Girl on the Block Page 4

  I’d resorted to trying to figure things out for myself by taking notes during the day, followed by extensive at-home googling on my heavy laptop. I studied the labels plastered on the vacuum bags of beef that came in weekly from the wholesaler. They had codes, use-by dates, and sometimes breeds, but they also had the name of the cut. I gradually memorized these names and learned the common uses for each cut. Chuck steak, which is heavily marbled, is used for braising beef. Ox cheeks are tough because cows spend eight hours of every day chewing, and they need a slow, steady cook. The tenderloin is the least used muscle on a cow’s body and therefore the most tender (hence the name) and the most expensive. Adam didn’t know any of this, and I was pretty sure his dedication to the job hadn’t gone anywhere outside of our working hours. He seemed more focused on using his weekends to prepare for his second year math degree.

  Adam and I had quickly become close friends, and I often noticed him flirting with me. I didn’t hate it. In fact, most of the time it made my working days much more interesting. We were both considered “juniors,” with limited responsibilities, but a lot of the time his duties extended to cutting steaks. I watched with jealousy when he would take one of the butchers’ closely guarded knives and use it on a cut of beef. The butchers seemed to trust him with the responsibility, thanks to his two years of dedicated service. He never played pranks and did his job fast and well, and he knew that his reward would be to gain a little knowledge from one of the butchers, even though he wasn’t that interested in learning.

  We took the piss out of each other a lot, timing our lunch breaks so that we could eat together and chat. If by chance Adam missed lunch, I would come back downstairs to find my apron in the walk-in freezer, perfectly stiff and frozen solid hanging down from the top rail. As payback, I would put his hat in the vacuum packer, squashing it flat in its little plastic envelope, until Steve told me off because the hats were expensive and by October I had ruined four of them. Instead I took to hiding Adam’s knives in the fridge to annoy him.

  I had also noticed Harris flirting with me. This was less welcome. He was forty-two; I was sixteen. He would constantly come up behind me, pull me into a hug so close that I could smell his breath on my neck, and ask me openly about my sex life (which, at sixteen, was pretty much nonexistent aside from the odd fumble in the park), to loud jeers and cheers from the rest of the guys. At first I was flattered by his attention, something I pinned on my pitifully low self-esteem, but this quickly changed. I was far too polite to tell him to stop, afraid of offending him or anyone else in the shop or seeming ungrateful for the opportunity I’d been given. After a few weeks of him touching my hand, my back, my hips, I began to shudder at the thought of him coming near.

  I only worked weekends, from nine in the morning until six in the evening, and I never knew who I would be scheduled to work with until the morning of. Before each shift a moment of panic would hit me, as I prayed that I’d be working with at least one of the other three women on staff that day. Amy was my age. We had started around the same time, but she was often shifted to other departments and I didn’t see her as much as I would have liked. Laura was older, mid-thirties, a plump woman with thin blond hair who wore shimmery blue eye shadow to work. She was tough, and at first she scared me. She had been there a while in customer service, and she could handle any comment fired at her by the men and respond in a way that would make them feel two inches tall. She’d also tear into any of us for any fun talk she deemed to cross a line. I never quite knew where I stood with her; I both loved and loathed having her there.

  Sharon was a bit older than Laura, and I adored her. An avid smoker, she would spend her breaks out back next to the “crusher,” a stinking machine that compacted down any waste from the shop, thus making her dedication to having a fag even more impressive. After a month of working together, she returned from a trip to Las Vegas with T-shirts for Amy and me, each with a deck of cards and bold lettering emblazoned across the chest, smelling faintly of cigarettes. I still wear mine to this day. I felt that I could always rely on Sharon and Laura to support me when the men behaved badly.

  The more time I spent around Harris, the more he disgusted me. I was ashamed to think back to my first day when I had found him charming. Like most sixteen-year-olds, I didn’t particularly understand older men, or men in general, but I had grown up believing that it was a good thing when someone went out of their way to compliment you. I began to dread the sidelong glances from his beady eyes. I smelled booze on his breath early in the mornings, home-brewed beer being his drink of choice. His aftershave was weak and covered nothing. His short, stubby hands were too small for the rest of him, and he paraded his giant frame around the cutting room like a rooster, inspecting what everyone was doing: chest out, getting too close and caring little about anyone’s personal space.

