After three months in the factory I’d earned my stripes. Those stripes took the form of burn scars and shallow lacerations; operating injection presses is not necessarily risk-free. Once I was marked as one of them, the factory workers began to treat me with a little more respect. Those that had failed to meet my gaze before now greeted me with sullen nods and those that had extended vague pleasantries now remembered my name. Of course, some of my colleagues had always been open and pleasant. Tomasz would usually stop for a chat on his way to the QA department and one of the QA guys was pretty friendly, though he’d gone a little eccentric as of late. My supervisor was a total prick, though his immediate superior, a bloke called Mike, was decent.
It was the Thursday of my thirteenth week when Mike approached me. ‘Reckon you’re ready for the night shift?’
I nodded, trying to project quiet confidence despite a sliver of nervous excitement. Night shifts meant solitude and unsocial hours bonuses, two of my favourite things. Mike briefly ran through the particulars: work week on night shifts runs Sunday to Thursday, 9PM until 5:30AM, no management would be present but there would be an extra supervisor floating around who would regularly visit my work area to make sure I was okay. Mundane, necessary things. The rest of that shift passed quickly, a blur of repetitive actions and droning noise punctuated by brief greetings and coffee breaks. The Friday was much the same, and the weekend resolved mainly around PC gaming. Sunday night arrived quietly, an understated entry into the working week compared to the commanding presence of the totemic Monday Morning I’d become accustomed to. It felt a little surreal heading out to work while most people were having their Sunday dinner, but I had no family to split a roast chicken with, so it hardly bothered me.
The industrial estate upon which my workplace sat was transformed in the dead air of a fallen day. I’d seen it after dark on the arse end of the evening shifts, but this was quite something else. The place was near-silent, the car parks were almost empty. The private road leading off the main thoroughfare and towards the factory seemed to shrink and withdraw from my footsteps, as though ashamed of its nocturnal nakedness.
Tomasz greeted me as I entered, cheerfully informed me that he’d visit once an hour to make sure I hadn’t fallen asleep or died. I scanned my face in the login machine and collected an extra jar of instant coffee from the cupboard in the main break room. My section was on the far side of the factory, the QA lab and offices serving as a buffer between the main factory floor (bulk production) and the specialist area where I manned the smaller, more fine-grained machines and injected small batches of to-order parts with minuscule tolerances and exotic materials. I walked over to my section, to the edge of the industrial estate where it met the fallow fields that marked the boundary of Ferenbrooke. Across the road, another factory was lit up. The garment place. It struck me as odd, but not excessively so. I knew that they made, among other things, the graduation robes for Ferenbrooke University, and it was about the right time for that.
I stopped outside the shutter doors of my factory section and lit up a cigarette, leaned against a lamppost and idly observed the garment workers moving about their business. The shutters of their workplace were wide open. Both within and without a mass of humanity went to and fro. Vans were being loaded, boxes thrown back and forth. Many of the workers wore familiar hi-vis vests stamped with the logo of the same temp agency that had originally placed me in my current role before I was hired on as permanent staff. One of the workers was leant against a fence post, smoking a roll-up. He spotted me eyeing his colleagues and nodded at me, a joyless low-effort greeting that I returned in kind.
My counterpart on the afternoon shift, an older gent named Tim, emerged from the factory in street clothes and winked at me while he thumbed his key fob. ‘All ready for you in there,’ he said. ‘Should be an easy night, as long as you can stay awake.’ He threw his bag into the back seat of his beat up little car and leaned on the roof a moment, looking at me. ‘Nights here are a little weird. You get foxes, muntjacs, all sorts running through the fields and woods, making a real racket. Pay it no mind.’
I nodded. ‘Thanks, mate. Enjoy your evening, what’s left of it.’
‘Oh, I will.’ Tim made a pint-downing gesture and entered his car.
