Free The Whole Story and Other Stories by Ali Smith Page A

on the shift before her, regardless of whether it’s Kenny Paton or not. It is not real mayonnaise. It has some of the things in it that are in mayonnaise plus some preservatives and a sugar substitute. It tubes and spreads more easily than actual mayonnaise does. It doesn’t stick to the equipment. It cleans off more easily. She begins every shift the same way; it is a ritual; she dumps the old bucket outside with the day’s grease vats and takes the lid off a new bucket out of the stores. That way she can be absolutely sure. She has thought before now of reporting Kenny Paton, but she would never grass so it won’t be her who reports it. The duty manager from hell. She won’t be it. He’s it. The nights he’s on and someone feels peckish at half-past one in the morning they should leave the car in the garage and stay at home and if they’re hungry eat some toast; there should be a phoneline they can call to let them know whether it’s him who’s on so they’d know not to bother coming out the bloody road all the way to Tesco Village just to eat wank and not know it, that’s what Kimberley thinks on her way home at half-past seven in the morning, blinking in her car at the bright light of day after a night of the fluorescent light at work, you never know what it’s like outside since there’s no windows. It could be raining or snowing or sheep and pigs could be falling out of the sky, you’d never know till you came out of work and found your car covered in them, and it’s a beautiful summer morning today, the car starts easily when she turns the key, it’s going to be hot later, it’s going to be a real beauty and she’ll be asleep all through it aye well that’s life and work for you isn’t it.
    The pay is £420 a week before tax, for managers, with increments. It’s not a hard job. Not many people want to eat fast food in the middle of the night though Kimberley can imagine it’s different in the south where there are more people who are stupider about what they do with their time and money and digestive systems. She knows she wouldn’t want to. You get the occasional mad person, but not that many mad people have cars, thank God, or are bothered to walk out as far as Tesco Village. You get sad persons and lonely persons. You have to know how to deal with it. You have to keep the druggies out of the toilets in the winter but in the summer there are a lot less of them. You get drunks, loud fourteen-year-olds who should be in their beds, you get couples either snogging or arguing and the call-girls meeting the men who they make money off in the Tesco car park. You get homosexuals that have nowhere else to go. Kimberley is always throwing them out. You get bored taxi drivers. She might marry a taxi driver one day, you’d get peace from each other with a man with a job like that. You get people from the supermarket on the three nights it stays open. Very occasionally you get a family with kids at four in the morning wanting all the breakfast items. But usually it’s dead. There’s an after-cinema rush from the multiscreen, an after-pub rush of people who shouldn’t be driving, then the long dead stretch for hours.
    Except that there’s never nothing to do, there’s cleaning to do so get cleaning, because when Kimberley first started here on the night shifts she went in circles from the stores to the kitchen to the food area to the till area out to the customer area then the wiping down of the seating, especially the difficult dipped places in the plastic where the food congeals on the seats that are shaped like the monster’s humps and head, she was scraping it out of the monster’s eyes and tail-spikes on her first night; they are lucky to have those monster seats, actually, since the burger places up and down the country are usually not differentiated at all. The manager then, whose name was Tony, who is running something important at head office in London now, noticed her initiative and how