After depositing the other new guys at their respective workstations – the various shops: Press, Welding, Paint, Assembly, Foundry – he led me to the Maintenance Section, where he himself worked, in a Portakabin wrapped round with a Plexiglas window that wore an arc of soot like a dark grin.
‘So, right, you’re the new cleaner. We’re getting in a floor-sweeping machine at the end of the week, and you’ll be minding that. I have a roster for the places I want you to keep clean, okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘My name is Josh … you’re Tommy?’
‘Mick. Tommy was one of the guys that you dropped off at Final Assembly.’
‘Mick, so. How old are you?’
‘Nineteen.’
‘You don’t look nineteen. Jesus, you could get away with being sixteen.’
‘My birthday was last week.’
‘You’ve a birth cert to back it up?’
‘Will I bring it in?’
‘No, not yet … just make sure you have it. You don’t know the problems I get in here. You have no idea. People … Give me a dog any day.’
I didn’t know what to make of him. He was my boss, and that came across for sure, but he was something else too: he was a boss who believed he didn’t have to ram the fact home. He looked at a calendar, crossed a date with a pen, turned and said, ‘My ex-wife wouldn’t let me have a dog because she said she’d hate to see its shit on the lawn and hair on the carpet, but in my experience cleaning up dog shit is easier than the shit I sometimes see coming across that door. I’ve got a couple of Grade A schemers, and a few who would stand on their mother’s back to get ahead, even if only by a little. So be careful who you talk to.’
‘Okay.’
‘Everything gets back to me.’
‘All right, Boss.’
‘You can call me Josh. Now, you tip along to the stores and draw what you need from Bergin; he’ll give you a personal locker, and another to store your cleaning equipment. If you’ve any problems, tell him to give me a ring. Then later you can clean the dirty smile off that fucking window.’
Silence.
‘I think I know you from somewhere. Are you one of Billy Stone’s kids?’
‘Yes.’
‘I can see the likeness. Is he still alive?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Working?’
‘He’s foreman out in Tiny Lawrence’s yard.’
‘Tell old Billy, he must be old now, that I was asking for him. He was a soapy arse jockey – he fell off a horse at Cheltenham and lost me a pile.’
He said this on a chuckle to let me know that his grudge had burned out a long time ago.
At lunch, he joined me at the table. There were a couple of fitters beside us, and they knew Josh well enough to get away with ribbing him about things.
‘Sally’s giving you the eye,’ one said.
‘Stop that now,’ Josh said.
‘Definitely is,’ said the other man, Mossy Flynn.
He lost his finger in an accident a week later. I remember because the hard brushes on my sweeping machine scooped it up.
‘Aren’t you married, Josh?’ I said, on noticing his wedding ring; I knew that I shouldn’t have gone there the very instant I’d spoken.
The atmosphere turned cold enough to chill our well-subsidised roast chicken dinners.
‘Was. I told you that this morning when I was talking about dogs – what do you think ex means?’ Josh said, carving through a breast.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
Mossy said, ‘There’s nothing to be sorry over. Not when you have a woman like Sally after your tail.’
‘Still, the marriage …’ I said, wishing I had kept my mouth zipped.
‘What happened there anyway, Josh?’ Mossy said in a low voice, glancing at his friend beside him.
I took a dislike to the man. He knew well what had happened to break up the couple, and was seizing the moment to try and prise it from Josh, just out of meanness. And I had given him an opening.
‘What caused us to break up?’ Josh said, looking at the peas and chicken he had speared with his fork.
‘It’s none of my business, I know, I know,’ Mossy said.
‘It was the only way I could get away from her mother.’
I decided to keep myself to myself after that, and to think twice before opening my mouth. I didn’t have much to do with anyone really as we cleaners were lone wolves, and there were only a few of us. Josh said I’d got the job on the strength of a phone reference from my previous employer, who’d said I was good for nothing only cleaning up. Luckily for me, Josh didn’t take what people said at face value.
No one had to make sure I was doing my job; if a place isn’t being cleaned it’s noticeable. I swept the areas Josh had designated for me: the long and wide corridors, between the storage aisles where the firm’s portable workbenches were stored. When I got the red-and-beige machine, it made life easier. A salesman called Dunne showed me the ropes, and handed me a few quid to tell Josh that it did the business, and this was easy to say because it did. It was like pushing a pram that had a dead man’s clutch. It wasn’t hard work – the only bad part was emptying its bin. It never ceased to amaze me the amount of dust that gathered, because I couldn’t see the dust on the concrete floors; a very fine dirt brown. It made me think that just because I didn’t see dirt it didn’t follow that none was present: that’s a philosophy I’ve always believed in since then, carrying it with me when I left the factory a year later to become a cop in Cardiff. I’d always wanted to become a policeman, but because I couldn’t get a hold of the Irish language I couldn’t join the Irish police.
