I used to work with a guy called Brannigan, his nickname was Spanky. I never questioned why but he did look a bit simian. He emptied the bins on the shopfloor, lurked at the recycling area by the underground carpark where cardboard was flattened and prepared for a new life and where food returns, including heavy-duty butchery binbags of gone-off meat, were fucked into the compactor - a large beast of a machine that groaned at the weight of its metallic claws mashing the assorted foodstuffs into pulp.
He also did the offertory collection at mass at the weekend, making sure the coppers proffered by the congregation were safely put away. He was one of those terminally middle-aged looking people but was probably under 30 when I first encountered him.
He'd often be attempting to chat-up the young ones from neighbouring retail outlets when they disposed of their comparatively meagre scraps of rubbish. It would only take seconds for them to dispose of it but in a lonely job, he wanted them to linger a while. Even then, I was struck how their lives as university students, with weekend parttime jobs and exciting, unwritten futures; were a world away from Spanky's reality - a dogsbody, generally ignored but for the occasional piss-taking by the storemen. A reluctant bachelor then and I imagine probably still is, twenty five odd years later.
