IN THE MAGAZINE

Illustrations by J. Penry

NIGHT SHIFT - PART 1

By Jesse Armstrong

Before the low-cost German supermarkets Aldi and Lidl came over in the late 1990s, the UK had its own homegrown “subprime” supermarket chain, Kwik Save. It grew up in North Wales near where I grew up and it pioneered the margin-boosting tactics of deliberate under staffing, low pay, crappy premises, and products displayed in nothing but the cardboard boxes they were delivered in. The resulting dispiriting ugliness about the whole shopping experience put the chain in what felt like a sadomasochistic relationship with its customers. “Come in, you filthy fuckers,” Kwik Save seemed to say, “we know what you want, affordable food. And, yes, you can have it, but first you must be cold and unhappy and view the brutal fonts in which all information will be displayed to you.”

Anyway, I worked a few months in a Kwik Save, often on the night shift and I always wanted to write something about the grim, grimy, self-loathing, group-bonding, sweaty, anxiety-filled, anarchic, slightly boundaryless feel of it. The chain has gone bust now, so I suppose this is my memorial to it. RIP Kwik Save.


They were playing five-card poker—wrong—when Coot said, “Alright, we’ve fucking talked about it I dunno how many fucking times, I’m brassic, Roberts is a cunt. Let’s rob the fucking money.”

It sounded spontaneous, like he wanted. But Coot already had everyone onside. The hardest to persuade had been Si. By the igloo-cold of the open chest freezers, he’d had to cover all the angles to get him to join up.

“Si, you’ll make 80 quid—no fucking risk. And if you don’t—I’ll break your fucking arm.” He smiled, at once diffusing and reinforcing the threat, and squeezed his arm hard. “You won’t even have to fucking do anything, you cunt. You were keen last fucking week.”

Mostly, it was the betting they did wrong. To stay in each round everyone bet just what he wanted. A big bet was nothing but a show of bravado. It showed you thought you’d win it all back. On his second night-shift night Si said he thought they were doing something wrong, but they told him to fuck off—that this was how they played on night shift and if they did it different in Las Vegas they could fuck off. Still, they got pissed off when Si stayed in for 5p every round and soon everyone started doing it. So the games were going down shit street.

Also wrong, though, were the hands. They got ranked ad hoc, based on a mixture of the immediate appearance of the cards and the length of service of the player revealing the cards, multiplied by the incipient brutality of the assembled team. So Si had once seen his straight flush beaten by Orange Dave’s full house.

“Alright,” Benson said, “but we should all do it together.”

“Alright then, let’s go down and fucking do it now,” said Coot.

It was a shit crime. Coot just opened the separate off-license till and took out the little float that stayed in there overnight. £354.40—they counted it on a wooden delivery pallet in the back shop. The only good bit was that instead of walking out with it in the morning they were going to put it up through one of the polystyrene ceiling tiles until a later date. Coot liked this bit. It made him what he liked to call himself, “the Kingpin.”

They all stood around as the Kingpin climbed to the top of the highest drinks pallet in the back store—on top of 15 cases’ height of two-liter Cokes—and poked the money up, through, and over. He fitted the tile back with exaggerated skill; slowly and quietly as if it was alarmed or likely to be taken for forensic testing and this lightness of touch would somehow avoid incrimination. Then they shifted the Coke on its pallet—swapping it with a little hump of Lucozade deep down the back of the storeroom. Then they went back to the shop floor and the pallets delivered earlier. They’d hardly started on them before first break and cards. It was a heavy night. Eighteen fat, high, wide, mixed bastards. Five more than normal and nothing light or easy.

It was anxious work, anyway, night-shift work. Because at three in the morning you’re anxious about anything. But tonight, Jesus. And there’s no boss there—only a poor dope who’s boss for the night. So it’s a sort of workers’ democracy, but no one trusts each other to work, so you all keep checking round the corner and making half-jokes—your own little Gestapo. It’s brutal—whittling down the big top-heavy pallets till they’re little mounds on each aisle—and then keeping on humping them out onto the shelves until they’re melted away and you can spin away the ghostly-light empty blue pallet into the back and move on to the next bastard, slicing the plastic wrap around it with your Stanley knife and considering the ugly geology of evaporated cream, toothpastes, Marmite, jelly packs, Paxo. Each element rich with its own properties. The heavy drum cans of family beans bending away from their cardboard base as you try to slide them in. The boxes of cornflakes that always get sliced as you cut off the front of their bigger box.

Out of the fluorescent flat-fronted box of the supermarket it was pitch. The plate glass gives you nothing back but your greasy self and the aisles stretching away sickeningly behind you. But right outside you could see when a gang of lads walked by. The sober workers inside—the pissed lads going home from the pubs—unimaginable ghosts to each other. Sometimes a gang would pound the glass and ask for a packet of crisps. Or, one time, a lad had crouched like a dog on all fours and pretended to lick the ground. Said he wanted them to smash a bottle of vodka and he’d lap it up.



Tonight, Si was looking out a lot. Because Kelly was out, and she might come past. When he thought about her he could feel his little heart go wild. And now after the money and a couple of cups of Nescafé, in the middle of the night, he was pretty frantic. He was nervous, he thought, because she was so fucking nice. He knew she’d just simply talk back to blokes in pubs. And the terrible thing about having had her, was if she’d have him—the shaggy-faced dope—who would she possibly reject?

