Clemens Meyer - All the Lights

‘You’re doing well,’ said Bruno, his big hand next to me on the control panel, ‘just don’t raise it too quickly or you’ll bump it at the top.’

Bruno was a pretty tall, stocky man, actually more stocky than tall, probably in his mid-fifties with white hair, but when you saw him from a distance he looked like a wrestler or a heavyweight boxer. He had a big block of a head that perched directly on his shoulders, almost no neck at all between the lapels of his white overall, and his hands, one of which was now resting on the forklift control panel next to me, were the size of plates. He wore a broad leather cuff around his right wrist to protect his tendons. He worked in the beverages department, where they fetched the largest pallets down from the shelves — crates of beer and juice and other drinks, which were roped together but still swayed ominously to and fro on the pallet as we lowered them out of the shelves.

Bruno had been working in the cash and carry for over ten years, always on beverages, and even though he wasn’t the department manager it was him who kept the place running.

‘You’re doing well, Lofty,’ he said. ‘You’ll soon have your licence.’ He called me Lofty, like most of my workmates did, because I was nearly six foot three.

‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘I know I’m making a mess of it.’

He laughed. ‘Oh, don’t worry. The longer it takes, the better for me. I have a nice quiet time with you. Better than all that hard graft.’ He pointed a thumb over at the beverages section. I heard bottles clinking through the shelves. Another workmate was lugging the last crates of the day.

‘There was one time,’ said Bruno, watching me attempt to get a pallet of salt boxes back onto the shelf, ‘one time I dropped a load of beer. Couple of years ago now. The rope tore. Shit happens.’ He reached into the pocket of his overall and took out a couple of ropes. He never threw them away when we cut them off the big beer pallets with our Stanley knives once we’d got them down in one piece. ‘Always come in handy.’ He had a little farmyard outside of town, with a stable and a few animals. He lived there with his wife; she took care of the animals and everything else while he was at work. Bruno always had this special smell to him, of animals and manure, but it wasn’t as if he stank; he just smelt faintly, and there was something else in the mixture that he brought along from his farm, something strangely sweet, more like bitter-sweet, but I never worked out what it might be.

‘Bring her down now,’ said Bruno, checking his watch, ‘time to clock off.’

‘OK,’ I said. I’d finally managed to get the salt pallet in the right gap. I extracted the fork, moved the truck back slightly, then pressed one of the levers and the fork came down very slowly from the very top, with a hissing and whooshing sound from the air expelled from the hydraulics. I waited until the fork touched the tiled floor and then positioned it so that the forks weren’t parallel to the ground. ‘Only drive with the forks tipped, never with the fork raised except when you’re stacking.’

I’d had to watch a couple of instruction films where they listed all these terrible accidents as a deterrent and then showed some of the consequences. Lopped-off limbs, flattened feet, people skewered on the fork, and the more I saw of this forklift inferno, the more often I wondered if I’d chosen the right job. But the other staff at the cash and carry were nice enough, and I didn’t intend to skewer them on the fork or drive over their feet.

‘Are you coming, Bruno?’

‘No, you drive it on your own, you know how to do it now.’ Sometimes Bruno stood on the tipped forks, even though that wasn’t allowed, and rode back to the recharging station with me. I drove off and saw him walking down the aisle in the other direction. He walked slightly hunched, his arms splayed a little way from his body as if he expected a surprise attack from one of the shelves at any moment. I tried to imagine him working on the building site with me, me explaining everything to him and showing him how to do the job, but I just couldn’t imagine the man demolishing a roof. Maybe it was his white hair, and that smell of his animals didn’t go with the dust.

I drove to the recharging station, right at the back of the warehouse by the delivery bay. I drove along the empty, brightly lit aisles, past the freezers and the long rows of refrigerated shelves against the walls. Ours was the last shift and I only saw a workmate now and then. They were standing in the aisles, doing their last chores, standing at the blue wheeled desks and writing lists of the damaged or torn-open stock we always found on the shelves; others were getting their forklifts ready for the night at the recharging station. I didn’t know all of their names yet, and even later, once I’d been working at the warehouse for a while and had scraped through the forklift test (‘It’ll end in tears, Lofty’), I took a shifty look at the name tags on their overalls when I talked to them or needed help.

‘Thanks, Ms Koch,’ I said, and she smiled and said, ‘No problem.’

I saw her looking at my overall, but I’d lost my name tag and hadn’t got a new one yet.

‘Christian,’ I said and gave her my hand. ‘Marion,’ she said. She’d lent me her forklift because a customer had asked for a bottle of Wild Turkey just before closing time. I’d fetched the whisky pallet down from the shelf, given him the bottle and then filled up the empty compartment. Bruno was using our forklift over in the beer section. It was a Friday, it was summer, and people were buying beer by the crateload.

‘Shall we have a coffee? It’s on me.’

‘OK,’ she said, and then we went to the vending machine. There were two coffee machines in the warehouse, one at the delivery bay and one in front of the cold storage room, and that one was closer.

I’d come across her in the aisles a couple of times before and we’d nodded hello, and seeing as she was quite pretty I’d smiled every time.

She wasn’t there every night, she worked days as well; only me and five other guys were always on nights.

‘You did your test quite quickly.’ She sipped at her coffee, and then she blew into the little clouds of steam. She smiled; she’d probably heard about how much trouble I’d had with it.

‘Bruno was a good teacher,’ I said and looked at the name tag on her chest again. ‘M. Koch, Confectionery’.

‘Bruno’s a good guy,’ she said. ‘You can always go to him when you need help, or when you’re fed up and you fancy a coffee and a chat.’ She smiled and blew into her coffee, then she drank a few mouthfuls.

‘Get fed up often, do you?’

‘Don’t be so cheeky, rookie.’ She held her coffee in front of her name tag and tapped me on the shoulder with the index finger of her free hand. Then she laughed, and I couldn’t help joining in. There was something about her and the way she talked to me that I liked a lot. When I’d sat down in her forklift (‘But don’t make a tour of it, I need it back again’) I’d felt the warmth on the seat where she’d just been sitting.

She seemed to be a couple of years older than me, maybe in her mid-thirties. She had quite short hair that was always kind of messy. We drank our coffee and talked about this and that.

We stood at the vending machine for a long time, and I kept putting more money in and refilling our cups. We were standing behind the piles of crates and stock so the only people who could see us were people who wanted to take a coffee break of their own. ‘Be right back.’ I went to the shopping trolley containing food just coming up to the best-before date. Sometimes there were three or four trolleys, and sometimes it was my job to take the trolleys to the ramp by the delivery bay where the rubbish bins were. Bread, chocolate, meat, milk, all still good for a few more days, and if I was hungry I tried to sneakily stuff myself with as much as possible of the best things before I threw them in the bins. Chocolate truffles, ciabatta with Serrano ham, Kinder chocolate. If one of the bosses caught me I could take off my overalls and leave, but I just couldn’t resist it. The stuff was being chucked out anyway, and I think most of us took the odd sneaky helping.