Short story: Banter

We are delighted to bring you a story written by Özgür Uyanık from his collection, Men Alone, published by Parthian.

Banter

He dragged the mop across the puddle, forming gunky swirls of rust-red fluid. A broken freezer unit in the student halls of residence in G Block had leaked on to the linoleum.

In his late thirties, when the prospect of starting his own family began to fade in earnest, Onur had decided to become a student again. He had wanted to be a writer since he was in his twenties, after the misery of an undergraduate degree in business studies that he had undertaken to make his father happy.

Wanting to fulfil his dream of becoming an author, he quit a job in advertising to take a master’s degree in creative writing, which was how he had wound up mopping floors in the deserted student halls of residence over the summer holidays to support himself.

The air in the noiseless student kitchen smelled of burnt oil, rotted vegetables and cigarette smoke, the latter odour seeping from the stained sofas arranged at the end of the kitchen area where, presumably, the students had socialised during term time; drinking, smoking, and bantering loudly. Just like they used to when he was an undergraduate over two decades earlier, no doubt.

Suddenly, in Onur’s head, the room became a murder scene as the spillage on the floor went from rusty brown to the dark red of congealed blood. The police forensic team had been and gone and here he was mopping up the aftermath of some mysterious massacre.

As a student of creative writing his mind was apt to wander into the arena of the fantastical at the slightest prompting. This renewed inclination to daydream that he had mostly lost over the years gave him a moment of joy as he recalled how much he used to do it so effortlessly, for hours and hours, when he was a child.

Natives

Only a handful of foreign students – mostly Chinese – and a couple of Welsh natives were left residing in the buildings and he wondered why they couldn’t – or wouldn’t – go home like everyone else. He imagined the reasons were all bad and depressing (the dead silence of the block had darkened his mood).

Going home for the summer – back to Türkiye – was what he would have done had he not been motivated to explore some temporary work with the hope that the experience might serve to enrich his life and, therefore, inform his writing. He wanted more than anything to write a novel, and soon. Thinking on it, as he went about the dull routine of cleaning after strangers half his age for minimum wage, he feared this experience was one that would yield absolutely nothing in the way of material for a book.

He’d chosen to move to Wales where he could concentrate on his degree away from the distractions of the London rat race and perhaps find a satisfying path in life that had eluded him thus far. After his degree he could become a teacher to make a living as he worked on writing the books that he felt he had in him – all ready to spill out of his head in a tsunami of creativity. He relished that sense of possibility and, at the same time, was vaguely aware that such anticipation of future accomplishments was a compelling drug by itself and kicking the habit and actually writing something was the awful next step he might never take.

Each morning, Onur loved to cycle along the River Taff to get to work. Sometimes it was sunny, and the birds chirped delightfully in the trees, and other times it was pouring with rain and the bloated river rushing the banks made him feel alive. Whatever the weather, it felt invigorating and life affirming – the opposite feeling to sitting at a desk and staring at his words on a screen, words that refused to conjure themselves into life.

Invariably, his immediate superior – the head of maintenance – was already there by the time Onur arrived and had locked his bike up. This boss of his, Kevin, would usually be chatting to the staff in the administration building with his overbearingly cheerful manner. When Onur entered, his first task of the day was to grab two walkie-talkies from the charging dock in the site manager’s office.

Onur then walked behind his boss to their workstation – Kevin called it the cabin – on the ground floor of one of the student residential blocks. It stored all the maintenance equipment, supplies, and, crucially, the electric kettle.

Kevin was in his late fifties, still married to the same woman after twenty-five years and father of three children, all of them married with children of their own. He said he lived in Cardiff but the groundsmen, who came by every morning for a cup of tea and a chinwag, teased him more than once about that because your postcode might live in Cardiff, mate, but you don’t. When they saw the hurt in his eyes, after briefly enjoying the ribbing, they backed off. After all, Onur realised, the banter had to be properly calibrated, or there would be no tea privileges for the visitors.

