He put down the mug of coffee the apprentice had brought him, its contents untasted.
The boy was only sixteen, red-haired and pale-skinned, tall and gangly with a prominent Adam’s apple and a voice which had still not broken properly.
He had attached himself to Joel, following him about everywhere, reminding Joel of the crossbred whippet pups his father had bred and sold. This boy had the same ungainliness and clumsiness. His parents were divorced, his father remarried with a second family, and Joel was aware of a responsiveness to the boy’s unexpressed need within himself that he had never been able to express with Paul.
Duncan needed his approval, shyly semi-hero-worshipping him in a way that Paul had never done.
‘I put sugar in it,’ Duncan told him now, watching him put down his untouched coffee.
‘Yeah, it’s fine,’ Joel assured him as he looked at his watch. Ten to one.
‘Joel, what’s going to happen… to us… ?’ Duncan blurted out, his pale skin flushing as not just Joel but several of the other men turned to look at him.
Before Joel could say anything, the door opened and the works manager walked in. He had aged years in the last few weeks, and no wonder, Joel reflected. He was in his fifties with one son at university and a daughter injured at birth who needed constant care.
‘The council offered them a place for her at a special home,’ Sally had told him. ‘But Peggy Hatcher wouldn’t hear of it.’
Joel watched as Keith Hatcher held open the door for the rest of the management team and the woman left to walk in.
She was a girl really still, not a woman, Joel reflected as Keith introduced her, her skin glowiqg with health and youth and good food. She looked glossy and polished as shiny and bright as a newly minted coin, so plainly untouched by any of the disillusion and pain that life could hold that Joel felt a surge of anger against her.
What did she know of the lives of people like him… their problems, their hopes?
She had started to speak, her voice clear and firm. She was talking about the large amount of money Andrew had borrowed from the bank, explaining that it was because of his inability to repay this debt that the bank were now forced to put the company into liquidation in order to sell off its assets in an attempt to recoup what they could of their money.
The bank regretted the necessity of having to do this but they must understand that they really had no alternative; the company had been operating at a loss for some considerable time. They would all be issued with formal redundancy notices, she told them, making it sound as though in doing so the bank was doing them some sort of favour, Joel reflected mirthlessly as he watched her eyelids flutter betrayingly while she made this last statement.
So she wasn’t totally unaware of what she was doing, then. He saw the way she suddenly found it impossible to look directly at them, dipping her head instead.
‘What about our redundancy payments, and our pensions?’ Joel asked her as she finished speaking, raising his voice so that she couldn’t avoid hearing him.
‘Ay… what about them?’ someone else echoed, others taking up the cry, while she shuffled her papers and tried to look calm.
‘Your normal statutory rights will naturally be honoured,’ she informed them. ‘You will be put on a list of preferred creditors and paid out once the liquidation is complete.’
When? Joel reflected bitterly. Their normal statutory rights fell a long way short of what they might have expected to receive had those of them with long service records been made redundant in the normal way of things.
‘When does this redundancy take effect?’ Joel asked her.
‘Immediately,’ she told him steadily.
‘Immediately.’ Joel stared at her. He had expected her to say that it would be a few weeks… a month or so. He knew his shock must be registered on his face, just as it was on the faces of the men around him; he knew it because he could see the pity in the woman’s eyes as she dipped her head again and looked away from him.
Some of the men were turning to the union rep., demanding that he do something, but the man was just as helpless as they were themselves.
‘The factory will be closed as from tonight,’ the woman was saying in that cool, elegant, distant voice which belonged more surely to some posh dinner party than here on the factory floor. ‘The accountants’ office will remain open as there will be certain formalities to be completed.’
The company accountant didn’t look too pleased at that prospect, Joel noticed. Personally he wouldn’t have put it past Ryecart to have been up to all sorts of financial tricks.
No doubt he had feathered his nest warmly and safely enough. His wife wouldn’t need to go out to work full-time to pay the mortgage and put food on the table, he reflected savagely.
‘What will we do now, Joel?’ Duncan asked him timidly an hour later.
‘Do? Why, we get ourselves down to the social services and get ourselves on the dole just like the three million or so other poor sods who can’t find themselves a job,’ Joel told him savagely.
The dole… the scrap heap more like, because that was what it amounted to and that was all they were to the likes of Ryecart and his kind… so much human scrap… and not worth a si
ngle damn.