Ross Raisin - Waterline

There is noise outside the door just before five: foreign voices, shouts, a woman laughing. Then it goes silent for half an hour, until all at once the noise returns and there’s a few minutes of activity before it quiets down again. After that, there’s just the occasional sound: doors shutting, a voice coming past, the flush of the toilet through the wall behind his head. Later the evening he leaves the room and finds his way eventually out of the hotel, making his way over to the terminal, where he gets a jacket tattie and a pint.

He doesn’t sleep the best, so the early start isn’t a problem. He is up at the kitchen for quarter to six, waiting in the potwash. Through in the cooking area he can hear the Irish chef instructing his shaven-headed team to get set up. After a few minutes he comes into the potwash holding a fryer smoking with bacon fat, and sees Mick standing by the machine.

‘Shite, yes.’

He goes off a moment and returns with a pair of overalls. ‘He’ll show you, but it’s easy enough. Wash 1 means you stand at this sink and scrub most of the crap off everything, then you stack it in these trays for him to put through the machine. And you clean the kitchen stuff.’ He points at the bacon pan hissing in the sink.

There is nowhere to get changed so he puts the overalls on in there, on top of his clothes. And that is the first thing he learns: not to wear anything underneath. Within half an hour he is pure sweltering from his exertions and the heat of the machine. Wash 2 is fine but. He’s got the right idea — just the bare black skin visible under his overalls whenever he bends down to stack something — he’s genuine fine and breezy. No that he’s said as much: he’s hardly spoke a word since he came in. It isn’t the same one as yesterday — he’s taller, this guy, and he’s fucking fast. It’s hard work keeping up putting the plates and cups in the trays before he grabs and trammels them along the runners into the machine — the hoosh of steam as he pulls it down and sets it running. Thirty seconds and they come out dry, it seems, because he piles the lot straight up and takes it over to the racks. When he does speak, it’s to tell Mick that he’s doing it wrong — ‘No. No’ — and he’ll stand in front of him and start stacking the trays himself. It’s doable but. He is doing it. He is managing. First day on the job and he’s on top of it.

It is a separate world but, the potwash. He’d’ve thought it would be different to this — all noise and shouting and Gordon Ramsay, waiters running about with their arses on fire — but it isn’t. It’s oddly quiet in there, cut off, just him and Wash 2 scrubbing and stacking, scrubbing and stacking. There is the clanging and jouncing of ovens and grills from in the kitchen, and each while a chef coming through, shouting, ‘Hot pan,’ but even through there, there’s no noise, no patter. Strange. It’s fine but. It suits him. Ye keep the head down, ye do your job. Scrub, stack; scrub, stack. The faces of waiters appearing at the hatch above the sink to dump the dirties on the ledge. You new, pal? What’s your name? Good to meet you, how’s it going? They don’t speak. They don’t see him even. Fine. That’s fine. And there’s something quite satisfying about the work as well — no exactly stimulating but it’s mechanical, you get into a rhythm, repeating the actions, challenging yourself to get the pile down. The empty ledge. A wee pat-the-back moment of job satisfaction. See that, Wash 2? First shift but no messing, eh, no fucking messing about, look.

Of course but he’s jumped the gun. There he is thinking he’s such a big man for keeping his piles down, while there must be hardly anybody in the restaurant. It doesn’t start coming properly until an hour in. Plate piles begin growing on the ledge, tall teetering columns of bowls and cups; the cutlery bucket swelling like a haemorrhoid; and the waiters finding their tongues at last, beefing that they’ve no space to put the dirties. He’s not keeping up and he’s soon enough sweating all over the place in a panic, desperate to get it down before the Paddy chef comes through and sees.

Wash 2 is fair agity getting with him by now, butting over to get the piles and stack them himself. And then, just when it’s coming on the busiest, the baldies start barging in with all their pots and pans, fat-fryer baskets, chopping boards, long metal trays lined with burnt knickers of egg. His heart is racing. He gets rushing about, losing his scourer, piles increasing all around him. He trips on a heap of pans by his feet and near goes on his neck. Bracing his hands on the sink, he takes a couple of deep breaths, the black guy glaring over at him. Get beasted in just. Get the piles down before the chef sees, finish this shift — then he can put down a marker, then he’ll know where he’s at. He leans toward the machine, ignoring Wash 2, pulls over an empty tray and gets loading.

Toward the end of the service, as he’s thinking it’s started to quiet down, they begin coming with great long dishes and glass bowls in from the restaurant. He gets scraping them out, chucking leftover sausages and grapefruit segments into the bin, until one of the waiters starts going through him, saying he has to wait until they’ve cleared all the food themselves. It must get reused, he realizes. All of it, too, they clear the lot. Even the eggs, man, Christ.

By the time it’s over he is pure wheezing, blowing for tugs. And that was breakfast — Christ knows what like the lunch service is, or dinner. Or if he has to work them all, either, that’s another thing he’s still in the dark about. Still but he got through it. His standards were up in the air quick enough, but he got through it — congealed crockery going straight in the tray and the scrub, stack of earlier turned into a dump, dump, dump. Fair unlikely that it was coming out the other side clean, but Wash 2 didn’t seem too bothered, he just wanted to keep it moving through, the piles kept down, the waiters shut up. To keep their faces away from the hatch.

Wash 2 takes off his gloves and motions Mick to follow as he goes into the kitchen. The baldies are bent and kneeling, scrubbing inside the ovens. Wash 2 writes his hours on the board and hands him the pen when he’s done.

‘Dia, is it? Hello.’ He holds out his hand. ‘My name’s Mick.’

It doesn’t feel quite the right thing, a handshake, but the guy takes it, with a small nod of the head. ‘Breakfast now,’ he says.

Mick follows him into a bare, bright room with tables put together into two long rows. There is a queue of twenty or so staff getting food from a table in the middle. As soon as they go in he feels exposed, stood there in the bright room for everybody to look at. There is the noise of chairs scraping as people take their places and start eating. Dia is gone ahead into the queue, and Mick joins the end of it, one of the chefs getting in just before him. He stays close behind and shuffles forward. There is a great purple wart on the back of the guy’s neck, his skin raw and pink around it where it’s been catching his collar. Somebody behind him too now, he can hear him puffing his frustration at the queue. ‘Come on, come on.’ His eyes on Mick’s back, taking him in. Chefs pushing in further up the queue; nobody saying anything.

Here are the eggs, then. By the time Mick gets to the table, eggs is mainly what’s left, plus a few sausages, beans, fruit salads. He doesn’t care. He just wants to get sat and get eaten, go back to his room.

Dia is on a table of black men, four of them sat together in green overalls. Mick goes to the other row, sitting himself at one end where the seats all around are empty. Further down there is a group of women, all dark haired, foreign-looking. One of them keeks over at him at one point, and he realizes he must be sat where their pals are about to sit. He eats up his breakfast quickly and at random. No that it’s a meal you’d want to linger over. One sausage, a slice of bread, and a small clot of beans sharing juices with three pineapple slices. Nay wonder they’re all so miserable.