‘What’s your name?’
‘Mick.’
He writes it down next to BREAKFAST: MICK WASH 1.
‘You’ve timed it well in fact — we had a guy left yesterday.’
They walk through the kitchen. He is staying calm. Heat, young men with shaved heads, the sound of a radio. They go past a heap of crates, and the kitchen throats into another room, smaller, dimmer than the main one. A very black man in dark green overalls is clattering a pile of frying pans into a sink.
‘Eric, take this fella down to the staff rooms.’ He turns to Mick. ‘Take whatever one is free and get yourself settled in for today. Breakfast starts at six so get here just before and I’ll sort you out some overalls,’ he says, and leaves.
The black guy hasn’t looked up from the sink, and Mick wonders a moment if he has understood. In a minute though he stretches off his rubber gloves and goes out through a fire door, the tap left running.
He follows behind him as they go down steps and through corridors, and it’s becoming clear enough that your man here isn’t going to speak, walking slowly ahead, the bare back of his neck shining under the fluorescent strips. At one point a stretch of tubing is out, and they walk on in near complete darkness until the next lit corridor, then down more steps, right into the bowels.
‘Here,’ the black man says, and goes back the way they came.
He is left in a long corridor with doors both sides. One of them is open, and he sees inside that it is a bathroom. He goes down the line of doors. Low music coming from one; snoring, another. Otherwise the place is silent. He stands there, wondering what is his next move. This is mental. Unreal. It’s that far removed from reality in fact that it’s hard to believe there’s not some kind of chicanery going on, the auld brainbox playing tricks. But to these people it’s just ordinary; he is ordinary even, that’s the strangest thing. All of them — the manager, the chef, the kitchen porter — it’s like they expected to see him here. He hasn’t caused the barest ripple of an interruption. Go downstairs and go in your room and you’re working at six the morrow, and everything just carries on as it was.
Somebody is coming out of a door down the way. A girl. She’s in her pyjamas and barie feet. He stands there rooted as she comes toward him, and he’s about to have to say something when she turns into the bathroom. She didn’t seem to notice him even. What, are they on drugs, these people? He feels like he’s totally lost his bearings, the quiet sounds of snoring and music and humming strip lights around him, a girl in her pyjamas, and he’s losing track already if it’s day or if it’s night. The toilet is flushing. She comes out and starts walking back to her room.
‘Excuse me,’ he calls out. She doesn’t hear him.
‘Excuse me.’
She looks back blankly.
‘Can ye tell me which of these is free, please?’ He can see now that she’s been asleep, the eyes half closed.
She shrugs her shoulders. ‘I think maybe this one.’ She points to a door by the bathroom, and pads off.
He pushes the door open slowly and the shapes inside become clearer as the light from the corridor filters through. The room is empty, the bed made. He finds the switch and the bulb takes a moment stammering on. It is like a compartment in a storage warehouse, threadbare and windowless; tiled drop ceiling. There is a sink and a chipped white Formica wardrobe, a waste bucket, a chair and a small table with an alarm clock, the hands pointing just the back of four. Unreality has hold of him now, carrying him numbly on as he arranges his few clothes in the wardrobe, takes off his shoes, puts them under the table and gets lying down on the bed. Careful. He needs to be careful. Too easy to get maunderly and think about things — the lack of daylight, for one, Christ — but actually what he should be thinking is good positive thoughts. He has found himself a job. He is on his feet. He has got himself what he was looking for. What was that, well? It was an anonymous room in a place with no reminders and no bastards to pity him or stick the boot on. The image of Craig in the cemetery comes suddenly to him, but he knows he has to shut it away, shut it right away. He looks about him. See if he gives the room a bit of a spruce up it might not be so bad. A mini television. Plants. Maybe he could knock a couple of plastic ones out the restaurant even — there ye go, now you’re talking man, now you’re bloody talking.
There is noise outside the door just before five: foreign voices, shouts, a woman laughing. Then it goes silent for half an hour, until all at once the noise returns and there’s a few minutes of activity before it quiets down again. After that, there’s just the occasional sound: doors shutting, a voice coming past, the flush of the toilet through the wall behind his head. Later the evening he leaves the room and finds his way eventually out of the hotel, making his way over to the terminal, where he gets a jacket tattie and a pint.
He doesn’t sleep the best, so the early start isn’t a problem. He is up at the kitchen for quarter to six, waiting in the potwash. Through in the cooking area he can hear the Irish chef instructing his shaven-headed team to get set up. After a few minutes he comes into the potwash holding a fryer smoking with bacon fat, and sees Mick standing by the machine.
‘Shite, yes.’
He goes off a moment and returns with a pair of overalls. ‘He’ll show you, but it’s easy enough. Wash 1 means you stand at this sink and scrub most of the crap off everything, then you stack it in these trays for him to put through the machine. And you clean the kitchen stuff.’ He points at the bacon pan hissing in the sink.
There is nowhere to get changed so he puts the overalls on in there, on top of his clothes. And that is the first thing he learns: not to wear anything underneath. Within half an hour he is pure sweltering from his exertions and the heat of the machine. Wash 2 is fine but. He’s got the right idea — just the bare black skin visible under his overalls whenever he bends down to stack something — he’s genuine fine and breezy. No that he’s said as much: he’s hardly spoke a word since he came in. It isn’t the same one as yesterday — he’s taller, this guy, and he’s fucking fast. It’s hard work keeping up putting the plates and cups in the trays before he grabs and trammels them along the runners into the machine — the hoosh of steam as he pulls it down and sets it running. Thirty seconds and they come out dry, it seems, because he piles the lot straight up and takes it over to the racks. When he does speak, it’s to tell Mick that he’s doing it wrong — ‘No. No’ — and he’ll stand in front of him and start stacking the trays himself. It’s doable but. He is doing it. He is managing. First day on the job and he’s on top of it.
It is a separate world but, the potwash. He’d’ve thought it would be different to this — all noise and shouting and Gordon Ramsay, waiters running about with their arses on fire — but it isn’t. It’s oddly quiet in there, cut off, just him and Wash 2 scrubbing and stacking, scrubbing and stacking. There is the clanging and jouncing of ovens and grills from in the kitchen, and each while a chef coming through, shouting, ‘Hot pan,’ but even through there, there’s no noise, no patter. Strange. It’s fine but. It suits him. Ye keep the head down, ye do your job. Scrub, stack; scrub, stack. The faces of waiters appearing at the hatch above the sink to dump the dirties on the ledge. You new, pal? What’s your name? Good to meet you, how’s it going? They don’t speak. They don’t see him even. Fine. That’s fine. And there’s something quite satisfying about the work as well — no exactly stimulating but it’s mechanical, you get into a rhythm, repeating the actions, challenging yourself to get the pile down. The empty ledge. A wee pat-the-back moment of job satisfaction. See that, Wash 2? First shift but no messing, eh, no fucking messing about, look.