Porky (19 page)

He shifted, and there was a silence.

‘Fine as yours, once, your Mum's hair. Wrap it round my finger, I would, tight as tight . . . all sparkling . . . You'll be off, lovely-looking girl like you. They'll be making you manager.'

‘Hold on, I've only been there three months.'

‘Brains like yours . . . sky's the limit.'

‘Haven't got much brains.'

‘No time left for your Dad.'

I'd finished snipping. I turned round.

‘No time left for a hug,' he said.

‘Of course I'll have time.' I put my arms around him. I didn't fear him now; I felt guilty, because I wanted his words to be true.

‘I'll be getting your blouse dirty.'

‘Don't worry. We wear overalls to work.'

‘Don't want you mussed up, do we?'

He pressed his face against mine and released me. He asked so little of me. That was how we were, now.

That was early January. Next morning I was travelling to work. Each year they put up Christmas trees outside the factories: three big ones outside Delta Flexed Products, six along the roof of Abercorn Computers, one giant tree in the Sheraton car park. The bus stopped outside Dataloop Systems. People shuffled off, coughing and wheezing. I rubbed the glass. Men stood on the roof of the factory, disconnecting the neon sign which had blazed ‘Dataloop Wishes You a Merry Xmas'. I watched the script being lowered. Down in the forecourt, more men were winching down a tree.

‘Six months to go,' said the woman beside me.

‘Pardon?'

‘Six bloody months, till me summer hols.'

The tree fell into a lorry. All these years I'd counted the trees from Dad's van. Now my childhood was over, at last. I was a wage-earner and I was starting to feel like a visitor in my own home. In that stuffy bus I was breathing the sweet, sharp scent of freedom.

‘Six months, day in, day out,' she said.

‘Gruesome,' I lied. ‘What a gruesome thought.'

You might not realize it, but there's a public road runs right across the airport from one side to the other; a road with bus stops and all, for people who work in the area. Passengers like you, with flights to catch, drive through that tunnel to the terminal buildings. Remember how desperately I'd run along there once?

The road I'm describing, the one I took each day, isn't used much because its sign says ‘Maintenance Areas', which puts people off. But in fact it cuts right across, from the A4 one side to the A30 the other. It's a wide, empty road, like a road in a dream. It crosses the incoming runway. As the big planes roar down so close, you think they'll strip off the bus roof like a plaster and leave you staring into space. But the shadow moves over you, and the bus shakes, and three hundred people will be watching the tarmac rise to meet them, tense for the bumpety-bump of Britain.

The place where I worked stood beyond the airport, out along the dual carriageway, between Rank Xerox and a building site. JT Catering was a brick box. Its air-vents breathed out curry fumes. Oriental airlines were some of its customers, that's why. It was mostly women who worked at JT; they came from the estates out beyond Hounslow and they were nearly all of them Asians. Their husbands dropped them off on the way to work; they'd hurry across to the entrance, these ladies, clutching their overcoats around their flapping saris; it was always windy because of the traffic. Some of them drove themselves in Datsuns and Toyotas; three women together, giggling as they bounced on to the verge, to park.

JT had contracts with lots of other airlines; it prepared their meals. I worked upstairs, the first weeks. You have to keep your wits when you're sorting cutlery. The clatter was deafening and it was so steamy that by lunch-break my mascara was down my cheeks. Outside, vans delivered crates of soiled plates. They were pushed through a thick plastic flap. Then they rattled along to the washing-up. Turbaned men stood there, in the mist. I never saw the dirty plates; I never knew what the passengers left on their trays, up there in the sky. By the time it got to me it was clean and slippery-hot. I had to sort out each knife, fork and spoon, according to the airline emblem stamped on its handle; then I slotted them into cellophane sheaths, ready for the next flight.

The days passed in a clattering blur. I forgot everything about myself. It was like school, it was so bright and normal, but it was more restful than school because I didn't know any of the people. Besides, most of them talked in their Indian languages.

At lunch-break you could walk to the canteen two ways: one way through what they said was the butchery, and the other way through the kitchens. I avoided the butchery, so it was some days before I met Jock. I preferred the kitchen route.

