129: Convalescent

Twenty babies enraptured, staring at the ceiling ; a damaged voice emits from the once wall mounted speakers dangling towards the ground ... "I am the jolly rhyming adult, I dance with words that I exult ... Richard pass me my beaker ...." In the corner of the nursery ham sandwiches are being blended into a paste for the babes, stirred in with some banana porridge. The 'blender', and by this I mean the person placing meat and buttered bread into the receptacle and not the equipment, is convalescing.  This task is convalescence - mending, improvement, restoration ; from the Latin verb convalescere, the prefix com, meaning with or together, and the verb valescere, meaning to grow strong.  The 'blender' occasionally spoons the pap into their mouth as part of their own prescription, normally triggered by a tap on the window, the tap usually by one of the junior doctors who roam the scaffolding with their clipboards and electronic tablets. “Hmmmm, with and together to grow stronger. With a wall and glass in between us I grow stronger. It’s better they’re on the outside isn’t it children?” ------------------------- We all sit in our circle in the stock room, exhausted. We’re down to six now, huffing and bent over on collapsing stacks of boxes and grey plastic Sunday school chairs. Our swollen, bloody faces meeting their opposites, eyes bearing up in fractured sockets, locking a laboured gaze on their opponents’. Each corner of our crumpled hexagon wheezes and seethes, nursing seeping wounds and cradling dislocated limbs. Already around 70% of shop-floor staff have been dispatched by their wilier colleagues, their putrefying bodies now stacked haphazardly in the ramp down to the loading bay. On team-building days like this, all the hammers have to be put out of sight. But not completely. Management swiftly concluded, after a short cycle of these exercises, that a modicum of exposure to prohibited expediences serves as a more effective deterrent than the outright removal of such items from the immediate environment. As such, some handles can be seen overhanging the edges of the storeroom cupboards, tips of hammerheads protrude alluringly from under the flannel covered sofa cushions, and a full, profile silhouette of a 16-inch claw hammer is clearly visible wedged in to the plastic housing of the only working strip lamp, which flickers arrhythmically in the centre of the ceiling. Some hammers have even been clumsily disguised as toddlers’ walking sticks and denuded umbrellas, clustered in the cloakroom corner. Others are stacked in neat piles under the dilapidated sash windows, their business-ends swaddled in cotton hand-towels, a folded A6 card sitting before them, emblazoned with the simple proscriptive: “Not today.”. Yes, languishing under the day’s dust, those dimpled and chafed wooden columns glint in their freshly varnished embodiment, holding up hardened steel heads that beam and nod, vowing to keep schtum for as long as the truce holds. And yet, concealed in that promise is the tarnished smile of domesticity, eclipsed in the tradesman’s grin. These weighty tools, the handmaiden of all built history, here may hammer no more. Sure, despite the embargo, in the heat of a fist fight, the occasional trembling palm might find itself reaching out, in the haze of routine, to wield a trustier assurance of staving-in a workmate’s cranium, but still the moratorium somehow holds sway. And not for want of choice: “Thor’s World of Hammers”, while not technically a “world”, really does offer a bewildering range of hammers. “It’ll knock you for six!”, used to be our slogan. Before all the death. Now it’s just: “If it’s a hammer, we’ve got it!”. And we’ve got the lot: Claw hammers, sledge hammers, ball hammers, framing hammers, tack hammers, roofing hammers, brick hammers, drywall hammers, rock hammers, forging hammers, toffee hammers, bone hammers, hunting hammers and dead-blow hammers. And a whole separate department for mallets: wooden mallets, rubber mallets, upholstery mallets, rawhide mallets, brass mallets, lead mallets, croquet mallets, gong mallets, meat mallets and gavels. But also a range of novelty hammers: play hammers, toy hammers, inflatable hammers, edible hammers, oversized stage hammers, plush hammers, squirty hammers, hammers for pets, hammers for vets, hammers for baking, hammers for weddings, dung hammers, harvest hammers, hammers for christenings… In the midst of my revery, it has somehow escaped me that Stevenson, who, since his 1:1 with Mr Tatteral had been propped up on a crate of miniature cheese hammers right next to me, has slumped forward, cracking his face nastily on the exposed concrete (where a particularly vicious scrap in ‘86 had torn away a chunk of carpet, underlay and linoleum). Looks like Stevenson’s succumbed to his injuries and is now being hauled out of the ring and flung onto the death ramp by the shop stewards. In the course of the body’s disposal, an antique steam hammer, too bulky to be hoisted up to the historical display on the first floor, has been knocked off its pedestal, crushing Mr Henry to an immediate pulp. That only leaves four of us — Mr Tatteral, Mr Studsworth, Thor and myself. The ceremonial glass hammer is spun twice in the centre of the circle, indicating that next up is Mr Tatteral vs Mr Studsworth. It’s a relatively short bout: a frazzled and flailing jumble of punches, the men writhing and squealing on the shabby carpet like a couple of drowning raccoons. Mr T. pins Mr S. to the floor and plunges his thumbs into the pits of his eyes, biting at his nose. At the same time, Mr S. tears at Mr T.’s ears, chewing tufts out of his beard. They gnash and gouge as a bloody mist rises about them. It’s all over in about 15 seconds, and declared a tie: two more bodies for the heap. No need to spin the glass hammer now. All eyes are on Thor – my line manager and boss of forteen years – as he turns to me, grinning. “Well…?”, he says, gesturing to the scuffed and rusty patch of rug. Of course, Thor is the only participant in these staff bonding sessions that actually gets to use a hammer. The crowd starts clapping and stomping, chanting: “Thor! Thor! Thor!”, as his hammer, Mjölnir, is carried to him by his attendants. I find myself in the centre of all this noise, facing off my boss as he raises the hammer above me. “This could be your chance to level up”, he says, winking, as I drop to my knees in resignation. It’s not. Time’s up. Thor flickers and dissolves into blackness as we remove our headsets and our vision adjusts to the bland hues of the HR training room. There are canopés and Chumbawamba playing on a stereo. I hate Thursdays.