From up here I can see the cimbrerstaal crew. They look, en-masse, like a strange twenty limbed creature, scratching frantically at itself, scratching out clods of strange pale flesh and rich, deep red blood. The fish are supposed to get to the cimbrerstaal almost clean, but when the gutting machines break down or malfunction, as they often do, the fish arrive looking like they've just been fighting in the Great War.

I hate working at the cimbrerstaal. Not only is it a job of no skill whatsoever, it's also painful and aggravating. You are basically one of the human, 'sensitive' arms of a giant vacuum cleaner with ten nozzles, which sucks up the blood and guts that remain after the fish have been through the gutting machine. After a half-day on the cimbrerstaal you feel like your fingers no longer exist. They are an amorphous ball of clenched pain. A few days on the cibrerstaal and you can't open the fingers of your right hand without the aid of your left.

My first day here they put me on the washing table, which is kind of a joke area where the retards usually work. I think they put you on it all day to see if you break; and then if you don't, they put you on the cimbrerstaal the whole of the next day. If you get through that without losing your mind or your will to live then you're pretty much suited to life in the fish factory.

Of course there is a kind of machismo to the cimbrerstaal. The factory bosses used to encourage it through the hired muppets they have as supervisors, until they realised that one third of the fish were being irreparably damaged through rough handling with the apparatus.

I hardly ever work the cimbrerstaal now. Having done two years in the factory I've established an unwritten seniority. I do all the supposedly skilled jobs with aplomb. I am a lightning hand at the necking. That is cutting the fish along the line of the gills - not too little and definitely not too much - so that it can be fed onto a spiked rod in the gutting machines. I am (and you'll have to understand I don't attach much pride to this) the fastest feeder on the floor. The feeder, I should explain, is the mug that sticks the metal spike into the fish's mouth, pushes the fish's body slitheringly along until the spike pokes its head out of the fish's arsehole and the first cog grips it and sends it through a mechanism that would put the nightmares of Franz Kafka to shame. What makes it a nightmare for the humble fish-gutter though, is the shower of shit and blood that spews out the rear of the fish. You can imagine, there are few voluntary feeders. They are all conscripted by the white helmets, on the basis of need. After a single session on the feeding nobody ever wants to do it again. Nobody, bar me. Who, by luck of being mainly left-handed and sometimes ambidextrous, managed to adopt a pose whereby shower of fish emissions was entirely avoided; and with time and practice, I have been known to be able to accidentally aim said emission at particularly irksome necking colleague, working too close for comfort and pissing me off with opinions of sectarian, racist or just downright ignorant nature. Of course I always apologise profusely afterwards. It would be a costly mistake not too, unless you are six foot four and blessed with psychopathic tendencies.

I used to be one of the best packers too, because I actually have an o'grade in arithmetic. I could do all the counting stuff, but I quickly grew to hate the job, despite it being given the greatest kudos in the wet department; and the reason I couldn't stand it was that your head got filled up with numbers. I hate fucking numbers. Strange, abstract lumps of things. Sometimes, on the packing, I would shut my eyes and see these concrete, three-dimensional number forms bouncing down hills in toytown colours, as if there'd been an explosion in a distant number factory. It was like the hallucinations of a demented maths teacher.

These days, all you hear about is repetitive strain injury. It's the latest buzz-word. Any time someone's got a sore wrist or something, it's RSI. There's even a bunch of ex-workers trying to put together some sort of class action against the company. It's all money, money, money: just fucking greed. In the old days you wore your work injuries with pride. It showed you were a real, honest-to-goodness worker. I was going to say, it showed you were a real man, but most of the men here are women now.

What you don't hear anything about is repetitive brain injury. I reckon that's where the real damage is done. Giant 3-D numbers tumbling down the hill at you. All the jobs put you into some sort of weird trance. And even though nobody ever says anything about it, I reckon everyone (except the management) is away off on a giant ten hour trip every day. You see them at tea break, fags drooping out mouths, black craters where their eyes are supposed to be. The only time they thaw out long enough to start a conversation about the football or the soap operas is at lunchtime, when you've a whole forty minutes to become human again. The rest of the time, they're dreaming automatons.

