All the Lights (15 page)

And then night. In fact it was still evening, but it had been dark since four, and I saw all the bright lights of the city. I stood outside the door, looked at the cars driving by, looked at the luminous signs and windows of the shops and bars opposite. The Turks and the Arabs had taken the area over years ago, and the Russians had a hand in things too, and back then before I went inside I’d had a couple of run-ins on this street, when we crawled from one bar to the next, but that was all over now. I opened the door and went inside. I took the money out of my bag, counted it out, rolled it up and put it in my inside pocket. The money smelled of fish, and the two queers in their little snack bar had stunk of fish as well.

‘The Boxer sent you, did he? Shacked up with him, are you?’

The guy winked at me and leaned over the little counter. ‘Used to look out for me, always looked out for me back then.’ He talked about their great friendship, about the Boxer’s honour, ‘Never lets anyone down, never leaves you in the lurch, you better believe it,’ and he talked about how the Boxer nearly made it to the Olympics, back then. He put a can of beer down in front of me and opened one for himself. ‘Have a drink. Out on leave, are you? Let’s drink to the Boxer.’ We said cheers, and he started talking again, about the Boxer and about the jail and about their golden days. The other queer didn’t say a word the whole time and just cut rolls and herrings, and when he started on the onions and queer number one was still going on and on, I flicked my half-smoked roll-up across the counter at him and said: ‘Time’s up.’ He grinned and nodded and took me to a little caravan he called ‘my office’, and it stank of fish and beer and cigarettes in there too.

I walked slowly up the stairs. The house was silent, and when the light went off I stood still and lit up. I walked on slowly in the dark. Light shone through the pane in the door. I stood still and put my hand on the bars. ‘Close it, I wanna show you something.’ I closed the window, turned around and still felt the bars cold on my hand. The Boxer was standing naked to the waist in front of his bed. ‘Hey, what’s this all about, pal?’

‘Just wanna show you something, son, come over here, come closer.’ He’d put his big hand on his chest, and I walked over to him slowly. He had the usual words and pictures on his arms and a big eye in the middle of his belly, but I’d seen all that often enough in the two years we’d been sharing. The Boxer wasn’t quite as inked up as the billboards I used to see in the showers, who carried their whole lives around with them on their skin, but he went to one of our in-house tattooists every couple of months. ‘It’s a new one, you haven’t seen it yet, it’s still fresh. Don’t need no photo any more. Never. Chucked them all away. She’ll always be with me now.’ He took his hand off his chest. There was the face of a young woman, she had shoulder-length black hair and was smiling. Her eyes were much too big, almost like in Japanese comics. She must really have been pretty fresh; her face was swollen up, especially her forehead and below her mouth – there weren’t any tattoo care sets in Fort Zinna. ‘Looks really beautiful,’ I said, and the Boxer nodded and went a bit red. I looked at his daughter, smiling at me with her big eyes. ‘Come in,’ she said. I looked at her nose, then her hair, which was quite short, and then her eyes … now they were sparkling and squinting at me. ‘Come in,’ she said again, ‘come on in if you’re going to.’ She turned around and I followed her along the hall. Maybe the Boxer had told her I was coming, maybe the herring boys. ‘The door,’ she said, and I went back again and closed it.

She sat down on the sofa. I stayed standing up in front of her, and she squinted up at me so that I took a couple of steps back. I held onto my bag with both hands and looked around. It all looked pretty cheap, but the Boxer had told me she was doing some training course, as a hotel clerk or something. ‘Like a drink?’ I nodded. She went past me to the sideboard, and behind me I heard her clinking glasses. She took a couple of steps, and then I felt her breath on the back of my neck. I held onto my bag and looked at the wall above the sofa. There was some reproduction modern picture up there, all just blobs of colour. She walked slowly back to the sofa and put two glasses of brown liquor on the table. ‘Why don’t you sit down,’ she said. She stroked the sofa cushions and tilted her head and smiled; she must have learnt that on her course.

I put my bag down and sat down next to her. ‘You’ve come on a little trip because of me, right?’ she said and moved closer. ‘Not that far,’ I said. I picked up my glass; it smelled like cheap and nasty ‘Goldbrand’, tasted like it too.