About a month after I’d started in the factory, I was in the main toilet area talking to Carty, a nice old man who kept his domain spotless. He said a lot of people had bad toilet manners: they parked snot on the walls, wrote sexually explicit graffiti, and left shit streaks along the bowl. Monkeys wouldn’t be as inconsiderate, so he maintained. He had slicked grey hair, deep blue eyes, and he smoked like his life depended on it. Cigarette smoke, he insisted, killed the smell of shit and its germs. He said that one of the foremen had been on his back a while ago, looking for a way to sack him, reporting him for loitering and not doing his job. ‘What he didn’t know was,’ Carty said, ‘I knew he was scheming to get his brother into the factory. His brother wanted a cleaning job. It was what he had done for all of his working life. Blood is thicker than water. Jobs for the boys. Mind yourself and your job,’ Carty warned.
The following afternoon, I went and told Josh, and he rubbed his lips and fiddled with his wedding ring. I wasn’t too sure why he wore it, but I was to find out before too long.
‘He’s an out-and-out fucker that lad.’
‘Carty?’
‘Not him. No … Dunne, Tommy Dunne. He’d have his fucking granny working in here if he thought he could get her in. He’d dig her up and bring her in, I swear to God.’
‘Tommy Dunne?’
‘Yeah … his wife is in the pay office, his two sons are working in Welding, his brother’s on the forklift, and last week his sister got a start. And she’ll – mark my words – ride her way up the ladder and into the Managing Director’s arms. No flute will be safe.’
‘Tommy Dunne,’ I said, ‘that’s the man who showed me the ropes on the cleaner. I thought he was a salesman, and he …’.
‘What?’
He stared at me. I had to tell him about the bribe.
‘You thought he was a salesman, Mick? How in the name of …?’
I nodded. ‘But I never saw him before.’
‘Yeah, okay, he’s back after three weeks’ holidays, so you couldn’t be expected to know who he was. He’s one of the top guys, God saves us, and he has the MD’s ear, right? And like
I said his sister will have a hold of more than the MD’s ear. You have the picture?’
‘I do, sure.’
‘Mick, lad, you’ve got to wake up to what’s going on. If you want to be a cop, you have to learn how to see … really see.’
Silence.
‘How much did he give you?’
‘Fifteen quid.’
‘Hmm, he offered me twenty-five. I told him to shove it up his hole. Unless it’s from a win on the horses or the sweeps, an inheritance, you should know that there’s no such thing as easy money.’
‘You’re right, Josh.’
‘A day’s pay. What did you do with it?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Well, he hasn’t come near me yet to make a report. Maybe he won’t. I don’t see how he can, because in my book it’s as bad to offer a bribe as it is to take one. Still, because there’s no underestimating the sneakiness of some people, we better make up a story.’
If Dunne ever had a plan to come at me over accepting money from him, it never came to fruition. Looking back, I doubt if that was his intention – I think he simply wanted to ensure that the deal to buy the machine went through without a hitch, and I suspect he was a little put out over Josh leaving the final decision up to me, as he’d said I’d be the one using it the most. And people like Dunne sometimes forget how many pies their fingers, and accomplice fingers, are in. But they came at me in other ways.
About a week later, I was helping to shift some filing cabinets in an office when Dunne’s sister, after some idle chit-chat, said that I looked very young. In the afternoon, a ginger-haired man from Personnel came on to the floor and asked me to produce proof of my age, to bring it in the next day. Josh said they were hoping that I’d have lied about my age on the job application form, and would use this as an excuse to dismiss me. They had done something like that to a guy on Final Assembly who’d refused to work night shift. He had said on his job application that he would be willing to work nights – I guess he was hoping it would never come about. The fact that he had a wife whose mind wasn’t there didn’t elicit much sympathy from Management. Granted, the union kicked up a little, but Tommy’s brother was the Rep, and all his shouting the odds and threatening strike action to Management was purely for effect. People were fooled by his phoniness, and thought he was a great man for going in hard against the top guys. Very few stopped to consider the fact that there was no overwhelming necessity for the guy to be sacked, because there were plenty of men willing to switch from days to nights because of the generous shift premium. When someone said this at a union meeting, Tommy’s brother shrugged and said, ‘At the end of the day, he broke his contract and that’s why we’re all here. It’s what they keep throwing back into our faces.’
When I showed my birth certificate to the Personnel man, he brought it into the Administration offices and had it photocopied. Some time later, no doubt after they’d scrutinised the original for signs of tampering, he handed it back and said, ‘How would you like a transfer to the Welding Section?’
I remained silent, and he continued, saying that there’d be extra money and a shift premium. Suspicious of his proposal, I said I needed a few days to think about the offer. He had made me feel as though he were doing me a favour, offering me a promotion, which he was in a real sense, but it wasn’t one for which I’d applied. When I went looking to tell Josh, he wasn’t around: he’d called in sick, and then we learned his wife had died in hospital. He brought her home to their house to be waked. After hearing the news, I hung out in a shower room that wasn’t used as such, and which was located in a part of the factory that hardly anyone had reason to visit, except for the likes of me and Carty and a giant from Foundry who sometimes went there to cry, and who some months later killed his mother on Christmas Day.