I glanced back towards the garment factory. The guy who’d nodded at me was gone, the shutters had descended. The building seemed to quiver with internal movement, like a burlap sack full of live animals. The effect was likely synaesthetic, a result of my brain interpreting the low thrumming from within the walls as visual information, but it was unnerving. This wasn’t helped by the twitching of curtains and swift movement of vague silhouettes in the windows. I headed inside my workplace and examined the order sheets. Pretty heavy workload. I played logistical Tetris in my head, optimising the assignment of jobs to machines and the order of operations to maximise the amount of production I could do as a lone operator. Some of the injection cycles took a while and left me with a bit of a wait. That time could be used for finishing another part on the second injection press and starting the next one, a continual dance to the tune of hydraulics. Such measures were necessary in service of unforgiving production targets. It was important to keep moving for my own sake as well; boredom and solitude combined with a late night could conjure demons. It’s all too easy to mistake a shadow in the periphery of your vision for some threat in the dead of night.
Half the night went by before the sounds started.
Well, there was constant noise in and around my workplace, of course. The hum and grind of heavy machinery, electric humming, tyres leaving a trail on poorly maintained roads. But in the early hours, a new section joined the industrial estate orchestra. It broke through the sonic barrier provided by my ear buds, drowned out the ’90s grunge with an entirely new-to-me flavour of cacophony. A thousand rhythms collided, chaotic cycles composed of shouts and grunts and screams. I couldn’t be sure that those noises came from people or animals, but they sounded far too wretched and wet to come from machinery alone. My eyes kept flitting to the shutters. I’d kept them down to ward off the midnight chill. Alone in my section of the factory, it was very apparent to me that I truly had no idea what was happening on the other side of that opaque metallic veil. Could the wind conjure such sounds? Could it disturb inanimate steel and wood and stone in such a way that the otherwise static matter was compelled to scream? I knew that the weather couldn’t be all that vicious; I’d have heard traces of the chaos on the factory’s tin roof. Whatever I was hearing, it was not a product of any circumstance I’d encountered in the daytime while working at Raymond’s, and it was certainly coming from the other side of the shutters.
I approached those shutters. I pulled on the cable which engaged their motor and I raised the stainless steel slats to reveal the damp night. Immediately it was apparent that the garment factory was the source of the noise. I stood there a moment, watched shapes moving in the windows. There wasn’t much to see with the shutters down and the workers all inside. Since I was there anyway, I took another few steps outside and lit a cigarette. Nothing notable happened while I smoked, so once I was done I lowered the shutters and returned to my work. I increased the volume of my music, knuckled down, and tried to get through the rest of my shift without thinking about the garment factory.
By sun-up, I was like the shambling dead. My supervisor came to relieve me and I clocked out, went home, and collapsed onto my bed. I’d worried that I’d find it hard to sleep in the morning after a night of work. This proved to be a needless concern. I slept long and hard, dreamless and still. What few hours I had to myself before I returned to work were spent on chores and life admin. I ate mindlessly, washed my dishes and put on my laundry in a vague haze. It seemed as though no time at all had passed before I was changing back into my work clothes and heading out to the factory.
My counterparts outside the garment factory were skittish, jumpy. A large part of me couldn’t help but wish our shift changes happened at different times. Standing there in the Raymond Castings car park, smoking, I occupied my mind by scanning the faces of the workers opposite. Very few of them looked familiar. One in particular, though, the chap who’d nodded at me the previous night, was present, wild-eyed, and clearly recognised me.
He glanced behind him at the garment factory and then trotted across the road to me. ‘Lighter?’ He asked, pulling a pouch of tobacco from his pocket.
I nodded and held my lighter out to him.
He sighed theatrically, rolled a cigarette with the sort of haste one rarely sees in an honest man, and lit it. He mumbled his thanks and waved towards the garment factory. He said, ‘Not smokers there.’ His accent was thick but intelligible, South Asian of some description. ‘I’m Abdur.’
‘How is it, working in there?’
‘Strange. Especially the back.’
‘The back?’
One of Abdur’s colleagues called wordlessly, made a beckoning gesture. The other garment workers were heading inside. Abdur nodded at me and trotted across the road.
I took that as my cue to head in myself.
