Night Shifts

By Clyve Kane

Take two totally ordinary, working-class, Yorkshire Englishmen. Throw them together by fate into the same accommodation. The result is a red-hot, man-to-man friendship for Dini and Steve that triumphs over depression, self-hate and loneliness.

Some people will call this story controversial. Read on and find out why no character is going to damage his manhood here - instead he's going to find gay male love in a better way. There's lots of sex, of course - but you will know why no disinfectant is needed before or after! They will show you how any man can have good, clean fun and it's still fun - and 100 percent natural masculine.

Strong bonds of friendship are forged in the fires of personal problems, hard times at work and with family.

This is a hard-hitting story with swearing and aggressive talk. I don't approve of intolerant or bigoted language as used in England or anywhere - but you need to see life there just the way it is. Remember this: when men play-fight - best friends included - they use insults because, yes, because they are friends. They're testing their bonds.

Definitely not for under 18s. NSFW topics. It's a controversial take on gay/bisexual relationships. I hope you will see it makes sense. Enjoy the action!

• Language: English
• Publisher: A Cord of Two
• Release date: Jan 18, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224222247

Clyve Kane

Clive Kane, before anything else he is, is a man. As a writer he is on a mission to look at deep friendships between men that turn sexual and intense. The mission: there is so much shallow portrayal of same-sex love thesedays that's plastic, false and confused. He found another and better way to understand it all, just stumbling on it by chance. It deserves to be better known. Telling stories is his way of sharing that vision.

Book preview

ONE

Going Down

Steve walked slowly across the wet tarmac of the car park. The man-made light glaring down from the lamp-posts was mirrored in the puddles. It was almost time to start work, but he didn’t hurry. The thought crossed his mind that when he finished, it would still be night, and he would go home in the damp dark of November.

Home? The word made him shudder. The house he’d lived in for most of his married life was no longer a home. At that moment his wife and two children were staying with her parents: his marriage was, you could say, dying a slow death. He’d told her he was going to move out to a room of his own. A room he still hadn’t found.

As he walked inside through the warehouse, some of Steve’s colleagues greeted him — he replied mechanically, without looking at any of them. Once he had his jacket and other belongings stowed in a cage locker, he assembled with the others (some thirty people, mostly men) to hear the briefing for the shift that was about to start.

We’re expecting the Alfa parts delivery tonight at about one a.m. People, we ’ave to get all the other work done to be ready for this. I can’t promise it will arrive on time — but when it does, we’ll all be busy. A few men muttered. When the vans leave by six a.m., the Alfa parts must all be in them!

This warehouse building was the depot of a car-parts distribution centre: spares and replacements usually manufactured abroad, or sometimes in Britain, would be delivered there and then sorted out to make consignments for dealers and customers. Then vans took these consignments from where they were in Yorkshire, out across the whole of the United Kingdom.

Steven Niddernley was a part-time employee of an agency, not of the firm itself, having no permanent contract. He’d been made redundant from a light engineering firm three years before, and this work was all he could find at the time. The resulting loss of money, and extra time to feel angry about it, had taken its toll on his spirits and on his marriage. Feeling depressed made him less and less enthusiastic about finding more work, and so he ended up doing just this job, hating it, and not bothering to change.

Steve often worked together with Dinesh Patel, and the two colleagues got on well. Dinesh was, in contrast, a full-time employee of the firm, with a proper contract. Steve was 39, from a local family and of just less-than-average height, with dark hair turning silver; his workmate was 30, short and well-built, from an Indian family. Now, Steve and Dinesh (usually called Dini by everyone who knew him well) did many jobs at the warehouse, but most of all, these days, it was order-picking. Wearing a headset of speakers and a microphone, each man got orders from a computer-generated voice, and made them up from shelves and boxes of spares. You could ask the voice to repeat, and when finished, you said, Finished. They called the voice Robot Rosie; occasionally it was a real, live woman called Tina.

