by Lee Evans
Amazingly, he said he was married with three kids, but he looked no older than sixteen. That was about all I figured he had going for him, as if you saw him, you’d think he’d just climbed off the porch in Deliverance. He kept looking around the shed at everyone else, sharing a bit of a crafty chuckle with them and pointing at me.
‘We got a new one ’ere,’ he announced. I half-expected him to take out a banjo and start strumming.
The birds arrived via a sort of waist-high wooden trap door that was lifted and tied up by our ‘shed runner’, George. To call him docile-looking would be an understatement – this bloke looked like a younger version of Worzel Gummidge, but with his stupid head on.
With his big walloping Wellington boots, his mad white spiky hair and his one long eyebrow, George would cheerfully lumber around the straw-strewn shed, checking that we were all plucking the birds in the correct manner. The birds were hung upside down from the hook in front of us and we would have to tear the feathers away from them as fast as possible. I stood there at my hook, frantically plucking. I ripped away handful after handful of feathers, revealing the white goosepimply skin beneath that reminded me of my legs when in swimming trunks. It was truly gruesome work.
I found George’s little quality-control visits difficult and unsettling, as his eyes weren’t exactly in tune with one another. When he stopped to talk to you, they would dart independently around in their sockets, as if a fly was constantly buzzing about the inside of his head.
I tore at my bird, the pound signs popping up in my head. But, after about a minute, it became blatantly obvious it was going to be more difficult than I’d first thought. I took a quick look around the shed. Everyone else was going great guns. I realized I was amongst professional pluckers here and I was way out of my depth. The people around me were tearing the feathers off these creatures as if the birds had flown through a jumbo jet’s engine on take-off. The woman across from me was already on her third bird, and I hadn’t even finished the intricate bit around the bird’s arse.
It reeked enough in that shed to melt nasal hair, and I couldn’t get the smell out of my head for weeks. I still can’t eat turkey. I even got queasy when Sir Bernard Matthews used to come on the telly and coo, ‘Bootiful!’
It was the end of the day and, if I’m honest, things hadn’t gone well for me. I’d only managed to pluck two turkeys, and so I was taken off into a quiet corner of the shed and informed by George that my services would no longer be required. I had to face it, the money-making world of turkey-plucking wasn’t for me.
I was left with something, though. For days afterwards, the smell of turkey was still on me, and everyone I met either started sneezing or began to have breathing difficulties right in front of me. At night time, I would lie alongside a puffed-up, sneezing, wheezing Heather. Her allergies going nuts, she would banish me to sleep in the bath in a sort of isolation block. Although she was angry at me because we had no money, I think she was willing to let it go because she couldn’t suffer this turkey-induced allergy any more.
As George told me, eyes rolling around like lottery balls, I just wasn’t fast enough. He was right – I wasn’t cut out for it. The others? They were just amazingly quick. One hefty woman in the shed could get a petrified turkey to practically undress in front of her just by looking at it. I, by contrast, was still on my first bird when George rattled his big triangle for lunch. So, on average, I would have been earning roughly fifty pence a day. That, by my reckoning, would make me a millionaire turkey-plucker by the time I was … dead. And my bus fare to the farm was sixty pence, so I would actually be paying to turkey pluck.
Interestingly, during lunch as we all sat around on bales of hay in the shed next door, I noticed that all of the other pluckers had brought in turkey sandwiches. I mean, not only would you think they might have had enough of turkey, but also they were eating turkey in front of turkeys.
Now that just ain’t right.
29. Kilburn’s Answer to Gordon Gekko
Every evening after returning from the Job Centre, I’d pick up a copy of the Evening Standard at the train station. The back pages always had an extensive job section. Most of the jobs required highly skilled personnel, but there were always one or two where they wanted someone to make the tea. That’s all right, I thought, that’s how it works; you make the tea for a couple of years, prove yourself and they might give you a proper job.
Even though I knew by the time I’d paid out for the train fare for the interview in London, it wouldn’t be worth my while, I was determined not to sign on the dole. I saw that as just wrong and I would always make the effort to go to the interviews. I knew Heather was working her arse off, and we were very anxious to move out of Mum and Dad’s back room into some place where we could not only be properly together but also make room for the baby.