Status

Clearly, living in Cardiff was deemed to be a desirable status symbol. Onur, with the natural arrogance of a Londoner still in his veins, was surprised about this. The day Kevin found out that Onur lived in Cardiff Bay – very much in Cardiff – in a sought-after development of serviced apartments, he could see the older man’s heart sink.

Onur quickly learned that behind the friendly façade of the boss there was the unspoken rule that he was to act very much like a subordinate, and nobody here wanted to know that he lived in Cardiff Bay or cared that he was doing a fancy degree.

‘Are you feeling happy and contented?’ asked Kevin cheerfully, like he always did, a hefty bunch of keys jangling on his belt, as they traipsed together towards the so-called cabin one morning.

‘Er, not one hundred per cent today, actually. Didn’t get much sleep.’

‘Oh, yeah? You best go back home and get out the right side of bed then.’

‘No, I mean, you know, I was just saying.’

‘Just saying? Just saying?’ Kevin teased.

‘No, I’m good!’ Onur grinned back, happy to slip into performative mode. Happy that he could be the maintenance assistant. On the payroll. Working.

The cabin was a squat space with breezeblock walls and a concrete floor that contained a sink, the cherished electric kettle, and four old office chairs specked with paint and oily stains.

There were locked metal cabinets containing precious power tools, stacks of building materials everywhere and plastic containers of spares. Spare keys, lock mechanisms, window latches, ceiling tiles, rolls of carpet, paints, sealants, cleaning products, buckets, mops, brushes, an ancient yet preternaturally powerful bagless vacuum cleaner held together with duct tape plus the accumulated paraphernalia of a handyman tasked with keeping the place safe and useable for the customers, which was Kevin’s falsely courteous sobriquet for the students whom he privately dismissed as dossers.

By nine o’clock, the morning ritual of reading the tabloids began. Kevin picked these up without fail on his way in, and Onur read the papers with an open mind, trying not to let his broadsheet sensibilities mar the experience.

They sipped milky tea to the sound of BBC Radio Two from an analogue FM radio. Sometimes a domestic – one of the cleaning staff – would pop in to ask for a hand shifting some bin bags and Kevin would be very bright and cheerful to their faces, only to make snide comments behind their backs and Onur had to laugh along with the banter (the domestics got even less respect than the students in the pecking order).

Kevin used to ask Onur about his studies in the early days – sizing Onur up – although Onur was too naïve to know it at first. A few days into the job, he finally understood that he was going to have to keep himself protected by being more circumspect about dispensing information vis-à-vis his own life after someone above his boss in the pecking order – the head electrician – whom he wanted to impress, came into the cabin one day. During a casual conversation, Kevin turned to Onur and said:

‘What the fuck do you know about it, you moron.’

His boss had called him a moron before, in a jovial way, when it was just the two of them, but in the presence of a third party such comments were wounding, and Kevin knew it. One thing that his boss never made an issue of – never to his face at least – was when Onur disappeared twice during the working day to conduct his prayers. This he would do either in the cabin if there was no one about or in one of the empty student rooms. For this at least, he felt thankful.

After the morning papers, they clipped on their walkie-talkies, grabbed a heavy metal toolkit, and started on their rounds. In the beginning, when Kevin was showing Onur the ropes, he carried the toolkit, but soon enough Onur was carrying it for him.

‘Harrow?’ Kevin called out in a faux-Chinese accent, making Onur cringe.

‘What if someone hears you?’ Onur grinned, to cover his discomfort.

‘No one’s here, you moron. Prop the door open with the toolkit.’

‘Yes, Boss Man.’

Ego

He used the insincere nickname because it seemed to massage Kevin’s easily bruised ego and contained within its use the unspoken threat of withdrawal of loyalty, or so Onur liked to believe. He lugged the toolbox up the steps behind him to the fire doors on the landing where the Boss Man waited for him with his big keyring, jangling the keys – the symbol of his authority. Wait, not ‘steps’ – stairs.

‘Steps are outside, you moron,’ Kevin had reprimanded him once. This was only one of the several nuggets of pedantry that  would be dispensed over the course of Onur’s three-month summer job.

