Incinerator

by Niall Leonard

  How could I have forgotten about the CCTV? Andy had cameras all over the joint, concealed under little black plastic domes, most of them pointed at the staff rather than the punters. I used to wonder why Andy had gone into catering, when he didn’t like people. He disliked the punters on a casual basis, but he made a full-time job of despising the staff. That was why he stayed in his office all day, watching us all through CCTV monitors. He wanted to check we weren’t stealing the fries or sneaking off to the bogs to smoke a spliff, but he wouldn’t join us on the floor to do that. Instead, he would sit poised in front of his six fuzzy monitors, waiting until he spotted an infraction of one of the hundreds of “suggestions” that made up the Max Snax Code of Conduct. Then his office door would silently open, and Andy would emerge like a nervous hermit crab scavenging the ocean floor for whatever it is hermit crabs eat. And now, as I had dreaded, his door was opening. I was about to get a three-minute lecture on proper behaviour for customer-facing operatives, which did not include obscene hand gestures to the kitchen staff.

  Andy extruded himself from his office. He was in his mid-thirties, I guessed, and always wore the shirt and tie he considered appropriate to a management position. I was always morbidly fascinated by Andy’s hairstyle—he had a decent head of hair, but by carefully calculated use of a comb-over, he managed to make himself look like a balding fifty-year-old. His complexion was blotchy and pale, and he compensated for this with a fake tan—not from an expensive sun bed, but from a bottle. Closer inspection, which I usually tended to avoid, confirmed it. Sun beds generally don’t leave pale streaks on your orange forehead or a faint tangerine tinge on the collar of your shirt.

  “Finn …” Andy bobbed and weaved and avoided my eye. He’d missed my finger to Jerry, I thought. This is something else. Probably a shit job he doesn’t have the inclination to do himself—that’s what he was paying us the statutory minimum wage for. “We have a clientele turnover issue.” I stared at him, doing my best to look mystified. I knew what he was saying, but I wanted to see if he could express it in English. “Over there.” He nodded as discreetly as he could towards the table in the corner of the restaurant furthest from the counter.

  She’d arrived mid-morning, ordered hot chocolate, and sat there sipping it for the next forty-five minutes. She was about my age, in the brown uniform of Kew School for Girls, although I doubted the stud in her nose was an approved part of the outfit. Her tangled black hair fell across her face and she was wearing too much eyeliner, but it failed to hide the fact that she had clear, pale skin, fine bone structure, and curves even the frumpy uniform couldn’t straighten out. Not as curvy as she could have been, for all that: at a guess she was about five kilos under her healthy weight. That was one reason she stood out in here. The other was that she was the only customer. It was too late in the morning even for the student crowd, and too early for the weekday lunch crowd.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “She’s blocking our prime seating.”

  I glanced over. I wasn’t aware we had any prime seating. All of them were bright green plastic around bright yellow tables, and all of them had the same thrilling view of our car park, if you didn’t allow for the vast window stickers that advertised Max Snax’s latest blend of herbs, spices, salt, more salt and chemical gloop that coated our pinky-grey mechanically-recovered-chicken-product.

  “But there’s no one else here,” I pointed out.

  “Because she’s blocking our prime seating!” hissed Andy. “And her attitude … it doesn’t fit with our corporate image.”

  The first few weeks after I started work here I had found Andy’s bullshit funny. I used to relay his latest examples of ridiculous corporate gobbledegook to my dad, and we’d both have a go at talking like that—“Could you transfer the sodium condiment across the consumption platform?” Then, after three or four months of it, I’d realized I might be working in Max Snax for years, soaking up the smell of stale fat, rolling myself in Max’s special chemical mix until I was permanently coated in it, and the joke was on me, and it wasn’t funny any more.

  “Tell her she has to order something or re-allocate her custom.”

  “Re-allocate her …?”

  “Now, please, Finn.”

  He darted back towards his office. For a moment his little crab antennae waved, sniffing the greasy air, then he slipped inside and the door clicked shut. I could visualize him settling back into his vinyl leather-look executive armchair, watching the monitor, waiting for me to redeploy unwelcome clientele. Timing me, probably. I sighed and made my way over.