The first half of the shift went by easily enough, my monotonous remove part/clean part/pack part cycle broken only by occasional smoke and sandwich breaks, right up until the strange noises started up again. I took the opportunity for a cigarette and eyed the garment factory. No movement was visible, nobody was outside. I glanced down the road and saw nobody around. By the time my cigarette was halfway done, I was tense. The strange sounds still emanated from the factory, but I had yet to see anyone. I stepped onto the road that ran between the two factories, took one step for each drag of my cigarette. I stubbed it out on the pavement outside the garment factory and scanned the yard. Nobody. I walked the length of the fence, eyed the brick and tin of the industrial behemoth before me. The front, the part I could see, was the warehouse. By the look of it, the offices and production area would all be in the back, not visible from where I was. The gate was open. Nothing stopped me from stepping onto those grounds and exploring a little, sating my midnight curiosity.
The warehouse shutter opened. I startled, dropping my nearly-done cigarette. Christ, the noise was so much worse without two sets of steel shutters between the source and myself. Wailing, forlorn and desperate. Not quite human, somewhat animal, potentially mechanical.
A man and a woman came out, looking ragged, pushing a rack of wrapped hanging garments between them. They wheeled it towards an open shipping container. The woman looked in my direction.
I reached for any plausible reason that I might be intruding on the garment factory’s night shift. ‘Abdur about?’ I enquired.
‘In the back,’ she said.
I nodded and headed back in to finish my shift. By the time I was done, I’d fully spiralled into wild speculation about the garment factory. I didn’t see Abdur again during any of my smoke breaks and I’d convinced myself that something sinister was afoot. At home I rummaged through my closet, pulled apart the contents of bags and boxes until I found the branded hi-vis that I’d worn as a temp with the same agency from which the garment factory sourced its workers.
On the third night, I brought the hi-vis with me. When Tomasz came to check on me, I asked if it would be okay to take the entirety of my break at once, a full hour of free time. He said it’d be fine so long as I didn’t fall asleep. He wore a wry smile as he said it and I chuckled politely. When the decided-upon hour arrived, I swiftly replaced my Raymond’s uniform with loose street clothes and wrapped myself in the temp agency hi-vis. I stood across the road from the garment factory, watching for an opportunity. After a few seconds I realised that the gate had been left unlocked. I silently cursed myself for not checking immediately and then gently teased it open part way, slipping in quietly and closing the gate behind myself.
My heart hammered with the thrill of trespassing. I was furtive, glancing left and right in search of potential spotters. I’m not sure why, instinct perhaps. On a logical level I knew I wasn’t infiltrating a military camp or anything like that, but my gut told me I was in enemy territory nonetheless.
The steel shutter was partly open, perhaps three feet of space to allow air flow. It was well-aged and intricately textured, a medley of dents and scrapes from decades of under-trained forklift operators delivering dings on the way to unload cargo. I approached and sank to a crouch.
Inside appeared to my unfamiliar eye to be entirely chaotic, a mess of racks and pallets and miscellaneous containers. I imagine my workplace would look just as inscrutable to the garment workers. There were very few people about. One or two shambling souls, head down, pushing product to and fro on wheeled racks and pallet jacks. Right at the back and to the right there was a door, plain fibreboard without a window. There was a whiff of the uncanny about it that I couldn’t quite place until I realised how strange it was to see a door in a factory without some sort of fire warning on it in this day and age.
I was confident that I remained unwatched. Only one person was visible and their back was turned to me. I debated simply turning around, returning to my own factory, finishing my shift and leaving sleeping giants alone. Something wouldn’t allow me to, though. Some combination of curiosity and existential malaise. The chronic tedium of endless produce/clean/pack cycles had rendered me twitchy and danger-prone. I hadn’t realised that at the time, granted, but it’s clear to me in hindsight. Two awkward steps forward, crouching down below the partly open shutter, and I was inside. I stood, glanced left and right, and walked towards the door at the back.
