As soon as he was gone the chamber filled with noise again. But although there was breast-beating, although there were lamentations and woebegone faces and even a few tears, still no one seemed exactly
surprised
. No one seized a box and began smashing up the slicing machines; no one grabbed the microphone and declared that he wasn’t leaving until Mr Appleseed’s blood had been spilled and who was with him? Instead everyone simply seemed to accept defeat. Already a few people were shuffling out of the door we had come in. I was shocked. Were these the men I had worked with side by side on ten-hour shifts in the furnace of Processing Zone B? Was this the indomitable spirit that had won us the Productivity Hamper?
‘We’re not just going to let them get away with this?’ I appealed to my comrades. ‘I mean, we’re not just going to lie down like dogs, are we?’
‘What else can we do?’ said Pavel, moving towards the exit.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Couldn’t we go on strike, or something?’
‘We’ve already been sacked, Fuckface,’ Edvin pointed out. ‘There’s not much point going on strike when you’ve already been sacked.’
‘Anyway, you have already done enough,’ gravelly voiced Dzintars chipped in surlily.
‘Me? What did I do?’
‘Always complain, complain. Never just do the job. Always Mister Moany-Moan.’
‘I was only trying to make things better for you,’ I protested. ‘You can’t blame me for this.’
‘What do you know about how it is for us?’ Dzintars growled.
‘All right, all right,’ Bobo intervened. ‘No point fighting about this now.’
‘Maybe we could make a deal with, how you say, the Union of Robots?’ chuckled Edvin.
‘Well, sarcasm isn’t going to help anybody,’ I muttered. But my inflammatory rhetoric proved useless. Word had filtered back that the pay cheques were being given out at the factory gate, and no one wanted to risk any trouble; though to be accurate people weren’t lying down like dogs so much as filling their pockets with marzipan bread and Danish pastries and whatever else they chanced upon on their way back to the locker room. The factory was suddenly full of men in blue uniforms we hadn’t seen before. As soon as the herd left an area, they would move in behind us to seal it off with plastic barriers. We were silent now, everyone retreated into his own thoughts.
There was a long, slow-moving queue at the gate: one of the blue-uniformed men was handing out cheques. Once they had been paid, few of the men hung around. They would stand outside for a minute, talking and shaking their heads; then, in clusters of twos and threes, they would mooch off down the street. In a corner of the loading area near the back of the building, more uniformed men were taking roughly robot-sized boxes from an articulated truck.
Bobo, Arvids and the rest of Yule Log Division were among the last to leave.
‘Name?’ The uniformed man had a jaw thick with stubble and a baton hanging at his side. I wondered if he and his cohorts had also been hired from the agency, especially for the occasion.
I gave my name. He found it on his clipboard and ran a line through it, then handed me an envelope. As I went outside to join the others, it struck me that Sirius Recruitment must have known about the lay-offs in order to deliver the monthly pay cheques several days early. I studied the figure at the bottom and did the arithmetic in my head; if I was correct, they had paid us up until eleven thirty-eight of that morning, and not a minute more.
‘I don’t believe it,’ Bobo said, looking blankly at the slip in his hand.
‘I know, of all the penny-pinching… You know, I bet if you invited them to dinner they’d be exactly the type of people who not only would they not bring any wine but then you’d find out they’d been
starving
themselves for three days beforehand – I say –’ as the paper fluttered free from his hand. ‘What is it?’
He crashed down on to the kerb and put his head in his hands. I chased after the cheque and caught it as it careened merrily along the gutter. Wiping away the dirt, I read at the top
BOBODAN ‘BOBO’ BOBEYOVICH
, and beside it a figure identical to the one on mine, comprising wages, overtime, back pay, money for untaken holidays. But beneath that had been printed
DEDUCTION
: agency fee 1200.001
E
; and beneath that,
DEDUCTION
: accom. 108 nts @ 8.58 p.n.; and then
DEDUCTION
: visa reg. & proc.;
DEDUCTION
: handling;
DEDUCTION
: air fares & insurance; on and on they went,
DEDUCTION DEDUCTION DEDUCTION
, until one found oneself at the bottom of the page, where nestled in a little blue box sat neatly
NET
: 000.00.