‘Bet you’re glad you’re here now, right?’ She moved away from me again towards the armrest, kicked off her shoes and stretched out her legs, touching my knees with her feet. I reached for my glass and pushed it to and fro on the table. There was an ashtray there as well, and I pulled out my cigarettes. I felt the roll of money in my inside pocket. ‘Be a sweetie and give us one.’ I lit my cigarette and handed her the packet. She fingered one out and put the packet down on her leg. I wanted to give her a light, but she took the cigarette out of my mouth and lit hers on it. I stood up and reached into my inside pocket. ‘Listen …’

‘Hey, don’t go running off.’ She jumped up so quickly that her cigarette and my cigarette and the packet as well fell on the carpet, but she took no notice and pressed right up to me and put her arms around me. She was really strong, even though she was so short. I wanted to push her away, throw the money on the table and disappear, find a place to hide and wait for Monday, but she held tight; she must have got her strength from the Boxer.

‘Don’t do that,’ I said, but she was still hanging on to me and rubbing her face against my neck, it must have been her nose, no, she can’t have got that from the Boxer, but maybe he’d had the best nose in town,
before
he nearly made it to the Olympics. She fumbled with my flies and said, ‘You’ve got to give me something, you know …’

I felt the roll of money in my inside pocket, but I knew that wasn’t what she meant, and now I knew that neither the Boxer nor the herring boys had told her I was coming either. I grabbed her by the shoulders but let her go again straight away, because I felt her skin and bones. I picked up my half-empty glass and lobbed it at the sideboard, so hard that splinters of glass and drops of liquor sprayed back at us. She took a couple of slow steps away from me and looked at me with her big Japanese comic eyes. I stumbled backwards and sat down on the sofa. I picked up her glass and drank it dry. Suddenly there was a man in the middle of the room. ‘Trouble,’ he said and came over to me. He walked fairly slowly, and I could have got him in the face with the glass, but I put it down on the table. I got up. I saw him pulling back to punch, but I didn’t move. He had a good right hook and I was on the floor. I turned on my side and looked between the table legs. She was crouching in front of the sideboard, her chin on her knees, and I looked her straight in the face. I got up. Straight away, the guy gave me two or three hard ones, and I went down again and looked under the table at the Boxer’s daughter, still crouched in front of the sideboard, not moving. I felt blood on my face. I saw the guy’s legs right next to me, I could have grabbed them, pulled him over and mashed him up, but I got up again and looked at him. He didn’t hit me straight away, and I looked over his shoulder at the wall. The guy rammed his knee in my belly, I gasped for breath and crouched down.

‘Stay down, fucker.’ He punched like a professional and talked like one too. I lifted my head slightly and saw her leaning forwards and moving both hands to and fro over the carpet, as if she was playing with something. I got up slowly and closed my eyes. He got me pretty bad, and I felt my nose break.

‘Hey son,’ said the Boxer, ‘you’re nearly as pretty as me.’

‘Walked into a door,’ I said, ‘in town. The usual, you know.’

‘Did she see you like that? You didn’t scare her?’

‘No no, Boxer, I went to hers first, it was all all right. She’s fine. She was pleased, the money and that, really pleased.’

‘Wasn’t much, but she’s still a trainee, in a real hotel. She doesn’t get much there, has to watch her money.’

‘I know.’

I stood on the bridge and looked down at the river. In the fields on either side were the remains of the morning mist. I heard the cars behind me, quite a lot of traffic, start of the week. A long way off, I saw a tugboat on the wide river. It didn’t seem to be moving. Maybe it was going over to the Czechs, maybe in my direction and then on to the sea in Hamburg. I lit up my last filter cigarette and threw the empty packet in the river. My nose started bleeding again, and I pulled a tissue out of my inside pocket. It smelled of fish, just like the money. I’d put it in her letterbox on the ground floor. Really wasn’t much, just over a ton, but it must have been the Boxer’s last reserves from his golden days, when he nearly made it to the Olympics. I looked down at the river again. A couple of ice chunks disappeared under the bridge. One got caught up on a red marker buoy, then broke free and floated on again. I pressed the tissue to my nose, threw my fag-end in the river and went home.