The Boss Man was forever hoping that his boss, the site manager, Caroline, would not be calling over the walkie-talkie with yet another leaking shower, faulty light switch, stained mattress, or the dreaded lock out. That was when a student left their key card in their room and the only way to get back in was for them to break open the lock and put in a new one.

At eleven o’clock exactly, the kettle was boiled without fail as Ken Bruce’s mellifluous voice filled the cabin with the pop music quiz that it was obligatory for them to take part in. On occasion they would be joined by the groundsmen too.

Kevin heated a Ginsters pie in the microwave, which he would eat with ketchup, invariably accompanied by a mug of his prized Gold Blend instant coffee – he always bought the expensive stuff, he said. Onur stuck to tea because what his boss drank was not coffee as far as he was concerned, although he’d never say that to his face. That would be unthinkable and roil the Boss Man and maybe make him not like Onur so much and give him the worst jobs to do and there were plenty of those.

Kevin presided over the cabin and the kettle with a strict adherence to protocol. This meant that if, say, an electrician turned up when the groundsmen were there then the groundsmen would immediately be relegated to background noise until they sloped off. They sat lower in the hierarchy, and they were fully alert to this. The head electrician trumped almost everyone but was equal in standing to the main contractor who rolled up in his van occasionally with his crew to handle the bigger projects like any major plumbing, guttering or flooring jobs.

Onur first heard about Gareth on such an occasion. The contractor was due to arrive for some work one afternoon and Kevin warned Onur about him. By his account, the man was a hulking vat of repressed rage and a dangerous thug. Hearing about this dramatic character, Onur was looking forward to meeting him. As it turned out, Gareth was not a part of the crew that time, and it would be a while before they met and Onur’s life took its fateful turn.

The domestics – mostly women – were at the bottom rung of the ladder as a group and could safely be ignored when they arrived at the cabin, or perhaps tolerated with a wan smile and distracted nods if they had a story to tell (always some lurid gossip that placed them at the centre of an awful universe where they could do no wrong).

The lowest of the low were the male cleaners who would get the full force of the Boss Man’s scorn when they were out of earshot, but they mainly avoided the cabin, probably hating Kevin as much as he hated them. Except for Ron, seemingly oblivious to Kevin’s disdain, who got the worst of it. As far as Kevin was concerned, a fifty-something man scrubbing and mopping floors was a total and utter loser deserving of zero respect.

‘Who’s gonna tell him Minehead isn’t in Devon? No wonder he didn’t get past being a cleaner.’ This, after Ron told them about his plan to take his kids to Butlins for the weekend where the security guard is a mate of his and he gets a good discount.

‘Why the fuck is he showing off about that for?’ Kevin had said with a nasty smirk after Ron had wandered off.

Onur felt sorry for Ron and anyone else who Kevin ridiculed, but this was just a summer job and what could he do except grin and play along? In a way, if Onur was being totally honest about it, people like Ron deserved what they got from people like Kevin: Ron was sequacious, ignorant, and invited derision. Maybe, despite his favourable opinion of himself, the banter was getting to Onur too and moulding him in the image of his master.

‘You think you’re better than me?’ Kevin said when Onur told him during a chat that he had interviewed for another job at the university as a notetaker for the student support department.

He would be taking notes in lectures for undergraduates who had been assessed as requiring the service due to various mental health issues or impairments such as dyslexia, chronic depression, anxiety, or physical disability (Kevin insisted on calling them spuds). ‘With your two jobs,’ Kevin added with a snort. Onur imagined Kevin, with that same expression on his face, in a pub at closing time attacking someone with a pint glass because they looked at him funny.

At around eleven o’clock, like most days, the door swung open and in loped The Boys – the groundsmen – for their morning tea break, in their grass- and soil-flecked utility trousers. They brought with them their outdoorsy energy, good cheer and acerbic blue-collar wit.

Nathan, the tall gangly one with a sharp haircut and acne-pitted jaw was the minimum-wage junior and the other short, pale, blue-eyed one, Paul, was the head groundsman for the campus who carried himself with a rueful resignation that spoke of thwarted ambition. One morning, the Boss Man was talking to The Boys about a second-hand Nissan Qashqai he had just put a deposit down on and he – foolishly and possibly to get it off his chest – mentioned his current vehicle, a canary-yellow Dacia Duster. The Boys cracked up laughing in unison.

