Jon McGregor - This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You

He hasn’t actually discussed it with anyone else since then, to be fair. He’s not at all sure it would help.

New York

Okay. So there are these guys, these two guys, and they’re standing by the side of the road, waiting for something. What are they waiting for? We don’t know what they’re waiting for. Not yet. That’s part of the suspense, okay? Okay. So they’re standing there, they’re looking kinda tired, kinda downbeat, y’know? Yeah. Regular-looking, I guess. The one guy, he’s older, he’s sorta late-forties, early-fifties, getting a little thin on top. Big mustache. No, forget the mustache. But he hasn’t had, like, a shave, not in a while. Okay. And the other guy, he’s a bit younger, he’s in his twenties, he’s kinda good-looking but rough around the edges with it, y’know? Also, they’ve both got this kinda old European look about them, nothing obvious, not the mustache or anything but just enough that when they start talking we ain’t surprised to hear they got these sorta like thick Polish accents, y’know? You with me? Right. Only they can’t both have the Polish accents, otherwise how come they’d be talking in English at all, right? So let’s say the younger guy it’s more of a Slovak accent or something. I don’t know. They got to have different enough accents that we accept them talking English when it’s obvious they don’t talk all that much English, y’know what I’m saying?

I told you already, New York. It’s set in New York. Right.

So these two guys, they’re standing by the side of the road and they’re waiting for something. We don’t know what they’re waiting for but they’re waiting. That’s the fucken suspense right there. They both got bags with them, these little plastic dime-store bags, with like a lunch-sack and a flask of coffee and maybe some work-clothes in them. So they look like working men, okay? They look like they’ve been working all day. So we think maybe they’ve finished work and they’re waiting for a ride home. And the camera pulls back a bit and we see a bunch of people waiting with them, same type of people, same clothes, bags, whatever, so we get a little context. But it’s clear that these two guys are, y’know, the guys. And it’s clear they’ve been waiting a while, because as the camera pulls back a bit more and we see the fields and farmhouses in the background we can see it’s getting near that kinda summertime dusk that comes real late in the evening, like nine or ten in the evening. Five to ten, whatever. Fucken magic hour.

Fields and farmhouses, right. Yeah, like I said already: New York, Lincolnshire. Right. Lincolnshire, England. They got the original New York right there. Little two-bit place. Coupla houses and a shop and a long straight road that goes all the way through to Boston. Right, Boston, Lincolnshire. I told you this already. Flat fields. Bitter wind. Crows and shit in the trees. The works.

So. Anyway. We got these establishing shots: our two guys, the wider group, the empty fields, the skies and all that, right? So then we give it some of that testing-the-audience’s-patience European-style time-passing, y’know what I mean, all that with the first he scratches his eyebrow, then he sniffs, then a tractor goes past real slow. All that. To establish the mood! To make sure the audience knows these guys are tired as all shit, and get them wondering what’s with the waiting. Okay? And then we’re into the dialogue. This piece is all about the dialogue, you with me? So first up the one guy goes, ‘It’s cold.’ Right? And we just had a location caption saying, ‘New York,’ so we’re kinda making the connection ourselves and hearing it as ‘New York, it’s cold.’ Right. You with me? That ring any bells for you? Okay, so then they talk about the weather a little bit, and what time it is, and then they start bitching about how the supervisor or whoever is taking so long coming back with the mini-van to pick them all up and take them back to their place of residence. And the one guy says something about him never being early. And the other guy says how he’s always late. You getting this yet? No? They’re waiting for their van, right? Van, man, whatever. We get right into the dialogue and they’re all talking about how hard the day’s been, like picking whatever it is they’ve been picking in the field all day long, like cabbages or something, I don’t know, onions and celery and all that, some real back-breaking dawn-till-dusk shit and now the supervisor has left them stranded while he’s all off down in the village or whatever. The village. Right. Exactly. You’re with me now. So they’re talking about how they’re sick of it, the working conditions, the money, all that. And the audience get to wondering about the dialogue, like how come it sounds so awkward and disjointed, and like, all right already so these guys are foreign but that don’t really explain it, there’s something else going on, something kinda funny, and some of these lines sound kinda familiar. All right. So the younger guy’s doing most of the bitching, but the older guy, he’s the wise one, he’s giving it all that you-do-what-you-gotta-do, and the younger guy’s not having it so he gets to saying that’s it, that’s enough already, he’s out of there, he’s leaving today. And then the audience are like, right, now we get it. Okay? You with me? They don’t got no words of their own, they’re just saying all this second-hand shit they heard on the radio, and they’re making us think of the new New York, the one we all know about, the one which is, like, built on immigration and exploitation and the hard fucken labour of the huddled masses like our two friends right here.

Fucken I don’t know, Wiktor and Andrej. Whatever. Right.

So they keep talking, and we’re still with the Euro-style fucken longueurs and like meaningful glances and shit. Y’know. Old man rides past on a bike, real slow. Birds rise up from the trees and circle round and settle back in the trees. All these long pauses, like, signifying the passing of time. Because they’re waiting for this ride back to their residence, right? And the one guy, he’s still talking about how he’s sick of this work and the money and everything and he’d rather be back home, and the older guy’s all, like: there’s no work back home! What would you do? You’d be walking the streets drinking knock-off vodka and getting ripped off by the cops! Y’know, basically the same shit migrant workers have always talked about. But still, everything they’re saying is like lines we’ve heard before, y’know? One of them says he’s going if he has to walk, the other one says something about it not being that far, the one of them goes he came looking for a job. All that. And we’re taking it like a game now, this is we the audience I mean, like trying to recognise shit. But then we’re thinking, well, hold up now, this don’t make no sense. How come these guys don’t got their own words for these things? How come they’re talking all this borrowed shit? Right? So then we get to thinking, wait a minute now, so maybe the joke’s on us. Maybe we’re hearing all this second-hand clichéd stuff because we can’t really hear what these guys are saying. We see them standing at the side of the road and we’re like, right, yeah, we know this one, migrant labourers, tired and weary, getting paid shit, getting ripped off, taking it in turns to sleep in the same bed, sending money home, the engine room of the modern economy, all that headline crap. But we don’t know shit. We really don’t know. So if we were to stop and listen to them talking for a minute, we wouldn’t even hear what they were saying anyhow. This is the fucken point which is being elaborated before the audience’s very eyes, y’know?