Crusher Read Free

expected the chair orthe table to go flying, or both, preferably. But of course they were screwed to the floor and she just winced as she bounced between them. I made sure she noticed me notice.
    “Thanks for coming to Max Snax. Have a great day.” I heard myself deliver the line with exactly the amount of patronizing insincerity, and a processed-cheese grin of exactly the width that the Max Snax staff training videos specified. She looked at me with even more contempt than I felt for myself at that moment, glanced down at my beige polyester shirt with its fetching perspiration stains under the armpits and down the sternum, and walked out. Even as I watched her go, my skin prickling with embarrassment and humiliation, I wanted to follow her. She had that sort of walk.
    And then the place was empty again. An empty plastic cell. Even with me standing there, stinking of sweat and stale fat, the place was empty. Just the little black plastic dome of Andy’s CCTV camera watching me. I couldn’t even give it the thumbs-up and flash it a mock-triumphant grin; I’d had enough irony for one day.
    I went back behind the counter, grabbed a damp cloth and started wiping down the counters, the cash register, the menus, everything in sight. Trying to keep busy so the urge would subside and pass—the urge to rip off this stiff nylon blouse and these shapeless, pocketlesstrousers and run home in nothing but my tatty briefs. Leaning time is cleaning time. Thanking time is wanking time. Frying time is dying time …
    Andy was back. He was wearing his blazer, the one with the brass buttons and the shiny elbows. He wore it at the Friday morning Max Snax staff training sessions, or when he announced the month’s sales figures, or whenever he gave someone a new pip on their plastic name badge.
    He was offering me one now.
    “That was exemplary, Finn. Really well-handled.”
    “It’s OK, Andy. Don’t bother.” He wanted to reward me for getting rid of customers?
    “Come on. Three more of these and you’re a Max Snax Star. That’s a six per cent pay rise.”
    If I turned it down he’d know I hated Max Snax, and him, and the uniform, and the job, and he’d hire some other school dropout. But I needed the money. I couldn’t drive, and I could barely read. What else was I going to do?
    “Thanks, Andy.”
    I took it off him. The first hole on my name badge already had a golden stud—you got that on your first day at work, just for turning up. I snapped the new one into the second little hole, and it didn’t hurt much more than punching it into my forehead.
    “Keep this up, you’ll have a branch of your own someday.”
    The rest of my shift was a deep-fried blur, and as usual I showered and changed before I left. The workplace shower was another reason I stuck the job. Our shower at home was like being peed on by an old bloke with a prostrate problem, but this one at work fired out scalding hot water that came down like a tropical storm. I was the only one who ever used it, and it felt like the one time and space in the world that I ever had to myself.
    I stooped in front of the washroom mirror—it wasn’t quite high enough for someone as tall as me—combing my mousy-brown hair with my fingers. I generally kept my hair short, or it would spring up in spikes I could never control. The rest of my reflection I tried not to look at. It wasn’t that I minded how I looked; apart from the kink in my nose where a sparring partner had broken it, it wasn’t such a bad face, according to my dad—triangular, with a big chin that currently needed a shave and a kind of girly mouth. My teeth were pretty straight and even, and my pale skin was clear (this week anyway). But I could never meet those washed-out blue eyes because they always seemed to ask how they’d got here, and whether they’d spend the next twenty years looking out from behind the counter at Max Snax, and I never had the heart to answer.
    I stuffed my uniform into my