TEDDY PACKERS

The agency finally got me a job when I dropped my requirements to "anything." The sheet they handed me said 'packing.' No more details, not even in the small print. It was a half-hour walk, then a twenty-minute train. Finally, a short walk past Morrison's supermarket brought a four-floor high mill into view.

Details had been vague. Pay was legal. I was past caring; just gagging for a break in my daily routine of video games and daytime TV in the summer holidays between college and university. It wasn't even desperation of the financial kind; just a needle to pick me out of the house, and wipe me back across society so I had a viable answer when I bumped into people in town.

I took my sheet to reception. After that, they showed me to a hangar-sized space where a sparse mix of people looked busy or broken. Sometimes both. I smiled and nodded at John. John was 1st in line. He didn't smile back, just stared through my head and into oblivion. On his left was a giant white box. I was 3rd in line. From there, I couldn't see what was in the box. He reached in and came back up with a beetroot red face and a teddy bear in his hands. On a tall wooden desk was a pile of cardboard sheets. Each sheet was folded twice to form a frontless box. I had John at around 55, but he could have passed for 70. Between us, and 2nd in line was Shabi, a lady in her mid-20s, tall, slender, and in possession of hope. She smiled a lot but said little. Sometimes the smiles hid something. It was hard to say what. Her role in the mill was to thread a plastic cable tie through two cuts in the card John had prepared and strap teddy in. My role, 3rd, was obviously the newcomer's cross to bear; the most pressured, and next to the guy on the end, Raz. Raz, was restless and irritable, his bilberry eyes watching, judging all from under a severe forehead. All day he twitched and huffed. The thing was, he had no endgame, no discernible destination, and I never did work out where he was in a rush to get to. Thanks to his grumbling, I routinely fumbled my simple responsibilities: jamming the bear and card into the upside-down plastic box. Raz's nervous disposition secured the desirable 4th place in line. All he had to do was seal and sticker up the boxes before stacking them on the wooden palette in a certain prescribed arrangement.

That was us. All day. Five days a week. Six if you wanted the extra pay.

They had us lined up on tall stools with long, thin metal legs, and one soul to share between us.

The radio did most of the talking.

I lasted three weeks, or £600. It was a Monday when the palette collapsed. Raz blamed me and stormed out for a fag, shouting about how I'd left a card poking up out of the plastic, throwing off his foundations. I wasn't having it. It was marginal. The repetition comforted some characters. Not me. My brain needed variation and everything the job offered was all laid out ahead of us; vast, sweeping plains of desert, with only a sparse smattering of lifeforms forced to fight to the death just to avoid adding to the mounting sand.

Who made these cheap bears? Who bought them? These were mysteries to each of us. Raz got irrationally angry if I asked questions about them; so much so that I would squeeze the odd one, convinced it would burst, giving birth to a cache of pills or powder.

 I saw the sadness of ocean oil spills in their sewn-on eyes.

 I didn't storm out or cause a fuss. Just slipped away one day, after a routine afternoon piss. I looked back at the building one last time before I ducked into Morrison's to escape the rain. In the dirt on one of the third-floor windows, someone had fingered in the words 'HELP ME' backward. I'd have laughed if I hadn't buckled under the weight of that brutal truth.