work in progress

a night out

Niamh and Cait worked in golden video. Cait worked in the clean room. She had to take off all her clothes in the special airlock room, shower and then put on a white gown and white pants. The were cold and scratchy. Next came a white bath cap to cover her hair and a face mask. She put plastic shoes on and then the finger cots. They were like little plastic condoms you pulled over each individual finger. Yuck. She then walked up to another airlock, into the interim room, and finally, the door would slide open into the clean room. Then the hours of tedium. You carefully threaded spools of video tape onto a machine, then poopped a video tape cartridge into the device and flicked a switch.Iin theory, the tape would all be fed nicely into the cartridge and would stop when it was full. It rarely went smoothly of course, and since Cait was especially bad at her job it mainly resulted in the tape getting caught and spooling all over the room and twisting around Cait's fingers. Cait would have to carefully unwind it all and start the feeding process all over again. Sometimes she got three tapes filled in an hour. Meera did 25. There were 9 girls working in here and for some reason nobody talked to anybody else. Cait never asked why. She just talked to herself, in her head of course. She had quite good chats and often in the tube or in bed in the morning she would think, I must say that to myself in the clean room or I ought to ask myself that question later.

The problem for Cait was that she could not remember what she had talked to herself about in the clean room and what she had actually talked to Niamh about. Afterwards, years later she would wonder if that was when the problems started between them.

Niamh worked in the lab. She was not sure why it was called that. It was a long warehouse with three aisles in it. Each aisle was full of big banks of video recorders, four high. There were twenty recorders in a row in each aisle on either side.Four bands by twenty was eighty and eighty by two was 160 and 160 by three was loads. Niamh had a little mobile ladder and she had to go along the aisle and put a video cassette tape into each recorder and push play record pause. Then she put a master tape into one machine at the top of each aisle and pushed on the big master switch a button marked play. The film would play and be recorded onto each tape. For three hours she was supposed to monitor the machines, take out dud tapes and log them in a special book. There were always dud tapes. When the film ended, she had to go along and push stop eject on each machine and take out the cassette, load it onto a big pallett and then wrap the whole pallett in cling film and then ring a bell for the boys to take it away. This was supposed to take five hours.After a break, she would set up a new film and halfway through she would be relieved and could go home. It should have been dull, but Niamh wa always busy. So busy that although she worked in golden video for three months and only ever recorded The Many Adventures of Baron Von Munchausen, she never actually saw the film. In fact she never did get to see that film.

Unlike Cait, Niamh liked her job. She felt useful. she liked feeling useful. Somehow, she never had time to think, she liked that too. Whenever she did think, she only thought about Krissy. It was better not to do that too much.

After work, the girls took the tube home to the worst flat in London, they crawled in the door, cooked horrible pasta and collapsed in bed until five pm. Up, wash, cook pasta and back to work. For three months. They had decided not to take any time off as they planned to raise enough money to go to Spain and live on thier money while they hitched around. Cait was very excited about Spain, Niamh did not really care so much. She thought she could do this forever. When David, the foreman told them he was legally obliged to tell them to take a night off, Cait was very relieved.

A night out. where shall we go ? That was when they made the mistake, Cait told herself afterwards.