What I’m about to tell you happened like thirty years ago or something. It happened to my mum, and I only know about it because she got drunk last Christmas and like totally broke down crying and saying she was a bad person. Of course, I told her she wasn’t, that she was the best mum in the world, which she is, but it was like she couldn’t hear me, and she just kept crying. I asked her why she thought that, and this is what she told me.
When she was in her twenties, she worked in this factory where they made the plastic packaging that goes on like a tube of superglue or the tray inside a box of biscuits and stuff. She said it was the most boring time of her life—twelve hours shifts standing at the mouth of this big machine as it spat out rows of bottle-shaped bits of plastic that she had to collect up and stack on the table behind her. I guess they have machines to do that now, but back then, in the nineties, they employed mostly women to do it, because they were more dexterous, she said. She didn’t have much choice anyway; there wasn’t a lot of work going for someone like her back then, and she had to take what she could get.
She kind of liked it in a way, though it was boring as hell. She had some good mates at the factory, and she said they’d have a laugh with the engineers—they’d take the piss out of them and be a bit flirty, though there was never any question of it going any further, it was just a way to pass the time. She had a best friend, Maxine, and they’d try and get on the same line if they could, and then the time would just fly by.
She liked her shift manager, Terry, too. He was pretty laid back, you know. He’d sometimes join in with their banter, and he didn’t make a big deal of it if they were a couple of minutes late back from their tea break. Then one day, Terry came in looking like shit,
