Family Business

by Mark Eklid

  Andreas was already pacing towards the red and yellow-painted tractor unit across the yard. A disquieted Graham followed closely behind.

  In the cab sat a driver who appeared to be preparing for his next trip. Andreas opened the passenger side door and placed his foot on the lowest of five steps to raise himself above the level of the cab seats.

  ‘Ray! How are you this morning?’

  ‘Now then, boss. Good thanks. You?’

  Andreas lowered himself to ground level again to speak to his escort.

  ‘Ray is one of my best drivers. Go on! Climb in and take a look.’

  Tentatively, Graham climbed the steps until he was inside the cab. A hand of greeting was waiting for him.

  ‘Hi, I’m Ray.’ It was impossible not to first notice the heavy black tattoo on the side of Ray’s bald scalp, swirling like a tangled knot of thorns, but his long, wire-wool grey beard was also pretty eye-catching. His left arm was a colourful mass of tattoo ink and a pot belly stood way beyond the limits of his open high-viz vest, more than hinting at too much time spent sitting in a truck cab and too many fry-ups eaten in service stations. Though their appearances could hardly have contrasted more greatly, the two men were of similar age but Ray, for want of a better expression, looked as if he had more miles on the clock.

  They shook hands.

  ‘Graham. Pleased to meet you.’

  ‘Graham is about to join us as the new transport administrator,’ announced a voice from outside the cab.

  ‘Really? I’d better start being nice to you then. Never know when I’ll need a favour on the rota. Good to have you with us.’ His accent marked him as distinctly local. Graham could note small but significant differences between it and the Leeds accent he had grown accustomed to at university.

  He looked around the cab.

  ‘The last time I was in one of these was when I was hitch-hiking back from a mate’s in Bristol when I was about 19. I can’t believe how uncomplicated it is on the dashboard. I expected it to be like the Starship Enterprise with all the technology these things must have these days.’

  Ray gave him a proud, tolerant smile.

  ‘I know how you mean. There aren’t as many dials as there used to be when I started out. It’s all controlled by the computer these days. This is one of the really new units and you’ve got all the switches within arm’s reach – the safety features, the radio, the trailer brakes, the diff locks, everything. This one I like. It’s the rear air suspension, so when you’ve released the trailer and you’re ready to get moving again, you press that button and it automatically returns the vehicle to its standard ride height. It’s a lot simpler than it used to be.’

  Graham nodded, knowingly, attempting to hide the fact that he had not understood half of what had just been said to him.

  Ray was just getting into his stride.

  ‘This one’s got a 12-speed automatic gearbox and cameras instead of the big wing mirrors, which is far more efficient and more economical as well because they don’t create anything like as much drag. And see here between the two tool boxes underneath the bunk? Slide this out and you have a 25-litre fridge. You can control the temperature of that from the dashboard.’

  ‘All the comforts of home,’ said Graham, craning his neck to look to the back of the cab. ‘Do you sleep in this as well?’

  ‘Nah, mate. I’ve done my share of tramping. If you can’t do a job there and back in a day, I ain’t doing it any more. I like my own bed too much.’

  Graham could understand that. He had never particularly liked the idea of sleeping in a caravan, never mind bedding down in the same space you’ve just spent almost the rest of your entire day.

  ‘Do you still like the lifestyle, though? There’s so much traffic these days it must get a bit frustrating at times.’

  Ray stroked the steering wheel as he considered his answer.

  ‘It’s no fun when you’re stuck in a tail-back on the M6 for three hours, let me tell you, but I wouldn’t want to do anything else. When you’re on a job, it’s just you in your cab with nobody in your ear, you know what I mean, and nobody to tell you if you’re playing your music too loud. I love it. It gives you time to think, if you want to, or just let the world go by, if you’d rather do that. You get to have a crack with the other drivers on the road and with the people at the other depots and you make some good mates. The biggest down-side really can be some of the other dickheads on the road, in their cars and their four-by-fours, who think you have no right to be driving at the same time as them.’

  His expression became more serious as he turned to look directly at Graham.

  ‘I tell you, everybody treats us like we’re the lowest of the low. Not all the service stations are big enough for the artics and the lay-bys are often full before you get there. But what people don’t ever think about is that all the food you eat, all the clothes on your back and all the electrical stuff you buy from the shops have all been on the back of one of these trucks at one time or another. This country couldn’t function without companies like this and people like me.’

  Graham felt a pang of guilt for the many times he had sworn under his breath at a truck driver for daring to overtake another truck travelling half a mile an hour slower on a dual carriageway. Ray’s words hit home. He had never truly appreciated the value of the industry. Their presence on the road was not an inconvenience, it was essential. This is an important service.

  ‘Good to meet you, Ray.’ They shook hands again and Graham shuffled across the seat ready to climb down from the cab.

  ‘You too. See you around maybe.’

  Maybe. Yes, maybe.

  Andreas was pressing commands into his phone as Graham lowered himself to ground level. He walked over to close the door of the truck without looking up before putting his phone back in his pocket and switching back to his tour guide duties.

  ‘Good?’ he asked.

