Third Degree

by Claire Rayner

  ‘Here we are then!’ Maureen had extracted herself from the car and George was a little amused. When her husband and family were about she needed to be helped. Now she was much more spry. ‘Good morning, Bert. Is Connie about?’

  The old man in the dark blue stores coat she had spoken to nodded at her. He lifted his head and bawled, ‘Connie!’ at the top of his voice. From somewhere inside the big building, a space which seemed to be filled with shadow beyond the double doors, someone bawled back incomprehensibly.

  ‘It’s me, Connie!’ Maureen produced a high fluting sound which was remarkably penetrating. There was a rumble of more shouting from inside the building and then a man came out. He was tall, wearing dark trousers and a shirt of so perfect and blinding a white beneath bright red braces that it made George blink. He had crisp dark hair, huge, very dark eyes with the longest lashes George had ever seen on a man, and the most melting of smiles.

  ‘This is Dr Barnabas,’ Maureen said with great formality, clearly pleased as punch to be showing off her friend, to whom she was now clinging, one hand tucked into his elbow. ‘She came just to help me, wasn’t that nice of her? I do hope you can find a moment to show her things. She’s ever so interested, aren’t you, Dr Barnabas?’

  ‘Oh? Oh, yes,’ George smiled. She was indeed desperately interested, but that was not the thing she wanted this man to know. He would expect of her no more than the sort of polite interest newcomers to his establishment showed out of good manners, so that was all she tried to display.

  She must have succeeded, because he smiled. His teeth were as George had suspected they would be, a very bright and glittering mouthful, and she understood with a little stab of admiration just why Maureen was so happy to count him as a friend. Any woman would be: he really was a most attractive creature. His age was an indeterminate forty or so – she could now see in the brilliance of the sunshine a few grey hairs beginning to appear at his temples – and was altogether a pleasure to look at.

  ‘You want to see the way round my rags?’ His voice was pleasant too, though deep and a little loud, with a North country accent, which startled her. He grinned as he saw the expression on her face. ‘You thought I’d talk like a stage Greek, didn’t you? Well, I was born and brought up in Newcastle. So there you go!’

  ‘I can’t tell one English accent from another,’ George lied. ‘Seeing I’m a foreigner myself. I’d love to see your ragheap. Maureen’s been explaining and made it sound real interesting.’

  ‘Oh, it is,’ he said, and turned his head. ‘Bert? Unload this stuff, and check if I’ve anything to go back to Mrs Ledbetter. Put it in the boot if there is. You’ll find a pile in the office. Come on then, I’ll show you round.’

  He turned, Maureen still on his arm, and made for the dark doorway, not stopping to see whether George followed him or not. Inside it was amazing. Once her eyes were used to the change in the light levels she could see easily. A pile of old shoes was the first thing that caught her attention. It had to be at least fifteen feet high at its peak and its base was spread widely across the floor. She wouldn’t have thought there could be that many old shoes in London. On the mountain’s other side was a smaller heap, which was almost as impressive, of hats: men’s hats, women’s hats, children’s baseball caps, all sorts. She blinked at it. Who wore hats any more?

  He laughed beside her, clearly reading her thoughts. ‘It is amazing, isn’t it? People do wear hats, though. In the old days, when my dad was in this business in Gateshead, there were more hats than shoes. But there’re still a lot. The other bits of leather are over there.’

  He pointed and she stared at the pile of handbags and suitcases that lay further inside the warehouse, and opened her mouth to speak; but he was already moving away, and after a moment she closed it, feeling cold inside. The sight had triggered a memory in her, a memory that was hateful; and she followed him silently, as Maureen, still clinging to his arm, started chattering again. The last time she had seen a sight like that, George thought, it had been on a TV screen showing a film of Hitler’s labour camps where people’s possessions were processed much as the people themselves had been. Wasting nothing, the Germans had made piles of items like this too; and George could have shuddered. The people who had worn these clothes here hadn’t been liquidated, of course they hadn’t, but the mountains of possessions looked the same and it sickened her.

  So much that she hardly noticed what came next, until they were standing halfway up a long aisle into which Connie and Maureen had led her.

