by Paul Murray
To think that only a moment ago I had been close to throwing in the towel! Now, as if someone had waved a magic wand, my problems had disappeared; I had been lifted out of the doldrums and my sails filled with wind again.
I forgot all about having it out with Frank and Droyd. Instead, I stood in the living room, stroking my chin and smiling to myself as the good news sank in. Well I’ll be, I thought, the system works; and Gene’s eye twinkled at me from across the room where she waited, frozen mid-scold, with the ghost.
The following morning, while it was still dark, I set off for my first day of work. I travelled on a bus full of surly men who looked disdainfully at my pristine blue dungarees – a gift from Mother’s poisonous maiden aunt – to Cherry Orchard, a dismal slum which did a passable impression of the middle of nowhere. At first I thought it rather a lark that an industrial park should share the name of Bel’s favourite Chekhov play: however, as with most aspects of my job at Mr Dough, it stopped being funny almost immediately.
When Gemma had told me that I would be working in a bread factory, I had taken it for a slip of the tongue: for everyone knew that bread was made not in factories but in bakeries, by red-cheeked men in tall hats. But I quickly learned that the mistake was mine, because a factory it undeniably was. Everywhere one looked men toiled like pygmies in the mighty shadows of the choppers and slicers, or stood on stepladders, as in some industrialized Hieronymus Bosch painting, stirring with oversized ladles at huge smoking vats. Machinery clanked and moaned; the air churned with bread-dust that mixed with sweat to form a sticky film on one’s skin and collected about the eye-sockets in prickling crescents. From the unseen ovens, the heat rolled in unrelenting waves, turning the floor into a furnace.
I worked in Processing Zone B, as a lowly bread straightener in the Yule Log Division. Yule Log was a Christmas delicacy made from marzipan with a shelf life something like plutonium’s; they enjoyed it on the Continent, or so we were told. There were five of us working in the room, not including Mr Appleseed, and except for Mr Appleseed’s abusive comments no one spoke; we laboured in silence like so many flour-covered Golems, performing the same mechanical motions over and over and over again. My role was to monitor the Yule Logs as they came in from the ovens through the hatch in the wall, removing any defective ones and ensuring that each loaf was sitting correctly on the belt, in a perpendicular relation to the rim, as it entered the sugar-frosting machine. Mr Appleseed had warned of the catastrophic consequences of a loaf entering the sugar-frosting machine in any position other than this one, and Mr Appleseed wasn’t the type of man you liked to cross.
As talking was discouraged in Processing Zone B, it wasn’t for a couple of days that I discovered why Gemma had asked about my Latvian – namely that, apart from Mr Appleseed and myself, the entire complement of Yule Log Division hailed from the town of Liepaja, having been rounded up at a recruitment fair held there by Pobolny Arbitwo, Sirius’s sister company, some months ago. It sounded like a rum sort of arrangement to me, but the Latvians said that many of their kinsmen had come to Ireland to work digging potatoes or cleaning hotel swimming pools, explaining that the pitiful wage they earned here was worth many times more when you sent it back to Latvia, and that as such they were coming out the real winners from the deal. Certainly they were homesick, they said; and their wives wrote letters to say how strange it was in their sorely missed city of Liepaja, with so few men to be seen. But the money they made at Mr Dough was enough to provide for their loved ones, and even set aside a little for their future; and for a modest sum, Pobolny Arbitwo rented them barracks-style accommodation with a microwave oven and comfortable bunk beds.
‘And you don’t mind it? You don’t mind the boredom, or this ungodly heat?’ We were in the canteen, a small cramped room with a table and vending machine and walls painted bilious green to discourage procrastination.
‘Not heat compared to some places,’ Bobo, who operated the bagging machine, said soberly. ‘For instance, last summer we worked in a marmalade factory in Aachen. Very, very hot. Many wasps.’ This provoked rueful murmurs of assent from the men around the table. ‘We are very lucky, to be here at Mr Dough,’ Bobo added.
