The large room I walk into is the finishing shop. Just inside the door there are pallets of shrink-wrapped magazines shoulder to shoulder, twenty-five in each rack, and twelve racks high, ready for the distribution centre, and right in front the conveyors, long and low, and one so new
you can still see the blue paint. Last week when I was here with the foreman, waiting to be shown round, a little man came down from his platform. His forearms were as big as Popeye’s, and he grabbed my shoulders in an iron grip.
‘Are you going to work here?’ he said.
‘I think so.’
‘Don’t,’ he said, pulling me away to his station on the conveyor. ‘Look. Do you know how long I’ve been working here? I’ve been working here for fifteen years, and in all those years I’ve been standing in front of this box, stuffing printed matter into that hole, and do you know what?’
‘No.’
‘It never gets full.’
‘Doesn’t it?’
‘Do you understand what I’m saying? It never gets full!’ He held me round the shoulders so tight, it was hard to say anything but:
‘Let go for fuck’s sake.’ Luckily the foreman came up, and the man let go of me, and we moved on.
‘You won’t be working here,’ he said. ‘You’ll be working on the rotary press.’
‘Fine,’ I said.
‘Don’t mind him. He’s a philosopher.’
‘Right.’
The rotary press is at the other end of the hall and down the stairs. I walk slowly down the two landings to the clocking-in machine. I find my card and stick it in the slot and the sound makes me jump. The ink is black – one
minute past seven it is red – and then I enter the cloakroom.
All the mirrors, all the basins with the
No washing feet or clothes
signs, the ugly yellow walls just like they were at Rosenhoff School, the grey metal cabinets one after the other, old men and young bikers, suddenly like big birds with their shirt tails flapping over bare thighs and white calves and then all in their blue work gear. Confident, seasoned.
I hate the thought of flapping my wings among them and try to delay it, but in the end I have to, and when I have finished, the new work clothes with their sharp creases are stiff and dark blue compared to the lighter, faded blue of the others. Behind me someone is whistling a wedding march, and I itch all over. I head for the door.
The concourse is strange and quiet and not as I remember it from my guided tour. The printing presses just
stand
there, three floors high, not a grain of dust stirring, and the air is cold against my face. I walk past the Number Three and on through a large door to the next concourse where only one press is standing, but this one is even bigger. Here is where I am going to work. At this machine. Seven men sit in two separate groups: printers and assistants. I am the one they’re waiting for, and when I enter, they all look towards the door, and a frighteningly tall, powerful man stands up and goes towards the console. I haven’t said hello to any of them, and I think maybe I should, but nobody seems to expect anything of the kind and I stand out on the floor between the two groups like an idiot with my arms hanging down like a pair of wooden planks. The tall man turns and yells:
‘TROND!’
‘Yes!’ someone tries to yell back, but his voice cracks at the top.
‘You tell this new . . . what’s your name?’ he shouts to me.
‘Audun Sletten,’ I say. My voice sounds reedy.
‘You explain to this Letten what his job is!’ Goliath shouts to the one called Trond. ‘He’s on C press.’
‘Sletten!’ I shout. Everyone looks at me and grins.
‘What?’
‘My name is Sletten, not LETTEN!’ I yell and feel my face itching. There is an echo in the room, and Letten bounces around like a ping-pong ball up under the ceiling.
‘Oh my God, did I get it wrong?’ Goliath says with a smirk. ‘It’s these ear protectors. They’re no good. My hearing’s damaged.’
Blood’s pounding in my ears, sweat running down my back. I clench my fists and raise them slowly, but no one even looks at me. I can hear their mocking laughter, and then they all get up and walk towards the press, and they are all bigger than me, and they laugh and shake their heads.
‘That was some entrance you made,’ Trond says, coming over to show me what they call C press.
‘Very funny,’ I say.
Trond is lanky and thin, has a Keith Richards haircut and a ring in his left ear and close up, he seems pretty normal.
‘What do you think of the Stones?’ he asks.
‘They’re OK,’ I say, ‘but Hendrix is better.’
‘Jimi Hendrix is a Negro, for Christ’s sake. And he’s dead, isn’t he?’
‘That’s true, but without the Negroes the Stones would have played the tuba. And that’s a fact.’
‘Hendrix is OK,’ Trond says, ‘but myself, I prefer the Stones.’
‘So I can see,’ I say, and Trond grins.
Goliath starts the press on slow, there is a jerk and everything begins to roll slowly.
