“Ah, not a bad one,” Spiderman said, wiping an eye. “Not bad at all. You got any more like that?”
He did. Lawrence was full of shit when he felt like it. He scraped up a mish-mash of One Thousand and One Nights and vulgar jokes picked up as a glory trooper. There was a mermaid, a unicorn and a dragon stranded on a desert island… He could not recall much of the puerile rubbish along the way, but it got a laugh and in this place, if you worked hard and raised a laugh, you were probably as safe as you could be without Tricky Fingers’ cock stuck up your arse.
Just one more shift and Day Two would be under his belt. Already he could sense time had accelerated relative to the creeping endurance test of Day One. Day Three would pass quicker and Day Four quicker still. The weeks would zip by like so many playing cards. Apathy could gulp a decade in this place.
The gang’s duty of the evening was the Cannery. Spiderman grumbled about this after SMS London left the Dining Hall.
“Those bastards have it in for us. Bating and canning in one day, that’s on top of carrying.”
Tricky Fingers gathered up the playing cards and swept his pile of curved plastic chips off the table into his leather pouch.
“What are those little chips?” Lawrence asked.
“Money,” Spiderman said.
“We get paid on Saturday,” Tricky Fingers said, “and after that it’s party time.”
They were all laughing. The talk of Saturday’s escape cheered them up. They chatted like a bunch of schoolgirls out to the Yard, where the gang assembled around Master Sergeant Ratty. Lawrence learned today was Friday. Saturday was party night. There was no work on Sundays, which created the chance of doing a little exploration. First he had to deal with the immediate challenges of the Cannery, whatever that was. They set off once again for the Factory. The reek of the place still hung about his clothes and hair and his body was greasy and sweaty after two full days without bathing. He would have to risk a shower this evening. Some other bastard could pick up the soap if he dropped it.
The Cannery filled the middle section of the Factory, between the Bating Hall and the Smoking House. The first impression was the engine room of a ship. One stood looking down an avenue of what appeared to be boilers each about the size of a railway shunter. Down the middle ran a single long steel table, on the scale of a Viking long ship, so clean it shone in the light from skylights and tallow lanterns. The gang flowed around Lawrence. Trolleys stacked with glass preserving jars rattled past towards the central table, around which value crowded at the ready. They scrubbed down under streams of water gushing from taps. That done, they each took a jar from a passing trolley and stood waiting. The jars were perfectly familiar to Lawrence, as they had been part of his life in General Wardian. A train of suspicion crawled in his mind. He simply could not believe it true. Not even The Captain would dare… The truth arrived in stainless steel tubs heaped with fresh red meat. His eyes dropped to Spiderman’s.
“You cannot be fucking serious.”
“You’d be surprised how fucking serious this place is.”
Many times had Lawrence eaten preserved meats emptied from exactly such jars. It came out in a big mound of jelly and collapsed under its own weight into various lumps of cooked steak.
More ingredients appeared: tanks of filtered sea water, jugs filled with pepper and rosemary. The value grabbed meat from the tubs, cut it into portions and packed it into the jars. The ultramarines paced about leaning in to correct any short-cutting. Every finished jar got inspected by a couple of under-sergeants. Human chains grew out like tentacles from the table to the pressure-cooking boilers, the jars got passed hand to hand up to each boiler hatch and eased down to be stacked by more value inside. When a boiler was full, the value climbed out and bolted the hatch down. Master Sergeant Ratty ordered the furnaces lit. Value lit spades of kindling and eased them inside the fireboxes, where the flames presently caught on bundles of willow. For an hour, the pressure cookers rumbled away. The few on stoking duty or watching the pressure gauges were the only ones with anything to do. The rest degenerated into a catatonic daze, lying about sweating, eyes dulled and sullen, as if shot up with narcotic drugs.
Master Sergeant Ratty yelled an order. Steam roared up the discharge pipes, nobody could speak or think in the racket. Dazed value cascading sweat strung out in human chains whilst Spiderman and the other firemen purged the boilers with cold water. The atmosphere now was a weight of crushing heat. The production cycle repeated. Years of practice had honed the team to a mechanism.
“Big Stak, I want to show you something,” Tricky Fingers said.
Lawrence wore nothing but underpants. He followed, albeit warily, not least to get out of the heat. Tricky Fingers led him to the crating room, so gorgeously cool, where the jars got labelled and packed into wooden crates. The two of them joined in, painting glue and rolling on labels. Each read, “The Captain’s Table. Finest savoury preserves of impeccable quality”.
Lawrence had eaten this brand as a guardian.
“How long has this been going on?”
“When I got here in ‘89, I asked the same question. The longest-served value then was Alpha501, a.k.a. Snap Turtle, who’d done eight years. He told me the place had been running five years when he first arrived. Apparently the first tranche of value built the Square from nothing while they lived here in the Factory. It’s a Public Era heirloom.”
“Thirty years,” Lawrence said. “Christ on a bike. Think of all the poor bastard surplus turned into steaks and boots in that time. I never thought I’d feel sorry