  My dad would often stop by the shop to say hello on his way to visit my uncle and cousins who lived in the nearby village. One Sunday in October, when I was working with Harris, he came by just as an early snow had begun to fall outside.

  “The road up to the car park is a bit too icy, so I’ll park down in the village this afternoon, that alright?” Dad said. He was never one to shy away from driving in dangerous conditions, having driven heavy goods trucks in his twenties, but outside the snow was coming down thick and fast, blanketing the shop’s car park in minutes. I nodded, and he turned to leave, but before he could, Harris was behind me and called out to him.

  “This is my new girlfriend, isn’t she lovely?”

  Harris placed his heavy hand on my shoulder, the cool metal of his chain mail radiating through the cotton of my overalls and the shirt underneath. A musky stench drifted lightly from his armpits, and his breath smelled of the onion salad I had watched him devour on the short lunch break we’d had together at his insistence. I laughed nervously, but it didn’t come out the way that I hoped it would. I was too polite for this.

  “She’s absolutely gorgeous,” Harris said to my father, like a congratulations. He pulled me closer until the curve of my backside and waist pushed against him. I had taken to trying to look physically uncomfortable whenever he came near, and I hoped to God that it came across that way to my dad. But Dad, all six foot three of him, laughed, and so did Harris, both safe in the camaraderie that only men can share, totally oblivious to the grimace on my face. Harris and I stood about a foot above Dad behind the counter, pink LED lighting reflecting unnaturally off the curved glass, which housed bulbous and glistening cuts of red meat slapped on black plastic trays that over the day had filled with blood.

  I removed my hat with my free hand, the one that wasn’t stuck against Harris’s thigh, and pulled the thin hairnet from around the bun at the nape of my neck. Wriggling free of him seemed hopeless, his hand on my shoulder squeezing the material tight.

  “What time do you finish?” my dad asked.

  “Six,” I replied, and that was when I managed to work myself free of the grasp and into the corner next to a hand-wash sink. I hated the height of that sink, and I had bashed my hip against it so many times trying to avoid that man.

  My dad’s face was unchanged, and there was an annoyance rising in me, starting from my gut, that he had failed to read his only daughter. His arms stayed folded across his broad chest, wrinkling the soft wool of the familiar red jumper that he wore whenever the temperature dropped. He browsed the counter hungrily, eyes falling on the pink of the lamb and the soft, pale pork.

  “Alright, I’ll be outside then.” He turned on his heels and left, and from my vantage point behind the counter, I watched him walk away, not stopping to question why this man in his forties was touching the hips of his sixteen-year-old daughter. Harris said nothing to me, and we trudged back into the cutting room in silence to rejoin the others. I returned to the tray of chickens stacked on my workbench.

  Sometime earlier, I’d discovered that if you press down hard and quick enough on the flimsy back of a chicken, air will rush through the
carcass and the whole thing will feebly squeak. I’d spent hours forcing each small carcass to bend until its bones broke beneath the force of my palm. The squeak turned into a squelch and the breastbone caved in on itself, leaving the floppy, wet, headless body of the chicken cowering on my red cutting board. This maneuver made it more difficult to remove the breasts and legs, but it also created more knife work, which I enjoyed in my boredom until I was left with nothing more than a central skeleton: creamy yellow bones and the lightest trace of purple-maroon organs in the cavity.

  I sensed Harris’s presence behind me once more, a sudden a rush of unease radiating through me. Beneath my overalls, I had started wearing skinny jeans, against the wishes of the managing department, purely because the itchy cotton of my work slacks had caused a rash behind my knees. To the men I worked with, this was a novelty. Any deviation from the shapeless slacks provoked a reaction, and my teenage calves, muscular and shapely above the steel-toed boots that we all wore for safety, set them off like a pack of hounds. Maybe it was the bristly slip of pallid skin between the hem of my jeans and where my socks began. They had all managed to sexualize my ankles for the last four weeks.