As dreaming automatons go though, I am by far and away the king of them all. If there was a degree in dreaming, I'd have a first class honours and be studying for my doctorate by now. Dreaming is what I love; and that's why I love working on the re-hang. It's perfect for going off on one. First, you are elevated to a height of three foot six above the rest of the factory floor, which makes you feel kind of stately and aloof. Second, the job is a piece of piss once you get the knack. It takes about three hours to get the knack, if you have a decent sense of rhythm. Basically, you stand at the bottom of a chute, which graded, gutted and cleaned fish slide down, arriving in a catch tray. These, you grab by the gills and whip onto a passing container tray. If a fish has a red or green elastic band round its tail fin, you pull a chain, so that said fish is deposited in rebate packing area. Otherwise, you don't pull a chain. Easy as that.

A few days on the re-hang and believe me, you've learned all there is to know about re-hanging fish. I am the Zen-master of the re-hang. The fish may fly towards me in their millions or they may trickle down in their ones and twos; but I am never thrown off the rhythm of my dreams.

The only thing that can ever destroy my equilibrium is a winter virus that might deplete the gutting crew. Then, and only then, am I removed from my chosen duties, and put on as a necker or feeder. I know some of the gutters snigger behind my back and call me 'the re-hang boy', but they are not stupid. They wouldn't do it to my face.

When I first came to this factory I got sucked into illusory hierarchal ambitions. It was imperative that I proved myself and was promoted out of the retards' spiral abyss of washing table, re-hang and cimbrerstaal onto the gutting tables. Then if I could prove my worth there I might be allowed to work at the grading table or the packing station or even in the freezer room. Then, if I mastered all these, I might even be trained up for my forklift licence (a ticket to better jobs elsewhere) or I might win a supervisor's white helmet, with its extra 12p an hour and the total alienation of all your workmates.

Dreams of further promotion and better pay and conditions were just that: dreams. In the fifteen years that the factory had been operating, only one person had got into lower management from the shop floor. Strangely enough, he was respected more than the white helmets. Maybe because he no longer had any pretensions that he was still one of the lads or, more likely, because he was the fairest of all the bosses. Also in his favour was the fact that he drove a second hand rust bucket, promoting rumours that most of his wages went on a messy divorce and a serious drinking habit.

Either way, his immediate boss was a twenty four year old university graduate who probably earned twice what he did and drove a brand new 4x4: a status symbol that earned him nothing but xenophobic disrespect.

In reality, without a BSc in Marine biology, you could expect little real promotion in this place; and any promotion you might be offered (with or without remuneration) would be paid for in rancour from your workmates. Better to be a glorious failure. Better to be a man who could hold his own up at the gutting tables, but who wanted to be nobody's boss for an extra 12p an hour. This is what I came to realise, once the gloss of employment had worn thin. So I kept my head down. Then I discovered the magic of the re-hang.

I had my first fully blown re-hang trip after I'd been working in the factory for about three months. The girl that had been working on it the previous day had done something horrible to her elbow and was hospitalised (and given her cards). The management were nervous of putting a newbie on, so, having arrived in late (as I often did then) I was punished by being put on the re-hang. My mates on the gutting tables were killing themselves laughing, because the re-hang is a job for newbies and retards only. The first two hours were awful; and I got ribbed to fuck at tea break about it. On the second session though, I had a sort of road to Damascus moment. In the back of my mind, I could see, clear as day, my first girlfriend's face. It just hovered up from twenty years previous and hung there, smiling, with slightly parted lips. Then, I was just sort of swallowed by the vision. I mean, I was still there in the real world of the factory, flicking fish onto trays and pulling the chain when required, but ninety percent of me was somewhere else altogether with Yvonne McLaren. We were in one of the upstairs bedrooms at one of those hideous, mad-for-it, teenage parties. The pair of us were naked, totally drunk and stoned, clutching at each other on top of a pile of coats and stuff. Then, there was that delicious moment when my cock, almost accidentally slid inside her. She was so lubed up, my cock slid in from tip to base in one graceful, fluid, awe inspiring moment. From start to finish, I relived the entire episode of losing my virginity, as if I were there all over again.

