I drove to the recharging station, right at the back of the warehouse by the delivery bay. I drove along the empty, brightly lit aisles, past the freezers and the long rows of refrigerated shelves against the walls. Ours was the last shift and I only saw a workmate now and then. They were standing in the aisles, doing their last chores, standing at the blue wheeled desks and writing lists of the damaged or torn-open stock we always found on the shelves; others were getting their forklifts ready for the night at the recharging station. I didn’t know all of their names yet, and even later, once I’d been working at the warehouse for a while and had scraped through the forklift test (‘It’ll end in tears, Lofty’), I took a shifty look at the name tags on their overalls when I talked to them or needed help.
‘Thanks, Ms Koch,’ I said, and she smiled and said, ‘No problem.’
I saw her looking at my overall, but I’d lost my name tag and hadn’t got a new one yet.
‘Christian,’ I said and gave her my hand. ‘Marion,’ she said. She’d lent me her forklift because a customer had asked for a bottle of Wild Turkey just before closing time. I’d fetched the whisky pallet down from the shelf, given him the bottle and then filled up the empty compartment. Bruno was using our forklift over in the beer section. It was a Friday, it was summer, and people were buying beer by the crateload.
‘Shall we have a coffee? It’s on me.’
‘OK,’ she said, and then we went to the vending machine. There were two coffee machines in the warehouse, one at the delivery bay and one in front of the cold storage room, and that one was closer.
I’d come across her in the aisles a couple of times before and we’d nodded hello, and seeing as she was quite pretty I’d smiled every time.
She wasn’t there every night, she worked days as well; only me and five other guys were always on nights.
‘You did your test quite quickly.’ She sipped at her coffee, and then she blew into the little clouds of steam. She smiled; she’d probably heard about how much trouble I’d had with it.
‘Bruno was a good teacher,’ I said and looked at the name tag on her chest again. ‘M. Koch, Confectionery’.
‘Bruno’s a good guy,’ she said. ‘You can always go to him when you need help, or when you’re fed up and you fancy a coffee and a chat.’ She smiled and blew into her coffee, then she drank a few mouthfuls.
‘Get fed up often, do you?’
‘Don’t be so cheeky, rookie.’ She held her coffee in front of her name tag and tapped me on the shoulder with the index finger of her free hand. Then she laughed, and I couldn’t help joining in. There was something about her and the way she talked to me that I liked a lot. When I’d sat down in her forklift (‘But don’t make a tour of it, I need it back again’) I’d felt the warmth on the seat where she’d just been sitting.
She seemed to be a couple of years older than me, maybe in her mid-thirties. She had quite short hair that was always kind of messy. We drank our coffee and talked about this and that.
We stood at the vending machine for a long time, and I kept putting more money in and refilling our cups. We were standing behind the piles of crates and stock so the only people who could see us were people who wanted to take a coffee break of their own. ‘Be right back.’ I went to the shopping trolley containing food just coming up to the best-before date. Sometimes there were three or four trolleys, and sometimes it was my job to take the trolleys to the ramp by the delivery bay where the rubbish bins were. Bread, chocolate, meat, milk, all still good for a few more days, and if I was hungry I tried to sneakily stuff myself with as much as possible of the best things before I threw them in the bins. Chocolate truffles, ciabatta with Serrano ham, Kinder chocolate. If one of the bosses caught me I could take off my overalls and leave, but I just couldn’t resist it. The stuff was being chucked out anyway, and I think most of us took the odd sneaky helping.
I tore open the packaging of a chocolate cake, cut two large slices with my Stanley knife, put them in the pockets of my overalls and went back over to Marion.
‘I thought you’d had enough of me.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘not at all. Hold out your hand.’ She gave me a questioning look but then held her hand out flat, and I took a piece of cake out of my pocket and placed it on her hand. ‘Hey, rookie,’ she said, ‘you’re a bit of a daredevil, aren’t you?’
It wasn’t until later that I thought I’d actually put her at risk. If they’d caught us … but we were safe behind the crates, and anyway the big bosses had left ages ago and the boss of ‘Shelf-filling/Night’ was pretty relaxed and often disappeared to the toilets for a quick smoke, even though it wasn’t allowed, and I’d seen him with his mouth full and a big salami in his hand before. And Marion seemed to have gauged the risk; she smiled at me and said thanks and ate the cake.
‘Got a bit of a thing about her, Lofty, have you?’
‘No, rubbish! I’m just asking, that’s all.’ It was after eleven and we were stacking large cartons of juice packs on the juice shelf. Bruno leaned against the forklift and said, ‘She’s married. He’s a bastard though. Met him a couple of times, at work parties and the Christmas do. He used to be a nice guy, I heard, but he’s been a right bastard since he lost his job. There’s your chance, Lofty.’
‘Hey, leave it out,’ I pushed two cartons onto the shelf. ‘I just think she’s nice, that’s all.’
‘Oh yeah, she’s nice all right, Marion is.’ He nodded. We carried on working in silence until twelve, then I had to go over to Processed Foods; there was only one woman there, Irina Palmer, and the twenty-kilo flour sacks were too heavy for her. Irina was very nice and she showed me around the processed food aisles once we were done. She smelled quite strongly of cold smoke and she coughed quite a lot, and while I was lifting the flour sacks off the pallet and lugging them to the shelves she’d disappeared in the direction of the toilets.
‘Right,’ she said and led me along the pasta aisle, ‘it’s all a question of practice, you’ll see for yourself after a while. It’s important if a customer asks you.’ She coughed and stroked the lapels of her overall. She was about the same age as Bruno and just about as stocky too, and I’d seen them heading for the toilets together a few times; Bruno liked a quick smoke now and then, but not as often as Irina, and he didn’t cough like she did either.
‘Right, here’s the normal spaghetti, then comes chitarra, that’s kind of straight pasta, we only have one brand though and hardly anyone ever asks for it.’ She was moving quite quickly to and fro in front of the shelf, touching the packets and cartons with both hands. ‘Here’s the fusilli, they’re like spirals, penne lisce, penne rigate, tortellini, tortelloni, macaroni, macaroncini, pappardelle, wide fettucine, then here’s the trenette, the same only thinner, rotelle for soups, orecchiette, they look like little ears, and if someone asks for vermicelli they want spaghetti and they’re from Sicily.’ She pronounced the names of the pasta like a real Italian, moving faster and faster in front of the shelf and showing me all kinds of pasta varieties that I’d never eaten and never even heard of. And then, when she showed me the ‘farfalle’ and the ‘rigatoni’, she suddenly said in the same tone of voice, with the same roll of the R: ‘You like Marion from Confectionery, don’t you?’