The Sound of Laughter by Peter Kay

Author:Peter Kay [Kay, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781409062769
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

4 p.m. till Raid

I was still on the performing arts course, and at the start of the year I collected my grant cheque. But as it only stretched to a new parka from Primark and a Terry's Chocolate Orange, I decided to take on a second part-time job. I'd heard through a friend of a friend that there were jobs going down at a local cash and carry situated on an industrial park behind the abattoir. And so I got a job working there a couple of evenings and at weekends. The hours fitted nicely around my shifts at the garage and I really needed the money if I was at least going to continue with my driving lessons.

I settled in straight away. My job title was Shop Floor Assistant, which basically meant I dragged food pallets out of the warehouse on a forklift, then I unpacked them and stacked the produce on to shelves. It was the height of glamour.

There were a few female members of staff working on checkout and in the office doing admin but the majority of staff at the cash and carry were male. Most of the lads I worked with were older than me and as it was the early 1990s many of them spent their weekends attending illicit raves in farmers' fields and most of their wages on drugs. I was trying to grow my hair long as I was going through a bit of a Jim Morrison phase at the time, but instead of getting beautiful flowing locks it just grew straight up like Marge Simpson's.

We used to work in pairs and one lad I frequently ended up with was Rob Grundy. Rob liked to work hard and play hard. He was always popping pills at the weekend and Sunday mornings could be a nightmare working alongside him. He'd either be miserable as sin because he was still coming down from the night before or he'd still be high as a kite and hugging me every five minutes. Some days he just wouldn't show up for work at all, like the time he spent the night in the police cells after throwing a litter bin through a McDonald's drive-thru window, just because they'd run out of ketchup.

The cash and carry wasn't open to lay members of the public like you or me. It was the card-carrying shopkeepers of Bolton that were our main clientele. And if I thought the customers at the garage were miserable then it was only because I hadn't met this set of grumpy tight-fisted bastards. It was like watching Van Morrison do his big shop. They used to moan about everything, the price of this, the price of that, there wasn't enough of this, there wasn't enough of that. There used to be a stampede every Saturday morning for the fresh bread. Grown men would elbow each other in the ribs over a Toasty loaf. I remember one Asian shopkeeper losing his rag because there was no thick-sliced bread left.

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