“When are we going home, Ciocia?” Marta asks Yola, as they stand in the sunshine outside the plant, counting their first week’s wages.
“When? When we are millionaires.” Yola smiles grimly at her niece. Surely there has been a mistake. The wages are about a quarter of what Vitaly promised. There is a slip of paper in the envelope with them, with all kinds of incomprehensible letters and numbers. There was never any of this nonsense with old Dumpling. Just cash in hand.
“Deductions—what is this mean?” she asks Geta, who is standing nearby, also counting her wages, which look considerably more than Yola’s, even though she does nothing but strut around and stick her nose into everything. At least when Yola was a supervisor she set an example through her own hard work.
“Deductions is everything what you paying,” squawks Geta in her appalling English. “See—transports, accommodations, taxes, superannuations, Nis.”
“Nis?”
“In England, everybody paying. Is law.”
“And this one—TR. What is this?”
“This is mean trenning ret. You no skill you must hevva trenning.”
“Trenning? What is it?”
“Trenning is learn. You must learn how to do this job.”
“This job every idiot can do. How I am learn?”
“I teach, you learn. I teach you to put chicken on tray.”
“And for this I pay?”
“After two week will be normal ret.”
“And you are pay more?”
“Of course. I supervisor ret.”
Yola feels a red-hot pressure building up inside her as though she is about to explode, and Marta has to hold her back, and who knows what might have happened at this point were it not for the intervention of an incredibly handsome young man with long blond hair and muscles in his calves the size of prize-winning marrows such as most women can only dream of—and yes, he is wearing shorts, which most men cannot get away with but in this case it is acceptable, in fact it is excellent, because the legs are suntanned and covered with fine blond hairs, and have muscles the size of—yes, we know that already. Anyway, this godlike man steps forward and says,
“Do you need any help with your payslip?”
Well, in this situation, what woman would not?
And marrow-legs explains everything, how the superannuation is for her pension when she retires, but since she will be retiring in Poland not in England she will not see a penny of this, and she will probably not see a penny anyway because these bloodsuckers will not pay the money into any pension fund, but will put it into their own pockets to spend on Rolls-Royce cars and luxury yachts, and yes, since she has mentioned it, probably they will also buy uncomfortable underwears for their sluttish wives, and the same is with this National Insurance, and maybe the tax too—if the taxman sees any of it he will be lucky, and the deductions for transport and accommodations are not strictly illegal, but they are excessive, and he will look into it if she likes. And at the end he asks her whether she would like to join the Poultry Workers’ Union. Well, in this situation, what woman would not?
Tomasz too has been recruited to the Poultry Workers’ Union by a young man wearing shorts who accosted him on the way in to work, though the young man’s legs were not a factor in persuading him—it was a deep unaccountable anger with Vitaly, and everything that he represents. That Vitaly, he is too impatient—he is so much in a hurry to get rich that he has forgotten the basics of how to be a human being. And Tomasz felt angry with himself too: He should never have gotten involved in Vitaly’s schemes. He had come to England to hunt for some rare Bob Dylan recordings and see a bit of the world before he got too old, and yes, maybe even find love if it should come his way. Yet somehow he had allowed himself to be degraded to the point where he could inflict suffering on other living creatures without so much as a quiver of sentiment. He had become a pawn in their game.
It was only seven o’clock in the morning, and already two terrible things had happened to him today. When he had gone down at dawn into the squalid eating room of the house to stuff his mouth with a few slices of bread, margarine, and jam—yes, he had invested in some apricot jam—before the white van came for him at six o’clock, he sat down to work on the song which he had been composing in his head during the night. And that’s when he discovered that his guitar was missing. He couldn’t believe it at first. He hunted everywhere, under the table with its debris of food scraps and crumpled wrappings from last night’s meals, in the mouldy kitchen cupboards, through the bedrooms still clogged with the over-breathed air of exhausted sleepers, in the grimy understairs cupboard. That was it. There wasn’t anywhere else to look. Someone had stolen it. One of these desperate anonymous men from some impoverished or war-blasted region of the world had stolen his guitar, and by now had probably traded it for—for what? A bottle of vodka? A chicken-and-mushroom pie?
This time he didn’t even cry. What was the point?
Milo let him sit up front in the passenger seat of the van, because he was the first to be picked up. As he climbed in, he remembered with a stab of regret that he hadn’t even said good-bye to Neil, his only friend. He was being taken to new accommodations in a seaside boarding house on the outskirts of Shermouth, closer to the slaughterhouse of the processing plant where he was due to begin work at six thirty. If he’d been sitting in the back, he probably wouldn’t have seen it; but up there in the front seat, he couldn’t miss it: there, right on the bend in front of them, the squashed remains of a white chicken that had been killed on the road. So that’s where its freedom had ended. Milo put his foot down and ran right over it. There must be a song in this, thought Tomasz; then he remembered about his guitar.
But if there was one thing that brought home to him how much he and the chickens really had in common, it was what happened later that morning: the incident of the Chinese slaughterman’s thumb.
