Clemens Meyer - All the Lights

‘Stay down, fucker.’ He punched like a professional and talked like one too. I lifted my head slightly and saw her leaning forwards and moving both hands to and fro over the carpet, as if she was playing with something. I got up slowly and closed my eyes. He got me pretty bad, and I felt my nose break.

‘Hey son,’ said the Boxer, ‘you’re nearly as pretty as me.’

‘Walked into a door,’ I said, ‘in town. The usual, you know.’

‘Did she see you like that? You didn’t scare her?’

‘No no, Boxer, I went to hers first, it was all all right. She’s fine. She was pleased, the money and that, really pleased.’

‘Wasn’t much, but she’s still a trainee, in a real hotel. She doesn’t get much there, has to watch her money.’

‘I know.’

I stood on the bridge and looked down at the river. In the fields on either side were the remains of the morning mist. I heard the cars behind me, quite a lot of traffic, start of the week. A long way off, I saw a tugboat on the wide river. It didn’t seem to be moving. Maybe it was going over to the Czechs, maybe in my direction and then on to the sea in Hamburg. I lit up my last filter cigarette and threw the empty packet in the river. My nose started bleeding again, and I pulled a tissue out of my inside pocket. It smelled of fish, just like the money. I’d put it in her letterbox on the ground floor. Really wasn’t much, just over a ton, but it must have been the Boxer’s last reserves from his golden days, when he nearly made it to the Olympics. I looked down at the river again. A couple of ice chunks disappeared under the bridge. One got caught up on a red marker buoy, then broke free and floated on again. I pressed the tissue to my nose, threw my fag-end in the river and went home.

Before I became a shelf-stacker and spent my evenings and nights in the aisles of the cash-and-carry market, filling shelves, fetching pallets from high on the storage shelves with the forklift, now and then helping one of the last customers of the evening and getting to know all kinds of food, I’d been working on building sites for a couple of years.

I hadn’t given up of my own accord but I wouldn’t have kept it up all that long, even if the boss hadn’t fired me. I was a builder’s mate, lugging sacks of cement and plasterboard, gutting flats — that meant I knocked the plaster off the walls, tore out fireplaces and chimneys with a big sledgehammer we used to call ‘Rover’, until I was covered in soot and dirt and spent hours getting the soot and dust out of my nose at home. The firm didn’t even pay well and the boss was a bastard. The guy came from Bavaria; I’ve met people from Bavaria who were actually OK though.

I can’t remember exactly when all the fuss with the boss started, but I do know we were demolishing an old roof that day. We found a big pigeon’s graveyard, two pigeons still alive and perfectly still in among all the bones, piles of feathers and pigeon shit and decomposing and mummified corpses, and we could only tell by their eyes and their heads, moving slightly every now and then, that they were waiting. We fetched the Portuguese guys and they killed them with a blow of a spade. Then we tipped lime over the pigeon graveyard and shovelled it all into buckets and tipped them down the rubbish chute fastened to the scaffolding outside.

And after that we didn’t feel much like hard work any more; the pigeons had got to us. We took the tiles off another section of the roof, not exactly motivated, removed the roof battens with wrecking bars, and then we took a lunch break.

We usually had our lunch break at eleven thirty, and when the bells of the church just round the corner rang at twelve we went back to work.

But when the bells rang that day we were still sitting with the Portuguese guys. They were drinking red wine out of cartons, passing them around. The Portuguese guys spoke very bad German and earned even less than we did and lived in tiny basement flats in one of the buildings owned by the boss. They drank red wine at work because they knew the boss wouldn’t fire them — they worked too well for too little money. They did bricklaying and plastering, and sometimes they were builder’s mates like us, lugging sacks of cement, gutting flats until they were covered in soot and dust.

And then when the fuss with the boss started and I’d slapped him round the face on both sides with my cement-encrusted glove, they all came to me one after another and shook my hand, pressed it and pumped it, said, ‘You did good thing’ in broken German, laughed and said, ‘You find new job, you good worker,’ and patted me on the back.

‘Lazy bastard,’ the boss had called me, and I hadn’t even been holding a wine carton any more, I was just sitting on an upturned bucket and leaning on the wall and trying to think of nothing at all.

And I wasn’t a lazy bastard, even if I had overdone it a bit with my lunch break.

And when I started the job as a shelf-stacker in the cash and carry they noticed straight away that I wasn’t a lazy bastard. I’d got the job through someone I knew, a guy who’d been working there for four years.

I’d got him a job seven or eight years ago and he knew I’d been out of work since the fuss at the building site, so when a job came up in the ‘Shelf-filling/Night’ department he’d put my name down for it. I made a real effort, stacking the stock on the shelves where they showed me, pulling a large barred cart along behind me to put empty cartons and packaging into. They explained how to use the little manual pallet jacks for lifting and moving pallets of stock around. They had electric pallet jacks too, called ‘ants’, for transporting several pallets stacked up, but I wasn’t allowed to use those ones yet.

It wasn’t one of those cash-and-carries that anyone could shop at. The customers had to have a special card; they had to run a company, self-employed people and that kind of thing who were buying for their businesses. We had a food section and a non-food section, but I was only ever on food and beverages. It was a huge market, on two floors with clothing and electronics upstairs. The food section was on the lower floor, and made up of different departments like Processed Food, Confectionery, Frozen Food, Delicatessen, Fruit and Vegetables and a couple of other ones I can’t remember now.

The aisles between the shelves were very wide so there was space for the forklifts. The forklifts operated all day long, even when the market was open for customers. The forklift drivers fetched large pallets out of the storage shelves, which went right up to the ceiling on top of the normal shelves where the customers took the stock from and put it in their trolleys.

To start with I was always wondering why there weren’t any terrible accidents, why no pallets tipped off the forks and crushed ten customers to death, why no feet got squashed under the large iron wheels of the forklifts. But later, when I had a forklift licence of my own and whizzed along the aisles in my yellow forklift, fetching pallets of beer or milk or sacks of flour down from the shelves, I knew it was all a matter of relaxing, taking care and judging distances right — and routine. But the most important thing, I thought, was that you had to be absolutely convinced while you were transporting pallets up or down that you were the very centre of the market.

It took me a while to learn how to drive a forklift. They let me do my practice after opening hours, when the only people in the aisles were from ‘Shelf-filling/Night’. One of the long-term staff was a registered examiner, but another long-term guy gave me practice lessons until I’d managed to learn all the secrets of driving and operating a forklift. Actually it was just the half-hour before the end of our shift at one a.m. Under his supervision, I drove his forklift — which I shared with him later — slowly along the aisles, stopped in the right position parallel to the shelf, positioned the fork and moved it upwards. Then when the fork was at the level of the pallet I steered the truck until the ends of the fork were just above the openings in the pallet. Then I pressed a lever on the control panel in front of me, and the fork lowered and slipped into the openings in the pallet. Then I pressed the other lever and the pallet rose slowly.