Hutt Valley Heartache

She said meet me at the gates at eight; sweet, the factory whistle would scream and we’d all bail, piling out the door eager to escape the stench of bad food and servitude.

She’d said it like it was a date – the gates at eight, with a smile that suggested more; and so I hoped that with the sun rising on a new day, we’d blow like Thelma and Louise and leave all this shit behind for something, anything, but I’ll be straight with you now and tell you that it all went wrong; no fairytale ending, just stupid and sad.

She worked across the expanse of black concrete, facing me as I scuttled around my machine tweaking dials and pulling levers. This place was all about snakes and ladders for the skilled and those that failed school – or maybe it was skin colour, what ever; anyway, she scanned the ‘product’ for foreign objects while I cooked up what passed inspection at the other end on this chain gang of automation.

Screwing the cooker door closed I hit the steam valves and note the time – this batch was asparagus so thirteen minutes exactly before I send in the cold water, no more no less. Thirteen minutes with sweet FA to do. Wander, ponder, I am the great absconder. I slap my boots down hard to fill the caverns of blackness with my presence and chase away fear. Like distant space stations, clusters of light and life appear and disappear.

Cardboard boxes are stacked like Lego behind workers in an attempt to trap the heat emitting from gutless heaters below their feet. It’s sad. This tomb-like factory was born from imaginations that stretched no further than economics with people as ‘out goings’.

For a long while I thought she was just lost in space like me, until she’d smiled - at me.

Oh. Um, shit.

A smile is nice, so simple a gift to reciprocate. Not me; I have no faith. I do have hope though; but it's a long scary road to reach what is essentially an unknown: to trust. Do I jump? No, I run for the safety of fantasy as the cold nights crawl onwards: to be rich, important, to be everything a beautiful girl would want. I walk tall.

Well, a little taller.

Shit, I might have known my math well enough to run the cooker, but some things just don't add up right and it took many repeats of that smile across the cold darkness before the penny dropped into this heart: come talk to me; it's safe, it's ok. Yeah I was always late.

For eight hours quality control sit on high stools with their cardboard insulation, blocks of wood under gumboots, hands sifting slowly through streams of fresh vegetables. Yummy processed food; we get it half price at the office. I can switch off the conveyor belt from where I work. Easy, see. Stoned giggles erupt, echo off into space as they all fall off their stools, their brains still following the vegetables. Huh.

We drop dead rats prised from the traps in the spice room onto the belt to see if The Ladies really are awake at four am… oops…no. Who buys this, this food? The innocent of course. Each week at Team Meeting the managers solemnly read out letters of complaint: "I'm returning a bolt which I assume is important" or "I found (a feather, dead fly, bee, plastic, metal, wood, hair, fingernail ....) something unidentifiable floating in my Spicy Tomato Cup-a-soup." The fun was juvenile and dangerous, but hey we should all be tucked up in bed with our sweet dreams, not living Orwellian nightmares. We were still kids at school, uniforms and bells, yes sir no sir, lets fuck shit up sir. Heavy machinery and cannabis, food products and snot, company profits and hours spent on the roof star gazing with the joint passing slowly round. Just not meant to be.

All together now: we gotta get out of this place if it’s the last thing we ever do...

The echoes here were just fucking brilliant.

That filthy conveyor belt was the site of my first official warning: covering a smoke break for her, caught alone, reading a book… while millions of tender green peas streamed on past. No matter that I wasn’t even supposed to be there, tripping out to that sea of green. It was her, looping through my mind and growing courage, wings even. Caught in more ways than one eh? I thought she was worth risks; she was worth conspiring with to make mischief. She was fun, her smile intoxicating; I wanted to touch her.

And I did.

The next warning was for an over-cook that had left several hundred cans of butter beans with dents in them. I falsified the time book. Tsk tsk. I’d been perving at her while she worked and as my supervisor bollocked me I could see her cracking up with The Ladies. Her easy laugh, her eyes briefly catching and holding mine sent me straight back to the kiss. The supervisor might as well have beamed back into the matrix for all I cared. Fucking magic.

