KimElliott.net

Everyone has terrible stories about their first job. I had several friends who worked in the local lettuce factory, twelve hour shifts, standing up, halving icebergs – hallucinating beheading their enemies, or maybe their supervisors.

Others, who worked boxing carpet samples, or worse, boxing boxes. I knew one man, whose entire role consisted of weeding insects from an endless conveyor belt of raisins for a major cake producer. An exceedingly bad position.

My own introduction to work came in the form of a two weeks experience in an accounts department, locked inside a secure wing of the local mental hospital.

There were many problems to this post; the most prominent being my utter lack of mathematical nous that saw me banished to the back room with the important role of shredding confidential documents for eight hours a day.

Like a scene in a cheap sitcom, I opened the door to a windowless room, empty but for a shredder and paper stacked from floor to ceiling, waiting to meet its maker.

I spent my days sweating over the machine, door closed because the noise disturbed the accountants. I would emerge at intervals to heave the plastic bags of waste through the department and across the hospital grounds to the industrial bins behind what I thought was an incinerator, but found out much later, was in fact just the boiler house.

Big black plumes of smoke circled the Victorian buildings. I had visions of amputated limbs and secret still births in yellow biomedical waste bags piled outside, waiting to be burned. We had been studying Auschwitz at school and I saw death everywhere.

It wasn’t helped by the stories my Mother had told me about the mental hospital detaining unwed mothers in the twenties and thirties, then holding them for the duration of their lives. I pictured these women, once coherent, slowly driven out of their minds by their hopeless situation.

In another circumstance I would have been fearful of seeing the ghosts of these women wandering the sterile linoleum floors. There was no need to conjure up spirits; the walkways and my mind were occupied with patients.

As soon as I left the double locked security wing of the accounting department, I would begin to eye up anyone who passed me. The block I worked in was supposed to be staff only, but the patients still wandered in, some zombified and lost, others acutely alert.

People in shirts and ties would occasionally break into incoherent shouts, or flail their arms. The person opposite you in the cafeteria would aggressively flip their tray without warning, spraying milk and pudding all over their neighbours.

I should have realised that one, how many balanced adults select milk as their drink of choice?

I went home and told my Mother. How do you spot a mental patient? She shot at me, Easy, they look like just like you and me. With that piece of wisdom I looked for menopausal women and sullen teens.

Now, I am equipped with the social skills to converse with people sitting on various positions of the mental health scale, half a lifetime ago I was an introverted bag of hormones intimidated by a building that emitted dark smoke.

Lunchtimes were the worst: I’d wander round the expansive grounds, between boarded up Victorian villas and open grass fields. Sometimes I’d hunt for conkers, occasionally I would dare to listen to my walkman, but the staff warned me against this so I’d be able to hear anyone approach me.

During my first week, I got into the habit of breaking the monotony of shredding by sulking in the staff toilets, slumped in a cubicle, walkman blaring Sisters of Mercy.

One afternoon, I pulled my headphones off, slouched out the cubicle to find a woman, around forty, vigorously brushing her teeth.  She asked me if I brushed mine, a pretty normal question from an adult to a kid.

I curled by lip up like a rodent, exposing my double train track braces for her to examine. She mimicked me, revealing a very nice set of teeth coated in blood. I leaned toward her, saw the blood on the bristles of her brush and smeared on her lips and cheek.

That’s when I decided to leave.

Two more days of sweating and shredding, punctuated with occasional failed attempts to flirt with a female accountant, who looking back was a, an adult b, just being nice and c, clearly not gay, I learnt the art of calling in sick.

I like to think it wasn’t the crazy that got to me, it was the monotony. I could have stuck it out with a bathroom full of compulsive brushers if only I was allowed to alphabetise a file, or answer a telephone.

Looking back, it’s more likely I was a lazy teenager who thought she was too good for day long shredding.

To all the patients I remembered but misunderstood, I’m sorry. To all the accountants, who I remember nothing about, perhaps if you’d thrown milk all over me, you might have earned a place in my memory.