  “Hi there.”

  She had been staring at the traffic turning the corner at the junction outside, as if waiting for a car crash to break up the empty monotony of her morning. She turned to me. Her eyes were bright green, almost too large for her heart-shaped face. I found myself wondering what colour her hair really was under the jet-black dye.

  “Can I get you anything?”

  “Didn’t know they had waiter service here.” Her tone was off-hand, a little amused, as if she was flirting, but not really. Her heart wasn’t in it.

  “We don’t.”

  “Then why are you asking?”

  “The manager wants you to buy something.”

  “I did buy something.”

  The amusement had evaporated. She knew what I had come over to say, and was going to argue about it. It was pointless, and her morning was spoiled before we’d even started, but a row would do as well as a car crash. I hadn’t felt sorry for her till then.

  “Let me get you another not-chocolate,” I offered. She missed the pun, and I was glad. It sounded ingratiating and pathetic.

  “Forget it. It tastes like piss mixed with soap.”

  “Really? I wouldn’t know.”

  Her nostrils flared angrily. I was angry too, wondering why I’d got myself into a playground spat on Andy’s orders. And wondering whether she’d put stuff on her lips to make them that shape and colour.

  “So I have to order something, or you’ll throw me out?”

  “No, you don’t. I’ll buy it, and you won’t even have to drink it. But that way you can sit here as long as you like.”

  She sighed, glanced out across the car park again, then flashed me a huge smile. “Actually, Finn, could you do me a Max Snack? One of those big triple-deckers?”

  Of course she knew my name. It was printed in big happy Max Snax font on the little badge pinned just over my left tit. Punters always ignored it until they wanted to complain.

  “With everything?”

  “Yeah, extra barbecue sauce, pickles, the works.”

  “Sure.” I didn’t move.

  “And a giant cola.”

  “OK.”

  “And could you put it all on a tray? With lots of napkins?”

  “Sure.”

  “And then could you shove it up your arse?”

  I nodded. “You want fries with that?”

  “Oh, just piss off.”

  She stood up forcefully, as if she expected the chair or the table to go flying, or both, preferably. But of course they were screwed to the floor and she just winced as she bounced between them. I made sure she noticed me notice.

  “Thanks for coming to Max Snax. Have a great day.” I heard myself deliver the line with exactly the amount of patronizing insincerity, and a processed-cheese grin of exactly the width that the Max Snax staff training videos specified. She looked at me with even more contempt than I felt for myself at that moment, glanced down at my beige polyester shirt with its fetching perspiration stains under the armpits and down the sternum, and walked out. Even as I watched her go, my skin prickling with embarrassment and humiliation, I wanted to follow her. She had that sort of walk.

  And then the place was empty again. An empty plastic cell. Even with me standing there, stinking of sweat and stale fat, the place was empty. Just the little black plastic dome of Andy’s CCTV camera watching me. I couldn’t even give it the thumbs-up and
flash it a mock-triumphant grin; I’d had enough irony for one day.

  I went back behind the counter, grabbed a damp cloth and started wiping down the counters, the cash register, the menus, everything in sight. Trying to keep busy so the urge would subside and pass—the urge to rip off this stiff nylon blouse and these shapeless, pocketless trousers and run home in nothing but my tatty briefs. Leaning time is cleaning time. Thanking time is wanking time. Frying time is dying time …

  Andy was back. He was wearing his blazer, the one with the brass buttons and the shiny elbows. He wore it at the Friday morning Max Snax staff training sessions, or when he announced the month’s sales figures, or whenever he gave someone a new pip on their plastic name badge.

  He was offering me one now.

  “That was exemplary, Finn. Really well-handled.”

  “It’s OK, Andy. Don’t bother.” He wanted to reward me for getting rid of customers?

  “Come on. Three more of these and you’re a Max Snax Star. That’s a six per cent pay rise.”