Before I became a shelf-stacker and spent my evenings and nights in the aisles of the cash-and-carry market, filling shelves, fetching pallets from high on the storage shelves with the forklift, now and then helping one of the last customers of the evening and getting to know all kinds of food, I’d been working on building sites for a couple of years.

I hadn’t given up of my own accord but I wouldn’t have kept it up all that long, even if the boss hadn’t fired me. I was a builder’s mate, lugging sacks of cement and plasterboard, gutting flats – that meant I knocked the plaster off the walls, tore out fireplaces and chimneys with a big sledgehammer we used to call ‘Rover’, until I was covered in soot and dirt and spent hours getting the soot and dust out of my nose at home. The firm didn’t even pay well and the boss was a bastard. The guy came from Bavaria; I’ve met people from Bavaria who were actually OK though.

I can’t remember exactly when all the fuss with the boss started, but I do know we were demolishing an old roof that day. We found a big pigeon’s graveyard, two pigeons still alive and perfectly still in among all the bones, piles of feathers and pigeon shit and decomposing and mummified corpses, and we could only tell by their eyes and their heads, moving slightly every now and then, that they were waiting. We fetched the Portuguese guys and they killed them with a blow of a spade. Then we tipped lime over the pigeon graveyard and shovelled it all into buckets and tipped them down the rubbish chute fastened to the scaffolding outside.

And after that we didn’t feel much like hard work any more; the pigeons had got to us. We took the tiles off another section of the roof, not exactly motivated, removed the roof battens with wrecking bars, and then we took a lunch break.

We usually had our lunch break at eleven thirty, and when the bells of the church just round the corner rang at twelve we went back to work.

But when the bells rang that day we were still sitting with the Portuguese guys. They were drinking red wine out of cartons, passing them around. The Portuguese guys spoke very bad German and earned even less than we did and lived in tiny basement flats in one of the buildings owned by the boss. They drank red wine at work because they knew the boss wouldn’t fire them – they worked too well for too little money. They did bricklaying and plastering, and sometimes they were builder’s mates like us, lugging sacks of cement, gutting flats until they were covered in soot and dust.

And then when the fuss with the boss started and I’d slapped him round the face on both sides with my cement-encrusted glove, they all came to me one after another and shook my hand, pressed it and pumped it, said, ‘You did good thing’ in broken German, laughed and said, ‘You find new job, you good worker,’ and patted me on the back.

‘Lazy bastard,’ the boss had called me, and I hadn’t even been holding a wine carton any more, I was just sitting on an upturned bucket and leaning on the wall and trying to think of nothing at all.

And I wasn’t a lazy bastard, even if I had overdone it a bit with my lunch break.

And when I started the job as a shelf-stacker in the cash and carry they noticed straight away that I wasn’t a lazy bastard. I’d got the job through someone I knew, a guy who’d been working there for four years.

I’d got him a job seven or eight years ago and he knew I’d been out of work since the fuss at the building site, so when a job came up in the ‘Shelf-filling/Night’ department he’d put my name down for it. I made a real effort, stacking the stock on the shelves where they showed me, pulling a large barred cart along behind me to put empty cartons and packaging into. They explained how to use the little manual pallet jacks for lifting and moving pallets of stock around. They had electric pallet jacks too, called ‘ants’, for transporting several pallets stacked up, but I wasn’t allowed to use those ones yet.

It wasn’t one of those cash-and-carries that anyone could shop at. The customers had to have a special card; they had to run a company, self-employed people and that kind of thing who were buying for their businesses. We had a food section and a non-food section, but I was only ever on food and beverages. It was a huge market, on two floors with clothing and electronics upstairs. The food section was on the lower floor, and made up of different departments like Processed Food, Confectionery, Frozen Food, Delicatessen, Fruit and Vegetables and a couple of other ones I can’t remember now.

The aisles between the shelves were very wide so there was space for the forklifts. The forklifts operated all day long, even when the market was open for customers. The forklift drivers fetched large pallets out of the storage shelves, which went right up to the ceiling on top of the normal shelves where the customers took the stock from and put it in their trolleys.

