. Men went for coffee; others stood and chatted. So much for Shanty Cotton. ‘Why hygiene problem?’ asked Laura.
‘Temperature rise is best,’ said Carmen. ‘No obvious source. Needs a technician. They can’t afford the risk of food poisoning. It’ll be at least six hours before the lines can get going again. That’s six hours more life for a few thousand chickens, and thirty-three men back home to their beds, unexpectedly. There’ll be a baby boom nine months from today. Well done, Laura, trust you!’
‘But what is it to do with me?’
‘I can’t talk and work,’ said Carmen. ‘I’d rather talk.’
‘Won’t they fire you?’ asked Laura.
‘They never put two and two together,
’ said Carmen. ‘And if they do I’ll just say it’s because I’m on my toes and vigilant. Health and Safety’s the last scam in the world. Shanty Cotton is a pushover.’
She went away to write a report on a detected brink-of-thaw in one of the bird-plus-giblets crates. These birds, she told Laura, stuffed as they are with a plastic twist containing the giblets of total strangers, are the most prone to inadvertent warming on their journey from point of death to point of sale.
‘It all sounds fascinating,’ said Laura politely. She was rather shocked.
‘I nearly lost a finger through frostbite the other day,’ said Carmen. ‘See this as natural justice. I am righting wrongs in the only way I know.’
‘So what do I say to Driver if he turns up again?’ asked Laura. The night shift had closed down: the workers gone home: management had been informed, the technicians roused from their slumber to detect the source of yet further trouble, which Laura knew could only be the result of the way Carmen had just had an assembly line rinsed down with boiling water from the sterilising plant, instead of using cold. Laura drove Carmen back home through the moonlit evening. Angela was baby-sitting. Woodie was at night class, studying Small Business Method and Aims. The moon was yellow and round; the beet fields made flat patterns of silver and black to either side: a chess-board pattern, said Laura. Carmen said it looked like draughts to her; nothing as complicated as chess.
‘Tell Driver I give in,’ said Carmen. ‘Tell him in the end what a girl succumbs to is boredom.’ The skin over her finger was peeling where the frost had damaged it. She tore at a shred with her teeth and cried out in pain as it took away flesh as well.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Laura in alarm. Carmen, whimpering, showed Laura her finger.
‘I can’t see anything the matter with it,’ said Laura, and indeed it seemed perfectly whole and perfect, a flawless finger on a prettily shaped and delicate hand. Carmen stared at the finger too, as if it belonged to a stranger. Laura forgot to steer and drove the car into a ditch at the side of the road, which was at least better than going into one of the poplars which lined it everywhere but exactly here. The ditch had been artificially extended into a pond; it was a habitat of the natterjack toad. A notice, glimmering in the moonlight, indicated the creatures were a protected species. Their mating cries rose to a crescendo as the car splashed nose-down into the ditch; then there was an abrupt silence.
‘I am sorry,’ said Laura, and got out of the car, knee-deep in muddy water, her long skirt wet and trailing. Carmen was able to get out on to dry land. They left the ditch, and the car and the toads, and began to walk. Carmen’s face, profiled, seemed to Laura to change shape even as they walked: the nose became narrower and longer, the hairline more decisive, the run of chin to ear smoother and cleaner. She said as much to Carmen.
‘Just a trick of moonlight,’ said her friend, and who should come along behind but Driver in his BMW?
‘Had a little accident, I see,’ Driver said. ‘You go back and stay with the car, Laura. I’ll drive Carmen into Fenedge and fetch help.’
And Carmen got into the BMW just like that, and they drove off.
And Laura went back and stayed with the car hour after hour, worrying about the children and hoping Carmen would have the sense to ring home and let them know she was delayed, until she gave up and walked on to Mr Bliss’s stables, where she had to rouse him in order to use the phone. A terrible night! She was angry with Carmen; who wouldn’t be? She didn’t get home until three, and no one had waited up for her. Even Mr Bliss hadn’t been particularly friendly. The horses had been restless all night and he’d only just got to sleep.
As for Driver, he said to Carmen in the car, ‘Now you know what it’s like to be everyone else, no one special. That’s what happens if you stand between Driver and his plans for you. Driver has all the time in the world, and you haven’t.’
‘I liked working there,’ said Carmen.
‘No, you didn’t,’ he said. ‘A lesson to keep you in order the rest of your life. How to go to work like everyone else, yawn, yawn, short of money like everyone else, no one to talk to, ditto; every path out of here blocked by your circumstances or your own nature. Your own nature being the biggest obstacle of all. Just as well you’ve accepted my offer.’