‘Canary yellow!’ Paul exclaimed in disgust.

‘The wife wanted it,’ the Boss Man said timidly, clearly distraught by the emasculating colour choice foisted upon him.

‘Canary yellow…’ Onur chuckled, sharing the moment with the two groundsmen and feeling the heady rush of belonging to the group, enjoying the banter.

‘Where’ve you been hiding that monstrosity then?’ asked Nathan.

‘I don’t drive into work, you plonker,’ the Boss Man squirmed.

‘What, you get the bus in?’ asked Paul with a mocking grin. ‘It’s easier to drive down, isn’t it, from where you are, mate? Out in the sticks—’

‘It’s not the fucking sticks, is it,’ the Boss Man winced. ‘Fuck off back to your litter picking.’

‘Alright, mate – keep your hair on,’ Paul said and finished his tea. ‘Thanks for the tea, mate.’

‘Yeah, thanks, Kevin,’ added Nathan.

Nathan and Paul were returning to their leaf-blowers and hedge-trimmers outside when the walkie-talkies buzzed to life. Kevin snatched his up and pressed the button. ‘Hello?’

‘We’ve got a lock out in block E, room 23,’ said the site manager Caroline over the airwaves.

‘Okay,’ replied Kevin and then looked evenly at Onur. ‘You don’t know me… you don’t know my life.’

‘Righto,’ was all Onur could offer as a response.

Humiliation

The humiliation of the canary-yellow Duster was still clearly weighing heavily on the man. Onur was his assistant, and he couldn’t know him, he couldn’t know his life. Knowing someone, knowing what they were and being able to define them meant power over them and that power – illusory or not – resulted in the application of contempt that could excuse any amount of bad behaviour. Sensing the boundaries of the boss/assistant dynamic being stretched, Onur would henceforth – as the lovely English phrase went – wind his neck in.

He had to know his place just as Kevin knew his place in relation to Caroline who was at the very top of the pyramid. Kevin was totally deferential in her presence (after all, she had the power to fire him and put paid to his Qashqai dreams) but as soon as she was gone, he would talk about her in various sadomasochistic scenarios where he was on the receiving end of her formidable interventions.

Everyone laughed along when he joked about being smothered by her breasts after he failed to please her – it wasn’t sexism, it was banter. This time, however, Kevin made no comment about Caroline. In fact, the Boss Man must have carried the hurt of the exchange with the groundsmen for the rest of the day because, to Onur’s astonishment, he never said another word.

Screwing hinges down on loose wardrobe doors, replacing missing plastic covers on window latches and dragging stained mattresses to be disposed of was beginning to dull his mind in the way that he had expected. What he hadn’t expected was that a lack of intellectual stimulation could be ameliorated by manly social interactions.

He found this to be interesting, in a tribal sense, but also depressing for what it said about society in general and about him in particular. He feared that his ability to assimilate was borne of a need to survive as a foreigner, with the risk of effacing his own cultural roots in the process.

His light skin and blue eyes had helped him blend in growing up until he mentioned his name. Then he would proudly explain that his name meant ‘honour’ in Turkish. Honour was central to Turkishness, and yet he was betraying his own name and discarding one of his own cultural tenets to gather material for his writing! He was uncomfortably aware that he would never do a job like this in Türkiye without risking his self-esteem, but here it was okay somehow to belittle himself for the sake of his artistic goals, as if he wasn’t really here at all.

‘Fucking Muslims,’ said Gareth, a tanned bodybuilder with dark pitiless eyes, whom Onur had been looking forward to encountering for weeks. He was finally in the cabin, with Onur and Kevin, and within minutes of his arrival he was already exceeding Onur’s expectations of him. A mug of tea in his beefy brown hands, tattoos disappearing up his company-issue work top, Gareth continued with a vexed sneer:

‘They’re untouchable – it’s a fucking disgrace.’