“So what are you going to say when Roberts asks you?” Orange Dave asked.

“What, about the money?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m just going to say I don’t fucking know anything.”

“Yeah. But what if he keeps on about it?”

“I’ll just say I don’t know anything.”

Si couldn’t tell if Orange Dave was just worried or had been sent by Coot to wheedle at him. He was a good man to work with. He drove through the pallet and made you work too, through guilt and the absence of any conversation. It seemed like the night shift was what Orange Dave was all about. That whipping out a pallet of nappies in eight minutes was him in his highest aspect. Rather than how it was with everyone else—a weird and furtive aberration.

The only three things Si knew about Orange Dave he’d been told by other people. They were: 1) that he lived with his mother, even though he must have been forty; 2) that his genuinely orange tinge came from his prodigious consumption of the cheapest tartrazine bright-orange squash and; 3) that he had once been offered a promotion beyond stock lad, but had balked at taking on any responsibility.

“But what if he keeps on asking?” Dave asked.

“Well, if we all deny it there’s nothing he can do.”

“Aye, except sack the lot of us,” Dave said. He was sliding long packs of washing powder in, having already cut a big X through the bottom of the thick plastic around them. When they neatly lay above the underneath layer, he could whip the whole lot off—abracadabra—and leave 18 boxes fresh in place.

“Do you reckon?” Si asked.

“Well, I don’t know. But Roberts doesn’t like looking stupid, like.”

“One of the day stock lads could have...”

“There was the money there when they locked up and it’s gone now,” Dave said. And as he slid the next column in, his face went from passive and benign to brutal for a second as he scrunched a little pucker of the plastic and then ripped upward to draw it off in one.

“What does Benson think?” Si asked.

“He thinks Coot’s only doing it to get his missus a ring.”

This was telling intelligence. Benson always worked with Coot. They were like a pair of working-class homophobic homosexuals. They spent every night together. Toiling side by side. Except they toiled as little as possible. They plotted and swore. If Benson had doubts about the money, with his thick forearms and bony, readable forehead, then there was room for maneuver.

“What do you reckon then?” Si asked. Dave now had Paxos in his hand—two across and 12 deep—like little parodies of the washing powder. You could hold one of these and do a delicate X in its fragile plastic and spin it on your finger, practically, before you tossed it into place.

“I dunno.”

The tape machine up by the tills clicked off. Up at the front you could make out that the streets were full for a while now. When you were out in it, he knew, it felt like something. Like something spontaneous—and in its immediacy and the fun and rough and tumble, like it could last. But through the glass it looked like the truth—the end of the night. Twenty past one and everything closing up. The people poured out like savages—after food, sex, a safe way home. They wobbled. They shouted, they fought.

It was like seeing some chemical reaction under a microscope the way everyone bounced around. Watching with the sound down not a disadvantage. A group of lads piled past; the strong at the front—the weak, joking, behind. The wheedlers trying to fit their chests in between the front—looking for a gap, tripping to adjust their pace.

Boys walked behind girls—quickened their walks to catch up—to say something, anything, make contact. And the girls checked them out. You could see it working, even on a street in the middle of the night—they didn’t dismiss them. They looked and said a few words and veered off across the car park. And the boys shouted after them, slapped one another on the back and made off.

Si was mad for a sight of Kelly—he wanted to see her with a couple of friends, wobbling off home. But she was so fucking approachable. It was impossible to envisage an evening where she went out without him which didn’t include some incident which if he knew about it would make his guts flip and his heart race like a hand whisk in thin air.

But still they went home, relentless, similar, falling toward taxis. And occasionally with someone different—a couple of older goth girls. Then some lads he knew—Nick and Sam, Grant and Sponge. Si banged the glass. Hard, twice, palms up, slapping the glass. It carried nowhere outside, but the thuds echoed ridiculously round the shop.

When she came by it was so painful and immediate he couldn’t remember not knowing it. Its inevitability and its occurrence all wrapped up in one. She was faithless and lovely and available and walking home with another boy. A man, so to speak. They didn’t look like they were having much fun, but then they needn’t, now. They would be going back to hers, to her right little tight little front room and her easygoing mum and dad—if they weren’t already in bed.

“You fuckin’ half-a-job!” Coot shouted.

They were halfway down their second pallet. But the first one had been mostly beans. Just slide those fuckers in, stack on top of stack. Si flipped the loose plastic nodule on the Matsui radio and “Marcher Sound” spilled out, trying to fill the air. A commercial station so thin in its self-confidence you felt it might simply fade away midbroadcast.

Orange Dave had toiled on. His only reproach his ceaseless labour. He’d knocked out half a heavily mixed pallet of bathroom and other stuff. The weird shit like Oxo and jelly cubes, custard powder and tomato puree, for over the freezers. And all the washing powders and fat bombs of fabric conditioner. If you sliced one of those it was the worst smell—worse than a split sausage of dog food. It came in two colours—spunky pink and spunky blue—but they smelled the same. A deep rich sick sweet smell—that mixed up with the acid-dirty floor in the back shop conjured up the grimmest conjunction of fake purity and dead dirt—like dry frying Turkish delight.


TO BE CONTINUED
NIGHT SHIFT | 1 | 2 |

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