A woman emerged from between two racks of shelves, awkwardly carrying a large box. She glanced at me briefly, then lowered her gaze and continued on her way. She wore the same agency hi-vis that I did. It struck me then that I hadn’t seen any permanent staff at all. Only temps. And there were only a few in this warehouse; mountains of product, only a handful of souls ferrying it back and forth for reasons unknown. Whatever happened in the back must demand quite a bit of labour given the large number of people I saw outside every day.
Confident that I was not revealed as a trespasser, at least not by anybody with the capacity to give a shit, I made for the blank door. It grew in my vision as I approached, its too-smooth surface conjuring images of yet another factory, a whole different crowd of underpaid human cogs.
The brass handle was warm to the touch.
Odd.
I pushed the handle down, eased the door open just wide enough to pass through. The door moved smoothly, silently. As though it were newly fitted. Its dull matte finish and the utter absence of any smell didn’t give the impression it was new. Timeless perhaps, but not new. The juxtaposition of this flawless mechanism nestled within the depths of a grimy industrial estate, a place where a discarded plastic food container might linger for months, was jarring. And the corridor on the other side of the threshold filled me with dread. It was bare, unadorned, unpopulated. Even dust and cobwebs seemed to give the back of the garment factory a wide berth. Totally incongruous.
It struck me then that I’d been standing in the doorway for quite some time, looking at the eerily clean carpet and the unmarred paint on the walls of that passageway. It was a straight line up to a T-junction about twenty metres down. No doors, just blank walls. Again, no smell to hint at a recent refurb but no wear either. I took a deep breath and stepped forwards. My heart hammered in my chest. The thrill of transgression swirled and blended with the anxiety of being caught, and also some other fear, something deeper and more fundamental.
By the time I reached the junction, a film of sweat had crept from my palms and forehead to cover me, creating a slick layer between my skin and clothes. I looked left and right. Both of my options looked identical to the path I’d just walked; twenty or so metres, no doors or decorations or blemishes, a T-junction at the end. I went right. Again I found two identical options. Perplexed, I went right again.
The same.
I walked to the end of the right path once more, completed a square. I should have been back where I started. Should have seen the door back to the warehouse floor. And yet, there was another T-junction.
I muttered curses and considered my options. Something was awry. Either my perceptions had misled me or there was some deception in the angles and lengths of that place’s construction and I was being messed with in some manner. Maybe not intentional, maybe just good old fashioned shitty workmanship on the part of the builders, but malice is not a necessary component of fuckery.
At the junction, I switched things up and headed left. To my relief this corridor was longer, had only a single turn at the end rather than yet another junction. Slick linoleum threatened to floor me as I hastened onwards, almost skipping towards…whatever was at the end of the corridor. Near the turn, I reduced my pace and slowed my breathing. The faintest hint of stamping feet broke the near-perfect silence of the maze-like environment.
Stopping at the bend, I poked my head round.
Ahead of me, hunched over and pushing a rack of suit jackets listlessly, was Abdur.
I caught up to him. ‘Hey!’ I stage-whispered. ‘What the fuck is going on? This place is mental.’
Abdur swivelled and looked at me, mouth hanging open.
I winced at the sight of him. Bloodshot eyes, clothes and hair unkempt. He looked like he’d been working for days.
Abdur shook his head. ‘You shouldn’t be here. Bad place. Bad.’ His voice trailed off into unintelligible muttering,
‘I don’t think anyone should be here. This factory is fucked, mate.’
Abdur shook his head. He turned back to his cargo, resumed pushing it. ‘Go. If you can.’
I watched him walk away. For a moment, I considered trying to retrace my steps, trying to exit and get back to my own shift and just not think about the garment factory. But weighing the draw of a mystery and some basic sense of compassion against endlessly pushing buttons and cleaning flash off of plastic parts? Lonely tedium just didn’t seem that appealing. Besides, there was no guarantee that trying to go back the way I’d come would actually work. Logic dictated that it should work, but I wasn’t optimistic.
When Abdur was almost out of sight at the next corner, I jogged to catch up. I kept a respectful distance, but I followed. Abdur glanced back occasionally, muttering. After some time and a few more turns, we arrived at a different sort of corridor. The same relentless beige walls, but interspersed with doors, most hanging open.
