Tomorrow

Slice-of-life short. A shop worker takes sandwiches to some engineers.

Just a little bit of slice-of-life, 800w!

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This is one of the last jobs of the day, and Tom always tries to be the one that does it.

Even were it not for the destination, he enjoys the walk up the slope under the shadow of the oak trees that grew either side of the path, dappling it in dots and blotches of sunshine when it’s sunny and shielding him from the worst of the rain when it’s not; as the destination is to be taken into account, he enjoys the smell of the engine shed as he comes to the crest of the hill and begins to walk on the flat of the ground, the smell of oil and smut and metal on the air.

He ordinarily goes up at about five o’clock, half an hour before the bakery is due to shut its doors for the day, and typically the men are sitting about working, but some days, like this one, an engine has had to be pulled off the line in the course of schedule’s run, and they’re all working on it together, its carapace open to show the pipes inside, as if to peer into the belly of a great, iron beast.

“Tommy’s here!” calls Bobby Smith from somewhere up in the rafters as Tom crosses the threshold of the shed, and he watches hungrily as the engineers come away from their craft, all of them — to a man — dirty with black dust and smears of oil as dark and shiny as molasses, Lee and Alun Dai with their shirts off because they’ve been under the thing, so that their chest hair is matted with it, their backs impeccably clean in the centre where they’ve been laid back on boards to ease them under the train body lifted as it is off its tracks.

Tom follows the ritual as it was taught him by Mr McAleese the first time he made the delivery: the hot tea first, cups set before each sitting at the table, one by one making a hollow sound against the unvarnished wood of what amounted to the engineers’ dining table. As each of them is set down from its stack of seven nesting cups, he hears the shouts and laughter from the lads as they wash their hands off and splash each other as they go — the youngest of them is Bobby at nineteen, but the eldest is Alun Dai at fifty something, and he laughs along with them and plays the same wrestling games as if he, too, is a young man.

Next comes the parcels of sandwiches, four of them each tied in squares of brown paper, laid one after the other in the centre of the table in a row. He pulls the end string on each of the parcels so that they open up and outward — after so many years doing this five times a week, the four of them are the perfect distance apart, so that each paper unfolds and sits in parallel to the next, the sandwiches cut into triangles in the middle.

“What are the fillings today, Tom?” asks Isambard Roe, and Tom points from left to right.

“Sausage, bacon, and egg here, chicken and celery, cheese and pickle, and on the end is ham and peanut.”

He stands back and watches as the men descend, all of them sitting around the table and pouring tea for each other, eating the sandwiches brought up from the café. It’s this moment that warms Tom for reasons he can’t quite define, the sheer gusto with which they throw themselves into their afternoon meal — much of the time they’ll work until eight or nine in the evening, and often later, on days like this.

“How’s the day gone, chaps?” he asks.

He loves to ask the question: there’s an immediate explosion of noise, each of them going, “Oh!” “Well!” “Fuck’s sake, Tom,” and they fall over each other to start speaking, to tell Tom of all their petty squabbles in the course of the day, of the actual work they’ve gotten done,

He sketches it sometimes when he gets home from work, sits by the fire beside his grandmother at her sewing and sits with his pencil at his journal, depicts the sheer animation with which the men speak, their eyes wide, cheeks full when they’re halfway through a mouthful of sandwich, the oil and smut still stained on their cheeks and bodies. All of them are just so eager to tell him things, to channel their misgivings and squabbles in the course of the day to an external party, and they all like him so well, it really makes him feel so —

Warm.

“Good night, boys,” Tom calls over his shoulder as he departs with the flask and cups stacked and held under his arm. “See you tomorrow!”

They chorus back the farewell, and Tom smiles as he goes off down the hill.

He’s looking forward to tomorrow already.