‘Let me,’ she says and thrusts her hand into my pocket, rummaging around and fiddling with all kinds of things, I gasp, and she winks, finds the money and counts off what I owe her and stuffs the rest back with a broad beam. And then, in a friendly way, she pats me hard on the knee.
‘Ouch!’ I scream. She laughs, loud and husky, wags her finger and goes into the finishing shop.
In the cloakroom I sit on the bench in front of my cabinet, stick my bad hand under my shirt and rub my knee with the other. It’s strange when there’s no one here, very unfamiliar and quiet, just grey and a hideous yellow, wet patches under the sinks, and I try to remember why I quit school. I don’t remember anything, and I sit there for a long time, my mind a blank, until I hear sounds that might be laughter on the stairs. It gets louder, and I hear the steel-toed shoes on the floor, but still no one has opened the door. I get up and stare at the door and wait, thinking maybe Trond was right. Maybe the printing business is not the trade for me.
15
KJARTAN, CALLED ELK because of his size and his gait, approaches A press waving a spatula knife in his right hand. Elk is the deputy printer and fifty-three years old, he is recently and unhappily divorced and has a mass of grey hair above his heavy face. I stand by the stacker, handing out sixteen-page sheets on a vibration plate, working them and piling them 32 high on a pallet. Soon I will have been here for two months, and no one can complain about my skills, the printed sheets go on the pallet in razor-sharp stacks. There are 12,500 sheets on each pallet, that is 25 sheets per stack and this is the tenth pallet today. For once we haven’t had a single paper break, and I am exhausted by the everlasting thunder of the press. It gets into your bones and in the end turns them into jelly.
I follow Elk out of the corner of my eye. I have just reported a blemish on the print. For the moment it’s outside the cut, but it is growing and soon it will be on the printed page itself. It has to be a build-up of ink on the rubber blanket. I reported it only because I am dying for a fag and know we will have to stop the press to remove it. I stand there shifting my feet, my pack of Petterøe out and ready, and I am just waiting for Elk to give the stop signal to Goliath, who is the head printer.
The spatula is gleaming. I was the one who cleaned it, it’s part of the job. Assistants clean the printers’ tools. It’s ridiculous, they could do it for themselves. But they insist, they want to maintain the line of command.
Elk paces around the machine. He closes one eye as if taking aim, a strange sight that is, and then he goes down on one knee, holds the spatula at an angle to the whirling rubber blanket, supports his arm with his left hand, and I realise he is not going to stop the press. The cylinders are rotating at 18,000 revolutions per hour: all you see is the newsprint flashing by. Goliath is in the cage behind the console reading a tabloid. No one else in sight.
From the large windows up under the ceiling a ray of sun comes shining into the concourse, so powerful and tangible you could bang your head on it, if that’s what you wanted to do. All of a sudden there are sparks raining through the room making the sun seem like a torch with a flat battery. Something flies through the air, and I feel a smarting pain in my earlobe. Christ, I could have been killed. A chill runs down my spine. I go numb, completely rigid, my brain slams the brakes on and comes to a standstill. And then I see the jet of blood. I start to run, I throw myself at the red button, so far from my post at the stacker, and the sound of the machine coming to a halt is like a plane crashing. Suddenly I realise Elk is drunk, that he smelt of alcohol when I reported the blemish.
‘We’ll fix that,’ he said with a crooked grin, and that was the first time I’d ever seen him smile. Now the great Elk is standing with one hand bleeding, screaming:
‘MY FINGERS, OH FUCK, I GOTTA FIND MY FINGERS!’
There are three fingers missing from his left hand. Goliath comes running in, he tries to calm Elk down, he has a rag he wants to wrap round the injured hand. He gulps so hard you can really see it, and he holds Elk tight around the shoulder, but Elk, who is almost as tall and even stronger, tears himself away and starts running in circles.
‘FUCK FUCK OH FUCK I GOTTA FIND MY FINGERS!’
People rush in from all sides and crowd around the A press, and we look for Elk’s fingers, but they are nowhere to be found, and to be honest, I’d prefer not to find them.
Goliath tries to catch the eye of the man with the large face that is the same colour now as his hair, and his hand just bleeds and bleeds.
‘Hello Kjartan. Kjartan.’ For once Goliath speaks gently. ‘Hello, Kjartan, take it easy now. Let’s get out of here. I’ll drive you to casualty. Come on now, Kjartan!’
Elk stares at Goliath with a strange, distant look in his eyes and then he shouts: ‘BUT DON’T YOU GET IT I HAVE TO FIND MY FUCKING FINGERS THEY HAVE TO BE SEWN BACK ON!’
But we can’t find his fingers, and Goliath forces Elk to go with him. He has lost so much blood that his knees are giving way, and he doesn’t look so tall any more. On their way out, they pass the foreman, who looks around him. Goliath doesn’t even turn his head, and as I am the one standing closest to the foreman, he asks me:
‘What’s going on here?’
‘Kjartan’s lost three fingers.’
‘Oh. Jesus!’ The manager sees all the blood and says Jesus again. Then he looks at me.
‘What happened to you? Your ear is bleeding.’ I touch my earlobe, and there is blood on my fingers.
‘The spatula knife,’ I say.
‘The spatula?’ Then it dawns on him. ‘So where the hell were you standing?’
‘By the stacker.’ Everyone looks back at the belt. In the wall behind the half-filled pallet is Elk’s spatula knife, centimetres into the plaster.
‘Oh, Jesus,’ the foreman says. ‘You could have had your skull sliced in two!’ He runs his hand through the hair he has left and leaves the concourse smoking nervously and goes up to the office where he spends most of the day flicking through pornographic magazines.
We wash off the blood, remove the ripped rubber blanket and stretch a new one around the drum, and we can go home.
In the cloakroom, the ever-hip Trond says: ‘At least I’m no longer the only one here with a pierced ear.’
The next day Trond calls me over. He is behind the press cleaning up. We have finished the print run and have to wash everything down before we start afresh.
‘Just look there,’ he says.
In the water tank, Elk’s fingers are floating. They are swollen and look like big snails. I throw up straight into the tank. The foreman, who is doing his inspection tour has recovered well from yesterday’s ordeal and says:
‘You’ll have to clean that up yourself, Sletten!’ And I have to wash the tank and remove my vomit and Elk’s three fingers.
‘I don’t want to watch this,’ Trond says, making himself scarce. I don’t really know what to do with the fingers. In the end I wrap them in some waste paper and throw them in the rubbish container. And then I go to the toilet and throw up once more.
It’s dark on my way home from the late shift. No one lives in this area. Along the road down to the Metro station there are nothing but factories and warehouses, and in a few offices the lights are still on. The old street lamps are hanging on rotting posts and swing in the wind and creak in their rusting metal holders, and most of them are smashed anyway. I am walking alone. There is no one else going my way that I feel like talking to. Trond lives in Lørenskog, and he has a car and all, and besides, I have fallen out with plenty of people.