‘All right,’ Trond says, ‘in front of you there are four drums, one on top of the other. Above and below them there are the ink rollers. The ink is pumped from the barrels. The printing plates are attached to the top and bottom drums, the two in the middle have rubber blankets. The ink rollers rotate against the plates, the plates against the rubber and the rubber against the paper. On the back of the paper web, there’s a huge steel cylinder that the paper wraps around. You can’t see it now, but it weighs so many bloody tons you can’t even imagine. If anything goes wrong when it’s moving, all hell will break loose.’
‘Right,’ I say.
‘Right,’ Trond says. ‘When we start up, no old ink on the rubber, it will clog, and then the blankets split, and the print is ruined, and every time we start up, the blankets have to be soaking wet or else the paper gets stuck to the ink when the plates slam on, and then it rips, and we have to spend hours with tweezers getting off all the stuff that’s got stuck. It’s a crap job. When I say wet, I mean wet, but not with water. White spirit. There’s a bucket on the stand behind you. Right?’
‘Right.’
‘You must never use water, spit, cry or piss on the paper.
It can’t take it, it rips straight away, and we have to re-thread the whole paper web. We do that as little as possible. It’s really boring work and nobody gets a break. When you wash the blankets, you use rubber gloves and those rags there, under the bucket stand. If you don’t, your skin will go red and after a couple of weeks it starts to fall off. Right?’
‘Right,’ I say.
‘If you feel the rag being pulled from your hands, never do the first thing that occurs to you.’
‘No? And what’s the first thing that occurs to me?’
‘Holding on to it. What happens then, we call losing your maidenhead. It often happens to new people. So let go and stop the press. The red button is there on your left. Right?’
‘Right,’ I say, and worry a little about that maidenhead thing, but I don’t want to ask. I make a mental note of the red button.
‘OK, wash away.’ And I wash. I’m clumsy and nervous and hold the rag too tight, wondering where my maidenhead is. It takes some time, it’s like the ink is glued on, but then most of it is gone, and the blankets are wet, and Trond yells:
‘READY!’ And suddenly it’s like standing on the runway at Gardermoen airport as a jumbo jet takes off. The press shrieks and howls and BANG! BANG! go the drums as they hit the cylinder, and the roar gets louder as the speed increases. I cover my ears. Trond looks at me and grins, points his finger to his temple and turns it. OK, there is something I don’t know, and now he will tell me. Trond steps behind the press and comes back with two small boxes. He gives one to me, and inside are two yellow foam rubber thingies.
‘Watch. Like this!’ he shouts in my ear and rolls the thingies between his fingers until they are small and narrow, and then he stuffs them in his ears. I do the same with mine. The roar subsides, the foam rubber expands, it’s a strange and slightly awkward feeling, the noise becomes distant, and it’s a little like being high. If anyone tapped me on the head, there would be an echo.
Trond shouts again.
‘WHAT?’
‘You’ll have to learn sign language! It’s a hundred decibels in here!’
Inside the soundproof room we remove the earplugs, and even though it’s supposed to be quiet in here, all sounds seem sharper than before. My first thought is to put the plugs back in.
‘In six months you’ll have ear canals like a cow’s arse,’ Trond says. ‘This being your debut, Samuel will be first on the stacker and then me. But don’t wander off. If the paper tears, and you’re not here, you’ll have Long John on your back.’
Long John: that would be Goliath. Goliath suits him better, but I guess I’ll keep that to myself. I am not ready to play David.
14
BANG!
I jump up from my post at the stacker, and I am up on the gallery within seconds. The paper has torn for the fifth time today and it’s not yet ten o’clock. The whole time it’s a hassle, I charge up the stairs like a madman to get there before the whole shebang catches fire. Something is not right. Each time the machine stops, the paper starts to burn.
The heat from the gas burners hits me as I run along the gallery and fling the small doors open. On my forearms, the few hairs I have left curl like tiny worms. I have been fast, but not fast enough. The flames lick out at the end of the top heater, and I rip the fire extinguisher off its stand and blast away, and films I have seen roll through my head, disaster films with flames out of control devouring everything, and here I stand with my three-litre extinguisher! If the machine oil catches fire, I’m done for.
The flames don’t go out, they spread, and soon the paper web is ablaze. I am so tired I am burning, my chest is hot and my back is freezing, and I run along the gallery and around the machine and grab the second extinguisher and stand there alone between ceiling and floor in the large concourse shooting from the hip like some crazed Western hero.
