LONDON JAN 2006 - THE CRUMPLED MUTTON CURRIE PIE

That was it for me and social work. I met guys who'd been doing it for years and they were all depressed, sensitive men who looked like they might own Maltese poodles. I left and got a job at Budweiser Brewery out in Mortlake (towards Wimbledon). I was a night-guard again, earning far more than I did doing social work.

I sat in a spacious guard-house with windows all round and signed trucks rattling with Bud bottles into and out of the brewery. The smell of fermenting hops or barley hung over everything. At first I found it pleasant and comforting, like being near a bowl of steaming porridge. Then one night, during my third or fourth shift there, it suddenly became nauseating and gave me a headache. From then on, even when I climbed out of the train down the road and caught a sickly-sweet whiff on the wind, the smell caused a band of pressure to clamp itself above my right eye. I would walk around the plant taking shallow breaths through delicately flared nostrils, trying to cut down on my intake.

My regular night-shift partner was a Nigerian who looked like an out of shape Mike Tyson. He sat at one end of the office and signed trucks in, while I sat at the other end and signed trucks out, or vice versa. When it became really quiet, after twelve, we took turns sneaking off for a kip in an empty conference room in one of the buildings on the plant. We had a devious Pakistani supervisor who worked at the South Office - we were in the North office. He materialised at all times of the night, creeping up from different directions and suddenly rapping on the window beside us, but we found a way to out-fox him. If Mike went for a kip I set my cell phone on his number and kept it in my pocket. Mike kept his cell beside his ear while he slept on the conference room floor. If the Pakistani dropped in I told him that Mike had gone to buy a pie, and I quietly slipped my hand inside my pocket and pressed the call button on my cell. Mike appeared five minutes later, with carpet tile creases on his face, looking for all the world like he'd just woken from a deep sleep. The Pakistani was completely flummoxed. He came two or three times a night sometimes, but we just rolled in relentlessly, yawning and rubbing our eyes, not even bothering to hide the fact that we'd been sleeping.

The Pakistani said to us, 'Man! Are you guys sleeping?' Where's your pie?'

So we began to bring the same foul, rumpled Mutton and Curry pie in with us every night. The Pakistani then tried to impress his work ethic on us.

'Man! Some guys wot sleep on the job is just taking the piss, innit? It's not right to get paid for work wot isn't done, innit?'

Mike and I agreed, and kept on returning with our crumpled pie. In desperation the Pakistani resorted to veiled threats.

'I've got sources wot inform me some guards is sneaking off for forty-winks. Now, I'm not saying that you two is the two, you get me, but I know all about it, and where the forty-winks is taking place. But I've got a kind heart, so I'm going to leave it for now, and if those guards come right then everyfings all right and no more said, right?'

Right. And the next night Mike staggered in with his shirt out, with drool on his chin and a bit of sleep clinging to the corner of his bloodshot eye, holding his Mutton and Curry pie out in front of him.