  ‘Very sleek.’

  ‘This is one of our newest units. Top of the range. We could buy cheaper, but these are the best. Come, I’ll show you the warehouse.’

  Andreas set off at a pace again but stopped beside a large tank.

  ‘This is for the additive we put into the exhaust fluid because it reduces emissions. All the companies use it these days. Effectively, it’s pig piss.’

  With that revelation and without explaining whether or not it was actually pig piss and, if so, how it was harvested, he shot off again.

  ‘Tell me about how busy you usually are, Andreas. How many jobs do you handle?’ asked Graham as he attempted to keep up.

  The ploy worked. Andreas stopped.

  ‘This depot does around 150 contract runs and 50 spot loads each week. Many of the contract jobs are fixed daily runs to places like Birmingham and Bristol with regular loads – like the sheet plastic on the pallets over there.’ He pointed towards several stacks, a metre or so high, wrapped in clear film, beside the metal fence on the side of the yard they had been heading towards. A forklift truck was bringing another three wrapped pallets to add to the pile. ‘We call these the milk runs.

  ‘Spot loads are when companies contact us and ask us to make a particular delivery. These are one-way loads normally, so then it is important to try to organise a back haul from that area to make sure the vehicle is not running empty. An empty vehicle is losing money. Making sure that does not happen will be part of your job.’

  Andreas held his stare to make sure that point had registered. Graham acknowledged it with a nod.

  When he first arrived for his tour of the depot he found Andreas’s certainty presumptuous. He was acting as if it was a done deal that the job offer would be taken up. At first, Graham wanted to point out that there were still important decisions to be made, but he did not any more.

  He could picture himself a part of this. He felt like he belonged.

  8

  It had been a long day.

  Graham was practically horizontal on the sofa, having quickly and effo
rtlessly come to terms with his new surroundings. Janet lay with her head on his chest.

  There were still two slices of pizza in the takeaway delivery box on the low lounge table in front of them and they appeared destined to remain uneaten. Ordering it had seemed a good idea to the point where it was almost a necessity but, when it arrived, they both found they were almost beyond hungry.

  The remaining unpacked cases and boxes had been stacked and shut away in the dining room. Neither of them had the slightest inclination to put anything else away tonight. It would save for another day. All they wanted to do now was relax and allow a non-taxing TV show to drift before them.

  Janet sighed. It seemed to Graham a contented sigh and that made him smile and pull her a little closer with the hand he held to her shoulder.

  She had been preparing for the move for much of the previous week; listing, wrapping and bundling everything she deemed absolutely necessary to take with them right from the start of their occupation of their new home in Unstone, a former mining village between Sheffield and Chesterfield. It had been provided, rent-free, by the man they were increasingly accustomed to regarding as a new family member and who was also, the following day, to be employer to both of them.

  Graham had only been required to give a week’s notice to the DIY superstore. He had walked away vowing to himself never to set foot there again, even as a customer, and had completed his first week in his new role as transport administrator for the company of Harry Johnson Global Logistics. He had driven up each day and had found the 50-minute commute painless enough, though that and the heightened adrenal demands of taking on a new job had meant he had no trouble getting to sleep those nights.

  Janet’s notice period was shortened by the amount of unused holiday days she was owed and so most of the preparation for the move had fallen to her. She would probably have assumed charge of the task anyway. Graham would arrive back to their Derby home in the evening and be inwardly alarmed by how much more stuff had been processed into the first-weekend-of-the-move-essentials collection of cases, boxes and bags in his absence.

  His reasoning that they could easily travel back to pick up more of their belongings the following weekend and the weekend after that, if necessary, was not seriously considered. His pointed observation, made only partly in jest, that if he had realised how much stuff she had wanted to take with them from the start he would have borrowed one of the artics to move it all, was ignored.

  It had taken them two trips in the car, everything jammed in with the skill of a world-class Tetris champion, and had seriously challenged the car suspension, but they had made it. They were in.

  ‘It’s a really nice place, isn’t it?’

  He knew Janet had taken to the house from the day they travelled up to be shown around for the first time by Andreas. It was an old Derbyshire stone cottage set back off the road and so instantly attractive, with trees and fields rising to frame the view as they climbed out of the car for a first look, that it was almost too quaint. Inside, it had been extensively modernised and had an en suite off the master bedroom. Janet had always wanted an en suite off the master bedroom.

  That had certainly helped her overcome some of her misgivings about being talked into making such a radical change to their settled domestic life, which had been a huge relief for Graham. He nevertheless felt he had to keep monitoring her feelings, to reassure himself, as much as anything, and was conscious that he was bordering on overselling the potential benefits of taking on new jobs in a different part of the country. That had also been done partly to reassure himself.

  This exciting new opportunities lark was certainly a scary business.

  ‘It’s a lovely house,’ she confirmed again, partly for her own reassurance. ‘I think we’re going to be all right here.’

  ‘Me too.’ He rubbed his hand on her upper arm, comfortingly.

  ‘I think you’re really going to like the people at the depot as well.’

  ‘Yeah, I hope so.’