To start with I was always wondering why there weren’t any terrible accidents, why no pallets tipped off the forks and crushed ten customers to death, why no feet got squashed under the large iron wheels of the forklifts. But later, when I had a forklift licence of my own and whizzed along the aisles in my yellow forklift, fetching pallets of beer or milk or sacks of flour down from the shelves, I knew it was all a matter of relaxing, taking care and judging distances right – and routine. But the most important thing, I thought, was that you had to be absolutely convinced while you were transporting pallets up or down that you were the very centre of the market.

It took me a while to learn how to drive a forklift. They let me do my practice after opening hours, when the only people in the aisles were from ‘Shelf-filling/Night’. One of the long-term staff was a registered examiner, but another long-term guy gave me practice lessons until I’d managed to learn all the secrets of driving and operating a forklift. Actually it was just the half-hour before the end of our shift at one a.m. Under his supervision, I drove his forklift – which I shared with him later – slowly along the aisles, stopped in the right position parallel to the shelf, positioned the fork and moved it upwards. Then when the fork was at the level of the pallet I steered the truck until the ends of the fork were just above the openings in the pallet. Then I pressed a lever on the control panel in front of me, and the fork lowered and slipped into the openings in the pallet. Then I pressed the other lever and the pallet rose slowly.

‘You’re doing well,’ said Bruno, his big hand next to me on the control panel, ‘just don’t raise it too quickly or you’ll bump it at the top.’

Bruno was a pretty tall, stocky man, actually more stocky than tall, probably in his mid-fifties with white hair, but when you saw him from a distance he looked like a wrestler or a heavyweight boxer. He had a big block of a head that perched directly on his shoulders, almost no neck at all between the lapels of his white overall, and his hands, one of which was now resting on the forklift control panel next to me, were the size of plates. He wore a broad leather cuff around his right wrist to protect his tendons. He worked in the beverages department, where they fetched the largest pallets down from the shelves – crates of beer and juice and other drinks, which were roped together but still swayed ominously to and fro on the pallet as we lowered them out of the shelves.

Bruno had been working in the cash and carry for over ten years, always on beverages, and even though he wasn’t the department manager it was him who kept the place running.

‘You’re doing well, Lofty,’ he said. ‘You’ll soon have your licence.’ He called me Lofty, like most of my workmates did, because I was nearly six foot three.

‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘I know I’m making a mess of it.’

He laughed. ‘Oh, don’t worry. The longer it takes, the better for me. I have a nice quiet time with you. Better than all that hard graft.’ He pointed a thumb over at the beverages section. I heard bottles clinking through the shelves. Another workmate was lugging the last crates of the day.

‘There was one time,’ said Bruno, watching me attempt to get a pallet of salt boxes back onto the shelf, ‘one time I dropped a load of beer. Couple of years ago now. The rope tore. Shit happens.’ He reached into the pocket of his overall and took out a couple of ropes. He never threw them away when we cut them off the big beer pallets with our Stanley knives once we’d got them down in one piece. ‘Always come in handy.’ He had a little farmyard outside of town, with a stable and a few animals. He lived there with his wife; she took care of the animals and everything else while he was at work. Bruno always had this special smell to him, of animals and manure, but it wasn’t as if he stank; he just smelt faintly, and there was something else in the mixture that he brought along from his farm, something strangely sweet, more like bitter-sweet, but I never worked out what it might be.

‘Bring her down now,’ said Bruno, checking his watch, ‘time to clock off.’

‘OK,’ I said. I’d finally managed to get the salt pallet in the right gap. I extracted the fork, moved the truck back slightly, then pressed one of the levers and the fork came down very slowly from the very top, with a hissing and whooshing sound from the air expelled from the hydraulics. I waited until the fork touched the tiled floor and then positioned it so that the forks weren’t parallel to the ground. ‘Only drive with the forks tipped, never with the fork raised except when you’re stacking.’

I’d had to watch a couple of instruction films where they listed all these terrible accidents as a deterrent and then showed some of the consequences. Lopped-off limbs, flattened feet, people skewered on the fork, and the more I saw of this forklift inferno, the more often I wondered if I’d chosen the right job. But the other staff at the cash and carry were nice enough, and I didn’t intend to skewer them on the fork or drive over their feet.