When the chickens arrived at the slaughterhouse, Tomasz’s job was to hang them up by the feet in shackles suspended from a moving overhead conveyor, where they dangled, squawking hopelessly, especially those with broken legs (though by now he was immune to the squawking) as the conveyor dispatched them, headfirst, through a bath of electrified water, which was supposed to stun them, before their throats were cut with an automatic blade. But just in case the water didn’t work or the blade missed, which was often enough, there were a couple of slaughtermen standing by to slit their throats before they were sent through to the steam room, where they were plunged into a scalding tank to loosen their feathers. Then they were mechanically defeathered and defooted before being eviscerated by another team of slaughtermen.
The slaughtermen were Chinese, skilled with the knives, but they were a bit short for the height of the overhead belt, so they couldn’t always see what they were doing; and it just so happened that one of them grabbed at a bird that had gotten stuck in the automatic foot-cutter, and somehow managed to slice off the end of his thumb, just above the first joint. At first you couldn’t even hear him screaming because of the noise of the chickens. Tomasz stopped the line and rushed off to find the supervisor, who immediately got onto his mobile phone and started shouting for another slaughterman to be sent, while the rest of them hunted around for the bit of thumb among the blood, droppings, and feathers on the slaughterhouse floor; but it had disappeared, and all the while the man was yelling and moaning and clutching his hand in a fist to try and stop the bleeding. In the end, they gave up on finding the piece, and somebody just drove him to the hospital to be stitched up as best they could.
Then the supervisor started shouting at Tomasz for stopping the line: “We’re losing money, yer twat, just get the bloody line moving, so we can get some bloody chickens coming through. What d’yer think this is, bloody Butlins?”
He looked only a few years older than Neil, without the acne, but also without the charm.
“Here.” He handed Tomasz the slaughterman’s knife, still covered with blood, though whether it was his or
the chickens’ he couldn’t tell. “You’d better take over, ’til the replacement gets ’ere.”
If I were to lose my finger, Tomasz thought, I could no longer play the guitar.
“Gloves. I need leather gloves.”
The supervisor looked at Tomasz with narrowed eyes.
“Are you some kind of troublemaker?”
“Same gloves we had in chicken catching. Without such gloves this work is dangerous.” For some reason, he still felt angry not so much with the supervisor, nor the owners of the plant, but with Vitaly.
“Listen, mate, people been doin’ this work without gloves for nearly two years.”
“And?”
“We’ve only lost three fingers. Well, four if you count this thumb.”
“Without gloves I will not do it.”
“Where’re you from?” asked the supervisor.
“Poland.” Tomasz smiled, knowing it was not the answer the man wanted.
“Oh, I should’ve guessed. Effin troublemakers. You’ll be wantin’ bleedin’ maternity pay next. Here, wait. You keep shacklin’ while I find some friggin gloves.”
“No,” said Tomasz. “Even for shackle work is need gloves.”
The supervisor went a horrible purple color.
“Listen, yer bloody Polish big girl’s blouse, next time I get any lip from you, it’s down the road. It’s only because we’ve lost this chuffin’ Chinaman, else yer’d be down the road now.”
But he went and found a pair of gloves.
Tomasz pulled them on slowly, pensively, one finger at a time. There was another phrase that nasty supervisor had used that got him thinking about Yola: Where was she? What was she doing? Was she thinking of him?
In the rest of the plant, the sudden stillness of the conveyor belt created a welcome break. Yola sighed and looked around. She hadn’t realized how noisy that conveyor was until it stopped. The narrow windows of the packing room were too high to look out of, but shafts of sunlight were angling in up there, with their bright reminder of summer. How had she become trapped in this place? The pressure in her bladder was becoming more insistent, but the thought of asking Geta’s permission to use the lavatory was just too humiliating. She held on. All around her people were taking the opportunity to relax, chat with their neighbors. Two of the Slovaks even tried to nip outside for a cheeky fag break, and Geta rushed out after them yelling, “No smok! No fudh fudhijjin!”
Yola thought this would be a good time to sneak out through the door unnoticed, but Geta spotted her and insisted on accompanying her, claiming it was her responsibility to make sure that the toilet opportunities were not abused, especially by Poles and Ukrainians, the devil only knows what they get up to in there, sometimes you could see the smoke coming out from under the door. How can you be expected to relax and enjoy a nice toilet break when this underwired harridan is standing outside and trying to hurry things along by rapping on the door and telling you to get a move on? Yola stayed firmly locked in for an unnecessarily long time, and made all kinds of toilet noises, just to annoy her.
“And don’t forget to wash hand after,” snapped Geta.
“Why you say this to me?” hissed Yola, from behind the still-locked lavatory door. “I am a teacher not a piggy.”
“I am fudhijjin qualify you not,” squawked Geta.
“I piss on your certificate.”
“Not certificate, diploma.”
“I defecate on your diploma.”
She farted noisily.