  Graham had told her a little about his new co-workers through the week, but he sensed her lingering nervousness about the impending reality of them becoming her new co-workers too.

  ‘I didn’t say, did I? You know I told you about young Zoe on reception?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Well, she came into work on Friday on crutches. She broke a bone in her foot doing jujitsu.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah. Honestly, to look at her you’d never think she was into something like that. She’s tiny. She’s really nice, though. I think you’ll get on great with her.’

  They fell into another contented silence, the type that only a couple totally at ease with each other can feel comfortable in. Another plot development of the TV show they were kind of watching was lost to them as their individual thoughts drifted in different directions again.

  ‘Is that manager still being a cow to you?’ Janet asked, casually, after a while.

  He had regretted mentioning that to her. Rebecca the depot manager, his immediate boss, had been frosty with him, to say the least. Her initial run-through of his duties had been cursory and when he asked her for clarification on a point shortly after, she appeared irritated at having to repeat herself, as if she had spent the whole morning trying to teach a surly teenager how to start up the washing machine. It made him feel inadequate, compounding the sense of vulnerability he had anticipated as he set about tackling an unfamiliar system on the first day of a new job.

  ‘She’s been OK,’ he responded, unconvincingly. ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Well, she’d better not be that way with me. I’ll give her what for.’

  Graham was well aware of his wife’s feistier side.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s worth mentioning to Andreas?’

  He flinched at the thought.

  ‘I don’t think that would be a good idea. I think the best way to win her over will be to show her how well I can do the job. She’ll come around. You know the other lad who does the same job as me?’

  ‘Dave?’

  ‘Yeah, except everybody calls him Sparky.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why do they call him Sparky?’

  ‘Oh. It’s because his second name’s Sparks.’

  ‘Oh!’ The explanation had clearly fallen some way short of her expectations.

  ‘Anyway, he told me Rebecca’s like that with everybody at first. He says she tends to regard everybody as useless until they prove otherwise.’

  ‘How odd.’

  ‘I know. He told me as well that he heard her complaining to Andreas because he’d brought in somebody who hasn’t got any experience in the job, which I don’t suppose has helped my cause. I wonder if she also feels a bit threatened, you know, with me being the boss’s long-lost natural father and all that. I wonder if she’s thinking I’m going to be moved up to take her place before long.’

  ‘That would be a bit strange. Is she really that paranoid?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m only guessing. I suppose in time she’ll see that I can do the job and realise that I’m not trying to muscle her out of the building and we’ll be fine after that. It’ll just take a bit of time, that’s all.’

  ‘I guess so.’

  Their wavering concentration was half-fixed on the TV again. A new character had drifted into the episode and neither of them had the slightest clue where he fitted into the plot.

  ‘Gray?’ Janet raised herself off his chest to look into his eyes. ‘We are doing the right thing, aren’t we?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m sure we are, love.’ He tried to inject as much certainty as he dared into the words. The effort worked well enough for Janet to settle her head onto his chest again.

  ‘It’s like we said, if we don’t at least give it a go, we’ll never know how good a move this could be for us both and even if, for whatever reason, it doesn’t work out, it’s not as if we’re making a commitment we can’t get out of. We can keep the house in Der
by for as long as we like and, if we need to, we can just move back. But I’m sure we’ll both be very happy here, once we get settled in, and all our old friends and your family are only 35 miles down the road, so we’ve no reason to lose touch with anybody. It’ll work out just great, just you see.’

  She sighed.

  ‘Yeah. You’re right.’

  The noise jolted him out of his deep sleep with the violence of an explosion. Five mini-explosions. He sat upright with a shocked gasp and attempted to calibrate his addled senses in the unrevealing darkness of an unfamiliar bedroom but could not even be certain if he was suddenly awake or remained locked in the false reality of a panicked dream.

  There were the noises again. Five loud bangs. They came from below and this time there was a voice, shouting, demanding.

  ‘Open the door!’

  Graham fumbled on the bedside cabinet for his glasses and tried to focus on the digital figures of the alarm clock. 3:58.

  ‘Graham! What is it? What’s that noise?’ Janet was sitting up now and had grabbed his arm.

  ‘I don’t know. It’s the middle of the night.’

  What the hell could it be? It sounded like the noise was coming from the front door.

  Five more bangs.

  ‘Open the door! Last chance, open the door!’

  ‘God, Gray – who is it?’ She was almost hysterical, frantic, frightened.

  ‘I don’t ...Christ, what the ...Jeez.’

  He shot to his feet and stumbled towards the bedroom light, switching it on and instinctively looking around for anything he could grab as a weapon to defend himself against whoever was announcing themselves with such undisguised threat. He stood blinking, in his baggy t-shirt and loose cotton shorts, moving only in sharp, jerky twitches and feeling like his heart was about to burst out of his throat, struggling to make any sense of this nightmarish awakening.

  There was another noise, heavier and louder than the others, a thud against the door which shook the whole house. Two seconds later and there was another.

  ‘Gray! They’re breaking in! They’re trying to break the door down! They’re coming in for us!’