Paul Murray - An Evening of Long Goodbyes

‘We’re not just going to let them get away with this?’ I appealed to my comrades. ‘I mean, we’re not just going to lie down like dogs, are we?’

‘What else can we do?’ said Pavel, moving towards the exit.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Couldn’t we go on strike, or something?’

‘We’ve already been sacked, Fuckface,’ Edvin pointed out. ‘There’s not much point going on strike when you’ve already been sacked.’

‘Anyway, you have already done enough,’ gravelly voiced Dzintars chipped in surlily.

‘Me? What did I do?’

‘Always complain, complain. Never just do the job. Always Mister Moany-Moan.’

‘I was only trying to make things better for you,’ I protested. ‘You can’t blame me for this.’

‘What do you know about how it is for us?’ Dzintars growled.

‘All right, all right,’ Bobo intervened. ‘No point fighting about this now.’

‘Maybe we could make a deal with, how you say, the Union of Robots?’ chuckled Edvin.

‘Well, sarcasm isn’t going to help anybody,’ I muttered. But my inflammatory rhetoric proved useless. Word had filtered back that the pay cheques were being given out at the factory gate, and no one wanted to risk any trouble; though to be accurate people weren’t lying down like dogs so much as filling their pockets with marzipan bread and Danish pastries and whatever else they chanced upon on their way back to the locker room. The factory was suddenly full of men in blue uniforms we hadn’t seen before. As soon as the herd left an area, they would move in behind us to seal it off with plastic barriers. We were silent now, everyone retreated into his own thoughts.

There was a long, slow-moving queue at the gate: one of the blue-uniformed men was handing out cheques. Once they had been paid, few of the men hung around. They would stand outside for a minute, talking and shaking their heads; then, in clusters of twos and threes, they would mooch off down the street. In a corner of the loading area near the back of the building, more uniformed men were taking roughly robot-sized boxes from an articulated truck.

Bobo, Arvids and the rest of Yule Log Division were among the last to leave.

‘Name?’ The uniformed man had a jaw thick with stubble and a baton hanging at his side. I wondered if he and his cohorts had also been hired from the agency, especially for the occasion.

I gave my name. He found it on his clipboard and ran a line through it, then handed me an envelope. As I went outside to join the others, it struck me that Sirius Recruitment must have known about the lay-offs in order to deliver the monthly pay cheques several days early. I studied the figure at the bottom and did the arithmetic in my head; if I was correct, they had paid us up until eleven thirty-eight of that morning, and not a minute more.

‘I don’t believe it,’ Bobo said, looking blankly at the slip in his hand.

‘I know, of all the penny-pinching… You know, I bet if you invited them to dinner they’d be exactly the type of people who not only would they not bring any wine but then you’d find out they’d been starving themselves for three days beforehand — I say —’ as the paper fluttered free from his hand. ‘What is it?’

He crashed down on to the kerb and put his head in his hands. I chased after the cheque and caught it as it careened merrily along the gutter. Wiping away the dirt, I read at the top BOBODAN ‘BOBO’ BOBEYOVICH, and beside it a figure identical to the one on mine, comprising wages, overtime, back pay, money for untaken holidays. But beneath that had been printed DEDUCTION: agency fee 1200.001E; and beneath that, DEDUCTION: accom. 108 nts @ 8.58 p.n.; and then DEDUCTION: visa reg. & proc.; DEDUCTION: handling; DEDUCTION: air fares & insurance; on and on they went, DEDUCTION DEDUCTION DEDUCTION, until one found oneself at the bottom of the page, where nestled in a little blue box sat neatly NET: 000.00.

I whistled softly to myself. Then, hearing a noise, I turned to see the gate close and a heavy bolt slide into place. Two of the men stared at me with folded arms from the other side.

Arvids, Edvin and Dzintars, who had been standing about in comparable attitudes of despair, now made a move to go. Pavel pulled Bobo to his feet and they trudged off down the road; I trotted after them, worthless cheque crumpled in my fist. The sky was heavy and dull and cold. Trucks rumbled by in clouds of exhaust fumes that made my eyes sting. What was happening to my life? Was this how it worked in the real world? Was it nothing more than a sand storm through which one walked with one’s eyes closed, every moment obliterated by the next? We arrived at the crossroads where the Latvians would turn off for their barracks and I would continue on for the bus.

‘What will you do?’ I said. ‘Where will you go?’

‘Call the agency,’ Dzintars said.

‘Call the agency? After that ?’

Dzintars shrugged.

‘No agency, no visa,’ Edvin elaborated.

‘But…’ I stood there chewing my cheek: I couldn’t just let them go , B-shift couldn’t be let just dissipate like ghosts in the afternoon, as if the last few weeks had never happened. And yet it appeared that there was nothing left to say, nothing except –

‘Chin-chin,’ Bobo clapped me on the shoulder. ‘See you later, old sport.’

‘Chin-chin, Fuckface,’ the others said, nodding at me; then taking their Yule Logs out of their pockets, they set off up the hill.

(Scene. A crumbling chateau by the Marne. Enter FREDERICK, a Count, and BABS, his tragic sister.)

FREDERICK: I don’t care what the bank manager said! I may not have any money left, but I’m still the Count, and I’m going to take on the dog-eat-dog world of the French wine industry and produce a half-decent Burgundy if I have to plant every grape myself!

(BABS is weeping constantly.)

FREDERICK (seizing her arm) : Damn it, Babs, can’t you see? What we have here is a dream, and as long as we re together no bank manager can touch it, because it’s a dream, I mean to say it’s not just –

FREDERICK: Damn it Babs, please stop crying

FREDERICK: Babs, you’re probably wondering about the other night, well the fact is it was all a plot of Lopakhin’s

FREDERICK: Damn it Babs

FREDERICK: Damn it

‘How’s the oul play goin, Charlie?’

‘Hmm? Oh, passably well, passably well… Just taking a breather at the minute, obviously…’

‘Oh, right,’ shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot. ‘Eh, I was just wonderin about that rent…’

‘Rent?’

‘Yeah, it’s just that your man was on lookin for it again, gettin a bit narky…’

‘Oh,’ I said spiritlessly, playing with a tassel. ‘Well, I’ll write you a cheque later on, will that do?’

‘A cheque, oh right, grand job,’ clearing his throat conversationally, ‘here, I was talkin to me mate what has the warehouse and he says there’s a shift goin if you’re —’

‘Ha, no fear!’ I said, looking back at the television.

‘Oh right so.’ He continued to hover behind. ‘Eh… is that Bel’s lipstick?’

‘Yes, yes it is, as a matter of fact.’

‘What are you doin with it?’

‘Oh, you know, just sort of holding it. Helps me focus.’

‘You all right, Charlie?’

‘Me? Tip-top. Never better. Still, best get back to the old play, no rest for the wicked, ha ha…’

‘Ha ha…’

The play wasn’t going well, obviously; the play was going terribly. I didn’t know how it had happened, exactly, but Lopakhin was running the show now, and every time I picked up my pen and tried to rectify matters, it only made them worse. For instance, Frederick had gone to Monte Carlo for a two-day cork-makers’ conference, but Lopakhin told Babs that he’d sold his half of the estate and run off to gamble away the proceeds — and Babs believed him, why did she believe him? So now while Frederick was footling about with tax concessions for a bunch of grasping Portuguese farmers, Lopakhin had his sister on her own and was spinning her such appalling lies — black was white, up was down, Frederick was a shady obsessive who was stifling Babs’s acting and romantic career — that I sometimes felt quite unwell and had to go and sit in the dark for a while.