Bones
By andy
- 401 reads
It's like the chicken on a Monday morning after Bob has been out
with his mates having a good booze up and a game of doms. I always tell
him to leave the bloody thing alone, but he never listens. And when I
come down on a Monday morning there it is, sitting on the kitchen
table. A carcass.
Fifteen members of our family have worked here. And I'll be the last to
go. Waiting for the last person to ring in to reception. 'Good morning,
Courtoulds Ladies Wear'. Standing on deck and playing on as the iceberg
rips through the stores and the laboratory and the design room; a
deluge of jogging bottoms flooding through the streets.
Some of the machines have gone already. You wonder if they'll end up
being sent to the factories where the clothes are being made now.
Morocco, Lithuania, China. Maybe there's a town in each of these places
that's just like Alfreton, only forty years behind. Maybe we should
organise a bus trip over to remind ourselves of how life was when the
factories first opened and everybody thought that a good future was a
cast iron certainty. When Shirley Bassey was belting out 'Goldfinger'
before the big screens vanished and the bingo moved in. I wish them
well with it. You know for certain they won't be earning anything like
us. And I'm sure that it'll be women doing it all. It usually is.
There was one male machinist here, but all the girls made such a fuss
over him that in the end he couldn't stand it any more and had to
leave. He was mothered off site.
They've all been given their notice now. And some mornings it just
seems absolutely ridiculous sitting here, with the girls gone and the
showrooms being emptied. As though I'm part of some giant con trick. A
pretend business. A set for some film that's about to be made; only
just before shooting begins all the actors are told that the Producer
has pulled out, and to take their lines and their make up back home
with them. And I look at that phone and imagine that if I pick it up
I'll find myself listening in to the factory banter of all those other
places where our work has gone off to. I wouldn't be able to understand
a word of course. And I imagine that the laughing will have
disappeared.
But it's not just here. They're all closing. There are just a few of us
littered about on reception. We're like those black boxes that record
the final moments before a plane is smashed into a thousand pieces on
some snow capped mountain, leaving the poor survivors to munch off of
each other until there's just a pile of bones and a recorded loop
saying 'Oh no!', over and over and over again.
And it was bloody good stuff too. That's the thing. Bloody good
stuff.
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