J Marsh: Apocalypse Rising

As Harpal comes around for the last time today, inwardly Valeri can only look back and recall each of those accusations as entirely true, salacious or not. You see, Valeri is a dashing figure, prone to outbursts, so confident in the moral superiority of the working class that he brooks no patience for the managerial shenanigans. Only his strong work ethic and his relentless commitment to detail have saved him so far from being fired. Even these habits will soon prove inadequate. He speeds about the floor, dashing madly, hoisting twenty-kilogram boxes onto pallets and shunting pallets into their spaces, the noise of gears whirring and the sound of hydraulics sliding overpowering the senses but never making him feel overwhelmed. Bursting in the distance a wave of sound bounds through the air, seeming to rattle and roll the s hop’s frame gently, in the morning light a thunderous explosion booming across the city, a train derailing somewhere sending scores of men running for their lives with only the clothes on their backs and the air in their lungs. The dashing figure in Valeri imagines himself joining the hopeless fight, making himself one with the ragged, haggard mob, but the better part of him knows he’s destined for something more.

Once the machines have come back to life, the whole shop is abuzz with activity, with Harpal barking out orders made redundant by the handful of workers who follow a plan already in the works. Valeri presses himself to work harder and faster, hauling his pallets at a pace that leaves him breathless, as Harpal shouts and screams at them all to move faster still. Soon, it becomes evident even to her the workers are working the pace of their work faster than ever before; still she shouts and screams all the same, playing the role she was meant to play. But Valeri knows, in the instinctive, guttural way all working men can know that the larger struggle is underway, the coming escalation of the working man’s war for freedom will be different. It has to be. In the streets of Britain already the columns of smoke rise from the fires of liberation burning through the night, tempting Valeri to join the fight immediately. It’s not for the ragged, haggard mob to know, but theirs is a disorganized, disoriented lashing out that can only end in failure. As the police slam their truncheons against the heads of the unemployed youths, nor can they know the working man’s fight for freedom should soon disabuse itself with such outbursts, these mobs to evolve into the mightiest fighting force the world has ever seen.

The shop where Valeri works is near the junction of three different highways and four different rail lines, not far from the port which permits the steady flow of cargo en route from here to there and from there to here. It produces nothing, but ships essential supplies to many factories, power plants, ports and airports, and more. It’s back-breaking work; he’s seen many of his fellow workers break their backs in exchange for the pittance they’re paid. As he turns in his gear at the end of his twelve-hour shift, he’s utterly exhausted from an entire night spent on his feet. On the way out, he passes a young man there to take over where he left off, the two exchanging a brief but knowing glance, Valeri leaving much undone work for his co-worker to finish, just as his co-worker will, twelve hours from now, leave much work for him to finish. Men like Valeri know this is their way; it’s from them all is taken and to them none is given. His parents knew this. They died trying to change it. On this, the busiest shift he’s worked, he harbours a burgeoning resentment for having worked so hard simply for the sake of another’s profit. Still, between Valeri and his replacement there’s the unspoken knowledge shared of the coming wave of protests; but for Valeri’s tendency to give in to the intemperate passions of rebellion he’d have kept secret his leanings and spared himself much pain and suffering. His struggle is not yet one with they who burst bombs and rattle off gunfire in the night, but soon it will be.

Since his parents were killed in the failed uprising fifteen years ago, Valeri’s worked many jobs; dishwasher, cashier, night watchman, now as a labourer earning a few hundred pounds a week. It’s a pittance when held up against the sums on the ledgers of the company whose profits he advances every day, but it’s a pittance which, in this day and age of transient work and disposable workers, neither Valeri nor any of his brothers and sisters in union can afford to risk. Valeri has worked there for more than three-and-a-half years, and by now his fiery temperament would’ve had him out the door were it not for his work ethic. There are shifts when he accomplishes more work than half his co-workers put together, leaving himself so utterly spent he can hardly move when he goes home. After Valeri’s parents were killed, murdered, a family friend took him under his wing and offered him guidance, a man now known to him and to many other workers as their brother, Murray.

But he’s never resentful of his tendency to outwork the rest of them, not at all. He simply knows how to do nothing else but work at the same pace, day in, day out, as if there’s something in him that compels him to throw himself into the work. As Valeri mechanically acts out this day, he thinks on the noxious, quixotic fantasy of the war fifteen years ago, as he’s come to fill his own thoughts with these fantasies, the days blending into one another as he willingly drowns them beneath the half-drunken haze so offered in escape to the realm of the imagined. During the frenzy of the busiest shifts of the week, Valeri has no time for himself, the frenetic pace of the work demanding his full attention, he along with all the other workers on the floor seeming to fit around one another, acknowledging each other with a nod and a nudge but always speeding through their task; they never finish on time, they can never finish on time, the managers berating them at random intervals, the whole floor overwhelmed with action. Not far from the shop where he works Valeri lives in one of the simple, functional blocks left over from another time. Inside, there’s leaky roofs, mice living in the walls, threadbare carpets and the faint after-smell of cigarette smoke filling every available space. For men like Valeri, it’s home, oddly comforting in its familiarity even as he dreams for himself something more. Murray’s the union representative at the shop, a man of quiet action, always working behind the scenes, managing connections ever so carefully. Although Valeri’s grateful for Murray’s having guided him through the tumultuous years of his youth, still he sneers at Murray’s aversion to confrontation. Stand tall, Valeri thinks, and boldly confront evil no matter the cost. Soon enough, the war in the streets will offer Valeri the chance to do exactly this.

There’s always someone fighting; some nights the couple in the unit next to Valeri’s keep him awake with shouting and screaming and thumping on the walls. There’s always someone fucking, too; some nights the couple in the suite on the other side of Valeri’s keep him awake with over-exaggerated panting and moaning and the rapid, rhythmic squeaking of bedsprings. Outside, there’s the sound of buses stopping, of bottles smashing against the pavement and of police sirens wailing day and night. Sometimes Valeri lies in bed, awake, watching the flashing red and blue lights that slant in through his bedroom window’s blinds and make for a show like a caricature of the northern lights. At work, Valeri is with his people, segregated among his own by the way of things. These men work every day to build something they can never afford. These men work to change the face of the city they were born and raised in, enslaved as they are, whether they realize it or not, by the pittance they are paid. At home, they are surrounded by the implements of their impoverishment.

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