‘Are you coming, Bruno?’

‘No, you drive it on your own, you know how to do it now.’ Sometimes Bruno stood on the tipped forks, even though that wasn’t allowed, and rode back to the recharging station with me. I drove off and saw him walking down the aisle in the other direction. He walked slightly hunched, his arms splayed a little way from his body as if he expected a surprise attack from one of the shelves at any moment. I tried to imagine him working on the building site with me, me explaining everything to him and showing him how to do the job, but I just couldn’t imagine the man demolishing a roof. Maybe it was his white hair, and that smell of his animals didn’t go with the dust.

I drove to the recharging station, right at the back of the warehouse by the delivery bay. I drove along the empty, brightly lit aisles, past the freezers and the long rows of refrigerated shelves against the walls. Ours was the last shift and I only saw a workmate now and then. They were standing in the aisles, doing their last chores, standing at the blue wheeled desks and writing lists of the damaged or torn-open stock we always found on the shelves; others were getting their forklifts ready for the night at the recharging station. I didn’t know all of their names yet, and even later, once I’d been working at the warehouse for a while and had scraped through the forklift test (‘It’ll end in tears, Lofty’), I took a shifty look at the name tags on their overalls when I talked to them or needed help.

‘Thanks, Ms Koch,’ I said, and she smiled and said, ‘No problem.’

I saw her looking at my overall, but I’d lost my name tag and hadn’t got a new one yet.

‘Christian,’ I said and gave her my hand. ‘Marion,’ she said. She’d lent me her forklift because a customer had asked for a bottle of Wild Turkey just before closing time. I’d fetched the whisky pallet down from the shelf, given him the bottle and then filled up the empty compartment. Bruno was using our forklift over in the beer section. It was a Friday, it was summer, and people were buying beer by the crateload.

‘Shall we have a coffee? It’s on me.’

‘OK,’ she said, and then we went to the vending machine. There were two coffee machines in the warehouse, one at the delivery bay and one in front of the cold storage room, and that one was closer.

I’d come across her in the aisles a couple of times before and we’d nodded hello, and seeing as she was quite pretty I’d smiled every time.

She wasn’t there every night, she worked days as well; only me and five other guys were always on nights.

‘You did your test quite quickly.’ She sipped at her coffee, and then she blew into the little clouds of steam. She smiled; she’d probably heard about how much trouble I’d had with it.

‘Bruno was a good teacher,’ I said and looked at the name tag on her chest again. ‘M. Koch, Confectionery’.

‘Bruno’s a good guy,’ she said. ‘You can always go to him when you need help, or when you’re fed up and you fancy a coffee and a chat.’ She smiled and blew into her coffee, then she drank a few mouthfuls.

‘Get fed up often, do you?’

‘Don’t be so cheeky, rookie.’ She held her coffee in front of her name tag and tapped me on the shoulder with the index finger of her free hand. Then she laughed, and I couldn’t help joining in. There was something about her and the way she talked to me that I liked a lot. When I’d sat down in her forklift (‘But don’t make a tour of it, I need it back again’) I’d felt the warmth on the seat where she’d just been sitting.

She seemed to be a couple of years older than me, maybe in her mid-thirties. She had quite short hair that was always kind of messy. We drank our coffee and talked about this and that.

We stood at the vending machine for a long time, and I kept putting more money in and refilling our cups. We were standing behind the piles of crates and stock so the only people who could see us were people who wanted to take a coffee break of their own. ‘Be right back.’ I went to the shopping trolley containing food just coming up to the best-before date. Sometimes there were three or four trolleys, and sometimes it was my job to take the trolleys to the ramp by the delivery bay where the rubbish bins were. Bread, chocolate, meat, milk, all still good for a few more days, and if I was hungry I tried to sneakily stuff myself with as much as possible of the best things before I threw them in the bins. Chocolate truffles, ciabatta with Serrano ham, Kinder chocolate. If one of the bosses caught me I could take off my overalls and leave, but I just couldn’t resist it. The stuff was being chucked out anyway, and I think most of us took the odd sneaky helping.