You would have liked it too. The first kitchen cooked Japanese: all stainless steel, with a strip of fish laid out and a few spring onions. Perhaps it was Chinese; I never liked to ask. The next kitchen was Indian, and quite different. They had these giant vats, bubbling. One bubbled orange and one bubbled brown, all oily on top. The aroma was wonderful; I'd always liked curries. Men stood there stirring them with ladles the size of boat paddles. They'd pause when I walked by, and stare, their brown faces perspiring. As I said, there weren't many English girls at JT and most of them were supervisors and older than me.

The Indian women never looked up. They didn't do the cooking; they dolloped out the food. They stood in a row, and my heart lifted when I first saw those stacked foil containers. The women wore rubber gloves; their caps bobbed as they moved, putting a handful of steaming rice into each dish. Then they spooned in the curry beside it, and pressed one green chilli into the rice, artful as flower arrangers. I wondered if they envied the food the direction it would travel. I did. I don't mean Asia; I mean anywhere. I thought that
abroad
would change me. I dawdled, watching them pinching down the tops. The dishes were slotted into the narrow metal galleys, ready for boarding. See, I knew the jargon, even though I'd never been inside a plane. I repeated the words to myself.

It might sound mundane to you, the work I did. But that money mattered. And there I was, sealed off in that steamy brick box, with my thoughts to myself. I was needed in the way the others were needed. Can you see how much that meant to me? And nobody knew the first thing about me. I was a new person, not just to them but to myself as well. That's what made it alarming, meeting Jock.

I was slimming, as I said, so I didn't eat much lunch. Just some cottage cheese, perhaps, and salad. The food was good because they used the same ingredients as for the flights. There were always curries, of course, for the staff, and fry-ups for the English chefs. I'd soon finish eating and then there wasn't a lot to do. I sat reading magazines; other people smoked but I'd never taken up the habit – you wouldn't, if you'd heard my parents' dawn chorus.

Sometimes I wandered outside, if it was sunny, but there wasn't anywhere to go. Just the traffic out there, slowing down at the lights and starting off again. I wasn't the age to close my eyes and will the next car to be red, or white, or whatever it was – I've forgotten now. I'd watch the planes coming in, their lights winking in the sunshine. But you felt out of place, standing on the road verge. So I usually stayed inside and read other people's newspapers in the ladies', and wandered about. That's how I found myself in the butchery.

Slumped in the doorway was a new delivery, two plastic sacks of meat, the blood pressed against the sides as if they'd haemorrhaged. Beyond it was a stainless-steel room, the same as the others, and a big man turning round.

‘I'll be buggered,' he said. ‘Frank's little girl.'

He put down the knife and wiped his hands on his apron.

‘Sent you round, has he, to check up on me?'

I paused. ‘I'm working here.'

‘Only joking, wasn't I.' He nodded at my overalls. ‘Been here long?'

‘Ten days.'

He wiped his hands again. His apron was streaked with brown.

‘Now you mention it, your Dad said you was a working girl now.'

Jock was one of my Dad's drinking mates. He was a harmless enough bloke, but it shocked me to see him here.

‘Never said it was here, did he? Sly bugger.'

I'd kept it vague, that was why. Dad didn't know where I worked. I looked at Jock's ruddy face. It was as if I'd been in a room thinking I was alone, getting undressed, and then seeing two eyes at the window.

‘Laugh a minute, this place,' he said. ‘Catch me being prejudiced. Which bit you on?'

‘Department Two.'

‘Better keep an eye on you.'

‘Why?' I backed away and stood at the rotisserie.

‘Catch it if I didn't. You know your old man. Thinks the world of his Heather.'

I watched the smeared glass window. Behind it the chickens turned, glistening yellow. They turned, showing the holes of their bottoms.

‘Bashful, eh? He does, honest. Always talking about his little girl.'

I made my escape. Back at the counter I couldn't concentrate. That night, most likely, there were the wrong passengers licking the wrong spoons, up in the black sky.