I whistled softly to myself. Then, hearing a noise, I turned to see the gate close and a heavy bolt slide into place. Two of the men stared at me with folded arms from the other side.
Arvids, Edvin and Dzintars, who had been standing about in comparable attitudes of despair, now made a move to go. Pavel pulled Bobo to his feet and they trudged off down the road; I trotted after them, worthless cheque crumpled in my fist. The sky was heavy and dull and cold. Trucks rumbled by in clouds of exhaust fumes that made my eyes sting. What was happening to my life? Was this how it worked in the real world? Was it nothing more than a sand storm through which one walked with one’s eyes closed, every moment obliterated by the next? We arrived at the crossroads where the Latvians would turn off for their barracks and I would continue on for the bus.
‘What will you do?’ I said. ‘Where will you go?’
‘Call the agency,’ Dzintars said.
‘Call the agency? After
that
?’
Dzintars shrugged.
‘No agency, no visa,’ Edvin elaborated.
‘But…’ I stood there chewing my cheek: I couldn’t just let them
go
, B-shift couldn’t be let just dissipate like ghosts in the afternoon, as if the last few weeks had never happened. And yet it appeared that there was nothing left to say, nothing except –
‘Chin-chin,’ Bobo clapped me on the shoulder. ‘See you later, old sport.’
‘Chin-chin, Fuckface,’ the others said, nodding at me; then taking their Yule Logs out of their pockets, they set off up the hill.
(Scene. A crumbling chateau by the Marne. Enter FREDERICK, a Count, and BABS, his tragic sister.)
FREDERICK: I don’t care what the bank manager said! I may not have any money left, but I’m still the Count, and I’m going to take on the dog-eat-dog world of the French wine industry and produce a half-decent Burgundy if I have to plant every grape myself!
(BABS is weeping constantly.)
FREDERICK
(seizing her arm)
: Damn it, Babs, can’t you see? What we have here is a dream, and as long as we re together no bank manager can touch it, because it’s a dream, I mean to say it’s not just –
FREDERICK: Damn it Babs, please stop crying
FREDERICK: Babs, you’re probably wondering about the other night, well the fact is it was all a plot of Lopakhin’s
FREDERICK: Damn it Babs
FREDERICK: Damn it
‘How’s the oul play goin, Charlie?’
‘Hmm? Oh, passably well, passably well… Just taking a breather at the minute, obviously…’
‘Oh, right,’ shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot. ‘Eh, I was just wonderin about that rent…’
‘Rent?’
‘Yeah, it’s just that your man was on lookin for it again, gettin a bit narky…’
‘Oh,’ I said spiritlessly, playing with a tassel. ‘Well, I’ll write you a cheque later on, will that do?’
‘A cheque, oh right, grand job,’ clearing his throat conversationally, ‘here, I was talkin to me mate what has the warehouse and he says there’s a shift goin if you’re –’
‘Ha, no fear!’ I said, looking back at the television.
‘Oh right so.’ He continued to hover behind. ‘Eh… is that Bel’s lipstick?’
‘Yes, yes it is, as a matter of fact.’
‘What are you doin with it?’
‘Oh, you know, just sort of holding it. Helps me focus.’
‘You all right, Charlie?’
‘Me? Tip-top. Never better. Still, best get back to the old play, no rest for the wicked, ha ha…’
‘Ha ha…’
The play wasn’t going well, obviously; the play was going terribly. I didn’t know how it had happened, exactly, but Lopakhin was running the show now, and every time I picked up my pen and tried to rectify matters, it only made them worse. For instance, Frederick had gone to Monte Carlo for a two-day cork-makers’ conference, but Lopakhin told Babs that he’d sold his half of the estate and run off to gamble away the proceeds – and Babs believed him, why did she believe him? So now while Frederick was footling about with tax concessions for a bunch of grasping Portuguese farmers, Lopakhin had his sister on her own and was spinning her such appalling lies – black was white, up was down, Frederick was a shady obsessive who was stifling Babs’s acting and romantic career – that I sometimes felt quite unwell and had to go and sit in the dark for a while.
