‘I’d recommend mentioning Turbine East to me again if you’d like to leave the room through a window. They are a statue of us, we are the worker. Remember that,’ Helma yelled over the din of metal reverberating against metal and the ever-present electrical hum that was composite to a day spent working in a power turbine. Racking an over-thread bolt into position, the old engineer gave a tug at the connection and cracked her knuckles as if in punctuation.
‘Wait, a statue has artistic merit. Ignore the metaphor, let’s just say that they’re passengers in a system that doesn’t need them. A waste of space and of material. They have a foreman, real hot-hands fixer kind of a fella, who came in ran everything hard enough that it had to be replaced and as a result stole ten years of our budget. You haven’t seen a newer turbine: bells, whistles, all decorated with whatever else it is that makes them soft. Fuses on the load banks! I wish we were half that lucky.’
Watching Helma spin a spanner around her finger with increasing vigour, the apprentice had come to notice that their new mentor was incapable of standing still when speaking, her every emotion needed to be inflected upon with an additional physical gesture.
Over these first days they had learnt, among other things, that a “small flick of pointer finger towards the ground” was an emphasis of the word no and, “fist hitting hand twice in quick succession” was a very loud version of the word no.
Today, they had been following Helma and learning the Turbine’s layout.
‘This is the main wiring harness,’ Helma continued, fanning her fingers out and then drawing them closed as a sign that the apprentice should pay attention, ‘bit boring but it’s very important that you under no circumstances ever take a cable out. It may look like a rat nest, it may some days even catch fire, but within every wire there is a purpose that most of them are halfway to achieving.’
Leaning in close so that the apprentice could see every molecule of seriousness within the irises of her eyes, Helma flashed a wide smile and patted the small dusty haired child on the head. She loved new workers, they were always caught between the eagerness to impress and a complete lack of knowledge that their inexperienced hands were still scared by. It was her job to scare them–just a little–and it was her full intention to make very sure that they knew working in the Turbine would be dangerous.
‘Anyway, leave the cables for the electrician, we already do enough of his work,’ she said, dramatically looking around for a listening ear or incoming pair of pliers. Seeing no danger, Helma softened and continued with her morning checks.
‘Don’t let him sell you any cigarettes either, he’s been growing tobacco behind the sluice pit and if you can’t find it by only the smell, nothing on this earth will bother you.
Both tall in frame and in character, Helma wore a unpent determination about her entire demeanour. She had often been described as too serious by the colleagues who knew of her and not serious enough by those who actually did. Over the two days the apprentice had begun to decipher her sentences and decided that they were pointedly wayward. Without failure, they began as detailed lessons that would slowly evolve into a seesawing kind of rant that ended with you as the butt of a joke; it was like a small smile that Helma used to show a person that they had her approval. To be told you were useless was one thing, but to be rinsed, flicked, and then hung up to dry on a cold winter’s morning meant that she respected you.
She was at home when moving and even her hair matched her temperament stride for stride: an untameable knot of curls was cropped with a hatchet and streaked with the memory of a brown that life could never hope to weaken. She knew this Turbine, and as she walked it was clear that she had gotten to know every bolt that was holding it together.
As they walked the apprentice had noticed that Helma’s overalls were much more faded than anyone else’s in the Turbine; through mending and impossible to remove grease stains, an entire biography of work had been painted onto her clothes and the apprentice lamented that they had already lost a button on their first week. With a sigh, and the conformation of the shop keeper later, the apprentice had come to learn that you were only given some things once and that clothes said a lot about a person.
They paid more attention to people from that day. That cable runners appeared relaxed, always leaning sideward with dirty back of someone who had spent their day inside a cable trench; the mechanics were slow but quiet from oiled joints, there was care to their presentation that showed they knew the damage that uncaring hands could wrought; the supervisors would confidently march into a room and look tired: they were neat and tucked in a casual way but usually haggard around the top of their pen pocket.
You could always pick out a bludger too, they were the clean-handed types with a quickness to their movements that gave the appearance that they were busy. You could never catch them leaning, their hands never were placed into their pockets.
Everything held a lesson, Helma had demonstrated that even through just listening there was a way that you could learn through the talk of those around you. “Still cleaning exhaust dust from the cutlery?”, “Hot today, isn’t it?” these were all minute insights into how the turbine was running; people hold the ability to notice things before they realise, and it was Helma’s job to draw that out of them.
‘How are you with heights?’ the old engineer asked, climbing a short ladder, and unscrewing the hatch. Air-tight seals began to wail recalcitrantly as the inrush of wind leapt into the cabin as if escaping from a fire.
Having never considered height, the apprentice had been thrown by the question and could only stammer a half answer. The desert was flat, their house was small, the thought that anything could walk amongst the sky seemed like an impossibility.
Light poured into the hatchway as if a column, and wind, wind that was both impossible and all encompassing, drowned the cabin in noise and rattled the apprentice enough that they suspected heights were well worth being afraid of after all.
With trepidation they climbed the ladder; A two fingered wave from Helma as she disappeared into the blue a sign for them to follow.
J. McCray
2022
Sunday Short Stories 