Onur could not believe what he was hearing. Gareth was spouting off about a recent incident reported in the news when an Iraqi asylum seeker was arrested at Dover trying to flee the country following his botched attempt to detonate a bomb inside a bucket on the London Underground.

Onur supposed that Gareth was trying to say that all Muslims were potential terrorists rendered untouchable due to the application of the innocent-until-proven-guilty cornerstone of the British justice system. What Gareth was not taking into account was the fact that the perpetrator of the so-called Bucket Bomb attack, Onur recalled, had been convicted and sent to prison for life.

The desire to confront a potential future problem if this deranged behemoth of a builder discovered Onur was a Muslim – and to forestall immediately any further Islamophobic banter – he decided to not stay silent in spite of his survival instincts screaming at him not to say anything.

‘I’m a Muslim,’ Onur said.

‘Fuck off!’ Gareth barked back, blinking slowly in disbelief at Onur; taking in his light skin and blue eyes to confirm his certainty that Onur could not be a Muslim. ‘Yeah, but you were born here though – not like the immigrants,’ Gareth reasoned after a pause.

‘No.’ Onur doubled down. ‘I’m an immigrant too.’

‘Oh—’

‘Well, we best get on, eh,’ Kevin interjected and that was the end of that conversation.

The next time this hefty, unhinged character arrived at the cabin, looking for Kevin to help him gain access to one of the dry risers, only Onur was there (having just finished up his noon prayers) and Gareth, brimming with his customary vehemence, shoved a bucket that happened to be there on the floor towards Onur with a booted foot.

‘Don’t forget your fucking bucket,’ he sniggered, but his eyes were not smiling.

Banter

Onur laughed it off – only a bit of banter, no witnesses. Besides, alone with him, Onur did not want to antagonise the large ornery man who, he reminded himself, had a reputation for sudden violence. Would he mention it to the Boss Man? No. Kevin was not to be trusted with such information. He could go directly to Caroline but then the whole matter would escalate and – the writerly reflexes kicked in – Onur appreciated that this was a valuable piece of life experience that he could use.

And each day he went on laughing at the demeaning jokes and the casual racism just to get through it, all the while taking mental notes that he would transfer to his journal when he got home, knowing with a hefty dose of self-reproach that there were real-world consequences to not challenging men like Kevin and Gareth, consequences happening elsewhere for now, outside his line of sight.

A few weeks later, Onur was cycling home when he heard the revving of a diesel engine. He turned towards the sound and, alarmed to see a grimy white Ford Transit Van bearing down on him, mounted the pavement in panic.

‘I’ll run you over next time!’ the driver yelled. It was Gareth.

Banter.

Onur went home that evening, a little shaken, and noted the episode down in his journal, pleased that he was building a record of his experiences that he could use later – perhaps even in his planned novel. Wasn’t it Graham Greene who said that an author must have a splinter of ice in their heart? Even though he still felt guilty for not reporting Gareth’s behaviour, he went to bed that night feeling as if he had already done enough.

However, in the morning he was gripped by the urge to avert some future calamity. He wrote an email to Caroline. When he’d sent it off, he felt much better. It had been the honourable thing to do.

One Friday, after his last day of work, Kevin offered to buy Onur a pint at the pub down the road. It was a cheerful offer, casually thrown out there, but when Onur said he would rather go straight home because he was tired, and meet him for a drink some other day, Kevin seemed perturbed and insisted.

So Onur said yes, wondering why Kevin was suddenly so interested in socialising. He supposed it was a kind offer – a fond farewell to a valued colleague sort of thing – and this made him feel as if he had belonged in the cabin during the summer after all, that the banter had been just what it said in the dictionary: light, playful teasing. Good-natured ribbing. A harmless exchange of words.

They stood outside the pub in the late summer dusk, chatting and sipping their beers – the weight of hierarchy lifted – when Gareth rolled up, all pumped to the gills with rage. Onur’s body discerned what was going to happen even before his mind did. Kevin stepped aside and Gareth, without a word, punched Onur full in the face. Onur fell backwards, already unconscious by the time his skull hit the pavement.

Özgür Uyanık’a collection, Men Alone: Stories, is published by Parthian and is available from all good bookshops.