‘What offer?’ asked Carmen but, even more than Tim ever had on the hilltop, Driver seemed to become vague; so much so, it was as if no one were driving the car; just a vague shape, an outline as of a head, only the view out of the car window could be seen right through it, and what a blotchy, patchy version of the moonlit view – as if the moon itself, the source of all light, were covered with mould, splitting its skin as if attacked by the athlete’s foot fungi (tinea pedis) and its glow accordingly ruptured and disturbed. Poor Carmen!
‘Accept the offer,’ said Driver, ‘and it won’t only be you who will prosper. Your friends can have a share of the good times too. Always wise, that. Placate the friends, avert the envy. If you get promotion, find a boyfriend, come into money, always throw a party!’ His face was back again: teeth white, gleaming and solid as he smiled; cherubic lips, crimson, dark and full.
‘I’ll do for them,’ said Carmen, ‘what I won’t do for myself.’
‘That’s what they all say,’ said Driver, ‘but it’s nonsense. You do it for yourself.’
This, at any rate, is what Laura told me Carmen told her of what went on between Carmen and Driver the night Carmen failed to send a garage out to retrieve Laura’s car from the ditch.
‘If you believe that,’ said Laura, ‘you’ll believe anything. I prefer to believe he’s her ghostly lover: they had it off under an ash tree in the moonlight.’ She was still cross. ‘What is more,’ she went on, and told me how the very next day, what was more, Carmen and Driver were seen together in a boutique in Kings Lynn, the most expensive shop in town – the kind which, when it first opens, makes people hoot with derision at the prices asked, but which seems to flourish nevertheless. Customers are seen going in who have never been seen before, and probably never will be again. County ladies with spaniels at their heels, and women who look as if they might be the mayor, and girls with long legs – and who should be there that day but Carmen, standing shameless in the middle of the shop, stepping out of dingy clothes – the kind favoured by Peckhams staff, wash-and-wearable and never shrinking out of shape because they have no shape to begin with – for all the world as if she hadn’t been home all night and needed to get out of them fast. There she stood in bra and pants for all the world to see – but since her figure was so perfect, Witness announced, it was hardly sexy at all, and the whole exercise perfectly decent, for all Driver stood in his navy uniform, braid and navy leather boots, leaning against the counter watching, hand on hip, like a brothel master. Who but Carmen!
Carmen apologised to the assistant, a lanky girl with a superior stoop, short dark hair and no bosom at all, for the state of the clothes she took off, thus without ceremony.
‘Junk them,’ she said. ‘They don’t fit anyway.’
Witness described Carmen as long-legged and ravishing: very much a bimbo type. She asked for a size twelve plain black skirt and a plain white blouse, ditto, which surprised Witness, who would have said a ten any day. Carmen said to Driver, ‘I’m only here because I don’t like upsetting anyone’s aesthetic sensibility, even yours.’
Mrs Baker would have been proud of her. Four years in a chicken factory and ‘aesthetic sensibility’ still came tripping off the tongue. ‘I can pay,’ said Carmen. ‘I have money set aside. If you choose to pay, that’s your funeral.’
‘Ah, funerals,’ said Driver wistfully. ‘Few and far between!’
‘No one wants to live for ever,’ said Carmen, taking the skirt and blouse, the most sensible garments in the shop, into the cubicle and shutting the curtain.
‘They might,’ murmured Driver. ‘The time could come when they just might,’ and he sat down on the little plump sofa provided for the purpose, and gazed
at the curtain with the foolish, rather endearing expression men have at such times, a mixture of anticipation, anxiety and self-consciousness.
Carmen stepped out of the cubicle. The skirt was too loose at the waist and the blouse far too tight. Fabric stretched between the buttons. Witness reported she went in like a clothes prop and came out like an hourglass.
‘God,’ said Carmen to Driver, ‘you are so old-fashioned!’ as the assistant went off to find a size eight skirt and a size fourteen blouse. When she came back she had a red satin dress over her arm as well.
‘I just thought –’ she said. ‘So few girls it would suit –’
The skirt and blouse fitted Carmen just fine if she belted both in, but the red dress fitted really perfectly, if, as Witness remarked, you cared for that kind of thing. It plunged to the waist at the back, curved out at the hip, in at the knee with a kind of red bobbled bounce, and covered the bosom, just, while emphasising a cleavage. It had thin shoulder straps, one of which was ready-made for slipping.
‘It’s made for you,’ said Driver. ‘Or shall we say you’re made for it? Look at yourself in the mirror.’
Carmen did. She was gratified.