  I could feel sweat prickling in my armpits and gripped the handle of the blunt knife they had assigned to me. Two hands moved to my hips, a head curling over my shoulder to look at me.

  “I’m glad he approves.”

  I shimmied away, and as I did, splinters of the block caught my apron and tore tiny holes along the front pocket line. At the sink, I pretended to wash my hands, but my blatant attempt to escape was obvious. I usually avoided eye contact with Harris, but this time I looked straight at him despite my better judgment.

  “Right, what’s next?” I asked. He picked up one of the chicken carcasses from the large green wheelie bin in the middle of the room, full of bones.

  “You haven’t got all of the meat off of these. It’s a waste.”

  “I tried.”

  “Try harder.”

  The rest of the butchers were watching us, peeking up from beneath the brims of their hats as they tied white string around joints of meat for the weekend. Our conversation was louder than the scratchy radio, but they were pretending that they couldn’t hear.

  “It might be easier to try if I didn’t have you skulking behind me at every turn.”

  Harris coughed, the universal sign that he was annoyed. It was his way of letting everyone know that you, like whatever it was that was stuck in his throat, didn’t agree with him.

  The other three butchers had now stopped their work and were leaning on the handles of their knives with the points dug into the wooden block. Ian, who had become my favorite after a long conversation about the 1960s and his childhood a few weeks ago, shook his head with what I thought was exasperation.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said to me, as Harris disappeared into the fridge.

  I wasn’t sure what he meant, but then there was a screeching as Harris pushed the rusty trolley to one side. In their semicircle around the bone bin, the butchers exchanged a quick, concerned look. It was clear that I was about to be punished. Harris sidled out of the fridge a few moments later carrying a large white plastic tray, perhaps a yard long and half as wide. Over its brim, a mass of something wet slid up and down with the movement of his plodding footsteps. There were groans and grimaces from the others, and Richie and Ian walked up to peek over the side of the tray.

  “Oh, now that’s not nice,” said Ian, looking up to Harris with a pleading smile. “She can’t do that.”

  “That” was a tray of chicken livers five inches deep. The stench of the brine in the fridge was enough to turn my stomach, but it was nothing compared to this: a strong, metallic odor not quite like blood, reminding me of the smell of the chemistry lab at school. It was the steely smell of chemicals that stuck to the hair of your nostrils.

  “Take the bile glands off,” Harris said, and he picked one liver out of the tray, waving the small thing around until blood flew from the surface and into the air. I thought of my mum ordering liver pâté when we went out for dinner. It would arrive in a glass jar, looking and smelling a lot like dog food to me. Coming face-to-face with this small, shining red organ was much worse.

  “She doesn’t need to do that,” Ian protested, but Harris barked over him.

  “I’m in charge.”

  This wasn’t strictly true. Steve was the manager of the butchery, but he was soft-handed and couldn’t delegate well. His specialty was handling customer complaints, whereas most of the butchers, like Ian, who had almost gotten into a full-on fistfight with a customer after he’d forgotten to remove the spinal cord from a beef rib, didn’t always deal well with the public. After being passed over for the manager’s job the previous year, Harris had decided to christen himself “supervisor,” and he had enforced the title ever since. No one bothered to correct him.

  Hanging from the side of the liver was a bright green sack about the size of a small chile pepper. It looked like an alien growth, bulbous and drooping sadly to the side. Harris opened out the liver to show me where it was attached by a small silver film. With a quick whip of his knife, he cut around the bile gland and removed it, tossing it into the waste bin. Aside from the stench, the task seemed simple.

  “But don’t burst the bile gland—it’ll go everywhere.”

  He threw down the tray with a thud, and the livers moved as a mass, rippling against the plastic and spilling up over the side. I picked one up, deathly cold from sitting in its own juices.

  “What happens if you burst it?” I asked.