—

Just before two a.m., the warehouse noise was even and no voices sounded. Conveyor belts, such as the one the two men were standing on opposite sides of, screeched slightly in the cold air. Forklift trucks beeped when they reversed, and boxes bumped and scratched on the floor when they were pushed along or chucked about with expert roughness. People become deaf to it all. Not much was left for Steve and Dini to do: this wasn’t order-picking, so you could do it slowly. Steve’s mind, in contrast, was working overtime with worry, and he felt angry and helpless. He burst out:

"It’s like a bloody morgue in ’ere tonight; reminds me of t’ ’ouse I’m goin’ back to in t’ mornin’."

"What do ya mean?" Dini’s face showed surprise.

"Me wife’s taken our children and gone off to ’er beloved Mummy and Daddy. (Beloved was said ironically…) We’ve ’ad one argument too many. So now I’m alone: lookin’ forward, said Steve bitterly, to findin’ me own accommodation."

I’m sorry for ya, mate. Must ya leave? said Dini.

I don’t want to fuckin’ stay… so I’m goin’ to get a room. Some filthy, cold place like t’ ones I saw yesterday.

The answers to Dini’s question were spat out with disgust and despair. Fortunately, Dini could turn around at that moment with some items he’d taken off the conveyor belt. He needed to take it all in. A half-thought came to his mind — he wasn’t sure if he should tell Steve; then he did.

Ya know… there’s a room to rent where I live, said Dini.

Really? said Steve, without enthusiasm.

Ya could come and look at it. It’s closer to work compared to where ya live now.

And it doesn’t look like a pigsty? retorted Steve.

His friend gritted his teeth a little, and answered, It’s just been re-painted and cleaned. I don’t think it’ll be too expensive for ya. You’ll ’ave just me and two other tenants sharin’ t’ bathrooms and kitchen.

So why’s it empty, then? Steve’s somewhat suspicious nature was showing; and he knew no reason to hide his thoughts from Dini.

Dini had to answer openly: "Look, Steve, there was a problem wi’ t’ lad ’oo rented it before: ’e stole things, and ’e ’ad to leave; but t’ others are honest, clean and look after t’ place. I’m bein’ selfish, mate, said Dini, grinning. I don’t want another tenant like t’ one we just ’ad. If you come, then I can say that I know ye’re a good bloke, and we can all get along."

—

Just at that moment, a voice shouted, It’s ’ere!, and the engine noise of the first truck to arrive could be heard through an opening roller door. Everyone started moving: all conversations stopped, and Steve and Dini had to try to finish the work piled around them, so that when other workers moved down to where they’d been, they in turn could move over to order-picking and start that, once the new parts came flooding in. Once the old work was sorted, they moved over and set up their headphones; Dini got back into the rhythm of responding to Robot Rosie’s commands in his ear, pulling out the goods from the right box and putting them into the right plastic containers, and thereafter he had time to think about what he’d just said to Steve.

Dini had left home six months before. Finding this accommodation and living there hadn’t been easy — and Drug Doug, as they’d nicknamed him, had turned it into a nightmare for a time. Dini wanted to be honest with Steve, but he also wanted to avoid telling him the whole story. He liked the thought of having Steve living there — and dreaded another problem tenant. Drug Doug started stealing from their rooms — twenty pounds from Jacob; his own mobile ’phone (being reminded of that theft kept him awake some nights, in a rage) — and eventually went crazy, howling curses at invisible people, and spraying the fire extinguisher all over the corridor and the kitchen for a non-existent fire; last of all he smashed a window and managed to jump through it, out into the street. That is what it had needed to get rid of him — after hospital he was put in rehab. Thank God he was gone!

Steve rushed about, following Robot Rosie’s dreary orders (D240, D240… one… Clutch Plate… to DD4, DD4… Angudee Autospares.) He and Dini were able to move hither and yonder, changing direction in a split second, hardly ever hitting one another. Some workers are a disaster when thus together: Steve once nearly came to blows with a big, fat lad who had crashed into him three times in ten minutes; Dini and a thin, nervous woman had had an icy, stressful experience when working on a day shift — muddling one another, correcting where the other put things, and still making mistakes.

