‘Are you going to work here?’ he said.
‘I think so.’
‘Don’t,’ he said, pulling me away to his station on the conveyor. ‘Look. Do you know how long I’ve been working here? I’ve been working here for fifteen years, and in all those years I’ve been standing in front of this box, stuffing printed matter into that hole, and do you know what?’
‘No.’
‘It never gets full.’
‘Doesn’t it?’
‘Do you understand what I’m saying? It never gets full!’ He held me round the shoulders so tight, it was hard to say anything but:
‘Let go for fuck’s sake.’ Luckily the foreman came up, and the man let go of me, and we moved on.
‘You won’t be working here,’ he said. ‘You’ll be working on the rotary press.’
‘Fine,’ I said.
‘Don’t mind him. He’s a philosopher.’
‘Right.’
The rotary press is at the other end of the hall and down the stairs. I walk slowly down the two landings to the clocking-in machine. I find my card and stick it in the slot and the sound makes me jump. The ink is black — one minute past seven it is red — and then I enter the cloakroom.
All the mirrors, all the basins with the No washing feet or clothes signs, the ugly yellow walls just like they were at Rosenhoff School, the grey metal cabinets one after the other, old men and young bikers, suddenly like big birds with their shirt tails flapping over bare thighs and white calves and then all in their blue work gear. Confident, seasoned.
I hate the thought of flapping my wings among them and try to delay it, but in the end I have to, and when I have finished, the new work clothes with their sharp creases are stiff and dark blue compared to the lighter, faded blue of the others. Behind me someone is whistling a wedding march, and I itch all over. I head for the door.
The concourse is strange and quiet and not as I remember it from my guided tour. The printing presses just stand there, three floors high, not a grain of dust stirring, and the air is cold against my face. I walk past the Number Three and on through a large door to the next concourse where only one press is standing, but this one is even bigger. Here is where I am going to work. At this machine. Seven men sit in two separate groups: printers and assistants. I am the one they’re waiting for, and when I enter, they all look towards the door, and a frighteningly tall, powerful man stands up and goes towards the console. I haven’t said hello to any of them, and I think maybe I should, but nobody seems to expect anything of the kind and I stand out on the floor between the two groups like an idiot with my arms hanging down like a pair of wooden planks. The tall man turns and yells:
‘TROND!’
‘Yes!’ someone tries to yell back, but his voice cracks at the top.
‘You tell this new. what’s your name?’ he shouts to me.
‘Audun Sletten,’ I say. My voice sounds reedy.
‘You explain to this Letten what his job is!’ Goliath shouts to the one called Trond. ‘He’s on C press.’
‘Sletten!’ I shout. Everyone looks at me and grins.
‘What?’
‘My name is Sletten, not LETTEN!’ I yell and feel my face itching. There is an echo in the room, and Letten bounces around like a ping-pong ball up under the ceiling.
‘Oh my God, did I get it wrong?’ Goliath says with a smirk. ‘It’s these ear protectors. They’re no good. My hearing’s damaged.’
Blood’s pounding in my ears, sweat running down my back. I clench my fists and raise them slowly, but no one even looks at me. I can hear their mocking laughter, and then they all get up and walk towards the press, and they are all bigger than me, and they laugh and shake their heads.
‘That was some entrance you made,’ Trond says, coming over to show me what they call C press.
‘Very funny,’ I say.
Trond is lanky and thin, has a Keith Richards haircut and a ring in his left ear and close up, he seems pretty normal.
‘What do you think of the Stones?’ he asks.
‘They’re OK,’ I say, ‘but Hendrix is better.’
‘Jimi Hendrix is a Negro, for Christ’s sake. And he’s dead, isn’t he?’
‘That’s true, but without the Negroes the Stones would have played the tuba. And that’s a fact.’
‘Hendrix is OK,’ Trond says, ‘but myself, I prefer the Stones.’
‘So I can see,’ I say, and Trond grins.
Goliath starts the press on slow, there is a jerk and everything begins to roll slowly.
‘All right,’ Trond says, ‘in front of you there are four drums, one on top of the other. Above and below them there are the ink rollers. The ink is pumped from the barrels. The printing plates are attached to the top and bottom drums, the two in the middle have rubber blankets. The ink rollers rotate against the plates, the plates against the rubber and the rubber against the paper. On the back of the paper web, there’s a huge steel cylinder that the paper wraps around. You can’t see it now, but it weighs so many bloody tons you can’t even imagine. If anything goes wrong when it’s moving, all hell will break loose.’
‘Right,’ I say.
‘Right,’ Trond says. ‘When we start up, no old ink on the rubber, it will clog, and then the blankets split, and the print is ruined, and every time we start up, the blankets have to be soaking wet or else the paper gets stuck to the ink when the plates slam on, and then it rips, and we have to spend hours with tweezers getting off all the stuff that’s got stuck. It’s a crap job. When I say wet, I mean wet, but not with water. White spirit. There’s a bucket on the stand behind you. Right?’
‘Right.’
‘You must never use water, spit, cry or piss on the paper. It can’t take it, it rips straight away, and we have to re-thread the whole paper web. We do that as little as possible. It’s really boring work and nobody gets a break. When you wash the blankets, you use rubber gloves and those rags there, under the bucket stand. If you don’t, your skin will go red and after a couple of weeks it starts to fall off. Right?’
‘Right,’ I say.
‘If you feel the rag being pulled from your hands, never do the first thing that occurs to you.’
‘No? And what’s the first thing that occurs to me?’
‘Holding on to it. What happens then, we call losing your maidenhead. It often happens to new people. So let go and stop the press. The red button is there on your left. Right?’
‘Right,’ I say, and worry a little about that maidenhead thing, but I don’t want to ask. I make a mental note of the red button.
‘OK, wash away.’ And I wash. I’m clumsy and nervous and hold the rag too tight, wondering where my maidenhead is. It takes some time, it’s like the ink is glued on, but then most of it is gone, and the blankets are wet, and Trond yells:
‘READY!’ And suddenly it’s like standing on the runway at Gardermoen airport as a jumbo jet takes off. The press shrieks and howls and BANG! BANG! go the drums as they hit the cylinder, and the roar gets louder as the speed increases. I cover my ears. Trond looks at me and grins, points his finger to his temple and turns it. OK, there is something I don’t know, and now he will tell me. Trond steps behind the press and comes back with two small boxes. He gives one to me, and inside are two yellow foam rubber thingies.
‘Watch. Like this!’ he shouts in my ear and rolls the thingies between his fingers until they are small and narrow, and then he stuffs them in his ears. I do the same with mine. The roar subsides, the foam rubber expands, it’s a strange and slightly awkward feeling, the noise becomes distant, and it’s a little like being high. If anyone tapped me on the head, there would be an echo.
Trond shouts again.
‘WHAT?’