It could be worse, he thought. I could be on door handles. God knows how they stand it. Fifty odd door handles to fit in one night. And as for the spot welding, they can keep that. All it takes is one emergency and they are struggling with broken welding heads for ages. Nothing much can go wrong for me. If the multi-wrench breaks, then another gets jammed into my hand in a trice. A new bucket of nuts now and then and I am all right.
He stuck his clock card in the slot provide for it and listened as the mechanism whirred and cluncked the time onto the stiff card. He removed it and placed it in the rack above the clock. It seemed to take no time at all to hang his coat in his locker and slip into his boiler suit.
The foreman's hand delivering the electronically tagged job sheet was ethereal: part of the night and the shadows under the girders that held the factory roof aloft.
He walked to to his place on the line with that slow, yet farcically quick indolence that marked the onset of robotic fatalism.
Already the line had crept forward a few inches on its determined way to glory. The insidious movement did not register beyond a brief flicker in his brain.
He bent slightly and took a wheel from the steel well of the delivery channel and placed it over the brake drum in front of him. He held it in place while he inserted four bolts into place around the hub of the wheel and screwed them partially into place. He was careful to make sure that all the flats on the bolts were lined up in a satisfactory geometric pattern. He knew that the big multi-wrench, hanging from its sprung cable above, would slip over them easily. All that was necessary was a brief touch on the button and the heavy wrench would grind as it wound the bolts tight. In a strange way he knew that he was being foolish.
The man on the other side of the track loaded his bolts into the wrench and hoped that their slowly turning ends, with their tapered spigots, would find the holes in the brake drum and force the wheel into place.
That was all very well, but he could never bring himself to do this. One of the bolts might be marred or be forced in cross-threaded. He knew that it did not matter.
Some dealer would eventually find out in the distant future when the car was serviced, but he could never allow that to happen. He was of the old school that took a pride in the most mundane of work.
Funny, he thought as he settled to the soul-destroying monotony of the work, I've been here for twenty-five years and I only said that I'd stick it for a couple. Just long enough to get some money behind me to buy a little shop away back home. I suppose we all felt like that when we came up North on that recruiting drive. Luton seemed so far away then. Down South because there was work. Better than hanging out on street corners, on the dole and smoking colt's foot instead of tobacco. We substituted one hell for another. Who knows if we were right? All right, we all had a couple of bob in our pocket then, but all we did was buy a house down here and find companionship in working men's clubs. None of us went home to stay, unless it was in a box. We were all going, right enough, but always next year.
He paused while he moved down the track with another wheel under his arm. He was nearly up to his nightly quota of fifty cars. Only twenty chassis down the line needed his attention. He smiled as he noted that the man on the other side had not caught up to him, despite his supposedly quicker method of working.
Perhaps one of the bolts had snagged and broken off in the brake drum. All hell would have broken loose as the rectification gang fought to fix it. Any hiccup while you were on piece work to top up the tiny basic wage caused ructions.
Too bad, he thought, I'll go and have a smoke. Ten minutes will do no harm. It's only a quarter to midnight.
He had got as far as the toilets when he realized that his cigarettes were in the pocket of the ragged and sad old overcoat that he used for work. He hurried to his locker in a sudden fit of annoyance.
"It's a good thing it isn't like it used to be," he said under his breath. "Thank God for the Union. What a miserable existence it was then. Scabs watching from the observation platform and all too ready to show you the door if they saw you crouched down behind a machine to take a bite out of a piece of bread, hungry long before break."
In his minds eye he could see again the ritual of the clothing. All the line workers had to hang their outside clothes on a cradle, set by each segment of the line, at the start of each shift. They watched the cradles being hoisted up to the roof until a break came.
God help you if you felt like a fag. Even a much needed visit to the bog was regulated by set times. In an emergency, a floater might come and take your place for a couple of minutes, but if that happened too often, you were out on your neck.
He went back into the toilet and lit up. The relaxing smoke from his cigarette caught his lungs, giving him great satisfaction. For some reason that was beyond him, he had not felt the need to remove his thick industrial gloves. After only a few puffs, he took the white tube from his lips and pinched the end whith his fingers. He felt proud that his strategy of weaning himself away from smoking was working. He glanced at his watch and smiled. It'll take them a while to catch up as yet, he thought. He hurried back to the line with his shoulders set in a feverish determination. A kind of madness seemed to take him as he stormed down the line, two wheels under each arm. As he bolted each one in place he counted aloud. He gave a little cheer when the fiftieth car was finally fitted with a set of wheels on its left hand side. He did not bother to go and wash his hands. He simply offered his job card to the line computer to verify in electronic indifference before slipping into the shadows under the girders. Soon he was stretched out along the main girder that sloped gently up to the roof. The dirty old sacking that was under him warmed his elderly body, giving him comfort like a small child's bedtime security cloth.
The sounds of the vast factory faded to a soft sigh. Well before three thirty had come to the early hours of the morning, he was fast asleep. It was a sleep as deep as death itself which only the siren marking the end of the shift could break.
By Richard Walker
All Rights Reserved
(Copying, reprinting, or distribution of this story, in whole or in part, is prohibited without written permission from the author).
About the author:
Richard Walker is an English author who has had these four books published in hardback version and is now presenting his work in electronic form: Sing A Song of Stopsley, To Catch The Shadow of The Moon, The Ballad of Baggy Mag, and Vox Angelicus (The angel voices of Luton). Read about them here: ebooks