I hadn't got away, of course. Jock or no Jock, you don't escape just by taking a job. Not when you're still at home. But it was a start. I felt like a plane, poised for take-off. But how would I get off the ground? I had to believe they'd accept me at British Airways, otherwise there was no point in drawing breath each day. But they don't recruit from backgrounds like mine; not if it shows.

It was up to me. I was on my own, as I always was; as I am at this minute, telling you this. I had to get away, with no help from anybody but myself. They have to do it through their looks, women have; people fool themselves if they think a nice face doesn't help. Once, in a pub with Naz, I was picked up by someone big in cosmetics. He said I'd make a buyer, a well-groomed girl like myself, and why didn't he give me a tinkle? Perhaps we could discuss it over a meal. There was no phone at home so I told him some numbers out of my head; there's probably some old dear in Hull or some place who had this man ringing her up in 1977. I told him in a fluster because Naz was there. But you see what I mean . . . I could work my way upwards, if I tried.

Concentrating on this, I managed to lose weight. Mumbling into my recorder, I reached Intermediate in my French. I had always kept myself well-groomed, the cosmetics man had been right about that; it was probably a reaction against the mud. So I had some things going for me.

I remember one Thursday, my day off, when I was in the launderette. This was before Dad bought our washing machine. I was sitting beside the dryer, reading the beauty tips in
Cosmopolitan.
In the corner of my eye I saw moving blackness, through the window, which meant that school had finished. All those blazers, dawdling. I kept my back turned. I told myself that I'd left that behind. Kid's stuff, I said. As I emptied the dryer I heard them calling to each other across the street. Soon I'd be living in London, miles from here; that's what I'd planned.

I pulled out my white nylon pullover. Dad's socks clung to it. They were black socks; they stuck like dried-up leeches. I peeled them off with a crackle of static.

Just then someone stopped outside.

It was Jonathan. He was holding hands with a girl I recognized, from the class below mine.

I turned back, quickly. Jonathan's hair was longer now, curling round his ears. I told myself it looked silly. He looked silly, long and gaunt. I waited for a moment; in the reflection I saw their shapes move away. Then I stood up and tried to fold up the white pullover. Trouble was, my legs kept bending; so I sat down again.

When I got home I told Dad I wasn't going to wash his bloody clothes any more.

‘I'm not your bloody wife!' I shouted.

We gaped at each other. Outside Teddy was whooping.

‘And I'm not Teddy's bloody mother!'

We stayed staring. I'd never shouted at him like that.

Suddenly there was a crash. Teddy started shrieking. Dad and I rushed outside.

Teddy had been climbing the drainpipe; it had come away in his hand. He lay on the ground, beside it. I flung myself down and held him. He gripped me, his arms and legs tight around me. He'd only cut his lip. I squeezed him.

He stopped crying soon, but I couldn't stop. I heaved and shuddered, soaking his shoulder. He clung to me.

‘My darling boy . . . my darling . . .' I gripped his filthy hand and covered it with kisses.

Standing near, Dad was blowing his nose too. When I finally disentangled myself and stood up, my tights were laddered and my skirt muddy. So much for grooming. Who cares about bloody grooming?

You'd think it would be easy, leaving a home like mine. You'd think it would be a relief. But it's never that simple, is it?

Naz worked downstairs, in desserts. That's how I met her. I was promoted, you see, on account of my performance, so two weeks later they sent me downstairs to Tray Prep.

The crockery rattled its way there on a rubber belt. It was quieter downstairs and not so smelly because the only cooking was done at the far end, in the bakery. It was open-plan. The kings worked here: the First Class Chef and the Pâtissier. They'd both come from the big London hotels. None of us dared speak directly to them; messages were passed through their assistants. I was shown around, my first day. In the pâtisserie there were gâteaux, and for Economy Class there were tin trays like at school, full of Bakewell tart and a sticky, nutty stuff that the Middle Eastern airlines ordered, Arabs having a sweet tooth. In the Cold Room, a dark place lined with shelves, there was a row of milky eyes. That was the crème caramels.

I wasn't shown round the First Class section, where the other chef worked. I got to know that only too well later, but when I started all I saw was this tall man, in his white hat, shouting at his underlings. Boxes of lobsters were carried over to him like maidens, their claws bound and their feelers nodding.