‘Huh,’ I said. Frankly I didn’t know how lucky I would call myself to be dragged halfway round the world in order to spend all day processing Yule Logs. That said, compared to box-making, packing, or stacking the pallet, I suppose I had it relatively easy up here in Straightening. For the most part, the logs behaved themselves, and most of the adjustments I made were more or less cosmetic – although every half an hour or so, one bold specimen would appear, sneaking along the belt in a perilous diagonal position. It was then that I would swoop in, with one hand deftly twisting it a little to the left or a little to the right as the situation required, before sending it safely on its way to the frosting-machine, having averted disaster.
The rest of the time I merely supervised the hundreds of identical logs going by, the hundreds and hundreds of identical logs… I was quite alarmed the first time I began to hallucinate: but the Latvians told me that it was quite a common phenomenon at conveyor belts, and something not to be feared but enjoyed. Soon much of the day came to be frolicked away in happy illusions, plucking multi-coloured apples from Old Man Thompson’s orchard, sporting with my imaginary dog on the lawn, sipping a gimlet with Mirela as we looked out from the pristine Folly, as she caressed my cheek and whispered sweet nothings…
Mr Appleseed kept watch on us at all times, patrolling tirelessly through the unbearable heat of Processing Zone B, or peering down from his perspex foreman’s box like a monstrous dungareed spider. Standing up straight, he would have been about nine feet tall, but he never stood up straight: he stooped with his shoulders gathered around his neck, muttering constantly in a gravelly maledictive rasp. He was impossibly thin, with thick glasses and a downturned mouth, and we were all afraid of him. In the early days, when I still held hopes of somehow rebelling or escaping or breaking free, it was always the thought of Mr Appleseed that stopped me.
I suppose it was because I spoke the best English that he singled me out as his confidant. It wasn’t that he cared anything for me personally; he told me so in as many words.
‘I hate bastards like you, know that, Fuckface?’ he’d say.
‘Yes, Mr Appleseed.’
‘I’ve seen your file. I know your type, all right. Think the world owes you a living, and Yule Log just drops out of the skies.’
‘Yes, Mr Appleseed.’
‘“Yes, Mr Appleseed,”’ he mimicked, his malign yellow stare boring into me through a mask of congealing sugar.
I had never met anyone who was quite so enthusiastically devoted to hatred. He hated everyone working at Mr Dough. He hated the countries they came from. He kept a sort of league table of his most hated races, on which they could move up or down.
‘Did you ever see anyone as bone-stupid as those Latvians?’ He’d lurch over, munching on a dry cracker, and lean against the rim of my conveyor belt. ‘No wonder their country’s such a shitheap. They must have driven poor Stalin to drink. If you’d said to me ten years ago, Fuckface, high up in your ivory tower, that some day I’d be in charge of a team of Latvians, I’d have told you where to go. But there it is. These days it seems that working in an international bread concern isn’t good enough for the Irish.’ He’d gaze mistily over Processing Zone B a moment, perhaps thinking of better times. ‘In fairness, though, I suppose these Latvians have their advantages. Cheap. No fuss with unions or anything like that. Hit them over the head enough and they usually understand what I tell them. And they work hard.’ He chuckled. ‘Bastards have their hearts set on winning that Productivity Hamper of Luxury Goods. Think they get many hampers where they come from, Fuckface? In Latvia? Think they’re already overrun with luxury goods over there?’
‘No, Mr Appleseed.’
‘No, sir,’ chortled Mr Appleseed. And then he’d catch sight of me, staring glumly at the logs going by and wishin
g he would let me go back to my hallucination, and his countenance would blacken. ‘Oh, you can call me a racist, Fuckface. You can think you’re better than me. But let me tell you one thing, Mr Theology Course, Mr Trinity College, all it takes is one phone call from me and they’ll be flying your replacement in from Latvia faster than you can say Abner Applese – actually, two things, the second being that I went to university too, except it was a university called the University of Life. And I may not have a lot of airs and graces, but there’s a blue Lexus out there in the car park with my name on it that’s fully paid up and no one can take away from me. Remind me again, Fuckface, how many Lexuses was it you said you had out in the car park? How many was that again?’
‘None,’ I’d mumble.
