He might have been thinking of me

He might have been thinking of me

I see him at his break times, still squeezing, still patient, still seemingly happy. Perhaps. He takes such care; he seems to devote his full attention to each individual squeeze. He picks up each sachet, whether it is ketchup or mayonnaise or a sterilised bandage, with the same care, as though he were cradling a baby. He gives it a slight squeeze, we have to do this to ensure that they are properly sealed but with him it is as though he was taking part in some ritual of gentleness. He is so focussed, so occupied completely and utterly in what he is doing. He isn’t a slow worker, he has occasionally been chastised by a superior for taking too much care, but given how little care the rest of us take we need someone like him to average it all out.

Maybe he is a Buddhist. He certainly seems very contemplative, standing there with a cup of coffee in one hand, the other gently cupping the sachet he was holding when the alarm went for the first bunch to take their breaks. Today I am holding a sachet of vinegar, the most hated of all sachets. Perhaps. They have a consensus here, vinegar is by far the worst thing we have to deal with because when one of these sachets has a small hole then the last thing you want spurting out is vinegar. It is harder to get rid of the smell of vinegar than anything else that comes in sachets.

Perhaps he stands there, sipping his coffee, staring out of the window at the skyline. The room where we get our free coffee and are allowed to smoke if they want is upstairs from where they actually work. He is standing by the window. The bell rings again, back to work. He drains the cup of coffee and puts the mug down by the sink, we both walk back to work. He places the sachet he’d been holding for the last fifteen minutes into the box with the rest and resumes his position and the line begins moving again and he begins again, as briskly as anyone else but somehow managing to take more time over each one.

Maybe it is some sort of optical illusion, because he isn’t moving any faster or slower than anyone else doing the same job, maybe it is an effect of the light, the way he is standing, that makes it appear as though he is taking more time. I should be concentrating on my own job but him taking so much interest in his, compulsively attentive to his occupation, is far more interesting than worrying about what I am doing. Most people are just shovelling them into boxes, he is assiduously testing each one. This is what makes his habit at break time so odd, not that it isn’t a bit odd to take a shit job like this one so seriously, but every time I have seen him cradling one sachet at break time he has always just placed it into the box with the others when he returns to work. There is nothing special about any individual sachet to him, but instead of this making them meaningless, it makes each individual one special, worthy of attention in and of itself. This is why I think he might be religious, he has such devotion, such continuous and unwavering faith in what he is doing. And I remember reading somewhere that Buddhist pay lots of attention to the everyday ‘little things’. And things don’t come much smaller or less consequential than a sachet of salad cream. Except maybe the atoms the sachet is made of, but you couldn’t account for each atom, you couldn’t be attentive at the level of particles.

Maybe he is a bit nuts, he seems very quiet, they say that it is always the quiet ones you have to watch out for. Everyone is quiet sometimes. He never comes for a drink with the rest of us after work. None of the others really care, or maybe they are a little intimidated by his being so conscientious. I don’t know where he lives, I don’t know anyone who knows him. He doesn’t look strange, he dresses like the rest of us, as casually as you can get away with. He looks just like you or me. But there is something about him, something I cannot put my finger on. He always seems so switched on, like he knows everything that is going on at all times, but never tells anyone else. Maybe that’s what omniscience does to people, it means they never have to speak. Or maybe he is mad, compulsively obsessed with sachets of vinegar and tartar sauce.

Maybe he escaped from somewhere and the only job he could get without references was this sort of labour, unskilled. Maybe he fantasises about chopping people up, stowing their various body parts around his spotlessly clean house in symbolic locations, the hands go under the sink so they can help with the washing up, the head goes in the living room so when he is watching TV he has someone to chat with. Maybe he fantasises about this sort of thing and the only way to keep his bloodthirsty cravings under control is to obsess over little plastic sachets of condiments.

