I couldn’t help laughing. ‘All I did was get her a coffee.’ And when she nodded and rocked her head like an Italian mama and opened her mouth to reply, I said, ‘Yeah, she’s really nice.’
‘Listen, Christian,’ she took a step closer to me, and because she hadn’t called me ‘Lofty’ like most of the others — funnily enough they’d often called me that on the building site as well, even though there were a few guys there even taller than me — well, anyway I knew right away there was something important coming now. ‘Listen, Marion’s very fragile, I know she doesn’t look like it, I mean, she’s, how can I put it, she’s never at a loss for words, but you mustn’t hurt her, do you get me …?’
‘No,’ I said, not laughing any more. ‘I don’t want to.’
She nodded and said, ‘It’s none of my business, but I like young Marion a lot.’
Then the boss’s voice came over the loudspeakers, telling us we could clock off now; actually he was only the boss when the other bosses weren’t there. I walked over to the staff exit with Irina Palmer, coughing even as she held her cigarettes in her hand ready for the next one, and then we went to get changed.
A couple of weeks passed until I next saw Marion from Confectionery. She’d been working days for a while, but when I didn’t meet her in the aisles or at the vending machine after that Bruno told me she was off sick. ‘Anything serious?’ I asked.
‘Don’t know,’ he said, but I could tell that wasn’t true.
‘Come on, tell me.’
‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘If you like her, don’t ask.’
And then we stacked six-packs of alcohol-free beer on the shelves.
Twenty minutes before the end of our shift — we were on our last round of the beverages aisles — he said to me, ‘Come on, I want to show you something.’
I followed him. We heard Irina coughing in the pasta aisle but Bruno carried on until we came to the fish and shellfish and then he stopped.
We called this section ‘The Sea’. There was a large sales counter behind a roller door. Next to it and behind it and all around it were tanks and small pools of live fish, live crabs and prawns, and crates filled with ice and cooled with the dead fish and shellfish in them. The roller door was already halfway down and we ducked underneath it. Inside, the lights were dimmed, only a few strip lights glowing yellow on the ceiling. He took me over to a large tank with a couple of tubes running in and out of it. ‘The water has exactly the same salt content as the ocean they come from,’ he said. ‘Just a tiny bit more or less and they’d die sooner or later.’
They were large crabs, lobsters or something, lying next to each other and on top of each other in the tank, packed so tightly they could hardly move. I went closer up and saw that their pincers were held together with rubber bands.
‘They stay in here,’ said Bruno, ‘until somebody buys them.’
‘But their pincers,’ I said, and I saw a particularly large crab moving its arms with the tied-up pincers and touching the glass.
‘So they don’t hurt each other, you see, and so they don’t hurt anyone who wants to take them out.’
I squatted down in front of the tank, my face directly in front of the glass. They had strange long eyes, dark telescopic eyes that came out of their little heads like tiny fingers. The lobsters moved around in the water that flowed in and out again through the tubes, but they didn’t have much space and some of them looked as if they were dead already or just about to die, lying still between the others. Their long, thin eyes; I don’t know why, but their eyes really did my head in. ‘Jesus,’ I said, standing up again.
‘Yeah,’ said Bruno. We stood in silence by the tank for a good while then, looking at the water bubbling and the big pile of lobsters.
‘Look at that one,’ I said. ‘The one right at the back, the big bugger. He’s got one arm loose.’
‘Where?’ asked Bruno, and I went round the glass tank and showed him the lobster, which kept opening and closing the one pincer it had managed to get free from the rubber band, opening and closing. It wasn’t moving anything else, as if only its one arm was still alive. ‘If he’s clever …’ I said.
‘You mean he could cut the others …’
‘Imagine it though,’ I said. ‘They’d have their work cut out tomorrow morning …’
Bruno laughed, then he shook his head. ‘I told you, Lofty, they’d just hurt each other.’
We heard the boss’s voice over the tannoy — the end of our shift. We ducked out again under the half-closed roller door, Bruno took the forklift to the recharging station, then we went to the staff exit and the changing room. ‘Shall I give you a lift?’
‘OK,’ I said, ‘if you don’t mind the detour.’ I usually took the last bus but Bruno gave me a lift home now and then, even though he actually had to go in the other direction. We hung up our overalls in our lockers, put away a couple of other things, had a bit of a chat with the others, most of them looking tired, we swiped our cards through the machine, and then we walked past the boss, who shook everyone’s hand goodbye, down to the staff car park.
‘About Marion,’ he said in the car.
‘No,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to tell me.’
‘She has it pretty tough sometimes,’ he said, but I just nodded and looked out into the night.
We were standing outside my house. We’d already said goodbye and as he started to get back in the car I said, ‘How about a beer — you’ve got a quarter of an hour, haven’t you?’
‘Yeah,’ he smiled, locking his car and coming back over to me. ‘My wife’s asleep anyway.’ We went inside and sat down in my little kitchen. I took two beers out of the fridge and opened them. ‘Lugging beer around all night,’ he said and clinked his bottle against mine, ‘makes you thirsty, doesn’t it?’
‘I get hungry as well sometimes with all that lovely stuff we carry around at work.’
‘You were pretty daring, that thing with the cake. That impressed her, that did.’
‘How do you know that then?’
‘It does her good, Lofty, someone treating her nice like that.’
The kitchen window was open slightly and I heard a train crossing the bridge. ‘Help yourself to an ashtray if you want to smoke.’
‘I will, thanks,’ he said. I went over to the fridge and put the ashtray on the table, and he lit up. ‘When you get home from work, can you go to sleep right away?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘not usually.’
‘Me neither. I’ve got this bench, out the front, and that’s where I sit then, even if it’s cold out. I have a wee drink there and I can look at the fields. I like looking at the fields. It’s never quite dark, all the lights from the city, you know?’
‘Have you got kids?’
‘No, we haven’t.’
‘Sorry. It’s none of my business.’
‘It’s OK.’ We fell silent, drinking and both looking out of the slightly open window into the night. He stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray and drank up his beer. ‘I’d better go.’
‘I’ll see you to the door.’
We said goodbye out the front. ‘We could do this again, eh?’
‘Yeah, let’s,’ I said. ‘That’d be good.’
He nodded and walked to his car. ‘See you tomorrow, Lofty.’
‘See you.’
He was very quiet the next day and the days after; we worked in silence and he disappeared straight away after our shift, and I took the bus home. I was usually the only passenger; the bus drivers knew me by now and said hello or ‘Home time at last, eh?’ And if I wasn’t tired already I got tired on the way, leaning my head against the window, and sometimes I even fell asleep but the drivers woke me; they knew where I had to get off. Then at home I perked up again and spent a long time sitting on my own in the kitchen, drinking beer and looking out into the night and waiting to get tired again.