‘That’s right, Fuckface, because for all your fancy ways you own precisely – what was it exactly?’
‘Nothing,’ I’d confirm, and he’d slap me on the back and say that I had a sense of humour at least, which was an important quality in a worker, and that he saw good things happening for me at the company, or rather he would have were I not on a temporary contract, which meant I would remain a straightener for the rest of my days, which by the way were numbered.
It quickly became apparent that I would not be learning values or realizing my potential or anything of that nature while at Mr Dough. It seemed clear as well that I would not be getting out of the rat race and joining the party for the time being. No sooner did I lodge a cheque than Frank would be after me, hounding me for his due. If it wasn’t groceries, it was central heating, and if it wasn’t central heating, it was rent –
‘Rent? What do you mean, rent? I gave you money for the rent last week, what have you done with it?’
‘Yeah, but see there’s more rent this week, and anyway you only gave me twenty quid and then the next day you borrowed fifty so you could buy that big fish…’
‘That “big fish” happens to be a wild salmon from County Donegal, and if you knew anything at all you’d know that fifty pounds is practically giving it away. I’m trying to make some sort of stab at civilized living here, I mean my God man, we’re not wild beasts, are we?’
‘Yeah, but see we’re a bit behind, though, Charlie…’
‘Huh,’ I said. To anyone who had witnessed Frank’s attempts at a household budget this hardly came as a surprise. Every few weeks he would sit down at the kitchen table with a six-pack of Hobson’s Choice and a plastic bag full of bills, receipts, scraps of paper and beer mats with numbers doodled on them, which he would empty out into a pile at the centre of the table. Then, slowly and carefully, he would drink the cans. Then, when all the cans were gone, some hours after he had originally sat down, he would with a little sigh sweep the pile of bills back into the plastic bag, which he then placed carefully in the dustbin.
Rarely had I seen someone in such dire need of an accountant; but Frank didn’t have so much as a bank account. ‘They’re only robbers, Charlie,’ he’d say. ‘If I wanted to give me money to robbers, I’d give it to robbers I knew, not some bunch of prats.’ Instead he kept it in his ‘secret hiding place’, namely a Celtic FC sock under his bed.
It seemed to me that he had plenty of it, too, and he was only haranguing me out of spite. Ever since Bel’s visit the two of us seemed to be bickering constantly – usually about money, though anything could set it off. It was plainly obvious that, although he pretended otherwise, Frank was also deep in ennui. Oh, he larked about with Droyd as if nothing was wrong; he drank countless cans and smoked countless joints; but he left his chicken balls untouched on his plate, and on more than one occasion I found architecturally salvaged items hidden behind the couch, crushed and twisted beyond recognition. He was oafish and unbearable even by his standards, and I was grateful that he was going out even more than he had before, and not returning until late.
With winter coming in, and me and now Frank both plunged in ennui, it was small wonder that Droyd too was down in the dumps. Frank never invited him along on his sprees, and apart from trips to the methadone clinic and to see his parole officer, he didn’t leave the house. He’d taken to spending whole evenings just sitting at the window, gazing out at the rain-swept street. He didn’t play his music as much as he used to, either, though I can’t pretend this troubled me overly. One night, however, he asked me if I could check something he’d written for spelling, and he handed me a grubby serviette on which, I saw, wedge-like forms had been inscribed.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘Press release,’ Droyd said. ‘For me music.’
‘Oh.’
‘Have to get word to my people that the Droyd is back,’ he clarified.
‘I didn’t know you composed,’ I said.
‘Wha?’
‘Music, I mean.’
‘Ah yeah.’ He scrutinized one of his chunky gold rings. ‘Well like I haven’t done any yet, cos I was banged up in the nick and that. But I’m goin to, as soon as I get meself sorted out. Play all the big clubs. Rotterdam. Ibiza. You ever been to Ibiza?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘It’s deadly there,’ he sniffed. ‘There’s these foam clubs where they pour in all this foam on to the dancefloor and birds just come up to you and start ridin you. It’s magic.’
‘Yes, that does sound jolly…’ I had been examining the serviette from different angles, but the wedges were stubbornly holding on to their secret. ‘This looks all right to me,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you read it out, and we can hear what it sounds like.’