So I wanted to show her I was doing all I could, even though it was soul-destroying going for job after job after job and getting nowhere. The trouble was, at every interview I would go for, there were twenty, sometimes thirty others all way more qualified than me. It was like you had to be Picasso just to make the tea at an art shop, and you can imagine what sort of weird shit that would be.
After being rejected by yet another interviewer in London, with the morale well and truly sucked out of me, I was determined to return home to Heather with at least something. So I took the Tube over to Kilburn in North London after reading a small ad in the Evening Standard’s ‘No Qualifications Needed’ section that had caught my eye earlier. After all, I was already wearing my faithful Oxfam suit that I’d had since college. I’d got quite a bit of wear out of the poor thing, and it was starting to beg for mercy.
I was also sporting a pair of shoes I’d bought as part of my bar uniform in Scarborough. After a whole season’s worth of mileage hiking around the back of the bar and now all the traipsing about London looking for a job, the soles of both shoes had sprouted holes. I had temporarily managed to mend them using a puncture-repair kit and, to my artistic credit, that was working very well, for now.
I am an eternal optimist, a dreamer and, as you will know by now, a bit gullible. That can be mistaken for stupid – all right, I accept it, I’m eternally stupid.
Which is my excuse for why I got involved in such an obvious scam. After walking for miles from the Tube station, the soles of my shoes feeling a bit thinner with every step, I eventually found the door I was searching for in a parade of pretty grim shops. It didn’t look like what I was expecting. It was squeezed between a laundrette and a betting shop, but the discoloured notice taped to the inside of the grubby glass panel did tally up with the advert in the paper. I held it up to compare the two: ‘Financial advisers urgently required. Apply within. No qualifications.’
‘That’s me,’ I said to myself. For a moment, I caught my reflection in the dirty glass door. With the suit I was wearing, I looked like Poncho the Clown, not a financial adviser. However, I was determined to give it a go. I entered the door and climbed the steep steps. The thick nylon red and yellow stair carpet was all lumpy, with bits missing so it showed the wooden floor beneath. The air was thick with the eye-watering, tangy burn of cigarette smoke from the bookies downstairs. That hung with me all the way up the wonky, narrow stairwell, which was decked out in the finest woodchip wallpaper. This, I thought, is like walking into Lompa Lompa Land.
As I got closer to the top of the stairs, I could hear the muffled sound of what appeared to be chanting of some sort. There was a moment when I wondered if I had the right place because as I reached the top it was like a scene from Alice in Wonderland, as the walls and ceiling suddenly closed in on me. I was now standing on a landing in a small sort of box at the top of the stairs that was so tiny I was unable to even lift my arm with the piece of newspaper to check where I was. My nose was pressed up against a single purple door with a sign taped on it that was very difficult to read. There wasn’t enough room to pull my head back and
focus on the lettering without banging the back of my bonce. However, I was just able to make out the words: ‘Sales conference in progress.’
The chanting was a lot louder now and was definitely emanating from the other side of the door. I thought about waiting where I was, not wishing to disturb a sales conference. I didn’t know what that meant, but I realized it sounded very important. No one I knew had ever been to a conference. That was something you only saw on the telly – ‘The Prime Minister is at a peace conference,’ that sort of thing. But here I was just about to enter – through a somewhat battered, dirty, old purple door, granted – a sales conference. Wait till Heather finds out what I’m up to, I thought.
I rolled the scenario over in my head. I’m loosening my tie and a butler hands me a gin and tonic. ‘Thanks, Jeeves.’ Heather is standing in a negligee next to a live leopard. I raise an eyebrow and strike a pose. ‘Sorry I’m late, darling. I’ve been at a very important sales conference.’ Nice.