I couldn’t help but gawk through the first door we passed. A small meeting room, its occupants in sweat-stained business casual wear, half a dozen of them round a table with a greasy-haired older man standing in front of a whiteboard upon which was written, ‘Closing The Loop.’ The stench of unwashed bodies that permeated the otherwise stale air was overpowering. Rancid white-collar flesh in poly-blend off-the-rack suits which desperately needed firing into the sun.
After that, another door and another similar room. Just two people. One of them was stood, giving a lengthy lecture with the aid of a projector. The current slide was titled, ‘Health & Safety At Work act, 1974.’ The other person was slumped in a chair, clearly dead. And by clearly dead, I mean his skin was grey and too tight on his skull, his eyes were missing, and his mouth hung open wide enough to fit a grapefruit between his upper and lower jaw.
At the end of the corridor was a door much like the one that stood between the front warehouse and the corridors in which we wandered. When he reached the door, Abdur turned his head and locked eyes with me.
‘You should go back.’ There was no threat or command in his voice, it was a simple statement of fact.
When it became clear that I wouldn’t leave him, Abdur grunted and turned the door handle. He went through backwards, dragging the coat rack.
I jogged up to him and took the other end, pushing as he pulled.
For a moment after crossing the threshold, I saw nothing. The light was low and the mechanical whirring combined with something that sounded like a thousand low groans crowded out any other sensory information. A deep, penetrating brown noise. When my eyes adjusted, I processed the scene.
A chamber almost as large as the front warehouse, feeble gas lamps high on the walls, ancient rafters high above serving as home to a mess of pigeons. It was filled with the largest loom I’d ever seen. It looked old, pitted brass and groaning wood, driven solely by human graft. Tens of workers stood at various stations turning wheels and operating arcane mechanisms. The loom moved through its cycle reluctantly, fought its operators. It was a machine that had outlived its natural lifespan. It was immediately apparent that the machine was unloaded. No fabric was being produced. Hell, I’d seen rolls of stock being delivered almost daily. As far as I could tell, the garment factory didn’t actually produce raw fabric. So why were they running a giant old loom? Running it dry, without material, going through the motions. I looked at the faces of the people operating the mechanical behemoth. Sweat-slick, pained, exhausted. Why?
I cast a quizzical look at Abdur.
He shrugged. ‘We never load it. It has to run. So they say.’
Around the loom, floating among the workers in agency-branded vests, were a few other folks wearing overalls in the company colours. They had ‘Supervisor’ stamped on their backs. One of these people, a heavy-set man with a pronounced twitch in one eye, passed by Abdur and I, muttering something about quotas.
‘Excuse me, why are you running the loom without any fabric?’ I asked.
The twitchy supervisor swivelled on a heel and fixed me with a wide-eyed stare. ‘Head office demands it. You should know that.’
‘Sorry, I’m new.’
The supervisor stepped towards me. His bloodshot eyes bore into me, his sweat-stained overalls shamelessly announced themselves to my nostrils. The man was manic, a tightly wound spring pointed in my direction. ‘Doesn’t matter. You should know that. From the moment your pen released a drop of ink upon the contract that brought you here, you should have heard the whispers. Felt the pull. We all do.’
I glanced at Abdur.
He didn’t meet my gaze, but nodded softly.
The supervisor narrowed his eyes. ‘You have signed your papers, haven’t you?’
‘I…haven’t gotten to it yet.’
‘Then what are you doing here?’
I stammered. I didn’t have a good answer. I looked from the supervisor to Abdur to the loom. I pointed at it. ‘I work over the road. I heard that. Thought it might be something sinister. I wanted to see it. I know it was wrong, I’m sorry.’
The supervisor shook his head, retreated a few steps. There was genuine fear on his face. ‘No no no. That won’t do. We’ve got a very strict policy on visitors, particularly those that arrive without warning. I’ll have to involve management.’ He stepped towards the wall and slammed a cartoonishly large red button.