  If I turned it down he’d know I hated Max Snax, and him, and the uniform, and the job, and he’d hire some other school dropout. But I needed the money. I couldn’t drive, and I could barely read. What else was I going to do? “Thanks, Andy.”

  I took it off him. The first hole on my name badge already had a golden stud—you got that on your first day at work, just for turning up. I snapped the new one into the second little hole, and it didn’t hurt much more than punching it into my forehead.

  “Keep this up, you’ll have a branch of your own someday.”

  The rest of my shift was a deep-fried blur, and as usual I showered and changed before I left. The workplace shower was another reason I stuck the job. Our shower at home was like being peed on by an old bloke with a prostrate problem, but this one at work fired out scalding hot water that came down like a tropical storm. I was the only one who ever used it, and it felt like the one time and space in the world that I ever had to myself.

  I stooped in front of the washroom mirror—it wasn’t quite high enough for someone as tall as me—combing my mousy-brown hair with my fingers. I generally kept my hair short, or it would spring up in spikes I could never control. The rest of my reflection I tried not to look at. It wasn’t that I minded how I looked; apart from the kink in my nose where a sparring partner had broken it, it wasn’t such a bad face, according to my dad—triangular, with a big chin that currently needed a shave and a kind of girly mouth. My teeth were pretty straight and even, and my pale skin was clear (this week anyway). But I could never meet those washed-out blue eyes because they always seemed to ask how they’d got here, and whether they’d spend the next twenty years looking out from behind the counter at Max Snax, and I never had the heart to answer.

  I stuffed my uniform into my backpack—planning to wash it at home—laced up my running shoes and headed out across the car park, dodging pedestrians as I built up speed. Pushing my pulse to 140, I pounded along the backstreet pavements, heading home.

  The street lights were flickering on as I pulled up, panting, outside the house. I stretched as I got my breath back, glad to see I was still supple enough to touch my knees with my forehead. But as my pulse slowed and my breathing found its resting rhythm I realized something was bugging me. The house was dark, as if Dad had gone out. But he usually worked on his writing till I came in from work—my coming back in was his excuse to knock off for the day.

  The curtains were already closed. Had they ever been opened? I fished my keys from my backpack and opened the door. As I reached for the light switch I registered something about the silence.

  “Dad?”

  It was too deep, as if the house was empty; but it didn’t feel empty.

  Our house was small—the door opened straight into the living room. The light came on dimly, brightening as it warmed up. Dad disliked the overhead light, and only switched it on when he had one of his fits of tidying-up. Now it flooded the room in the way he disliked, cold and harsh, and fell on him where he sat at the table. Not sat, so much as slumped, the way I’d seen him once or twice when he’d been to the pub and somebody else was buying.

  I paused in the doorway, certain something was wrong, trying to figure out what exactly. “Dad?” It was too cold in the room. He couldn’t hear me—he still had his earphones in.

  I’d found him like that before a few times, early in the morning. He’d be resting his head on his folded arms. Now his arms were pinned underneath him, at an odd angle, and he wasn’t breathing. I knew that, even before I consciously worked it out, even before I registered properly that the crown of his head was a sticky mass of blood, and something heavy and bulky lay on the floor by his chair, itself stained with red, with bloody hairs sticking to it.

  My dad was dead. He had been sitting at his desk, plugged into his music, and someone had crept up behind him holding his award for Best Newcomer 1992, and hit him over the head with it, and kept hitting him until he died. His eyes were open and his glasses had fallen off. There was blood coming from his mouth and clotting in his beard, and pooling on the table, and he was dead. And the house was empty and silent.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  NIALL LEONARD is a drama and comedy screenwriter, born in Northern Ireland and currently living in West London with his wife, bestselling author E L James, and their two children. Among his many television credits, he has created episodes of Wire in the Blood, Silent Witness, Ballykissangel, and Hornblower. He has also led seminars and workshops on screenwriting and script editing for the BBC, the Northern Ireland Film Council, and the Irish Screenwriters’ Guild, and has lectured on the creative process at the University of Reading. Incinerator is the companion novel to Crusher, Niall Leonard’s debut young adult novel.