Bron-5

Continued from Chapter 4: Bron-4 | ABCtales

Chapter 5

It had been a long walk in the dark from Edgware Road to Willesden. At meal break, she’d ask Abdul for a fiver’s advance on her wages so she’d have the money to get the night bus back. Bron darted down the unlit passage that led to the back entrance to the Metalmasters factory, the way all the cash-in-hand workers had been told to use. No point in alerting the authorities, “keep things nice and quiet”, Abdul said. The registered staff got to use the front lobby with its worn rubber matting and sagging red plastic leatherette benches.

Bron pushed open the door, blinked as her eyes took a few seconds to adjust to the searing overhead arc lights after the darkness outside. The night shift started at 8pm but Mustapha the mechanic was still on duty, a bad sign. Nuts, bolts, washers and chain from the innards of one of the big presses were scattered on a trolley; Mustapha was lying on his back, hammering at something in the machine’s innards with a small mallet. Further along, the Number Two and Number Three presses kept up a rhythmic screech-clatter-bang-screech. Metal clattered on metal as the workforce went about its business, stacking sheets of metal on top of each other; there was the occasional crash as someone tossed a bin full of offcuts into a wheelbarrow.

Metalmasters was going full steam, pulling out all the stops to meet a big order, a couple of thousand shelves for the Iraqi government, at least as fast as its 40-year old machinery would allow. Abdul said that the owners were close to someone in the military there, a few strings had been pulled, not too many questions asked. Metalmasters wasn’t going to turn a big order down; there were few enough of those, especially for a British company fighting off cut-price competitors in Asia. Rumour had it that it could be the company’s last big job; the owners were preparing to pull the plug and sell the factory site off to a property developer.

Gleaming buff-painted pieces of metal emerged fitfully from the oven, Siddiq and Sidney gripping each one with tongs and swinging them onto trolleys that would be pushed to the loading bay.

Abdul emerged from the office, looking harassed. One of the big presses breaking down in the middle of a big job was an unwelcome, if not entirely unexpected turn of events.

“Bron! Bron! There won’t be any work feeding the press tonight; we’re a machine down.”

“Oh! But I’ve walked here all the way from Marble Arch and…”

No, no, no! No worry! Tonight you go with Rod and Avi on the loading bay. Put shelves into the container. Full shift tonight, no worry…”

Bron liked working with Rod and Avi, at least Avi (Rod was a small, balding man of few words). Avi was from some part of central Asia that used to be part of the Soviet Union but had now declared itself independent. It ended in ‘stan’; Bron couldn’t remember the rest of the name. Avi hadn’t hung around to see how things would pan out in his homeland; he’d taken advantage of the freedom to travel to up sticks and head for a new life in England. He said he’d bring his family over next year.

Avi looked up as Bron came into the messroom and hung her coat and jacket up in the locker. She was already wearing her ‘aviator’’s overalls.

“Sodd-och SHEE, Bron! Soom-AYE!”

Avi had insisted on Bron teaching him a few Welsh words and phrases. He claimed to be the only person in Wherever-it-was-stan to speak the language. He’d tried to teach her a couple of verses of poetry in his language. The rhythms and cadences reminded Bron of Cymraeg.

Avi, Bron and Rod started to unload the trolleys and carry the painted metal shelves into the innards of the dark-blue 40-foot shipping container that was parked end-on on a trailer in the loading bay. They all kept their thick work-gloves on; it was a favourite trick of the paint shop guys to insert a shelf still hot from the drying oven into the stack of shelves.

The place was full of practical jokers. Bron’s first job at Metalmasters had been to collect the scrap in a metal wheelbarrow and deposit it in a huge pile in the yard. One day, when her back was turned disentangling a piece of swarf, someone had quietly welded her barrow to a steel stanchion. No amount of pushing and tugging would move it; Bron was baffled. Abdul was not amused.

