Summertime

IT IS NO PLACE to stage a memory: a square concrete yard, a rundown building, a town with the life ebbing out of it.

The yard was where the trucks pulled in. The building contained an office, a tea room, a coolstore and two freezers. The town's fading industrial outskirts were the horizons of my 18-years-old life.

The names can change, for reasons of poetry and the law of libel. The town can be anon. The facts might swerve a little, too, as I hurtle towards them.

There was Rod, the boss, a benevolent, balding red-head who knew enough to know an office is to hide in. Jim, one of the drivers. Shortish, grey, honk-nosed and drunk-eyed, despite his sobriety. Wayne, the other driver, married at 21, a man who possessed mildness and slowness in equal quantities. Gary, the foreman, who will forever have a place in my heart. And me, a shy, bespectacled boy thrown from the Narnian cocoon of my childhood into the foul pit of employment.

Ah, summer...

At 7.30am on December 1, 1984, a full hour before my usual rising time, I slouched into the tearoom. Apart from the occasional stint at my father's pharmacy, this was the first day of employment in my entire life.
Gary met me with briefly raised eyebrows.

'Cup o tea.' he barked.

I nodded, and thanked him politely.

'You think I'm f***ing making it? You make it for me, ya little prick.'

My job, as far as it was defined, was to make up orders and to help load and unload the trucks. We stocked yoghurt, in three or four flavours. We stocked eggs and milk and butter. Ice cream in 50-litre containers. Huge cartons of Watties Mixed Veges.

Most products - yoghurt aside - came in 20kg boxes, which we passed rugby-style in chain gangs from the cool store to the trucks. After the first week my forearms were covered in aubergine bruises where the box-edges had struck. After the second week, the colour remained but the pain had gone.

It was a matter of pride to work quickly. If you were loading a truck, the hardest job was the 'lifter' - the person who had to catch a 20 or 30kg box hurled from two metres away, and hoist it on to the truck deck, then turn within a second to be ready for the next one.

Unloading, the hardest job was the 'catcher', the person on the end of the chain. You'd have to catch a 20kg tub of ice cream at the door of the freezer, slide four or five metres along the icy floor to stack it in the correct place, and be back at the door before the next one landed. If you were too slow, the tubs were piled up until the doorway was blocked and you had to work in darkness.

Gary, typically, reserved the easiest jobs for himself. He was the stacker on the truck deck, until the pile got too high. Or he found himself a place in the middle of the chain. Every so often, we had to stop while he pulled back his shirt-sleeves.

'Big muscles, eh.'

It was a strange season for me: a long summer of fohn winds and brightness, which I had to spend in a dim-lit chill.

I was 18, about to leave home. Optimism, anxiety, sadness and sexual desperation all curdled within me.

I had a brief flirtation with a girl from the sixth form. We went for long evening walks which ended at the playground of my old primary school. There, in the privacy and darkness of the fort, she was generous within certain limits. I found my body straining for more, while my mind turned to run. I was inexperienced enough to fear situations I could not control.

There were no conflicted feelings among my workmates, who thought of women mainly as the possessors of 'boxes' - a two-pronged word: something one owns, and something one puts things in.

'Hey, come here.'

'What?'

'Shhh. Come here. Look at the box on that one.'

A small crowd gathers.

'Phwoah.'

'Yeah, that's what I said.'

Not long after the girl and I broke up, I left Friday night drinks early because I was meeting a friend for dinner. The friend, it happened, was male. From that time on, Gary had me pegged.

'Hey, Aids,' he greeted me on Monday morning. 'Did ya get some nice boy?'

A row of crooked, yellow teeth grew beneath the straight bristles of his moustache. Men like him always have moustaches.

Once he discovered this new game, he played it relentlessly. 'Hey Aids, go lock the freezer.' 'Aids, where's my cup of tea?'

It would be exaggerating to say that I suffered. I am vulnerable to ambiguity, or to faint praise, but have never seen cruelty as personal. Gary tried to be a tyrant, but was merely a bore.

If this was fiction, there would have to be a showdown. He and I would square off in the chiller. Yoghurt pottles at dawn.

But this is just life, and life is mundane. There was no crisis, no epiphany, no Last Battle. Things just meandered on, until they came to a close.

The end came one February afternoon. I had been working in the freezer for an hour, and when I emerged I felt a trickle in my nose. I reached up a hand to my face and felt blood.

I went to the toilet and stoppered my nose with a sheet of paper. When it was drenched I threw it in the bowl. Scarlet spread in ribbons across the water. After half an hour, I had used an entire roll, and still I was bleeding. I went out into the washroom and grabbed the towel. I folded it in eighths and pressed it to my nose. Soon, a circle of blood had soaked right through.

After a while Rod came looking for me. His eyes nearly popped out when he saw the towel.

'Holy Jesus,' he said.

The others appeared behind him.

'Are you all right?' said Wayne.

'Careful,' added Gary. 'Don't let his blood get on you.'

My working day ended half an hour early, in the office of Dr K., who told me that prolonged exposure to cold temperatures can thin the blood. He, too, can have his name changed. He is dead now, and his children need not know of the felonies he tried to commit in his tiny surgery office. On one level I pitied him, just as I pitied Gary.

A few weeks later I loaded my backpack on a Newman's bus, and climbed aboard. As we pulled out on to the highway, and moved past the shops, past the factories, out into the countryside, it seemed as if I might never return. It was a whole world I was leaving behind. A whole life.

I did return, of course. The following summer I found a better job, on the overnight shift in a factory making cardboard boxes. There was another foreman, another girl, another story - and after that I left for good.

This brief memoir first appeared in the Dominion Post.

Back to bernardsteeds.com home page