Marina Lewycka - Two Caravans

“Nis?”

“In England, everybody paying. Is law.”

“And this one-TR. What is this?”

“This is mean trenning ret. You no skill you must hewa trenning.”

“Trenning? What is it?”

“Trenning is learn. You must learn how to do this job.”

“This job every idiot can do. How I am learn?”

“I teach, you learn. I teach you to put chicken on tray.”

“And for this I pay?”

“After two week will be normal ret.”

“And you are pay more?”

“Of course. I supervisor ret.”

Yola feels a red-hot pressure building up inside her as though she is about to explode, and Marta has to hold her back, and who knows what might have happened at this point were it not for the intervention of an incredibly handsome young man with long blond hair and muscles in his calves the size of prize-winning marrows such as most women can only dream of-and yes, he is wearing shorts, which most men cannot get away with but in this case it is acceptable, in fact it is excellent, because the legs are suntanned and covered with fine blond hairs, and have muscles the size of-yes, we know that already. Anyway, this godlike man steps forward and says, “Do you need any help with your payslip?” Well, in this situation what woman would not?

And marrow-legs explains everything, how the superannuation is for her pension when she retires, but since she will be retiring in Poland not in England she will not see a penny of this, and she will probably not see a penny anyway because these bloodsuckers will not pay the money into any pension fund, but will put it into their own pockets to spend on Rolls-Royce cars and luxury yachts, and yes, since she has mentioned it, probably they will also buy uncomfortable underwears for their sluttish wives, and the same is with this National Insurance, and maybe the tax too-if the taxman sees any of it he will be lucky, and the deductions for transport and accommodation are not strictly illegal, but they are excessive, and he will look into it if she likes. And at the end he asks her whether she would like to join the Poultry Workers’ Union. Well, in this situation what woman would not?

Tomasz, too, has been recruited to the Poultry Workers’ Union by a young man wearing shorts who accosted him on the way in to work, though the young man’s legs were not a factor in persuading him-it was a deep unaccountable anger with Vitaly, and everything that he represents. That Vitaly, he is too impatient-he is so much in a hurry to get rich that he has forgotten the basics of how to be a human being. And Tomasz felt angry with himself, too: he should never have got involved in Vitaly’s schemes. He had come to England to hunt for some rare Bob Dylan numbers and see a bit of the world before he got too old, and yes, maybe even find love if it should come his way. Yet somehow he had allowed himself to be degraded to the point where he could inflict suffering on other living creatures without so much as a quiver of sentiment. He had become a pawn in their game.

It was only seven o’clock in the morning, and already two terrible things had happened to him today. When he had gone down at dawn into the squalid eating room of the house to stuff his mouth with a few slices of bread, margarine and jam-yes, he had invested in some apricot jam-before the white van came for him at six o’clock, he sat down to work on the song which he had been composing in his head during the night. And that’s when he discovered that his guitar was missing. He couldn’t believe it at first. He hunted everywhere, under the table with its debris of food scraps and crumpled wrappings from last night’s meals, in the mouldy kitchen cupboards, through the bedrooms still clogged with the over-breathed air of exhausted sleepers, in the grimy understairs cupboard. That was it. There wasn’t anywhere else to look. Someone had stolen it. One of these desperate anonymous men from some impoverished or war-blasted region of the world had stolen his guitar, and by now had probably traded it for-for what? A bottle of vodka? A chicken-and-mushroom pie?

This time he didn’t even cry. What was the point?

Milo let him sit up front in the passenger seat of the van, because he was the first to be picked up. As he climbed in, he remembered with a stab of regret that he hadn’t even said goodbye to Neil, his only friend. He was being taken to new accommodation in a seaside boarding house on the outskirts of Shermouth, closer to the slaughterhouse of the processing plant where he was due to begin work at six-thirty. If he’d been sitting in the back, he probably wouldn’t have seen it; but up there in the front seat, he couldn’t miss it: there, right on the bend in front of them, the squashed remains of a white chicken that had been killed on the road. So that’s where its freedom had ended. Milo put his foot down and ran right over it. There must be a song in this, thought Tomasz; then he remembered about his guitar.

But if there was one thing which brought home to him how much he and the chickens really had in common, it was what happened later that morning: the incident of the Chinese slaughterman’s thumb.

When the chickens arrived at the slaughterhouse, Tomasz’s job was to hang them up by the feet in shackles suspended from a moving overhead conveyor, where they dangled, squawking hopelessly, especially those with broken legs (though by now he was immune to the squawking), as the conveyor despatched them, head first, through a bath of electrified water, which was supposed to stun them, before their throats were cut with an automatic blade. But just in case the water didn’t work or the blade missed, which was often enough, there were a couple of slaughtermen standing by to slit their throats before they were sent through to the steam room, where they were plunged into the scalding tank to loosen the feathers. Then they were mechanically de-feathered and de-footed before being eviscerated by another team of slaughtermen.

The slaughtermen were Chinese, skilled with the knives, but they were a bit short for the height of the overhead belt, so they couldn’t always see what they were doing; and it just so happened that one of them grabbed at a bird that had got stuck in the automatic foot-cutter, and somehow managed to slice off the end of his thumb, just above the first joint. At first you couldn’t even hear him screaming because of the noise of the chickens. Tomasz stopped the line and rushed off to find the supervisor, who immediately got onto his mobile phone and started shouting for another slaughterman to be sent, while the rest of them hunted around for the bit of thumb among the blood, droppings and feathers on the slaughterhouse floor; but it had disappeared, and all the while the man was yelling and moaning and clutching his hand in a fist to try and stop the bleeding. In the end, they gave up on finding the piece, and somebody just drove him to the hospital to be stitched up as best they could.

Then the supervisor started shouting at Tomasz for stopping the line: “We’re losing money, yer twat, just get the bloody line moving, so we can get some bloody chickens coming through. What d’yer think this is, bloody Butlins?”

He looked only a few years older than Neil, without the acne, but also without the charm.

“Here.” He handed Tomasz the slaughterman’s knife, still covered with blood, though whether it was his or the chickens’ he couldn’t tell. “You’d better take over, ‘til the replacement gets ‘ere.”

If I were to lose my finger, Tomasz thought, I could no longer play the guitar.

“Gloves. I need leather gloves.”

The supervisor looked at Tomasz with narrowed eyes.

“Are you some kind of troublemaker?”

“Same gloves we had in chicken catching. Without such gloves this work is dangerous.” For some reason, he still felt angry not so much with the supervisor, nor the owners of the plant, but with Vitaly.