Maybe it is a new form of therapy they are trying out on the mentally ill, a way of keeping them in a relatively safe environment occupied in some banal task so that they get to experience stability and predictability. The most unpredictable thing that happens here is that occasionally someone squeezes a sachet over zealously and gets an eyeful of vinegar. But surely we’d have been told before he started working here, unless the management (Jim, who does the hiring and firing) didn’t know about him. Maybe they don’t tell people what they are doing to give the mentally ill person as much opportunity to be accepted by the people around them, even then they’d have to keep an eye on them, make sure they didn’t start running around flashing people or whatever. I don’t think they’d put someone who was seriously dangerous into this kind of situation; there is no security here, there is no need for it, what is someone going to do – steal lots of little packets of ketchup?

When lunchtime comes about and we all get forty-five minutes to spend as we like. He usually leaves alone and comes back like the rest, just before the time elapses. They sometimes go to the pub, sometimes to a take-away, sometimes they split into groups, a few go and do their shopping, a few get a drink, whatever. Today they all went for a pie and a pint in a nearby pub. They chatted about various stuff, sports, celebrities. I was quiet, wondering, not for the first time, where he went during his lunch breaks. Does he go and buy under-the-counter pornography that it secretly imported from Europe? Does he commit shameful acts of public indecency on the other side of town? I nibble at my pie. Does he take a journey to see a back-alley drug dealer to feed his habit? I sip my beer. They finish their lunch and three of them crowd around the quiz machine. I usually know a lot of the answers but I am somewhere else, anticipating the moment when I will next see him and how I will try to discern which, if any, of my speculative guesses about how he spend his lunchtimes is correct. They lose the game and casually - still having ten minutes – walk back to work.

I see him walking down the street towards work from the opposite direction to us and I immediately start trying to remember what is in that direction, where he could have been. Of course this was futile, once he’d walked to the end of this street he could have gone in several directions, he could have been doing anything. We walked back inside and had a quick cup of coffee before work started again. The light had changed, the sun had moved round to another side of the building and he still seems to working slower yet also at the same rate as everyone else. Can optical illusions work even when the source of light is moving around? I don’t know. Maybe I should ask him, but then he’d know I was watching him. If he is ill then he’d most likely identify me as a target, or suspect that I knew what was wrong with him. So I can’t really ask him. There he is, gingerly clasping the sachets, expecting them to burst even under less pressure than a highly motivated ant could have exerted. He looks absurd, as though his life comprises of looking after these sachets with the utmost care, as though lives depended on it. Maybe he has nothing else, maybe he works night shifts as well, I don’t know anyone who does the night shift so I can’t find out if he does. Maybe he is an insomniac.

During the afternoon break I stand on the same spot he stood on this morning, trying to work out what he could have been looking at. I drink some coffee, it is cheap, bitter crap. I take a long drag on my cigarette and allow my gaze to wander over the various things you can see out of the window, rooftops, a mobile phone tower, an underground station. Nothing particularly interesting or boring. Of course he was probably looking at nothing in particular, he was probably thinking. He seems very pensive. Perhaps he is planning some new weapon, the likes of which we have never seen before. He could be planning to take over the world. Or he could be planning to save the world, he could have been thinking about ways to solve all the problems of poverty, disease and crime. It is possible that he might have been thinking about me.

There is a radio at work, and a small TV in the coffee room. Occasionally when the manager isn’t around there are arguments because people want to listen to a certain station or watch a certain program. He never says what he wants to watch and nor do I. Maybe he likes the pop stations that we always seem to end up listening to. Maybe it is only their dull repetitive droning that keeps him from losing it and going on a killing spree. He could tear the legs off one of the chairs that are dotted around in case you want to sit down and use it as a primitive weapon, clubbing colleagues over the head, leaving them bloody, soaked in condiments. You wouldn’t be able to tell the blood from the ketchup. He would stride confidently around, surveying his victims’ smashed skulls before sitting down and ringing the police to tell them what had happened. These thoughts are interrupted by someone telling me that there’s no point thinking like that. I get back to work.


It is the end of the day. A few people linger, most go straight to wherever they’re going. I walk out casually, trying to spot where he is headed. I take a brave step and decide to follow him but when I round the corner he is nowhere to be seen.


I am sitting in a room with no windows, staring straight ahead. I watch a film of some kind, a silent one, some sort of montage, synthetic music plays softly. A man is injecting something into my arm but my expression does not change.