“Art, can you help out Linda on line three.” Betty ordered.

“Sure.”

Arthur stowed the broom in its designated wall bracket, made his way to line three. Linda was looking harassed. A normal state of affairs for her. Linda was a walking case study of ‘Be careful what you wish for’. In her case, it had been promotion from the belt to line charge hand.

Everything looks easy till you have to do it.

“Art, can you let Flo go.”

“Sure.”

Flo wasn’t looking too great, and at seventy three years of age, Art had to question why she was even here in the first place. Not that Flo was the oldest. There was an eighty four year old on line six. Most of the workers on the factory floor, which was ninety four percent female, had been here since they had left school. Normally charge hands stepped in to let someone off the belt for short periods of time, but the boxer on the line was chewing more packets than it was sealing.

The company was family owned and run and the majority of the machines were of an age similar to Art. No doubt once automation became something the family could afford, then a good eighty percent of the workforce would be out of work. It was a case of when, rather than if. He was pretty sure some of them would die the day after redundancy. Habit and the company seemed to be the only thing keeping some of them going. That and sheer bloody minded obstinacy.

Betty, his own charge hand, often joked that the only reason she was still married at sixty eight was because she worked days and her husband worked nights.

’You can’t fight if you don’t see each other’. Was her often spoken refrain.

He couldn’t really argue with that. He let a decided green about the gills Flo hobble away. At fifty three, he had only been here a year. Not particularly through choice. He had been a sales rep till his wife had been feeling under the weather. She had gone to the doctor, who had sent her to the hospital, where they had diagnosed ovarian cancer. Three weeks later she was dead.

Arthur still hadn’t decided if that had been a good or a bad thing. The first week had been lots of tearful appointments where clinical staff had waffled on about treatments and positive outcomes. The second had been the nervous uncertainty of all the various treatments, and the third had been a brutal lesson on the frailty of the human body.

She had succumbed so fast. So fast that he was still reeling over her demise a year later.

His fingers moved to twirl his wedding ring, only finding skin. No jewellery to be worn on the belts.

The company was very strict on that. Not that it stopped some of the sixteen year old new start girls from ignoring it.

‘Accidentally, allegedly’ not long after he had started, a girl had one of her rings stuck in her line belt. Which had de-glowed her finger. She had tried suing the company, but the company couldn’t afford to pay out, lest it start a trend, so it had gone to court. The company had argued that ‘No jewellery’ was stated clearly on induction, in the employee handbook and on signs in the cafeteria, shop floor and in the cloakroom.

The court had agreed that the accident had been the employees fault. The girl had used a ’no win, no fee’ solicitor she had seen advertised online, and had failed to read the small print. Specifically the part where it said “No win-no fee, only where the claimant has not been found to be negligent.”

The company had sued for costs and the girl had found herself faced with two separate sets of legal fees.

Whether she had just been naive, or whether she had deliberately worn jewellery in some twisted idea of earning a potentially large pay-out, no one knew, nor would know, as she had walked out in front of a moving bus shortly after receiving the invoices of two sets of legal fees.

The packer was still not behaving and Linda was now shouting loudly at the woman who had been on it. As if that was going to help. The packer was known to temperamental and since all the women on the belt rotated position every hour. Some of them treated the machine like a perverse form of mechanical Russian roulette. But without the loud bang and the blood.

No, that wasn’t true. It often went bang and was known to draw blood on occasion.

It wasn’t difficult working here. Just monotonous. Anyone with a working brain cell could pick up all the various belt tasks within an hour or two of starting them. For Arthur, the hardest part was staying awake.

He could have gone back to his old job, but his heart was no longer in it. Doing the job he had once loved, would have brought home how much he had lost. There were no children. At first, it had been him. No time, too work orientated and when he had decided he could ease off, take paternity leave, her career had taken off and children had taken a back seat.

And then it had been too late, nature had made the decision for her, for them. They had talked about fostering, started the process and then she was gone.

He had simply done nothing for a couple of months after the funeral. Until he found himself looking far too often at the bottle of bleach in the toilet. He missed the noise, the clutter, the presence of another being in the home, but dating just seemed too overwhelming at his age. He was trying to save his sanity, but the current dating scene was just too alien.

It was all acronyms, swiping and phone apps. He had been to a couple of organised ‘Find a date nights’ but they had been strangely lacking in males and the women had consisted of two age groups. Young women, overweight in both flesh and self-opinionated worth, looking for bottomless wallets over six feet in height, and women late seventies and above looking for live in carers.

Of the happy middle ground, there was no sign.

Two singles events were enough to hammer home that it wasn’t for him. Especially since both seemed to be populated by the same women. It was depressing enough for him to hide the bleach out of sight.

He still needed to fill up his time and for something to pay the bills until his pension kicked in. He knew the factory was always looking, that it was predominantly female and it was close by. He had nothing to lose.

The first couple of weeks had been an eye opener. He had always read about toxic masculinity and how bad predominantly male workplaces were for women, with high incidences of unwanted sexual advances and chauvinistic behaviour. It had become readily apparent that those writers had never worked in a predominantly female environment, as all those same issues existed in role reversal.

There were a few that had caught his eye here, but they were all married with kids. Which just painfully brought home all his own missed opportunities.

“What are you doing this weekend?” He asked of the girl opposite. He didn’t really want to know. It just broke the tedious monotony and he already had a good idea as to what the answer was going to be, as the girl across from him on the belt, had a sister who worked on his own line.

She was shy, one word answers to start. She wasn’t going anywhere, and neither did it appear that he was either, anytime soon. She slowly loosened up and became quite the chatter box by the time Flo returned and took his place. He made his way down the line, apparently they used to just duck under the belts, until a woman had her hair caught in the belt and one unintentional scalping later, everyone had to walk to the end.

“You know that Eliana is a he-she?”

Arthur stopped to look at the speaker. One of the older generation in the factory who took great pleasure in stirring things up between the lines. And also one of the ones who happily grabbed the backside of any male who had the misfortune to walk within her reach. Behaviour that would have been instant dismissal for any male to have done the same to any of the women in the factory.

Apparently, sexual assault and misogynistic language, or in this case, misandry, was only a scourge that affected males.

And yes, he did know. Eliana and her sister had started barely a month ago at the factory and Eliana was a favourite topic of conversation amongst the women, and what they didn’t know, they happily made up.

“Yes, I did know, as it happens. And it doesn’t make her any less of a human being. Not sure the same could be said about you though...”