Marta, meanwhile, went around and chatted to the young women on the other side of her belt, who turned out to be Ukrainians from the west, and one of them had been to Poland though not to Zdroj. So, like many people all around the plant, she was away from her position when suddenly the belt started up again with a judder, and she had to race around to catch the first chickens going through. She picked them up off the line; there was something repulsively solid and wooden about them—in fact it was just as if they had been cooked—boiled—complete with their feet still on and their innards inside them. While she was wondering what to do with these horrible whole-boiled birds, another bird came through that was definitely not boiled alive, in fact, though it had lost most of its feathers, it seemed fairly intact, as though it had bypassed foot-cutting and evisceration altogether. As she reached for it, the poor, limp, featherless thing started to struggle in her hands. It was still alive. Then the next one came through, and to her horror, it was alive, too. Or half alive. And then another. The line had picked up speed now and was going at its usual pace. What should she do?
She grabbed the three half-alive birds off the line, and started to scream.
The Lithuanian supervisor was the first to arrive. He laid a soothing arm around her shoulder and offered her a handkerchief. Geta, having abandoned her thankless toilet vigil, was next on the scene. The live birds had by now recovered from their shock and were scuttling around on the factory floor. The boiled birds had moved on down the line, and there were more half-alive birds coming through, faster and faster. Geta started shouting at Marta, and at the featherless chickens that were scurrying here and there between everybody’s legs, and at the Lithuanian supervisor, who shouted back that Marta was a sensitive type and should not be upset.
“Polish is not sensible, is lazy bastard!” Geta shouted, which was too much for Marta, who burst into tears. Then one of the chickens made a dash through the door, which Geta had left open, and the others followed, straight through into the packing room. At the far end of the packing room another door opened, and Yola, having realized that the live audience for her toilet noises was no longer listening, was sauntering back into the plant. Seeing the chickens darting toward her, she naturally held the door open for them. And they were gone.
“Sack! Sack! You sack!” shouted Geta, her face blotched with fury, and gave Yola a little shove.
“Sack youself!” Yola shouted, and shoved her back.
Yola was not without friends in the breast area, and friends of friends in drumsticks and thighs, and Marta was not going to stand by and let her aunt be insulted, so Geta suddenly found herself surrounded by an angry crowd demanding that she apologize and reinstate Yola at once.
Meanwhile, news of the Chinese slaughterman’s thumb had spread like wildfire around the plant. In the evisceration room, it was his whole thumb that had been cut off; by the time it reached drumsticks and thighs, the poor man had lost his whole hand; and in weighing and labeling, he had had to be amputated above the elbow. The Chinese were marching around stamping their feet and chanting incomprehensibly, their pockets bulging with chickens’ feet, while others were unshackling the chickens, which were tumbling dead and half-dead onto the belt and the floor.
All at once several doors of the plant flew open and out into the bright sunshine of the yard poured the workforce. The three naked chickens were still there, clucking around and wondering what would happen next.
Tomasz noticed that the blond man with the impressive calf muscles who had recruited him to the union was still hanging around by the gate. He looked as though he had been about to get on his bike and call it a day but turned back when he saw the commotion in the precinct. Then Tomasz spotted Yola. She came bursting out of one of the doors, rushed up to the union man in a dramatic manner, and threw her arms around him. So Tomasz’s joy at finding her was tempered with desolation at finding her in the arms (well, almost) of another man.
“She say sack! She say, you sack!” she was wailing.
“Hold on, hold on.” The union man’s voice was calm, but with a nervous edge. “Let’s establish a procedure. Is anyone from management here?”
Geta came forward at once. “Is Polish no good working. Too much toilet. Chicken run away.”
The three liberated chickens clucked wildly, as though to prove her point.
“Hold on,” said the union man, his voice now sounding more nervous than calm. “Let’s just get the facts. What chickens are we referring to here?”
&nbs
p; Now the slaughterhouse supervisor, the one who had argued with Tomasz about the gloves, pushed his way through the crowd.
“Listen, mate, I don’t know who you are or what you’re doing here, but you can bugger off. Okay?” He turned to Geta. “Shut up. Don’t talk to him. This wanker’s a nobody. We don’t want him on the premises.”
“Hold on. I’m the representative of—”
“Bugger off or I’ll call the police.”
Suddenly the Chinese men from the evisceration room arrived on the scene, and they were still carrying their fearsome-looking knives. They started shouting and waving the knives in the air, and though no one could understand what they were saying, you could see that they were pretty mad. The supervisor got his mobile phone out, but one of them knocked it out of his hand onto the ground and stamped on it again and again until it was completely smashed.
“Hold on!” The union man held up his hand. “No violence, comrades. I’m sure we can resolve this through peaceful negotiation.”
The supervisor looked only fleetingly grateful.
“Listen, matey, the only negotiation I’m interested in is getting these idle buggers back to work.”
“Hold on. Hold on. First we must hear their grievances.”
There was a clamor of voices and squawks. Everybody seemed to have a grievance, even the chickens.
“Every minute that line’s stopped, we’re losing money. It’s all very well sayin’ hold on friggin’ this, hold on bleedin’ that, but the soddin’ supermarkets don’t hold on, do they? Buy one get one free, mate. That’s what we got to give ’em. By Friday. Otherwise we lose the supermarket contract and it’s bye-bye Buttercup Meadow, and all these friggin’ wankers that’s shoutin’ for workers rights can say bye-bye to their bleedin’ jobs.”
Strawberry Fields Page 15