  ‘See, Dr Barnabas?’ Maureen said excitedly. ‘See? There they all are, the people I told you about, sorting all the stuff that lands on the conveyor belt, fast as they can go.’

  The belt was indeed a huge one, trundling noisily and fairly slowly towards the far side of the building. George glanced ahead and estimated it ran about seventy feet, and it was piled high with old clothes. Standing a few feet apart along its length were the workers, men and women, some in turbans, some in saris, some wearing masks over their faces (to keep out the dust, George guessed) though others seemed content to breathe in whatever was there, their eyes fixed on the things passing in front of them. They picked over the items in front of them at amazing speed, pulling out dresses and coats, blouses and skirts, trousers and shirts and tossing them into the great bins at their sides. Between them all a couple of boys were darting about, taking away full bins, replacing them with empty ones which were swiftly filled.

  ‘There you see?’ Maureen pointed. ‘On the side.’ Obediently George looked at the side of the bin that had just been delivered to the man behind whom she was standing and she saw the stencilled lettering. Caribbean.

  ‘You see, Dr Barnabas?’ Maureen shouted, above the rumble of the belt. ‘It’s all so –’

  The man at the conveyor belt jerked his head round. He was tall, and very black, with a woolly Rastafarian hat pulled down over his dreadlocks. He grinned widely at George.

  ‘Well, doctor, fancy seeing you here,’ he said and immediately turned back to his conveyor belt, reaching out, pulling at items, throwing them into the basket or discarding them to go on to the next picker in the line. ‘You turn up everywhere!’

  She stared at the back of his head and then peered round to look into his face. ‘Do I know you?’ she said.

  ‘Oh, Gawd, don’t it make you feel good?’ the man said to his neighbour, a tall black woman in a turban who nudged him without for a moment losing track of the items going by on the belt. ‘You think they’ll know you and they never do. Mind you, you can’t blame them. I can’t tell them apart, neither.’

  George laughed gratefully as suddenly the memory slid into her mind. ‘Mangoes,’ she said.

  ‘At last! I wouldn’t have told you, not after you didn’t know me last time neither.’

  ‘You’re out of context!’ George protested. ‘You see a guy in the market, you don’t expect to see him here as well.’

  ‘A man has to make his gold where he can!’ The woolly hat bobbed as he broke into a song, turning the words into a sort of rap. ‘A man got to work, pay his debts when he can, every man got to work, eat his dinner where he can ….’

  ‘Dr Barnabas!’ It was Maureen. She and Connie had moved further down the conveyor belt, and George saw that Connie had vanished. She touched the man’s shoulder and said quickly, ‘You’ll hate me, but I’ve forgotten your name too. I guess I’m getting past it.’

  ‘That’s OK, doctor! You meet a lotta guys like me, I know that. I’m Gregory, Gregory St Clair.’

  ‘Hi,’ she said gratefully. ‘I’ll never forget again. I’ll come back and talk to you later.’ She moved away. ‘Sorry I was so dumb.’ And she hurried down the line to Maureen.

  ‘Connie had to take a phone call or something,’ Maureen said and again she sounded important. ‘Said I was to show you the rest. So, here you are …’ She launched herself into a great tide of explanations, clearly entranced to be doing so, Remembering the subdued woman who had sa
t serving tea in her own living room in Gidea Park, George marvelled a little. Did Monty Ledbetter know this wife as well as he knew his usual one? She seemed to have dropped ten years from her age, she was so animated.

  She talked on and on about the different places the various workers came from. Indeed they made a remarkable sight; some of them were in their national dress, especially the Indians and Pakistanis, others in tight jeans or leggings and shirts. But George let her mind wander. Gregory St Clair; what was he doing here? He had his stall; did he need to do work like this? That it was unpleasant was clear; the air was thick with dust which smelled sour and tired, it was disagreeably hot. And noisy. She could feel inside herself the vibrations from the heavy rumble of the conveyor belt and the thudding of a great press which was pushing the clothes into the huge bales she had seen outside, before wrapping them in the sheets of cheesecloth that gave them their uniform colour.

