Boomchee

I saw Barry this morning in Pak’nSave. A tall, older man with thick grey hair pushing a supermarket trolley. Even though I hadn’t seen him for about 25 years, he was unmistakable. I didn’t call out or wave. He wouldn’t know me from the crowd of middle-aged women doing their weekly shop. He made me think of Susie.

It was her bright smile that first drew my attention to Susie. I’d been working at the Glaxo factory for a week and was still trying to put names to faces. I was one of a group of six university students who had answered an ad for a summer job, back in the day when Glaxo had its big pharmaceutical factory in Palmerston North.

The students were given a range of jobs in the factory. Some were fun, like working the huge guillotine that cut through heavy stacks of cardboard, or the machine that wrapped boxes in sheets of plastic and sealed the edges with heat. But some jobs were straight out boring, like working on the conveyor belt. This involved taking things off the conveyor belt and putting them into boxes. I can’t even remember what we took off the conveyor belt. Little tubes of… something? When the students worked on the conveyor belt, we used to chat and laugh and tell jokes to pass the time of day. But I noticed that some of the permanent staff really had to focus to do the job. They found our chit chat and laughter distracting. I wondered what they really thought of us, this group of smart people who came in and picked up their jobs for a couple of months to make a few bucks, and then took off back to university. Maybe they resented us.

But Susie wasn’t