Tina, the woman who put the data from the deliveries and despatches onto the computer for Robot Rosie to announce, had once worked as an order-picker. She’d been bullied to tears by a female colleague who kept barking, Out o’ my way!, yet Dini had seen her working at a wonderful speed with a young lass who’d been doing it for only a month, and needed helping. He’d worked with her once, when a snowstorm kept most of the workers away, and they had to try to keep on sorting inside. It came naturally to help one another: she could remind him, for example, what an R70 was — and he could open a container lid she was struggling to push down, shift the contents in a split second so that they fitted perfectly, and neither felt told-off or shown up.

She marvelled at how he, being as short as she was, could lift two containers at a time, when a heavy one could be a strain for her. She fancied the muscles in his arms and shoulders — which he wasn’t aware of. Steve liked it when she gave the orders instead of the computer, or any other member of staff: not only was she pleasanter to hear, but she understood what they had to do. And the supervisors liked to put Steve with Dini — to get the best out of Steve, a normally unenthusiastic and rather sullen worker.

Once he was able to think of other things again, once the Alfa parts had been picked and sorted, Steve felt somewhat better. Now they changed their work, taking off the headsets and carrying filled containers over to be collected by the drivers — and in a moment he could picture a room to rent that wasn’t too bad. He hoped it would be so.

TWO

Drifting, Not Quite Drowning

How had it come about that Dinesh Patel, from a large Indian family, had left home? In India, everything revolves about the extended family: work, housing, socialising, education — and marriage. In his case, it was the latter that proved to be the last straw. His father and his mother’s parents were immigrants from India; Dini had an older brother and sister, and a younger sister. His brother and the elder sister were married by then, and the family had been urging him to hurry up and get married, especially since his thirtieth birthday earlier that year. As it was, his Dad had never got on well with any of them — critical, sickly, a drinker, suffering from serious depression — and was often away on business.

It is important to realise that Dini had had friends while growing up, but was becoming lonelier as they seemed to drift apart — especially as they were all married by then! The pressure seemed to come from all sides, until one day, after an argument with his father, his mother and his brother, it had become too much — and Dini had left the family home.

On the outside, Dini looked well. Three years before, he’d taken up gym in an attempt to improve his health and self-image (he was quite short and had been out of shape). Unlike Steve, he liked his work: one must understand that because he’d had a full-time contract with Eurcaroparts since he was 25, it gave him a sense of security. Dini had had just one other job before this one. After school he’d studied at a Polytechnic, but soon dropped out: he was unmotivated then, and he struggled with dyslexia — he was not able to write well — which made it all too much. There was no trouble for him in reading labels or orders, or books and newspapers, for that matter — but if he were ever to write a note, it would remain a mystery, as they said. In the distribution centre, this was hardly ever necessary.

—

The work that night went on as usual. During the short second break, Dini had sat with Steve and a couple of other men, as he often did, though not always. While Steve drank coffee and ate chocolate, and Dini drank black tea and ate a high-fibre protein bar, they agreed that Steve would come to see the room that evening.

At his house, after sleeping, the process of waking up and washing, eating, and getting ready to do something with the little that was left of the already-fading day, made Steve depressed. All alone in a house he’d known for ten years. By the time he arrived at the property where the room was, a double-storey terrace on the corner of a very busy road and a grimy little cul-de-sac, he was feeling angry and bitter.

At the door Dini greeted him: "Come in, mate. Did ya find a place to park?"

"Aye," said Steve emptily.

You should be glad when ya can, in this place, thought Dini but didn’t say it. T’ empty room’s downstairs; here…

He showed it to Steve: it reeked of paint. It was all landlord-coloured matt-cream woodchip on the walls and matt-white on the ceiling; and had the standard wardrobe, drawers, and double bed… which said little to bachelor Dini, but