The later staff food is harder going even than the breakfast. Usually there’s a tray of mince, without tatties, and a tray of carrot omelette, or onion omelette, or sausage omelette. Then it might be chips, which are away in a second, and hard, chewy rice that gets stuck between your teeth. He sits at the correct table now. Takes his place with his African co-workers and chows away silently next to them. He asks the other two their names. Obi and Vincent. They wear the same green overalls, but they work in a different kitchen, he doesn’t know where.
One day after the breakfast shift, the head chef comes in the potwash to tell him he needs to go up and see the operations manager: she has to get his details on the system.
He goes after staff food. Her office is on the same level as the kitchen, through a corridor with the same scuffed carpeting and bare walls as the rest of the staff side, but the occasional plastic plant and a wall clock with the hotel logo on it. A few shabby efforts at perking up the gloom — it’s in fact no unlike the walk used to be up to Alan’s office — which maybe explains how his stomach is feeling right now. Away, it’s Mick! Good to see you. You’re a kitchen porter now, I hear. Good for you, that’s great.
He’s about to chap the door, but he hears voices inside, what sounds like an argument, and he hangs back. Hard to make out what they’re saying, but it’s two women. Probably he should get leaving. But then there is movement inside, and he presses back against the wall as one of the housekeepers comes out, leaves the door open, and is away muttering down the corridor. The operations manager appears, sees him, scowls.
‘I’m here to fix out my details.’
She turns away. ‘Wait.’
The door shuts, and a few moments later she shouts him to come in.
She gives him a sheet of paper to fill in and ignores him, busy writing quickly onto a pad. She’s rattled, clear enough. He can feel the movement in the desk as she writes. A great black printer between them with Post-it notes stuck on it: Tronc adjustments. Gerry, Plane Food, 4 p.m.
Scottish, he puts on the form, and Mick; the rest he makes up. He’s filling this out on a need-to-know basis, is how it’s going to go, and there’s fine well certain things they don’t need to know. Provan, he calls himself, after Dave Provan who played for Rangers when he was a wean. As he passes the form to her, he says that he doesn’t have a bank account. She doesn’t try hiding the scunnered expression that comes on her face, but it seems at least she believes him. They’ll pay him in cash, she says, until he’s got one. An envelope job. Nay problem. Nay problem at all.
When the first paypacket comes, handed to him by the head chef at the start of one dinner shift, he doesn’t have any pockets to put the envelope in, so he tucks it in the top of his pants. When he’s signed out and he gets back into his room to take a look, one side of the envelope is clabbered with sweat and it pulls apart easily. There is a wad of twenties. No a great lot of twenties, mind, for the hours he must have worked. He sticks it on the table, under the alarm clock. Next day off, he’ll go buy a mini television. Christ knows where but. It isn’t like there’s shops around; or pubs, minimarkets, offies. The area around the hotel is a demented wasteland of concrete and car parks, carriageways and flyovers. The only place to go is the terminal. From what he can tell, none of the workers much leave the building. They keep to their rooms, or they lounder about the basement amongst their own squad. Mostly, though, they work. There’s staff on twenty-four hours, and he’s got accustomed by now to the comings and the goings during the night: the banging of doors and shuffling in the corridor; the toilet flushing and the noise of the pipes in the walls as the different groups come on and off shift.
Mainly it is KPs and housekeepers down there in the basement. The doormen as well, and the night porter, whose room is across the way from his and he hears getting in each morning just the back of six. Each squad is divided by continent, it seems, as if these are skills you’re born into, the cleaning of saucepans and toilets. The KPs, apart from himself, are African; the housekeepers, South American; most of the chefs and the receptionists, East Europes; and the waiters, fuck knows.
That’s what Dia has told him. The KPs are pretty much the only ones that ever talk in English. And they understand better than he’d thought, the times that he’s had any conversation with them; which isn’t a great lot, to be honest. Eric is still quiet with him while they work, although he has noticed that he’s aye similar with the others when they’re together. Dia is a wee bit more talkative getting with him though, telling him sometimes which of the waiters and the chefs he dislikes the most.
Outside of the potwash and the lunatic buffet, there aren’t many places to go: there is a small staff room, round the dogleg at the bottom of the corridor, with a table and a few chairs, a battered oven, a kettle and a toaster, but Mick never goes in there, so the only place he sees anybody is in the laundry room. He goes in one afternoon, with a carrier of socks and pants, and Dia is at one of the machines taking out his clothes. Before he gets leaving, Mick chins him to ask about their pay. Dia smiles.
‘It is not very much.’
‘Aye, I’ve noticed.’
‘You write down how many hours but it is always the same.’
‘They take some off for the accommodation, then? They must do, eh?’
He grins. ‘Oh, yes. They do. And food. We stay in a fine hotel. See?’ He looks up and around at the drop ceiling. ‘You are not with the agency?’
‘No.’
‘You are lucky. You are an Englishman. I am with the agency.’
‘Careful, pal, I’m Scottish.’
Dia laughs. ‘Yes, yes, sorry. Scottish. We are the same, then.’
Mick smiles. ‘Aye, well, maybe.’
The next time he is on with Dia, they speak some more. Dia asks him about Scotland and Mick begins telling him about the yards, what like it was working in them. He quietens up soon enough though. Dia is obviously interested, but he doesn’t press him. It’s surprising, in fact, how much he knows already. He knows all about the big boats that were made on the Clyde, which probably goes to bloody show what dark part some of these ships they made had to play in people like Dia’s history. Mick realizes he doesn’t know if Ghana has a coastline even. Pretty bloody ignorant, really, but he doesn’t ask. Dia tells him about his family. He has a wife and a baby, he says, at home in his country. He’s going back soon to work as an accountant. That’s what he studied, accountancy, christsake.
He is getting on. He’s no maundering up in Glasgow with his head stuck to the freezer or rotting in the shed like a sack of potatoes; he is getting through the days and the already familiar pattern of work, sleep, work, sleep, work, day off, work. Over the next couple of weeks, he goes each few days into the terminal and gets a supply of four-packs for the bargain price of £6 each. One day off soon, he’ll get out and onto the subway, buy the mini television, allow himself to think about giving Robbie a call. Even to see outside of the airport, that would be something.
He is dozing in his room one afternoon when he hears some kind of commotion down the corridor. He ignores it at first, but after a few minutes he gets up to have a hingie out the door at what’s going on. It is coming from round the dogleg. He walks down the way, and keeks inside the staff room as he goes past. All the housekeepers are in there, it looks like, and as well he notices Dia and Eric inamongst. The women are talking in Spanish, but maybe those two understand anyway; it wouldn’t come as a great surprise, in truth. He goes in the laundry for a moment, listening to the babble through the wall, then he leaves away back to his room.
He wakes up, sweating. The jittery sensation of knowing he’s awake and the dream is by but the feeling of it staying with him. He sits up with the sheets resting damply on his stomach, the head muddled, the image still there. She is knelt down in front of him and he is looking at her from behind. A great dump of washing in front of her, and she is lifting a pair of overalls out of the pile. He closes his eyes and tries to keep the picture moving, to see the front of her, but his chest and then the whole of his body has started laddering, hardening. The yellow edge of light on top of the door and the dim shapes of the room coming into focus. Wardrobe. Table. Clothes left lying on the floor. He is in the hotel. A potwasher. On again the morning, a matter of hours just.