to accumulate possessions. Eventually, the past sticks to you like fluff to Sellotape dragged across a dusty suit.
In the living room, a packet of Super Kings lay on the coffee table, and an American woman shouted about sun protection on GMTV. David was harnessed in his bouncer, hanging in the kitchen doorway. His pink face trembled as the sun bounced through the windows, greenhousing the room. I started to tiptoe across the carpet, as though I was an art thief and the naked baby was a security system, but when I got halfway to the kitchen, his mouth opened. I stopped and smiled but the mouth opened wider, until I could see the whole dark passage, so I stood there, grinning. David filled his lungs, held his breath, and screamed. “David, dinnae. Fuck. Please don’t. D’you want this?” I offered him a plastic toy with a squeaky button and a mirror. He threw it at me and screamed louder.
“What ye done tae him?” asked Deanne, when she returned from the bathroom.
“Sorry,” I said. “I was just after a glass of water.”
“David! David! Wee man. Ssshh. Bouncy, bouncy. There you go. Shhh. Shut up!” She unclipped him from his harness and laid him naked on his mat, sprawled helpless like a crab on its back.
“Right, Wayne, you’re on buns. Buzz is dressing, Gordon’s on grill. And train Captain Picard here, aye?”
“Owen. My name’s Owen.”
“Doddy! I’ve two chicken burgers left! Gie me three runs of six, two beanies, two fish, start holding two trays of chicken.” It was the hottest day of the year and the kitchen already stank of sweat. “Wayne, I need a continuous pull on Big Bens and Cheese. Come on, cook me some food or I’m gonnae get in shit.” This is how Benny’s works: the “I’m going to get in shit” effect. The business functions because everybody is held responsible for those below him. If it’s your second week and a new starter is sweeping the floor with her apron on, you have to correct her. If you don’t then the store manager will complain to the shift runner, the shift runner will take it out on the floor manager, the floor manager will shout at the team leader, and the team leader will bitch at you. Belatedly, you’ll ask the new start to take off her apron. “Sorry,” you’ll say, “it’s just that if you keep it on then I’m going to get in shit.”
“Why?”
“Dinnae ken. It’s just the procedure.” The next time she has to sweep the floor, she’ll anticipate rebuke from even her lowliest colleagues. She’ll self-censor. In this way, the surveillance becomes panoptical.
Raj exemplified the most successful management strategy practised in Benny’s: he divided the plebs into a favoured section of predominantly experienced workers and a sub-class of inexperienced or socially-compromised novices. The favoured section was privileged with lenient discipline and exemption from the most awful cleaning tasks; the sub-class was universally pissed on. When Raj said “Cook me some food or I’m gonnae get in shit,” the favoured section philanthropically policed the sub-class. In these times of disposable labour, the relatively unproductive sub-class can do little to disturb this mechanism.
When recruiting managers, Benny’s had traditionally favoured ex-military personnel. By the turn of the millennium, however, the totalitarian style of management was losing favour. Although the old regimes appeared to be in control, they were actually more susceptible to rebellion than the modern, comparatively liberal systems built on division. There may be truths about society contained somewhere in these observations. At Benny’s, however, it was hard to develop such a train of thought. For example, consider the life of a bun man. A beeper decrees when toasting should start, a buzzer stipulates when it should end. There are two toasters to be worked on overlapping cycles, and the bun man’s timing is sometimes regulated by a corporate apparatchik with a stopwatch and an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. And yet, at Benny’s, bun toaster is as good as it gets. Take the poor dressings guy: he’s got eighteen seconds to apply condiments to nine buns—a wet slice of pickle, squirts of ketchup and mustard, and a pinch of the onions that come dry in a packet. And the dressings guy is a labour aristocrat next to the grill man. Every time the bun toaster sounds, the grill man must squeeze on a plastic glove and place the frozen discs of meat in the patterns demanded by a plaque above his head. Then he needs to close the grill, initiate the timer, and remove the glove before the lid of his other grill starts to rise. In four seconds, he’s supposed to sprinkle salt on every slab of meat and shovel the meat onto the dressed buns; then he’s supposed to scrape, squeegee, and wipe the grill, retrieve the plastic glove, and lay another pattern of meat. He has forty-six seconds to complete this cycle.
The only escape from this is to cook so much food that the production caller yells, “Enough!”
“Gie me a hold on everything,” said Raj, whose table was now congested with trays of unboxed burgers. “Clean the place up, come on!”
So much lettuce had been strewn on the floor that it looked like a lawn was forcing its way through the tiles. White cloths were dyed yellow with mustard, and every surface was smeared gory with ketchup. On the finger-marked stanchion of the bun stand, a slice of cheese was peeling from its right corner, and somehow a sliver of pickle had stuck to an overhead strip light (where it slowly dried, threatening to launch a kamikaze bombing mission). Raj surveyed the devastation. “Hang on, where the fuck’s Captain Spock?”
At Benny’s, the stock areas are called The Cave. It’s where you go for a private conversation or a five-minute skive. You stand in the stock room with one hand in a condiment box, ready to remove something as soon as the door opens, and if you really don’t want to be found, you go to the back of The Cave, past the bulk Coke and syrup lines, and into the chiller. That’s where I found Spocky. He was sitting on a box of shredded lettuce, reading his book in the sulphurous light. He didn’t hear me open the door, but as I pushed through the curtain of overlapping plastic slats, he stood up, leaving an incriminating dent impressed on the cardboard box. “What th—”
“It’s s–so hot out there.”
“Are you not cold in here?”
“It’s not too–too b–bad actually. I was getting a b–b–bit worried about the oxygen.”
“You’re not right in the head.”
He nodded in vague agreement and coughed into his hand.
“Get your arse back in there.”
“Wh–why?”
“Why? Cause you’ve gottae do some work.”
“Wh–why?”
“Cause that’s just the way shit is.”
After work, I said to Kit, “Let’s climb Breast Mountain. Come on, it’ll be quality.” From our window, the hill looked rubbery in the shimmering heat. “Come on, we’ll take the cider; we’ll watch the sunset.” It was one of those rare hot days, when radios play outdoors and men in shorts wash cars. Parents cleaned mud from paddling pools. Sweaty kids rested bikes against shady walls. In the sunshine, teenage girls lazed in bikini tops, wearing beach towels like sarongs.
Breast Mountain was a sort of no man’s land. It was a border zone between city and country, between this time and the past. Weeds