Then it occurred to me that I couldn’t knock anyway, as I couldn’t lift my arm. In fact, the only thing I could do was slide my hand on to the door handle and enter. It was tight, but I managed to squeeze my hand along in front of me. By now the noise was really getting up some speed. The chanting was a lot louder – it sounded like some kind of religious cult carrying out a spiritual exorcism. ‘Out with the old, in with the new!’ they chanted. ‘Out with the old, in with the new!’
I turned the handle and the door swung open. I stumbled into the room and found myself standing in front of a smartly dressed crowd of about fifty or sixty people. They were all sizes, shapes and colours. They all had their arms reaching up to the heavens, as a tall, boyish man with blond wavy hair, blue eyes and the sharpest pinstripe three-piece suit I have ever seen paced up and down encouraging them. His shiny Italian shoes gliding along the thin grey office carpet, he was prancing around in front of a white board that stretched along the entire wall. On it, Pinstripe Boy had written slogans such as, ‘Screw the fuckers into the ground,’ and ‘Don’t even let them breathe.’ He kept hitting the air in front of him like there was an imaginary punchbag and shouting angrily at the crowd: ‘Out with the old, in with the new! Come on, you bastards, let’s hear it.’
The man in the pinstripe suit – clearly, the leader of this sales cult – suddenly noticed me and shouted over as the crowd in front of him carried on their chanting. ‘Why are you here?’
I couldn’t quite hear him at first because of the racket in the room. ‘Sorry?’ I asked, volunteering my ear.
He shouted at me again, more forcefully this time. ‘I said, why the fuck are you here?’ I held up the paper and was just about to tell him it was about the advert when he cut me off. ‘Are you here to make some money?’ I was confused. I was there for the job, but I was now thinking I might have the wrong place. He came closer and bellowed in my face. ‘You don’t like yourself!’
‘What?’ It was difficult to know what was going on. Maybe, I thought, I have the right place and this is part of what it’s all about. After all, everyone else in the room was a bit lively, so I decided to play along. I shouted back in my best Kirk-Douglas-we’ve-got-to-build-a-long-boat-right-now rallying cry. ‘Yes, I don’t like myself!’
I thought that would do it. I smiled at the crowd who, noticing that the man in the pinstripe was shouting at an odd-looking scruffbag in a clown’s suit with out-of-control fuzzy hair, suddenly become less enthusiastic about their chanting. It began to fade out until eventually they stood staring at me with bemusement.
I was also bewildered by Pinstripe Guy, who was now circling me as if he were a lion just about to pounce on a vulnerable antelope, which just happened to be wearing a comedy suit. He started shouting at me again. Fuck me, I thought. What the fuck have I done to this bloke? ‘You hate yourself, don’t you?’ he shrieked. ‘And you’re here to make some money. Am I right?’
Now I felt uncomfortable. ‘You fucking hate yourself, don’t you, fuzzy boy?’
That made me jump, and I reacted by shouting back angrily, ‘Yes, I do.’
He smiled. He knew he had me. In his mind, he had cracked me, and so he went in for the kill. ‘You are a pile of dog’s shit, a useless piece of human waste. What are you?’ He waited for my answer, and the crowd watched this rather one-sided game of verbal tennis with interest.
I shouted back, ‘Dog shit!’ This time I slapped my forehead hard with the palms of my hands for effect, hoping if I showed a bit more anguish he would stop shouting at me, but he kept going.
‘What are you?’ he roared again.
I thought perhaps I’d got the last one wrong, so I tried another one. ‘Human waste?’ I stared at him to see if I’d got it right, then realized I hadn’t done the slapping of my forehead bit, so I smacked my brow again, harder this time. But it was too late now and must have appeared out of context. Mr Pinstripe simply shook his head.
His ritual humiliation of me now over, he grabbed a plastic folder from the top of a cabinet, held it in front of my face and tapped on it with his finger as he spoke. ‘This is your sales kit. Look after it, it is your friend.’
The king of the pinstripes, who, I later discovered, was called Dan, handed it to me. ‘It will earn you a lot of money, fuzzy head.’ Then he shouted at me again. ‘Go and sit down. Join the winners, you loser.’ Then he began rallying the crowd again by pointing randomly at various people and shouting at them, ‘Darryl, how much did you earn this week?’