A klaxon blared, shrill and insistent.
Heads swivelled and their resident eyes fixed me, permanent staff and temps alike staring at me with mouths agape.
I stood frozen. I looked at Abdur in search of guidance, found only confusion.
Within a minute, the group I’d seen in the meeting room filed into the loom chamber, eyes darting about in a manner that suggested an uneasy balance of predator and prey in the minds of the management team. The man who had been heading their marathon meeting was leading the procession, a thick brute with a thinning rendition of a slick-in-the-late-90s hairstyle and pig-like eyes that shone with the sort of malice that only an MBA can engender in a person.
‘What’s happening, Dave?’ Asked the apparent leader of the congregation.
The supervisor, whose name tag said Steven, replied, ‘Sorry, Henry. This bloke’s from over the road. Came in dressed as a temp. Curious fucker with no right to be here, no papers.’
A craven old woman stepped forwards from the mass of management. Her hi-vis had ‘HR’ emblazoned on both the back and front. ‘That’s a potential minefield, that is. He shouldn’t be back here.’
Henry asked, ‘How does it look for us, liability-wise?’
The HR woman stroked her chin and hummed. After a moment of deliberation, she pulled a pen from the pocket of her hi-vis and lobbed it like a dart at one of the pigeons that was roosting in the rafters. The bird dropped to the ground. ‘Bring it to me!’ Cried the HR woman.
One of the temps tentatively picked up the pigeon and brought it to the old woman. She retrieved a Stanley knife from the same pocket as the pen and knelt on the ground. With the bird held by its neck in her left hand, she brought her blade down and sliced the animal from breast to tail. She cast aside the knife and reached into the pigeon’s innards, rummaging around in the blood and gore. She grunted and cooed as she did so, her eyes rolling back in her head. After a solid minute of that, she pulled her hand free and dropped a steaming handful of pigeon guts onto the factory floor, discarding the bird’s carcass. The woman got her face right down to ground level and inspected the guts, the manner in which they fell and the spatter patterns of the blood, muttering wordlessly.
‘Ill portents. We might well get shafted by the Factories Act 1961.’
Henry rubbed his chin. ‘Might? One may well infer that we also might not then, correct?’
‘Indeed, but I wouldn’t chance it.’
‘Well, that’s why you’re still on five figures, I suppose. With respect.’ Henry shifted his gaze to me. ‘I like the look of this lad. Keen. Clever. We could make real use of him, given that he’s already demonstrated such an interest in the operation.’ Back to the HR woman. ‘Could you scuttle back to the office and print us off a new starter form? I’ll see if we can’t get our fresh colleague here familiar with the way we work before you get back.’
The HR woman scrambled to her feet and bowed low before hobbling back out of the chamber.
‘As for you,’ Henry said to me, stepping closer and clapping a glove-like hand on my shoulder, ‘let’s see how you handle the loom, since you’re so keen on it.’
Abdur stepped up to the brute, not meeting his gaze. ‘I’ll do it. Let me. He isn’t part of this.’
Henry grunted. ‘He soon will be, one way or another, so I say we should get him up to speed.’
The temps scattered about the loom chamber all watched the interaction with bated breath and wide eyes. They glanced at one another and exchanged whispers.
‘I really don’t think I should be here,’ I said.
Something about the room was making me cold. The high ceilings seemed to be leaning in closer, the walls crowded inwards, as though the bricks and steel were eager to eavesdrop on the conversation.
Henry dropped his smile and all pretenses of friendliness from his voice. ‘You’re manning the loom, son.’
‘No!’ Shouted a worker from out of sight. Raised voices joined in a chorus.
The management team glanced at one another. ‘Quiet down!’ Called Henry.
A plastic bottle arced over head, filled with yellowish liquid. It caught the HR woman on the shoulder. She squealed as the cap popped off and the liquid within coated her. It reeked of ammonia.
Abdur grabbed me by the elbow and led me out of the loom chamber as the impromptu industrial action began in earnest. We started negotiating the bland corridors, chaotically careening left and right while brutal screams chased us.
