Of course but he’s jumped the gun. There he is thinking he’s such a big man for keeping his piles down, while there must be hardly anybody in the restaurant. It doesn’t start coming properly until an hour in. Plate piles begin growing on the ledge, tall teetering columns of bowls and cups; the cutlery bucket swelling like a haemorrhoid; and the waiters finding their tongues at last, beefing that they’ve no space to put the dirties. He’s not keeping up and he’s soon enough sweating all over the place in a panic, desperate to get it down before the Paddy chef comes through and sees.
Wash 2 is fair agity getting with him by now, butting over to get the piles and stack them himself. And then, just when it’s coming on the busiest, the baldies start barging in with all their pots and pans, fat-fryer baskets, chopping boards, long metal trays lined with burnt knickers of egg. His heart is racing. He gets rushing about, losing his scourer, piles increasing all around him. He trips on a heap of pans by his feet and near goes on his neck. Bracing his hands on the sink, he takes a couple of deep breaths, the black guy glaring over at him. Get beasted in just. Get the piles down before the chef sees, finish this shift — then he can put down a marker, then he’ll know where he’s at. He leans toward the machine, ignoring Wash 2, pulls over an empty tray and gets loading.
Toward the end of the service, as he’s thinking it’s started to quiet down, they begin coming with great long dishes and glass bowls in from the restaurant. He gets scraping them out, chucking leftover sausages and grapefruit segments into the bin, until one of the waiters starts going through him, saying he has to wait until they’ve cleared all the food themselves. It must get reused, he realizes. All of it, too, they clear the lot. Even the eggs, man, Christ.
By the time it’s over he is pure wheezing, blowing for tugs. And that was breakfast — Christ knows what like the lunch service is, or dinner. Or if he has to work them all, either, that’s another thing he’s still in the dark about. Still but he got through it. His standards were up in the air quick enough, but he got through it — congealed crockery going straight in the tray and the scrub, stack of earlier turned into a dump, dump, dump. Fair unlikely that it was coming out the other side clean, but Wash 2 didn’t seem too bothered, he just wanted to keep it moving through, the piles kept down, the waiters shut up. To keep their faces away from the hatch.
Wash 2 takes off his gloves and motions Mick to follow as he goes into the kitchen. The baldies are bent and kneeling, scrubbing inside the ovens. Wash 2 writes his hours on the board and hands him the pen when he’s done.
‘Dia, is it? Hello.’ He holds out his hand. ‘My name’s Mick.’
It doesn’t feel quite the right thing, a handshake, but the guy takes it, with a small nod of the head. ‘Breakfast now,’ he says.
Mick follows him into a bare, bright room with tables put together into two long rows. There is a queue of twenty or so staff getting food from a table in the middle. As soon as they go in he feels exposed, stood there in the bright room for everybody to look at. There is the noise of chairs scraping as people take their places and start eating. Dia is gone ahead into the queue, and Mick joins the end of it, one of the chefs getting in just before him. He stays close behind and shuffles forward. There is a great purple wart on the back of the guy’s neck, his skin raw and pink around it where it’s been catching his collar. Somebody behind him too now, he can hear him puffing his frustration at the queue. ‘Come on, come on.’ His eyes on Mick’s back, taking him in. Chefs pushing in further up the queue; nobody saying anything.
Here are the eggs, then. By the time Mick gets to the table, eggs is mainly what’s left, plus a few sausages, beans, fruit salads. He doesn’t care. He just wants to get sat and get eaten, go back to his room.
Dia is on a table of black men, four of them sat together in green overalls. Mick goes to the other row, sitting himself at one end where the seats all around are empty. Further down there is a group of women, all dark haired, foreign-looking. One of them keeks over at him at one point, and he realizes he must be sat where their pals are about to sit. He eats up his breakfast quickly and at random. No that it’s a meal you’d want to linger over. One sausage, a slice of bread, and a small clot of beans sharing juices with three pineapple slices. Nay wonder they’re all so miserable.
Everyone’s in their own group — the baldies at one table, the waiters another, the receptionists — all of them keeping in with themselves. It’s like school. And it’s so quiet, that’s the strangest thing. Hardly anybody talking, just chowing their food down in silence, the only noise in the room the sound of knives and forks hitting plates. Most of them look foreign, maybe that’s part of it, the lack of mixing. Still but, who’s he to talk, the cloyed-up Scot there at the end of the row.
He is finishing off when the head chef comes in and walks over to him. He stands stooping opposite him, his hands pressed on the table.
‘Go okay today?’
‘Fine, aye, once I’d got the hang of it.’
Some of the women are looking over.
‘You need to get your speed up, that’s all.’ He stands straight, looking off toward the door, then back at Mick. ‘Next staff food is at five, and your late starts at half past, okay?’ He pats once on the table and walks away.
He doesn’t go to the next staff food. He holes up in his room, laid on the bed in his pants and his socks, done in, drifting in and out of sleep through the afternoon.
The late shift is longer, relentless, more types of crockery. At least but he is in the bare scuddy underneath the overalls, which is a pure blessed relief compared to earlier. And as well he manages to wrestle a few more words out of Dia, who is on with him again.
‘Where are ye from?’
‘Ghana.’
He realizes it’s coming to a close when the waiters are only leaving tea and coffee cups, and these wee pots skinned with leftover mustard and ketchup.
When the kitchen start bringing all their pots and pans through, Dia gives him a hand scrubbing them clean, and afterward shows him where the mop is to follow where he’s already swept. They are about done when one of the baldies comes through with a bottle of beer in his hand, sheer-legging over the wet floor to reach for his knife bag off one of the shelves. A beer. That would be pure fucking heaven right now. He doesn’t say anything to Dia though, and they finish up, draining the machine and bringing out the rubbish bags before they leave, away back to the staff quarters.
He gets into his room and tummels onto the bed.
Chapter 19
The next day is much the same; and the next. His body is feeling like it’s took a kicking. By the time his day off comes, he’s that exhausted it is all he can do to get out of bed in time for staff food, and he spends most of the rest of it asleep.
The rota is two shifts each day out of breakfast, lunch or dinner, and one day off a week. His mind is occupied, near enough, and then when he’s no working he’s too tired even to think. He gets kept on Wash 1 for the first week, either with Dia or with Eric. He doesn’t try getting any patter out of them so it’s aye quiet working, but no that it’s frosty or anything, it’s fine, it’s just work. They two have their own reasons they don’t yap on, the same as he does, and so they get on with it just, silently working as a team while the baldies flash in and out with hot pans and the waiters gurn through the hatch.
The afternoons, which are only a couple of hours if he’s on a lunch, he rests up in his room, or he goes out the back fire exit to the terminal for a pint, or sometimes, if he can’t stomach the idea of returning for the lunatic buffet, a sandwich.