  ‘Washed coverings from the cheeses they import from Canada,’ Maureen said, noticing the way George’s glance was directed. ‘Neat, isn’t it?’ At that moment another noise began, and George caught her breath. It was amazingly loud, crunching and shuddering, and seemed to shake the floor beneath her feet. She put her hands to her ears in self-defence.

  Maureen grinned and nodded at her. ‘I’ll explain that,’ she bawled, ‘when it stops. Have you seen enough of this?’

  ‘I think so,’ George shouted back. She turned and followed Maureen as she made her way back up the conveyor-belt line. George wanted very much to talk to Gregory though she couldn’t see quite how she could in this din; then it stopped as suddenly as it had started. The residual noise of the presser and baler and the conveyor belt seemed pleasantly quiet in comparison.

  ‘There, that’s better,’ Maureen said. ‘I expect it’s gone wrong again. It’s always doing that. We really ought to get back, if we’re to be at the hospital in time for lunch.’

  Deliberately George stopped just behind Gregory. ‘Why does it go wrong? And what is it?’ she asked. She didn’t really care all that much but she did want to remain near enough to Gregory to start another conversation with him if she could. She didn’t know why she needed to, she was simply certain that his presence in this place was important to her.

  It was Gregory who answered her. Another tall Afro-Caribbean man had come strolling up the aisle to take Gregory’s place at the belt, and Gregory stretched, stepped back and turned to George.

  ‘That there was the old macerator,’ he said. ‘It’s for chopping up the leftovers into rags. Ain’t that right, Mrs Maureen?’

  ‘So I’ve been told.’ Maureen sounded fussed now, as though she was uncomfortable talking to Gregory. ‘Connie’ll tell you if you like. I was going to explain to you, but I don’t really know much about it.’

  ‘I’d like to see,’ George said. ‘Could you ask Connie to show me?’ And she waited, in the hope that Maureen would go away and fetch Connie, leaving her to talk to Gregory.

  After a moment’s hesitation, Maureen did. She went plodding away up the aisle, calling over her shoulder, ‘Once you’ve seen, we’ll have to be on our way.’

  ‘I’ll show you the macerator,’ Gregory said. He was no longer wearing the tight black shorts George remembered from the market, but a pair of very expensive-looking black jeans under a crimson shirt. He straightened his cuffs as he moved away from the belt to lead her back to the doorway end of the aisle.

  ‘Like my jeans?’ he said, stroking his thighs lingeringly as he walked, looking over his shoulder wickedly. ‘Not so good as the legs, but nice, hey? You find good gear on the belt and old Connie, he doesn’t mind if you have the odd bit, as long as you don’t get greedy.’

  ‘He’s a nice man,’ George said almost as a question, and Gregory nodded vigorously.

  ‘Oh, he’s a good guy. One of the best. Lets a man pick up what he can while he pays his debts,’ he said. ‘It ain’t so bad when you walk out with a pair o’ good jeans after a long day here and no cash.’

  ‘No cash?’ George was puzzled. ‘Doesn’t Connie pay you?’

  ‘Oh, sure he pays! Only he don’t pay me. He pays the man direct, doesn’t he? It’s to be sure the debts get sorted. Me, I’m a bad man, bad, baaad man!’ He laughed, a fat happy sound deep in his throat. ‘Give me the cash and won’t I just go and put it on the horses someplace else? The old man, he don’t like that, so Connie pays him direct. And me, I get some jeans. So! Here we are. The machine that makes the noise. Only now it looks all broke down again, hey, man?’

  He stood to one side, peering down a narrow spiral staircase in the corner of the huge warehouse, beneath which there was another floor, some machinery and several men standing about looking disconsolate. George could see all there was to see through the slats in the iron steps: a vast oily machine with a hopper in front and great balers behind, and huge glittering blades, set in a massive corkscrew pattern, at its heart. And as she stared into the space she knew quite certainly what had happened to Don Greeson and his dog. And, perhaps, to Lenny Greeson too.

  25

  George was proud of herself. She showed no visible sign of the way her pulses were thumping with excitement, making her chest feel tight; nor did she show any undue curiosity. She just stood and stared down into the basement and said casually, ‘Would they let me go down and take a look? It’s one hell of a machine, that!’