‘Freaks!’ Abdur spat as he ran in front. ‘Been working people to death. Everyone wants to stop it. We don’t know how.’
I didn’t respond. Didn’t have appropriate words in that moment. Still don’t, honestly. The tension among the workers, the pressure pushing outwards against the thin skin of one-size-fits-all hi-vis jackets was unlike anything I’d ever seen.
Abdur stopped, leaned against a wall, panting. He choked down a few ragged breathes then spoke. ‘We fight back sometimes, scream and shout and throw things. Next day, nothing changes. They don’t care.’ Abdur glanced back at me. ‘We signed up for this, even if we didn’t know it. But you didn’t. You can leave, you can tell people. You can help.’
I eyed the corridor in the direction we came from. The voices of our pursuers sounded distant, impossibly so given the confines of the factory plot. I met Abdur’s gaze and nodded. ‘Yeah, I’ll tell people.’
Abdur nodded. ‘Almost there.’ We jogged a few more lengths of the irrational network of corridors and came to a door, different from the one I’d entered the back through. Abdur pulled a ring of uncountable small keys from the cargo pocket of his trousers and unlocked the door, opened it to reveal a different angle of the front warehouse.
Once in the main warehouse, we found our path blocked by a forklift, its driver one of the supervisors. ‘What are you two up to?’ Asked the supervisor. ‘Ain’t meant to be coming through there.’
Fifty metres to our left, the original door I’d used to access the back swung open. Half a dozen pigeons burst through, followed by the HR crone. She pointed at Abdur and I, screaming. ‘VIOLATION!’
The supervisor on the forklift glanced at her then back at us. His face hardened.
Abdur rushed to the vehicle and roughly pulled the supervisor out of the seat. He mounted and then drove the forklift into one of the shelving units, used the forks and the vehicle’s momentum to buckle one leg and bring tonnes of cargo down to block the doorway in which the HR woman stood. She squealed as pallets of finished clothing rained down on her, fell silent when crippled steel shelving followed. Large hands grabbed her, pulled per back into the corridor and forced the door shut against tonnes of fabric.
‘Go!’ Abdur shouted.
I hesitated for a second, but the sight of the chaos in front of the door pushed me into a run. ‘Are you coming?’ I called back to Abdur.
He shook his head, his expression forlorn. ‘My contract.’
I didn’t understand. Still don’t, really. With everything that had happened, everything we’d seen, how could an employment contract still dictate his behaviour? I suppose there could be immigration concerns, a family to support, any number of other confounding factors. But still, he’d clearly aided my escape from the management team. He’d be getting fired for insubordination, or gross misconduct or something, surely?
I exited the factory under the partly open shutter doors and bolted for the yard gate. I yanked it open, slid through and jogged back to my place of employment. The sky was already beginning to grow lighter, a timid blue replacing the familiar black. That didn’t make sense. I couldn’t have been in the garment factory longer than forty minutes or so. I checked my phone; dead. It had been damn near fully charged.
I entered my workplace and found Tomasz pacing, wide eyed. ‘Where the fuck have you been?!’ He spat the words out.
I held up my hands in a placating gesture. ‘I just went for a walk on my break.’
‘You dumb motherfucker, you missed half your shift! I was worried! You’re my responsibility! Jesus Christ, what were you thinking?!’
‘Half my shift? No, that can’t be right. I haven’t been gone that long.’
Tomasz pointed at the clock on the wall. Almost half four. I’d been gone for four hours.
My mouth dropped open. ‘That doesn’t make any sense.’
Tomasz’ expression blended confusion, anger, and pity in equal parts. He was on the edge of hyperventilation. He shook his head slowly, then silently left my section and headed back to the main factory floor.
What came next was entirely unsurprising. I received a phone call that afternoon, informing me my employment had been terminated due to my unauthorised absence. In truth, I felt some relief at first. The thought of going back to work and seeing the garment factory was certainly less than appealing. Would Henry, the brutish manager, seek me out for some sort of revenge? Would I be compelled to work the empty loom, pointlessly weaving air for the sake of procedure, following the whims of an unseen and unseeing head office? It seemed unlikely that Raymond Casting would keep me safe from their psychoti neighbour. Better to be clear of the industrial estate entirely.