‘Five hundred pounds.’
‘Five hundred pounds? You’re a winner, Darryl. Calvin, how much?’
From there on in, I was paired off with a mentor. He was a black lad named Joe. He took one look at me and burst out laughing. He did that a lot; he laughed at everything and everyone. He led me away from the rest of the group into an adjoining room. There we sat at a small desk for the rest of the day until it got dark as Joe took me through the plastic folder’s pages of illustrations, diagrams, graphs and newspaper cuttings highlighting the benefits of unit trusts. The folder underlined how unit trusts performed compared with other similar offerings. It also explained interest rates, APR figures and a load of other financial jargon that made my head spin.
It contained all that was needed to make you sound just like a proper financial adviser. Then there was a dummy form that Joe took me through as if I were a customer. He showed me his trick of how to get the punters, as he called them, to sign it just by offering them the pen, looking them right in the eye and just waiting, not saying a word. Joe demonstrated that, but then he started laughing again, saying he couldn’t look me in the eye as I made him crack up. All the same, he assured me that the tactic worked every time.
I couldn’t make head nor tail of it all, but Joe kept drilling me. ‘Learn it, geez,’ he said, clicking his fingers. Then he would bounce around the room laughing. ‘You’re gonna make a mint, right, geez?’
I liked Joe a lot. He had patience with me. He knew I was an idiot, and he knew I wasn’t a salesman, but he could tell just by looking at me that I was desperate. He himself had gone through the same process. This was the only job going, and I really needed it. Heather and I had no money.
Joe just wanted to try and help – plus, it was in his interest, as whatever I made, he would get a cut of it. I worked for him now so he was very keen to get me to sell. ‘The unit-trusts financial package, unlike other insurance policies, is diversified across the entire stock market. So all your money isn’t in the same basket, but is spread by our expert teams across only the most successful companies.’ That was the sort of sales jargon I had to learn parrot -fashion from the plastic pages of my sales kit.
Joe told me to go home and learn it off by heart, as tomorrow we would be going out selling. ‘I need you, bruv,’ he said as I left for home, shutting the purple door behind me. I could hear his loud laugh as, by now completely exhausted, I walked down the stairs. But I would find out I needed Joe a lot more t
han he needed me where we were going.
I got back to our house very late in the evening, and Heather quickly forgot her anger about my tardiness as I explained that I’d actually managed to find a job. However, her enthusiasm quickly waned when I told her what it was. But if there’s one thing she always falls for, it is my perpetual positivity, and so I soon had her back on my side.
She sat on the camp bed giggling at me, as I strutted around our tiny cramped bedroom pretending I was Gordon Gekko. I must have looked such an idiot in my Oxfam Poncho the Clown suit with extra large lapels and strategically missing trouser turn-ups.
Heather said she had some good news herself. She had been looking in the Southend Evening Echo and had found a flat that she thought just right for us. ‘We have to act fast,’ she buzzed away, ‘as it was the cheapest one there and could easily be snapped up if we don’t show interest very soon.’ That brought me crashing back to reality. Heather always does that. I’m forever doing my ‘I have a dream’ speech, and she will be the voice of reason, of authority and of reality in our relationship.
It’s a good job she wasn’t married to Martin Luther King or any of those other people who do great things. ‘I have a dream –’
‘Oh blimey, ’ere he goes with his “I have a dream” malarkey again. Sit down, you great walloping buffoon.’
‘Ask not what your country can do for you –’
‘You can do something for me – you can put that shelf up in the back bedroom.’
‘One giant step for man, one –’
‘You can stop leaping all over the place, for a start. What’s the matter with you?’
I knew she was right, of course. We needed to get somewhere proper to live as we had a baby on the way. So not wanting to crush her hopes, I told her that we should make the effort and go to see the flat, but secretly I was concerned. I just couldn’t see any way we could afford it, but Heather was adamant that she wanted somewhere other than just one room to live in with a baby. She eagerly explained she could just about do it on her wages, and if it meant going without, then that’s what we’d have to do.