Paul Murray - An Evening of Long Goodbyes

And then five minutes after that:

‘Frankie?’

‘Yeah?’

‘D’you ever see your reflection in a spoon, like, and just for a second you think, “Ah fuck, I’m upside-down?”’

‘Yeah, o’course.’

‘Fuckin scary, isn’t it?’

There was only so much insulation any film could give one, and tonight was the night I reached the end of my tether; I almost heard the snap. As if in a trance I rose from the couch and headed for the kitchen, and it’s quite possible that something terrible might have happened if I hadn’t been diverted by the telephone.

‘Yes, what? Oh …’

It was Gemma Coffey from Sirius Recruitment. She had called to offer me a job.

For a moment I was paralysed. Could it really be true? Out of the blue like this? Had the time come at last for me to step up to bat, to play my part in –

‘Charles?’ she said.

‘I’m here,’ I said faintly.

‘Well, can you do it?’

I assured her that I could; I added how grateful I was to her for remembering me out of the millions that came to her door, and that I wanted her to know I believed in this job, whatever it was, and would do my level best to help make the dream come true –

She said Good, but all that wasn’t so important with this particular job. ‘It’s only a temporary position, and it’s not quite as glamorous as the ones we discussed. It’s factory work, basically. You don’t have a problem with factory work, do you, Charles?’

‘It’s not a jar factory, is it?’ I said, there being only so many ironical twists I was willing to put up with in my life.

Gemma said that it wasn’t, it was a bread factory in Cherry Orchard. I said that in that case, I didn’t have a problem, and that I was just happy to be a part of the Sirius Recruitment team. Gemma sounded pleased, though she pointed out that technically I would be employed not by Sirius Recruitment but by its sister company, Pobolny Arbitwo Recruitment. ‘But that’s not important,’ she said. ‘The important thing is that I’m not going to forget about you out there, Charles. Come through for me and I’m going to find something really special for you.’

I told her she could count on me. She said she knew. She asked if by any chance I spoke Latvian. I said I didn’t. She said it didn’t matter. She gave me an address, the bus route to take, and a name to report to — Mr Appleseed — then we thanked each other and said goodbye.

To think that only a moment ago I had been close to throwing in the towel! Now, as if someone had waved a magic wand, my problems had disappeared; I had been lifted out of the doldrums and my sails filled with wind again.

I forgot all about having it out with Frank and Droyd. Instead, I stood in the living room, stroking my chin and smiling to myself as the good news sank in. Well I’ll be , I thought, the system works ; and Gene’s eye twinkled at me from across the room where she waited, frozen mid-scold, with the ghost.

The following morning, while it was still dark, I set off for my first day of work. I travelled on a bus full of surly men who looked disdainfully at my pristine blue dungarees — a gift from Mother’s poisonous maiden aunt — to Cherry Orchard, a dismal slum which did a passable impression of the middle of nowhere. At first I thought it rather a lark that an industrial park should share the name of Bel’s favourite Chekhov play: however, as with most aspects of my job at Mr Dough, it stopped being funny almost immediately.

When Gemma had told me that I would be working in a bread factory, I had taken it for a slip of the tongue: for everyone knew that bread was made not in factories but in bakeries, by red-cheeked men in tall hats. But I quickly learned that the mistake was mine, because a factory it undeniably was. Everywhere one looked men toiled like pygmies in the mighty shadows of the choppers and slicers, or stood on stepladders, as in some industrialized Hieronymus Bosch painting, stirring with oversized ladles at huge smoking vats. Machinery clanked and moaned; the air churned with bread-dust that mixed with sweat to form a sticky film on one’s skin and collected about the eye-sockets in prickling crescents. From the unseen ovens, the heat rolled in unrelenting waves, turning the floor into a furnace.

I worked in Processing Zone B, as a lowly bread straightener in the Yule Log Division. Yule Log was a Christmas delicacy made from marzipan with a shelf life something like plutonium’s; they enjoyed it on the Continent, or so we were told. There were five of us working in the room, not including Mr Appleseed, and except for Mr Appleseed’s abusive comments no one spoke; we laboured in silence like so many flour-covered Golems, performing the same mechanical motions over and over and over again. My role was to monitor the Yule Logs as they came in from the ovens through the hatch in the wall, removing any defective ones and ensuring that each loaf was sitting correctly on the belt, in a perpendicular relation to the rim, as it entered the sugar-frosting machine. Mr Appleseed had warned of the catastrophic consequences of a loaf entering the sugar-frosting machine in any position other than this one, and Mr Appleseed wasn’t the type of man you liked to cross.

As talking was discouraged in Processing Zone B, it wasn’t for a couple of days that I discovered why Gemma had asked about my Latvian — namely that, apart from Mr Appleseed and myself, the entire complement of Yule Log Division hailed from the town of Liepaja, having been rounded up at a recruitment fair held there by Pobolny Arbitwo, Sirius’s sister company, some months ago. It sounded like a rum sort of arrangement to me, but the Latvians said that many of their kinsmen had come to Ireland to work digging potatoes or cleaning hotel swimming pools, explaining that the pitiful wage they earned here was worth many times more when you sent it back to Latvia, and that as such they were coming out the real winners from the deal. Certainly they were homesick, they said; and their wives wrote letters to say how strange it was in their sorely missed city of Liepaja, with so few men to be seen. But the money they made at Mr Dough was enough to provide for their loved ones, and even set aside a little for their future; and for a modest sum, Pobolny Arbitwo rented them barracks-style accommodation with a microwave oven and comfortable bunk beds.

‘And you don’t mind it? You don’t mind the boredom, or this ungodly heat?’ We were in the canteen, a small cramped room with a table and vending machine and walls painted bilious green to discourage procrastination.

‘Not heat compared to some places,’ Bobo, who operated the bagging machine, said soberly. ‘For instance, last summer we worked in a marmalade factory in Aachen. Very, very hot. Many wasps.’ This provoked rueful murmurs of assent from the men around the table. ‘We are very lucky, to be here at Mr Dough,’ Bobo added.

‘Huh,’ I said. Frankly I didn’t know how lucky I would call myself to be dragged halfway round the world in order to spend all day processing Yule Logs. That said, compared to box-making, packing, or stacking the pallet, I suppose I had it relatively easy up here in Straightening. For the most part, the logs behaved themselves, and most of the adjustments I made were more or less cosmetic — although every half an hour or so, one bold specimen would appear, sneaking along the belt in a perilous diagonal position. It was then that I would swoop in, with one hand deftly twisting it a little to the left or a little to the right as the situation required, before sending it safely on its way to the frosting-machine, having averted disaster.

The rest of the time I merely supervised the hundreds of identical logs going by, the hundreds and hundreds of identical logs… I was quite alarmed the first time I began to hallucinate: but the Latvians told me that it was quite a common phenomenon at conveyor belts, and something not to be feared but enjoyed. Soon much of the day came to be frolicked away in happy illusions, plucking multi-coloured apples from Old Man Thompson’s orchard, sporting with my imaginary dog on the lawn, sipping a gimlet with Mirela as we looked out from the pristine Folly, as she caressed my cheek and whispered sweet nothings…