I’ll send it to you in the transporter beam.” You could hear Raj laughing as the door swung closed.
“He’s awright for a Paki, eh?” said Gordon, crashing the grill tongs onto the grease trap.
“What?”
“I says Raj is awright for a Paki.”
“Aye, suppose.”
Gordon had started at Benny’s two months after I had, but we’d known each other since school. He’d been planning to follow his uncle into the jewellery trade, but when that didn’t work out, I persuaded him to join me in the burger game. I enjoyed working with Gordon even if it was hard to talk above the background noise—metal trays cymballed steel surfaces, grills hissed, bun spatulas clattered, fry baskets crashed through the automatic racking machine. “Someone hit that fuckin’ timer!” shouted Raj because the “Time to wash your hands” beeper had been ringing for two minutes—preep preep, preep preep, preep preep—like a phone call that nobody wants to answer.
“Woah, where you going?” said Raj, stopping Lucy as she walked through the kitchen.
She paused by the milkshake machine, holding her apron. “Kieran says I’ve to count a float.”
“Kieran!”
“What?”
“Did you tell Lucy to count a float?”
“Yeah, she’s going on tills.”
“Fuck off,” said Raj, brandishing the floor plan. “I’ve got Lucy and you’ve got Captain Picard through there.”
Kieran studied the plan and stroked his tie. “Okay, but whose shift is it, yeah?”
“It doesnae matter whose shift it is; you cannae steal my staff just cause you fancy them.”
Lucy looked embarrassed, and Kieran pulled the keys from his pocket, tossing them from one hand to the other. Everybody fancied Lucy. “If you’d ever been on the ABC shift supervisors course then you’d know about PROSE—Plan, Review, Organise, Supervise, Encourage. There’s the plan, yeah? Here’s me reviewing it, ‘Hmmm.’ And here’s me organising: ‘Lucy, you’re on tills today.’ Okay?”
The milkshake machine had been making an enteric growling noise, and now Raj removed the lid and peered inside. “Buzz!” he said. “Get us some shake mix!” He turned back to Kieran, wielding the lid like a shield. “No danger are you swapping Lucy for that prick. No danger.”
“Raj, at the end of the day, I’m the shift runner, so all the staff, including you, are under my jurisprudence, yeah? It’s not about any one area; it’s about maximising sales and improving the performance of the whole team. Yeah?” Kieran tossed his keys higher, caught them, and slipped them into his pocket. “Go on, love,” he said, patting the small of Lucy’s back. “Put your apron away for me.” So Lucy strolled past the chicken vats and paused by the backroom sinks, where Spocky was attempting to clock in. I watched as she said something, took his card from between his fingers, swiped it, pressed yes, and left him to survey his new environment.
Spocky was so slightly built that at a casual glance he appeared taller than he really was. Perhaps this was why he’d been given enormous polyester slacks that trailed in the seeping sink water. Holding up these circus clown trousers, Spocky stood in his red and white striped uniform, gazing at the swamps of grease beneath the fry station. He studied the polished white walls, the cascading faces of stainless steel, and the mayonnaise-crusted ceiling tiles. Meanwhile, above a stack of defrosted buns, the electric fly trap sparked blue, incinerating another victim with a short fizz-crackle.
3
Listen, the only good thing about Benny’s was the craic you could have with your colleagues. Now, looking back from beyond a train wreck of friendships, I’m nostalgic for this teenage camaraderie. When I think about Dundule, I think about Gordon: Gordon, aged thirteen, swaggering into school with tramlines shaved into his head; Gordon, on his first shift at Benny’s, returning from B&Q having failed to buy a tub of tartan paint; Gordon, in full Highland dress, marrying a girl who was, technically, his sister (I know! I know!); and Gordon, departing on some mad odyssey, leaving me to deal with the police. I think about Kit, too. I met Kit at work, but she soon became my girlfriend. The last time I saw her, she was pregnant with someone else’s child, but at one point, Kit and I thought we were going to get married. I think about Buzz, who could get you any drugs you wanted, and Spocky, whose real name, Owen, I almost never used. But most of all, perhaps, when I think about Dundule, I think about Lucy.
Like me, Lucy only scooped fries part time. During my second year at Benny’s, I was re-sitting my school exams at Dundule College of Further Education, while Lucy was already at university, halfway through a sociology degree. It was Lucy who persuaded me onto the politics course at the University of Central Scotland. At that time, Lucy could have persuaded me to do just about anything.
The first class I ever attended was halfway through my first term. My arm was in a sling (I’d been stabbed the week before), and though I was late, the class hadn’t started. We were in room 7G in James McPherson Tower, Melvyn Macveigh’s room, where, because Melvyn Macveigh taught Marxism, the desk-graffiti said stuff like: “Dyslexics of the world untie”; “Academics of the world unite: you have a world to win and nothing to lose but your chairs.” At ten past the hour, Macveigh strode in without apology and slapped his briefcase on the table nearest the door. “It amazes me that they entrust a train company to a man who considers a hot air balloon a desirable mode of transport. Right, what are we supposed to be doing? Ah, I think I’m supposed to stimulate you with this handout.” In brown cords and salmon shirt, he slithered around the rectangle of desks, placing an A4 sheet before each student. When he reached me, he paused and whispered, “Politics and society?” as if circulating profiteroles. I nodded and he affected surprise, rubbing his head as he returned to his desk. “Miles Austin? No? Ashley Zechstein? Wayne Foster?”
“Aye.”
“Ahhh!” he said, as though a long-standing mystery had been contentedly resolved. “Bene qui latuit bene vixit, I suppose. Shall we have a moment to digest this handout?”
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, revolution in Romania and celebrations in Wenceslas Square, the USSR ceased to exist at midnight on the 31st December 1991. With the categorical refutation of Communism in Eastern Europe, has the spectre of Marxism finally been exorcised? In 1991, the Wall Street Journal was less sure: “Marx’s analysis can be applied to the amazing disintegration of communist regimes built on the foundations of his thought but unfaithful to his prescriptions.”
“Well?”
“...”
“...”
A plump girl in a stripy sweater clutched her Beginner’s Marx; a mature student sighed, rubbed his beard, and squeezed the bridge of his nose; a boy in a rugby shirt thumbed that month’s Economist. With every moment that passed, the chair creaking, heating humming, background noise grew louder, until you imagined you could hear breaths and heartbeats, and you looked at Melvyn Macveigh, who continued to stare out the window, happy to wait