‘SAMUEL!’ I yell. Jesus, I’m new here, why don’t they help? Then I see it: it’s the gas in the burners, they’re not
switched off. It’s supposed to cut off automatically when the machine stops, but there is a blue hiss in there. No wonder it’s on fire.
‘SAMUEL! FOR FUCK’S SAKE, SWITCH THE GAS OFF!’
Samuel is sitting inside the soundproof room. I can see him when I bend down: he is smoking and reading an old
Playboy
, or looking at the pictures, that is, because he can’t read English. My voice must have cut through. He gets up from his chair, puts the magazine down and grinds out the cigarette with a steel-toed shoe. I have thought about it many times: why does he wear those protective shoes? The heaviest thing he has ever dropped on them is a pack of cigarettes. He goes over to the console and switches the gas off, steps back to his chair and lights another cigarette, opens
Playboy
, and he doesn’t even send me a glance. I stand up, there is the taste of ash in my mouth. I lick my lips, but it won’t go away.
In fact, we have the same job. Assistant rotary press operator, it says in the files. But as I am thirty years younger than him and new to the job, Samuel has awarded himself an age increment, which means that every time something happens, he stays in his chair, while I rush around like a maniac.
Of course, there are Trond and Jan, but Jan is off sick, and Trond is on the toilet and has been there for a long time. Trond is the ballet dancer of the workplace, he finds his way everywhere, he can turn his hand to
everything
, he is full of humour as dry as the air we work in and has a knack of being on the toilet each time the paper tears.
I slide down the banister from the gallery and cut the paper just before the fire reaches the one-ton heavy roll, and then I race back up again. With the gas switched off it’s easy to control the flames. I pull out the rest of the paper, sweep up a hundred metres of red-hot web and stuff the whole lot into the container for inflammable litter.
I brush the soot off my overalls. My forearms feel as dry as old cardboard, I am so tired, I am sweating and freezing, and I sit down on the lowest step of the stairs and roll a cigarette. To thread a new web alone is impossible.
Maggi walks past in a light blue coat with a notepad in her hand. She is forty-five years old, newly divorced and always cheerful.
‘Goodness me, are you here on your own?’ she says.
I do not answer, and she asks:
‘Anything you need from the shop?’ and stands with her pencil at the ready. Her job is to run errands, fill the coffee machine and make everybody happy.
‘Petterøe 3 and rolling paper. Rizla.’ She writes it down as she is leaving and waves over her shoulder and is gone. With numb fingers, I roll the shreds of tobacco I have left. The cigarette looks more like a trumpet, but I light up, and my hands are shaking, and then the foreman enters the room. His coat is spotless white, and he stops in front of me, looking at his watch as though it were some kind of new invention.
‘Tell me something, Sletten, haven’t you been here long enough to know the break starts at eleven and not at ten?’
I get to my feet, drop the cigarette and stub it out with my shoe.
‘And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there are some very serviceable ashtrays placed here and there on this floor.’ He turns on his heel and brushes invisible dust off his coat. There is a bald patch at the back of his head, and his hand automatically shoots up to cover it, and then he is off through the doors at the far end of the hall. The doors slam shut, and the sound slams through my head, and there’s a humming in there, for this is my father leaving, the way I saw him the last time he was home five years ago. It was Sunday morning, and we hadn’t seen him for two weeks, and suddenly the door opens, and in he comes wearing the same clothes he wore when he left.
‘Hello,’ I say. I feel timid, but he doesn’t answer anyway, just walks right past me to the stairs, his eyes fixed straight ahead, and then there is the smell of him, the smell of his jacket, his body, the smell of bonfire and forest and long-forgotten sunny Sundays, only so strong and unfamiliar in here. He hasn’t shaved since he was last at home, maybe hasn’t washed, either, and there are grey streaks in his beard I didn’t know were there. I turn, and my mother is standing in the living room doorway, she doesn’t speak, just gazes up the stairs, and I gaze up the stairs. We can hear him in the bedroom, he is taking his rucksack from the cupboard, pulls out the drawer of the bedside table, and we know what he’s got there, the police never found it, and there is a clunk as he drops it into the rucksack. My mother mumbles something I can’t make out, and upstairs he stuffs more things into the rucksack, and then he comes back down. I hold my breath, I do not breathe, my mother does not breathe, and he is outside, slamming the door behind
him, and it slams through my head, and he didn’t even look at me.