RuKsaK

Carnaby Industrial Estate was a two-lane, grey streak of concrete with a different stench for every building. Mine was paints, glues and newly sawn wood. Others were meat, sugar, rust and more. Those rows of architecturally bullied buildings gulped down the weeks of two thousand people every Monday to Friday.

The whole stretch of road saw a heavy line of people chug down it every morning carrying an honest glumness which had started ticking in the public houses of Bridlington around twelve hours before. Public houses which would inspire depression elsewhere, but offered grim relief in Bridlington. The factory classes always shrink their despair with alcohol. This despair filled the factories and offices and the products which farted out of it were equally sorry as a result.
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The clock machine pinched fifteen minutes pay from you for a minute’s lateness. This exacting cull worked well - you never saw a clock-card stamped outside 7.58am to 8.00am.

Monday brought its standard vitriol:
‘RuKsaK – what you fucking doing here?’
‘I work here you daft cunt.’
‘Oh aye. I thought you were just the resident mince-queen.’
‘Fuck off Wes, and you know you should fuck off.’

The inanity expressed in this place bothered me back then. I always grit-grinned at the way in which such stupid hate could be said with such conviction.

A guy with two grown sons on the topic of unemployment:
‘What this country needs is another fucking world war. There were loads of jobs after that World War 2.’

A typical berating twat:
‘Fuck me RuKsaK. What you doing here at this time?’
‘I’m on overtime – working fifty-five hours a week at the moment.’
‘You fucking pussy! I’m working fifty-five hours a day.’
‘Aye – and you asked the question you gay fuck-stain.’
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Profanity was a social tool here. The further you could insert a fierce insult into a co-worker, the more respect you got, the fewer insults returned. There was a clear strategy for this. I learned fast how to describe heinous sexual acts with co-workers’ wives, theirs with other men and their prowess in having poorly functioning or always welcoming orifices. Every sentence ending with a Saxon-tongued blast.

It’s where I get my failure to stop swearing from.
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Our meagre money was spat at us on Thursdays and saw us leaving after 5pm. We were paid in an alphabetical chain. I was lucky to have a surname in the first half of the alphabet. Everyone figured the vinegary-smug Albert Abrams was a cunt as a result though. The cash was enough for food, two nights of outstanding alcohol abuse, and a car, if you had one. It wasn’t enough to make the job bearable, hence the need for booze.

I usually did a guvvy on my hungover Saturdays as well. A guvvy was a private job and licking a few cheap hotel bedroom doors with filched white paint got me enough to make it only just worth it.
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Another bit of luck was me not being the youngest. Two of us had started work in the painter’s gang on the same day and I was thankful for having two years on the other guy. He was a faster worker than me, but his slight youth meant he got all the shit possible.

Lunch break – a thirty minute reprieve, together as a gang, was spent eating our remaining crap sandwiches from plastic boxes and showing each other, with ever progressing lurid appreciation, the tits we found in our daily newspapers. We had lunch in the paint shed, where the stink was so strong you had to chew and munch your sandwiches hard in the sides of your mouth to get the intended taste.

The lad suddenly yelled out:
‘Oh, fuck me! Which filthy cunt...’

He flipped his lunch box over and three ripe shits thumped onto the cabin floor. Nebbo, a lifer in our factory, gave out a drilling laugh.
‘I put your sandwiches in me before lunch and churned out a shit for your box lad.’

The cabin cracked into noisy laughing and wired appreciation of the comical invention. Then the lad, with his shataround meal sitting in front of him on the floor, began to bubble and weep.
‘Why would you do that you cunts?’ He spluttered repeatedly, each word hatching from a sob.

Nebbo, rose from his upturned bucket fast, his feet striking the wooden floor:
‘You fucking gay little cocksucking cunt! Fucking crying like a dripping pussy.’

He started striding towards the lad. I stood up to block his way. I’d had enough.
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To be continued.

Monday, March 07, 2005

Aching weeks