Collecting a pie and chips for my 2am meal break, I hear:“Hey you need to stop watching me and do your job eh?” Female laughter follows me as I hunker down opposite Tommy. Shit, they all knew. Last night's Shortland Street and then the love-struck Pākehā boy; can ya imagine it?

Tommy was my age, had done three seasons here and sold the drugs that got the team through the night. Important role. Greenery, caps and pharmaceuticals. Blowing smoke out the cleaning room window later that morning we hit the steam valves and strip for a sauna; talking shit, wishing we had lives, girlfriends, something to do.

“This place is fucking suicide; get out quick before you get any HP’s or a girlfriend eh.” Tommy expels wisdom before sucking hard on the joint. His face is tight, eyes bulging as he holds the smoke in as long as possible. It looks like he's drowning, or dead. “Yeah right man, so you going to pass it over or what?”

See? That’s me all over

She’d said to meet her at eight, but I was fucken late. I'm always late.

I tell ya it was a day of some big mistakes, the least of which cost me a cruisey job. More importantly was her.

My third warning meant disciplinary action would be taken: demotion it was and the bitch of a supervisor did not hesitate. I’d sorted a chair for the guy who was emptying the cans out of the big wire bins I push in and out of my cooker; he had a sore back. I found one for myself as well; give him a hand I figured. Wrong.

“We don’t sit on this job – stand up,” the dead fuck had hissed at me. After this quite unjustifiable slap in the face she might have seen my only reason for actually turning up each night cracking up over there on the line – my new friend, but it don’t matter – anyway she turned back around and there I am with me arm still raised in a fucken’ Nazi salute. Her smirk fell lower than her tits: “Right, you’re washing the boxes from now on young man– enjoy!”

Yep I’m a 4th generation New Zealand-made slave; and as I pirouetted on the wet floor with my middle fingers raised at the bosses high up in their warm offices I could almost taste the futility. “There's no justice ladies,” I protested. “It’s just us down ‘ere being fucked over and over.”

Maida, the Jehovah with fifty kids or something, gave me my only applause. Everyone else had buggered off for a fag. I hit the stairs that lead up past the hoppers of soup mix to collect Tommy and climb onwards and upwards to our sanctuary. Sparked up and toked hard. Sedated, deflated. With our feet dangling over a ledge I idly flick dead flies into the open hoppers below. Most of the plant was silent at night with just the odd security light twinkling amongst looming shades of black. Thinking back over the busy harvest when the night shift had come on, we’d dropped a lot of shit off this ledge. Pot if you're lucky, flies, snot, bolts and a good spurt of Tommy’s jungle juice on those nights when things were a little out of kilter if you're not.

It was up here that I kissed her, high as a kite, trying to touch her tongue with mine. I can still taste her. Gave me a push that nearly sent me over the edge and into the Thick Mushroom Soup when I brushed her breast with my hand.

Won’t be trying that again; not up on that ledge anyway.

When she said ‘eight’ she meant it cos she never was one for lingering. Had already missed her a few times, seeing her pedaling off on her bike, headphones on tight unable to hear my yelling over her beats. Christ, I never really knew if she was serious or just playing games as she cruised off to fuck knows where. To do what? To be with who?

Meet me at the gates…. And don’t be late she’d said, cos I don’t wait. Shit, I was trying to save my job, brown nosing the manager that it was all a bit over the top and that the bitch had it in for me. Calm down he’s saying; the union will have to be involved and blah blah blah.
More fool me eh? Man what the fuck was I thinking. The sheer monotony, the humiliation and abuse, a crap wage and shitter of a drug habit to boot. Give it to me baby. There I was trying my hardest to get my leash back on when I’d been all but shown the door marked ‘life’.

Meet me at the gate at eight she’d said. The invitation I dreamed of. I could finally see her out in the real world without a hairnet on; maybe do something normal like look at each other in daylight. We could have some fun; maybe go into town or something.

I’d really like that.

But that invite was only half the story; she was like that, dug her mysteries like where she lived, what she got up to with her mates out there on the other side.

Only cos it was her last shift an all. And I was late.

The sunshine and her smile, it was right there. Well I tell ya, and I really fucking mean it, I'm never going to be late again.

Never going to be late again.