Nevertheless, it was all I had left. I had not called Gemma at Sirius Recruitment. My experience at Mr Dough had soured for me the whole idea of working; or rather it had served to confirm what I suspected all along, namely that working for a living was a mug’s game. ‘The way I see it,’ I said to the others, ‘if you’re not rich, you’re poor, and the only way to get rich is either to be rich already, or take up some sort of a crime, like architectural salvage or robbing old ladies – no offence, I mean.’
‘Ah you’re all right, Charlie,’ Frank said.
‘Gnnhhhrhh,’ snored Droyd from his stupor on the sofa.
‘Or starting a recruitment company,’ I mused bitterly.
So, as outside the streets grew day by day chillier and darker, and the fateful dinner party floated before me like an uncontemplatable abyss, I whiled away my hours in my dressing gown in the armchair. I wrote a line of my play and scratched it out; I swamped myself in vast deluges of memory; I concocted plan after fantastical plan by which to force Bel to stay – including, but by no means limited to: skywriting a carefully worded apology in the area of sky adjacent to her bedroom window; feigning to have contracted a life-threatening illness; having my play finished, submitted and produced to great acclaim at the Abbey, starring Bel Hythloday, ideally before Wednesday; ringing up Mother and proving to her by exhaustive analysis of her recent behaviour that Bel was in no fit state to travel; actually contracting a life-threatening illness viz. Lassa Fever by concentrated association with Boyd Snooks. But most of the time I did what I did best, which was nothing.
I thought sporadically of returning to my monograph. I had reached the 1950s now: all the films were in that lurid Hollywood colour that made everything look at once gaudy and exhausted. Gene had stopped wearing make-up years ago, but the overripe tones saturated her too, accentuating the vacancy that grew at the heart of her performances. If she had been trying to hide herself in her earlier films, in those last four –
Personal Affair, The Egyptian, Black Widow, The Left Hand of God
– she was gone. Sleepwalking would be putting it kindly: everything about those performances pointed to a person who was no longer actually there – the inertia, the lifelessness of her movements, the opacity of the beautiful eyes.
The Left Hand of God
would be her last starring role in a movie. As soon as the film was completed she fled Hollywood and holed up in New York with her mother. The studios promptly suspended her for breach of contract, and accused her publicly of prima donna tantrums. Reporters hounded her; the telephone rang day and night until finally her mother disconnected it.
In the New York apartment everything became confused. She slept for days on end. She didn’t recognize the faces of her friends. She had never been political before, but now became obsessed with Communist plots: she thought the Communists were trying to poison her, she thought they were replacing the words on the pages of the books she read. She stopped eating, then went on a diet of chocolate and bread and butter and gained twenty pounds in a couple of weeks because she thought she was pregnant and eating for two. Every night she imagined she gave birth, and every night the Communists stole her child; or she dreamed that Daria was no longer in an institution, but in the house of a couple living down the street. Her brother would find her in the middle of the night, banging on the neighbours’ door, demanding that they give her her daughter back. At last she was committed to the Harkness Pavilion asylum, New York.
Electro-convulsive therapy – ECT – was at that time considered a breakthrough in the treatment of the mentally ill. By administering an electric shock directly to the brain, it seemed that patients could be temporarily jolted out of their psychoses. The shock made them forget everything; and as Gene commented, you can hardly be depressed about what you don’t remember. She was given thirty-two of these treatments over a single year. Every time she woke up not knowing who or where or what she was. Gradually, some of her memories would come back; generally, childhood first, then adolescence, then the middle past. But the months and years preceding the treatment did not. They were simply gone – impersonally stripped away, as if they had never happened, so that years later, when she came to write her autobiography (entitled, self-deprecatingly
Self-Portrait
), she had to rely on newspaper scrapbooks, letters, the testimony of friends.
Her life in the institution became one long grey anonymous blur, punctuated by the electric current. And in some ways it worked: she was pacified, docile; she knitted, made tables, scrubbed floors; she was happy to be relieved of the burden of her identity. But she remained in dread of the ECT sessions. She recounts one occasion, waking up in the usual state of utter limbo, and – although, of course, she did not know why – suddenly becoming so angry that she punched the nurse standing over her right in the jaw. In revenge, the nurse brought her to the ward where the hopeless cases were kept and left her there for the day. Gene herself was so far gone, however, that she mistook them for Method actors from the Stanislavsky school. She stood there and applauded, all day long.