‘Right.’ He took back the serviette and, tracing his finger along it, read in a halting monotone: ‘For DJ Droyd it is all about the music. He is like a machine cos like nothing can stop him. Also cos nothing matters to him except the beats, which they are the only hope for the future. He is known as the Droyd to represent what he is sayin like in his music. He is sayin that we are livin in a future war zone and it is goin to get worse. When the war comes against the robots and the computers they will easily win probably because they don’t get tired or hungry like humans and they never give up not like humans. The only hope is to be more like a robot yourself and not go mopin around havin feelins and that like a sap. This is what he is sayin.’ He looked up. ‘That’s all I done so far.’
‘Very interesting,’ I said. ‘Thought it possibly strayed off the point a little towards the end, that whole part about the war against the robots. Over all, though, very impressive.’
‘It’s the truth,’ Droyd said in a low voice, pulling down the peak of his cap.
‘What is?’
‘All this stuff, right,’ waving his hand at the prevailing clutter, ‘it’s all an illusion. We seen a film about it in the Joy. It’s just created by the computers so we won’t realize what’s really happenin, which is we’re in these energy pods and they’re harvestin our energy,’
‘Cripes,’ I said.
‘Yeah,’ he said.
In spite of his occasionally erratic metaphysics, we did reach a kind of détente over those weeks. He told me how Frank and he had first met, when Frank had gone to salvage a bathtub from a condemned building and found Droyd sleeping in it. He’d taken him back to the flat in his van with the rest of the junk, and then let him stay on the couch until he sorted himself out, which turned out to be the best part of a year.
‘Then what happened?’ I enquired.
‘That’s when I started taking the gear,’ he said, wiping his nose matter-of-factly. ‘You know yourself, you start off just smokin a bit to come down after you’ve had a few yokes, next thing you know you’re knockin off the chip shop.’
‘And working for Cousin Benny…?’
‘Yeah, but that’s all behind me now,’ he said. ‘Here, what’s the most yokes you’ve ever had?’
‘Hmm, let me see…’
‘Once I had seventeen, right, me and Frankie were at this rave in this car park down the country. It was fuckin mad, me heart stopped for five minutes. They had to take me to hospital in a helicopter and th
en I was in a wheelchair for two weeks and this doctor told me if I ever took a yoke again I’d die.’ His eyes misted over nostalgically. ‘I just told him to fuck off.’
As far as I could work out, these ‘yokes’ were some manner of energy-boosting pill, with similar effects to a multi-vitamin supplement. According to Droyd, malcontents and dropouts gathered to consume them at ‘raves’, open-air dances staged in the middle of the night under motorways or in muddy fields.
‘Fields!’ I said. ‘But what if it’s raining?’
Droyd shrugged. ‘You have to have a laugh, don’t you?’ Jogging his knee, he turned back to the empty black square of the window. ‘Cos otherwise, y’know, what’s the bleedin point?’
As the days went by at Mr Dough, each one identical to the one before, this was a question I frequently put to myself. Far from stepping up to bat, and fulfilling my long-cherished dreams of becoming a productive member of society, I felt I was embarked on a vast and inconsequential digression from my own life; and just as the logs on their way to the sugar-frosting machine merged, under my gaze, into one, so the hours and days blended into a single unbounded expanse, and life itself took on the trappings of the conveyor belt. There didn’t seem any reason why it shouldn’t go on in the same way forever: then one night Frank happened to stay home.
We were all sitting together watching the television. Frank liked to watch the twenty-four-hour news channel, which usually had footage of things exploding from one war or another. My theory was that this enthusiasm harked back to his days in the Lebanon with the Peace Corps, though to hear him speak about it you would think that all they had done out there was lie around and play practical jokes on the US Marines, sneaking up behind them and bursting balloons in their ears, shouting ‘Incoming! Incoming!’
Footage of a tank rolling over the rubble of a woman’s house gave way to a commercial break. A cartoon sun with spirally psychedelic eyes rose to repetitive thumping music over what appeared to be some sort of skinhead prison-island.