Soup

One summer he worked in the soup factory. Six weeks of rising at 6
a.m. He was between things, that's how he justified it. He didn't mean
it.

He walked to the wide gates through the cool, damp mornings knowing
that by the time he saw the light again the sun would have burned off
the moisture in the air. Outside the gates the workers would be
waiting, not because the gates were locked to them but he sensed
because they wanted to delay to the exact minute the time they became
owned by the factory. He waited with them. A mix of people, different
ages, men and women. Most had arrived on foot in their light summer
coats but some had bicycles. They had their last cigarettes before the
silent agreement to walk through the gates.

The job centre had put him onto it. Manufacturing the woman had said.
He noticed the sheen of sweat on her upper lip. He took the number and
called. The foreman showed him round, asked him a few questions. Set
him on. It was as easy as that to get a job in the town in those days.
You just walked into one.

The factory made packet soup. Mixed the powder in great silver vats.
The ingredients came in great sackfuls and his job was to empty the
sacks into the hoppers. No skill in that. Attach the sack to the
lifting gear, position it above the hopper, loosen the binding on the
bottom of the sack and watch the powder fall. It made the air
thick.

Sometimes he had to push a cart through the packing department. Here
the women in teams of six boxed the packets and boxed the boxes. They
put them onto a conveyor belt and they were shipped through the
labelling and out of the doors.

The women talked and laughed as they packed. Their hands a blur as they
made their living sitting on the high stools in their overalls and the
puffy blue hats that covered their hair. You got to judge women
differently when they were all covered up like that. Beauty was
different unembellished.

Each day was a different smell. Oxtail, tomato, cream of chicken. Each
day a different colour coated the overalls of the workers. He grew used
to breathing soup. Pale yellow or pale pink coated the inside of his
nose and mouth. He tasted soup all day.

He made himself believe he wasn't part of it. From the bite of the
clock on his card at the beginning of the day and through all the moves
he learned to do without thinking. He made himself believe he wasn't
there and so he didn't speak much to anyone. He just got on with it and
nobody knew him.

When the hooter sounded breaks and lunchtimes he was surprised how fast
the workers left their tasks. How they flooded into the sunlit yard and
turned their faces up to the light. Outside they seemed more human and
he watched their interactions, how the women pulled off their hats and
shook their hair out, laughed and huddled, looked at the men. How the
men shucked off the top halves of their overalls and leant against the
walls eating from their pack up tins. Sometimes they got a game of
football going.

What startled him the most and shamed him was how, when the hooter
sounded the end they all smartly returned. No question. They were meek
and so was he. They all conformed, pushing in lines back through the
hanging plastic doors. The women obediently tucking their hair back
inside those hats. The men pulling up their overalls.

"You're solid," his supervisor said to him once, "a solid worker,
you'll do well here." And he couldn't tell the man that hearing this
made his heart leaden. Instead he smiled as though accepting a
compliment. "twenty three years," the supervisor said, banging his
chest with the flat of his hand. Was that pride?

He was between things, he kept telling himself. The route of his life
would open itself to him if he just waited, bided his time. When the
hooter sounded the end of the working day the men and women left so
fast. There was a frisson of freedom, there was laughter in the clock
out line. The regular click of the clock releasing the workers out into
the evening light.

He walked home each time, climbed into the bath lay in the hot water
thinking again and again, he was between things. Around him the water
turned to soup.