  He took the liver from my hand, put it down on the block, and ever so gently stuck the tip of his knife into the bile duct. It burst with a violent spurt, spilling so much thick, foul-smelling liquid out over the block that I struggled to understand where it had all come from.

  He was watching me for a reaction. I picked up the knife and began to work.

  “Kid, you don’t have to do that,” said Ian.

  “It’s fine. I don’t mind.”

  Most of the livers passed through my fingers intact and went into another white tray while the bile glands were thrown into the bin in the middle. A couple did not. More than a couple. The gland would burst and bile, cloudy and stinking, flowed out, covering my hands, the block, and the deep maroon of the liver. Occasionally I went to brush some hair out of my face, smelled the bitterness, and retched quietly. When I was finished, the gray stain on my fingers remained for two days. Harris watched me from the other side of the workroom, having given up on his own work for the day. When I was finished, he stood close behind me once more, looked over my shoulder, and told me I’d done an alright job.

  That evening after work, I threw my stuff on the back seat of Dad’s car after the snow had let up a little and the ice was turning to puddles. We chatted about our days, how my uncle and cousins were, and what was for dinner at home, but nothing was mentioned about the exchange with Harris. Had I overreacted? If Dad had found Harris’s behavior abnormal in any way, he didn’t let on. He took one look at my stained fingers, gave a sniff at the stench on my hands, and burst out laughing.

  A week later, both Laura and Adam were on shift with me, and the butchery was busy. The holiday season was approaching, and there was an urgency to our work. Less chatter, heads down, constant scowling. Small problems seemed to amplify into much bigger ones. Pressure hung over us like a weight, only increasing as the days passed. Harris, however, didn’t seem to be feeling the same stress as the rest of us. He was jovial, cracking jokes above the noise of everyone working, to no reply, which didn’t seem to put him off.

  At moments when the shop was less busy, Adam and I had come up with a new game that eclipsed freezing aprons or vacuum packing hats. When one of us wasn’t looking, we would print out a meat sticker from the till and place it on the other’s back. Whoever had their sticker stay on the longest won. To our joy, we’d managed to find a label for SPOTTED DICK, which naturally had become a fav
orite. SHAG PILE was another. Laura constantly shot us disapproving looks, but we eventually won her over with LARGE SAUSAGE.

  Sometimes Harris would join in, uninvited of course. He seemed to think that he could behave as badly or childishly as he liked without any consequence. In retaliation, Adam and I refused to laugh at his jokes, not because they weren’t funny, but purely on principle. That morning, Harris had stuck TREACLE TART on my back. I yanked it off as soon as he did it. His thick, fumbling fingers, which didn’t lend themselves to subtlety, and his smell usually gave him away before he was a few feet from us.

  “That was shit,” Adam declared, loud enough so that Harris could hear. We both laughed, forgetting that Harris didn’t take kindly to being made fun of. Laura told us to stop our antics, but she didn’t mean it. Plastered across her face was a supportive smile. Sharon, working by the glass wall, was trying not to laugh. A moment later, somewhere behind me, I heard Sharon say, “Don’t.”

  I felt a hand brush my work coat and grab hold of my waist. I had no time to move, could only look straight on into Laura’s widening eyes and gaping mouth. With one hand Harris held me tightly, and the other he placed on my arse. It wasn’t fleeting—he kept his palm and fingers on one cheek for a few seconds before releasing me and letting me fall forward slightly into the block where Laura was working. I heard his heavy footsteps retreating, dragging over the linoleum flooring.

  Very calmly and quietly, barely looking up from the piece of lamb in front of her, Laura asked, “Did he just touch you?”

  I nodded, trying to laugh it off.

  “Turn around.”

  I did as I was told. Whatever had been stuck to my backside, she removed and waved it gently in front of my face. The label read BEST RUMP STEAK.

  “Right,” she said under her breath, balling up the label tightly in her fist. I looked up at her, speechless, wondering if the whole thing had been my fault to begin with. Sharon scurried over, and she and Laura began a heated discussion in whispers. I stood there awkwardly, waiting for them to involve me, but before they did, Laura waved me away. “There’s customers out front.”