My first week of unemployment passed quickly. I sent a few emails to various local journalists about the inhumane working conditions at the garment factory, tried to make some phone calls. I received no answer until the third day, where a young reporter picked up my call to the Ferenbrooke Times.
‘That’s just business, isn’t it? It makes no sense and the people at the bottom are treated like crap. Sad but that’s how it is.’
‘This was something else. I’m a factory worker myself, trust me when I say this garment factory is beyond the pale.’
The reporter sighed theatrically. ‘I’ll have a little dig around.’
I got an email two days later.
Hey,
Editor put the kaibosh on looking into the factory.
If you get any hard evidence of criminal wrongdoing, let me know and I'll try again.
If anything pops up on my end, I'll let you know.
Apologies,
Stephen PorterThe police were likewise uninterested. It seemed that nobody cared much about how the garment factory abused its staff. For the rest of that week, I lounged at home, caught up on some TV shows, played some old games. It was a bit of an indulgence to spend multiple days doing nothing, but I felt I needed the time to process the strange events.
At the start of the second week, I refreshed my profiles on job sites. I browsed around for a few hours a day, applied for a few gigs. There wasn’t a lot I was qualified for and I wasn’t hopeful. I sent an email to the agency that had originally placed me at Raymond Casting, got a reply informing me that I wouldn’t be accepted back onto their books due to failing my probationary period at the job they placed me in. That stang, but it was fair I suppose. I shot them another email suggesting that they should inspect the garment factory before placing other temps there, but of course it went unanswered. I then hunted down other local employment and temp agencies and signed up wherever I could.
For three weeks I got nothing other than some immediate rejections for jobs I’d applied for. The agencies had little to nothing for me. My bank account shrank. For three days I rationed two tins of baked beans and half a loaf of bread to make sure there would be enough in my account to cover rent. After that bill emptied my account, I got my first offer from an agency.
A temp-to-permanent position at the garment factory.
I ignored it. Started ringing round old acquaintances and family members to see if anyone knew of anything. Got a couple of days cash in hand work which let me eat. Then another offer from another agency. The garment factory again. I didn’t bite. Kept looking, kept sending CVs and filling out applications.
A month passed that way. I missed my next rent payment. Got a letter telling me I had a week to make good or the landlord would start eviction proceedings. Went out and walked around the neighbourhood in a daze, a still panic that made me feel more prey animal than person.
When I got back to my flat, another letter waited behind my door. Very strange for the post to come twice in one day, but not the strangest thing I’d experienced at that point.
I sat on my sofa and opened the letter. On some level I already knew what it was, I think.
An employment contract for the garment factory. A short cover letter saying they were still interested in hiring me.
I checked my bank balance on my phone. Heavily overdrawn. No work available. Nobody to turn to.
I found myself wondering how the garment factory stayed open, functioning as it did. How was it allowed to continue? All those people passing through and none of them ever raised a complaint with the council or called the police?
Had I misunderstood the situation somehow? Exaggerated the strangeness? Perhaps sleep deprivation had something to do with it. There was no way it could actually be as crazy as I remembered it, right?
Surely.
I ran my eyes over the employment contract, looked for anything unusual. It looked like every other contract I’d signed.
I pulled up my email client, refreshed it. Nothing new. Checked the job search sites. No bites on any applications, a couple of new auto rejections.
That letter arrived this morning. Reading the contract again now, I can’t find anything that suggests some sinister situation. It’s the only job on the table, and I’m out of options. Benefits will take at least six weeks to come through.
Would you take it? Just for a while, knowing you can quit any time? Knowing that the version that exists in your head is some over the top fever dream, a combination of sleeplessness and unfamiliarity? It has to be, right? It couldn’t have actually been like that.
It couldn’t have been.
And I really need the work.