Carty had a bad cold, and the end of his nose was so red you could find your way in the dark with it. He had a tawny shirt with the sleeve rolled up higher on one arm. After he listened to the offer I’d been made, he took a long pull on his cigarette and told me that they wanted to shift one of Tommy’s brothers from Welding because he had difficulty in meeting the daily quota and he also didn’t want to work nights. He was a skinny man, not in the best of health. Carty knew him. ‘A smile never dawned on his ugly puss,’ he said. The man had been dying for as long as Carty could remember, thirty years at least.
When we met there in late afternoon, close to finishing time, we must have been chatting for about ten minutes when the door opened, and in walked Tommy Dunne with his face aglow, like he was a saint after a long prayer session who had made a God connection. Carty’s lips drew in. He said nothing, just looked at Tommy, waiting for him to say something. But he just went off and set things in motion.
A coffin was the appropriate resting place for Josh’s wife. That’s how bad she looked. He was broken. Apparently, they’d got back together six months before she died. He’d taken her in because she was dying. I didn’t tell him about the day’s events, and nor did Carty; we thought it would have been inappropriate.
When he returned to work, I noticed how the pockets of sorrow under his eyes seemed to have grown bigger. He was distant, always seemed to be half-listening, like one of his ears was elsewhere. Carty got fed up with the hassle, and tore all the clocking cards into confetti after he got his final pay cheque. They moved me into Welding on ‘promotion’. And Josh had nothing to say to us about our comings and goings – I don’t think he was really aware of our going until long after we were gone. By the time his thoughts were back in focus, there was nothing that he could do to reverse matters. He brought Carty out for a meal and a few pints, and once he stopped at my welding machine to chat, and said that I shouldn’t be hanging around; I should go chase my heart’s desire. Then he asked me to open my hand, and into my palm he pressed a sixpence piece, ‘For luck.’
A hangover morning, still and drying out after a wet and windy few days. Bitterly cold, too. I haven’t been back in town for many years; I returned to bury my father. Yesterday, Josh had shaken my hand at the cemetery, but I hadn’t realised it was him until I had time to reflect in the evening – there was a woman with him. She looked a little like Sally, but I couldn’t be sure.
And now it is my turn to behave as Josh had done all those years ago: to repair, if only temporarily, a bridge of love.
The hotel steps on which he and his wife had stood as a newly married couple are gone, burned to ash, and the site built up as a shop and apartments. The factory lies derelict, holding nothing except empty spaces and the ghosts of old schemes and schemers. Today is similar to the day when I had first laid eyes on him. He was merry, his wife beside him, spreading his good fortune by creating arcs and bursts of silver rain. And I do that now, in memory, in gratitude for the things I learned from him: the coinage is euro, the wish a secret, and I walk on and away from their dance and fall.
Thursday Market
Before Thursday’s first wash of light around the market square building, there’s the jingling of tubular bars, the flapping of canvas like a flock of wounded birds searching for impossible flight, the clanging of trestle tables being set in place, a maze of stalls spreading from the old building that houses a display of sarcophagi lids, bearing long-dead names of men who’d amounted to something in another age.
The old market square building is now a heritage centre, this you should know, one of the few changes since your last visit. Its modern treasure hoard is a wealth of Bord Fáilte brochures, guide books, glossy leaflets, encouraging tourists to spend time here, money there. Coloured beads and knick-knacks, almost weightless in consideration for your flight home, you see, easy packing, a little something for you to show someone where you’d holidayed. Forgettable experiences kept unforgettable through memento. These days, fresh fish is sold from a refrigerated van parked near the entrance to the cathedral. At the railed cenotaph to the fallen of 192
2 you can buy clothes from a Pakistani and sofas and carpets from an old traveller man who did business with your mother. A new man called Cheap Jack sells gardening implements and toys. A young guy with hunched shoulders and a perpetual cigarette, unquenchable like the Olympic torch, sells pirated DVDs. Here, in the Thursday Market, you can still buy items at a cost a little below that in the shops.
But you’re not listening so intently now. I can see the drop off in interest. So I don’t remind you that back in the fifteenth century a name inscribed on a sarcophagus lid decreed us our Thursday Market.
Into the silence I say that a deed good or bad can carry a long way into the future.
Yes, that is so true, you say. Bitter? you add.
Perhaps a little, I say.
Not over us, you say. Not after all this time.
I say quietly: No, not over us. You.
You look away, the tips of your fingers touching the cellophane packaging of the plain biscuit on the saucer, resting there like a headstone against your cup.
To bring you back from the faraway place you had brought yourself, I say there is the well too, long sealed over, now grated but visible, a curio. But I think sometimes it’s not possible to unravel the knot in a harm.
I used to love touring the stalls, you say.
I tell you some old memories to loosen the knot I was tying, and you shake your head in this small café down the road from where you used to live. This café is new – on its ground stood a bicycle shop that was dark and dusty and oily, like a forge, smelling of new and old rubber and saddle soap. On a crooked shelf, a dozen or so rear lights glinted the red eye at a turn of the sun or the fall of a car’s headlights. Silence then as our fresh cappuccinos arrive. My heart gives a little flutter when I remember the last time we sat in a café and you complained about the crack inside my mug. Well, the manager didn’t know where to look as you listed off the names of germs that lived in the tiniest of fissures in delft.
Deadly Confederacies Page 7