Then the courtesy car started up. James would have known it anywhere; it was a Citro?n diesel that sounded like a suit of armour falling downstairs.
Mr Knight was leaving his Audi for the work to be done. After all that bluster and bullshit. That’s the way it usually went.
James listened to the Citro?n bump off the garage forecourt and grind into second gear as it joined the traffic. Then he got up and went back to work.
He walked to the back of the workshop, but Ang was already retrieving the spanner from the layer of assorted rubbish in the bottom of the disused pit. Ang was quick to volunteer for anything and Brian was not slow to take advantage of it. He put him to good use fetching sandwiches, parking cars and dialling phone numbers for him, because he was too busy to waste time on hold. Three years after arriving in England on the axle of a flatbed truck, Ang was still learning the language. So far he’d only really mastered the four-lettered words.
Brian Pigeon calling. Please hold. You have message? Ang practised his lines endlessly under his breath, but the task was a minefield.
Now Brian directed him from the edge of the pit, hands on hips, the poppers on his overalls starting to gape. James had noticed that lately, when Brian leaned into an engine bay, he had to find somewhere safe to rest his belly.
He glanced at James. ‘Spanner was a bit much.’
‘Sorry.’
Brian shrugged, then said, ‘Did you like the gasket fairy though?’ He laughed at himself, and then added a review: ‘Bloody hilarious.’
James smiled faintly, and put out a hand to help Ang up. He was slim, so he braced himself, but Ang was as light as a feather and seemed almost to float out of the pit.
James followed Brian across the workshop to the office while Ang picked up his broom and turned the radio up, singing along, putting the wrong words to the wrong tune.
‘Ang!’ shouted Mikey. ‘You sound like a randy cat!’
‘Thank you,’ said Ang, and went on singing. He loved that radio. It was on in the morning when they arrived for work, and still on when they left every night.
Brian looked up as James came into the office. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’
‘No,’ said James.
‘So soon after …’ Brian shrugged with his hands ‘…you know …’
‘I don’t mind,’ said James, and he meant it. He didn’t mind about much any more. Nothing was important enough to mind about.
Brian took a crumple of notes from his pocket and tugged free a twenty. ‘Here,’ he said.
James tucked it into his top pocket without a word.
‘Shit,’ said Ang from the doorway. ‘Money for old nuts.’
‘Rope,’ said James. ‘Money for old rope.’
‘So what is money for nuts?’
‘I dunno. Peanuts, maybe? You get paid peanuts? Not much money, you know?’
‘Oh,’ said Ang. ‘OK.’ He hovered at the door.
Brian was on the phone, sorting out the new hydraulic lift. Four years ago when James had first started, they’d had three crappy old inspection pits. Now they had been filled in and replaced with two lifts, with a third on the way, and a new cement forecourt – and they still had to put the coffee against the microwave door to keep it shut. Brian was rich but tight; James figured maybe he was rich because he was tight.
He shouted at someone about delivery slots and concrete setting times, then banged the phone down and shouted, ‘Arseholes!’
Ang leaned into the office with his usual good timing. ‘I’s fired for peanuts.’
‘What?’ said Brian.
‘I’s fired. No James.’
‘James gets fired.’
‘But I’s fired for peanuts.’
‘James gets fired,’ Brian repeated. ‘He’s white and English so he gets fired. You’re a Chinaman so I can’t fire you because that would be racist, see?’
‘Shit.’ Ang frowned. He toyed with the end of the broom handle, picking at the wood with his fingernail.
Brian sighed. ‘Are you going to clean the floor or am I going to have to call immigration?’
Ang twitched upright and started sweeping ‘I’s Hmong person,’ he pointed out sulkily. ‘Not Chinaman.’
‘Well, now you’re in England, and in England we work.’
Across the garage, Pavel gave a hollow laugh into the wheel-arch of a Lexus.
James reached up and continued undoing the nut on the Golf’s exhaust clamp. It was the thirteenth time he’d been fired. Two hundred and sixty quid’s worth of humiliation. Brian Pigeon was some actor – he should have been in the West End, not running a grubby MoT garage in south London – and his anger was convincing, even when you knew it was fake. Sometimes Mrs Pigeon came to the garage, although she rarely got out of her sleek Mercedes – just issued orders to Brian through the window, as if she were at a McDonald’s drive-thru. Brian never got angry with her though, and sometimes James wondered whether that was why he had a reserve of that emotion, all locked and loaded and ready to direct at him whenever a customer looked like getting litigious.
It always worked. Nothing appeased a rich bastard faster than seeing some grease-monkey fired on the spot for screwing up a job. Nothing made them feel more important.
It wasn’t for real, but James still found it unpleasant. There was the embarrassment of publicly claiming a cock-up that was never his. There was the forced apology. There was the shouting and the submission and the spittle in the face.
It all made him feel like shit.
Even the twenty quid he got made him feel like shit. Brian always gave it to him as if he was doing him a big favour, singling him out for special treatment like a favourite son.
‘Jesus,’ said Brian Pigeon quietly.
Ang stopped singing and stared sadly out of the double doors.
James followed their gaze and his heart sank even lower.
His wife was out there, sitting cross-legged on the edge of the forecourt, like Buddha in a blue anorak.
It only reminded him that feeling like shit was exactly what he deserved.
3