  ‘Oh, they fuss a bit,’ Gregory said. ‘Don’t reckon it’s safe, you know? Big knives. But you’re a doctor. You’re different. Go on down, see what happens! Me, I’m going to get coffee and a pattie.’

  She was torn. ‘Oh. I wanted to talk to you.’

  ‘At your service, doctor, that’s me!’ Gregory said cheerfully. ‘Talk away.’

  She looked over her shoulder to see if Maureen was coming back with Connie and since they weren’t, said hurriedly, ‘I was just wondering how it was you were here. I mean, this isn’t at all what I’d have thought you’d do. Don’t you own that stall in the market?’

  ‘Own it?’ Gregory said judiciously. ‘Not to say own. But it’s mine all right. You know how it is with the money and all that, doctor. It kinda drifts away. A bit of this, a bit of that …’ He winked and sniffed, turning up his nose at her.

  Deliberately George ignored the hint. His bit of this or that, whatever it was – pot, crack? – was none of her affair. He seemed a happy and healthy enough young man, and she had no right to be censorious. ‘But why work here? Can’t you do better than this? It doesn’t look very pleasant.’

  ‘It’s disgusting,’ Gregory said with some force, but then shrugged. ‘Still, the man said it was the work he wanted done, so I just said, great, I’ll do it. And I get the jeans, don’t I?’

  ‘What man?’ George asked. He looked at her sideways, his eyes glinting.

  ‘What’s it to you?’

  ‘It’s a lot to me,’ George said a little desperately now. ‘I’m trying to find out about – There’s a guy I’m trying to help, and someone’s treated him bad on this patch. And I think maybe – I don’t know, I just have a feeling that this place here has something to do with it. So I wanted to know why you were here, anything I can find out about the place.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Gregory said. He looked over her shoulder too. ‘Well, I’m off to my coffee and pattie. See you in the market sometime, doctor!’ And he went, just as Connie and Maureen arrived at her side.

  ‘So you’re interested in my macerator?’ Connie said and smiled at her, his teeth gleaming in the shaft of sunlight coming in through the big double doors. ‘It’s only a big machine. You like machines, doctor?’

  ‘I love them,’ George said fervently as Gregory vanished. ‘It looks a really great one. My grandfather was an engineer, you know? He’d have loved to see this.’ She smiled brightly as the lie embellished itself easily. ‘He used to work with the textile factories, and I guess he’d have had to use a machine like this, huh? To chop up the incoming stuff? I know they used to make a lot of yarn out of rags.’


  ‘Ah, that’s not the same as this. They used to make cotton scrim and so forth out of cotton waste. I know that. But this machine takes whatever comes. We don’t sort it out, see. Just anything that can’t be sold on – about an eighth of what comes in here – I chop into rags, sell to India. They like it for’ – he shrugged – ‘all sorts of things. Stuffed into furniture, maybe, who knows? I don’t really care. All that matters to me is that they pay a reasonable price. But they won’t take it till it’s chopped, so I chop it. Well, it’s been a pleasure to have you here, doctor. Sorry I had to pop away. Had a business meeting in my office. But Maureen here will have looked after you …’ He put his arm across Maureen Ledbetter’s shoulders and hugged her and she beamed happily at George from the crook of his arm.

  ‘Oh, it’s been great. But I really would love to see that machine,’ she said and deliberately turned and began to walk down the spiral staircase, moving carefully. The iron was cold and slippery and the turns very sharp.

  ‘Well, I’m not sure that –’ Connie began, then seemed to accept the inevitable and let her go. After a moment he followed her.

  ‘I’m not going down there,’ Maureen called down. ‘I’ll just see the stuff is put in your car, Dr Barnabas. Is that all right?’

  ‘A pleasure!’ George called back heartily as she arrived at the foot of the staircase. ‘I’ll just have a quick peek.’ She went towards the machine across the floor, which was made of stone and covered with a thick soft layer of what looked like pinkish snow. George could see clearly, however, that it was the multi-coloured fibrous dust left by the fabrics that were piled in the hopper of the machine.

  A man was peering into the bowels of the great thing as she came up to it, and Connie said loudly behind her, ‘What is it this time, Allen?’