Then there’d been the time someone had sent her to the stores to ask for ‘a long weight for a left-hand cylinder rod assembly’. She’d been at the counter for a good 30 minutes before the storeman deigned to tell her that ‘long weight’ actually was ‘long wait’. The joke had been played on every newcomer at Metalmasters for as long as anybody could remember, but everybody still thought it was hilarious.

Bron was the only woman at Metalmasters, apart from a large, regal West African lady who appeared occasionally with a red plastic bucket to allegedly swab down the toilets. “Dis lot filthy!” she’d exclaim, her head tilted back. The toilets weren’t noticeably less disgusting after one of her visits.

Bron, Avi and Rod worked steadily, through the night, carrying the pieces of metal into the far reaches of the container and stacking them up, inserting sheets of brown paper between each to protect them. The metal shelves weren’t perfectly symmetrical. Even before it had reached chest height, the stack had developed a decided list.

Rod hastened off to find Abdul.

“You sure this will be OK? Look at the angle of that top one. Reckon that’s going to stay there all the way to Istanbul?”

“Baghdad.”

“Wherever. It’s not safe, man…”

“Just carry on. We stuff some wood in when you get to the top. Safe as…safe as house.”

Avi shrugged his shoulders and went to get the wheeled steps, which he positioned inside the container, next to the stack before mounting them. With a backward tilt of his head, he motioned Bron and Rod to start handing up the shelves. Bron and Rod set to wrapping them in paper; then Bron grabbed three and passed them up to Avi.

“Steady, steady! No need to rush – we make this job last all night…”

The guys were protective of Bron, tried not to give her the heavy jobs. Though, really, there’d no need to be. Along with her brother, she and Mam had done almost all the work on the farm, after Dad had pretty much abdicated all responsibility. She was used to toting hay bales and manhandling uncooperative sheep into pens.

The pile grew; the list became more pronounced.

“Give me that piece of wood,” said Avi pointing down from his platform at a piece of 4 x4 offcut. “And some bubbly-wrap…”

He wrapped the timber in two or three layers of the bubble wrap and thrust the piece into the narrow gap between the topmost piece of metal and the roof of the container. The length of wrapped timber slid in easily enough for the first couple of feet, then stuck fast. Grunting, Avi slapped his gloved palm on the end two or three times, wedging it into the narrowing gap. “I’ll get a hammer,” called Rod, turning in the direction of the stores. Avi didn’t respond but gave the wood another slap, harder this time but hitting it off-centre. It swivelled round through ninety degrees and popped out of the gap. The pile of metal shelves teetered for a split second. “LOOK OUT!” yelled Avi, but his words were drowned by the shrieking groan of four tons of metal crashing to the ground. Instinctively, Avi grabbed a bar in the roof of the container as the metal swept the steps away from under his feet, leaving him swinging. Down below, Bron threw herself out of way while covering her head and face with her arms. Something heavy hit her legs, followed by excruciating pain. She lay on the floor; metal clashed and clattered about her ears.

The owner drove rapidly through Willesden’s dark streets, jumping red lights and hitting 60mph between the junctions. It would be quicker than waiting for an ambulance, he’d said. Bron sat in the back, wedged in between Abdul and Avi. The pain in her legs still throbbed, but was beginning to subside into a dull ache. “Iasgod I FAWR!” she groaned, rubbing her left calf. But she could wriggle her toes; perhaps nothing was broken after all.

They could see the lights of the hospital. Avi leaned forward into the gap between the front seats, in answer to something the owner had said. Bron couldn’t make out their muttered conversation but the owner fumbled in his jacket pocket and thrust something into Abdul’s outstretched palm. Abdul in turn held the roll of paper in front of Bron’s face for an instant, then thrust it into the pocket of her overall. “That’s one hundred pound. You say, you fell down steps outside. Not say anything about Metalmasters, about the factory. Then, another hundred next shift. OK?”

Two hundred quid. More money than Bron had ever had in the palm of her hand in her whole life. More than enough for a return ticket to Holyhead.

To be continued in Chapter 6: Bron-6 | ABCtales