After lunch I tried to repeat the experience, but was thrown back further into the past, to a time when my cock was merely for pissing out of. I was, once again, a small boy. I remembered, in the same vivid way: building gang huts out of discarded bits of rusted corrugated metal (could smell the rust even); climbing trees and sitting in high up branches that tested your balancing skills and fear to the max each time a puff of wind blew; picking bright orange wild nasturtiums for my mother and getting teased rotten by the other boys in the gang so badly that I threw the flowers away. Memories I didn't even know I had. Obscure, pointless memories many of them: the sort you'd expect your brain to file and forget. I even remembered the slightly stale, slightly metallic smell of the bus tickets I used to collect if the numbers at the top of the ticket added up to the magical twenty one. I remembered that the 3p ticket was blue and that when the fares went up to 4p the colour changed to a disappointing buff brown. That sort of thing.

Over the weeks that followed, I found myself deliberately being late so that I would be punished by being put on the re-hang: a strategy that often back-fired and had me working on the cimbrerstaal. But the pain was worth it for the pleasure of working on the re-hang, when I was lucky enough to be punished that way.

The way the wet department of the factory worked was loosely on a first come first served basis. In the morning, the best positions - graders and packers - were filled first. After that, next best was the gutting tables. Then the cimbrerstaal (crap and mindless a job as it is, it still had some vague macho kudos). Then the re-hang. And lastly, the washing table. There was minimal supervisory interference because most folk knew where they worked best. It also kept lateness to a minimum. A clever policy, especially given the ludicrous early start.

Our shift began at 6am and finished at 4pm. We worked four days a week. This was considered one of the perks of the job. You had an hour and a half after you were finished to do your shopping, go to the bank etc; and you had a three day long weekend. It was worth it for ten hours on your feet, with only two ten minute tea breaks and a forty minute lunch break to break the tedium. Folk thought you were lucky if you managed to get a job in the fish factory. Didn't matter if you smelt of fish crap all your life and you were constantly picking near enough invisible fish scales off your skin, you got a pound an hour more than your average shop assistant and you got double time if you had to do a Sunday.

Like many of the factory workers, I didn't live in the small town that the factory was on the edge of: rather, I lived twenty miles away in a rural township, which, before the war, employed its sons and daughters in farming. Now, like all my neighbours, I had to make do with whatever employment could be found in the nearest town. So, whatever start time you had, you had to allow for a thirty to forty minute drive along single track roads to the town.

I wasn't the only one that was frequently late. There were a number of us. But, given that the country boys and girls were harder and stronger (growing up chopping wood and chasing fucking sheep instead of watching telly as town kids do) and therefore better workers, we were rarely sacked for timekeeping.

My lateness - five minutes on a good day, twenty minutes on a bad day and an hour and a half on truly disastrous days - was almost without exception overlooked. My punctuality however was noted by all.

My punctuality came as a surprise even to me. One Monday morning at 4.30 am when the alarm went off, instead of curling up under the duvet and groaning, I jumped up out of my bed and dived into my clothes. I had been dreaming I was on the re-hang, reliving my memories and re-dreaming my dreams; and I was mad keen to get back on the re-hang again. So keen I was up and out my house as quick as Billy Whizz. I clocked in at 5.40am. I was standing by the re-hang, waiting, a full five minutes before the first of the floor supervisors arrived.

I don't remember exactly what he said to me, but he was surprised. So were all of my work mates. I don't know which surprised them more, my punctuality or my choice of work stations. At lunch, people joked about it. I'd catch words floating in the wind and I'd see them looking. But I ignored them. I just sat on my own, eating my sandwiches or smoking cigarettes.

When I arrived early the next day and the day after that and again chose to work at the re-hang, I think people thought I had finally lost my mind. Some of my work mates stopped talking to me even. The few that I thought of as friends didn't though; and that was all that mattered, the rest of them could go and fuck themselves.

After several weeks on the re-hang, I found out I was known as 'the re-hang boy'. But by then, I didn't care. They could have called me 'wanker' to my face and I wouldn't even have swung a punch. I didn't care a fuck. I had the re-hang all to myself. I was free to remember and dream, ten hours a day: free to fly high above the blood soaked gutting tables; free from the factory drudgery.

I understand my work mates thinking I'd gone mad. They didn't understand. In their world, the re-hang is the domain of retards and fools. The re-hanger is the lowest of the low: too thick and to slow to work with dangerous knives and machines. The re-hanger gets no respect. If you're on the re-hang you can't even pretend you're an important cog in the machine. There isn't even anyone beside you to have a laugh with. You're on your own, three foot six above the rest of them, just getting on with putting the fish back on the overhead track where they belong: alone with your visions and dreams.



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