the cage

I’m nine years old. Kelway Road Park is heaving. And I count myself lucky to have a place midway up the wigwam - a climbing frame, twenty feet high, made from a web of welded iron poles. A few flakes of paint suggest the frame may once have been bright red. But, it has long since turned to bare metal that burns with cold in winter and fries fingers in the sun.

On this mild May afternoon the wigwam is warm and wonderful, and children hang all over it like monkeys at Westing Wildlife Park. As more and more of us clamber on the climbing frame, its legs creak in the cracked tarmac. But no one pays too much attention.

I cling on three bars from the top. Above me the big boys perch - the elders in the troop - swinging their Doc Marten boots and flicking fag butts at the heads of any smaller kids daft enough to put a hand upon the penultimate rung as they approach the summit. The big boys swear and smoke, and belch and fart, and kick and punch. But we don’t mind the brusies or the smell. We all want to be like them.

Unnoticed, I casually sneak a bar higher. I feel like a God as I gaze out at the park below. There are children everywhere. They stagger dizzily from the roundabout, run up slides and turn swings into human catapults. Others paddle among ducks and boats, or chase each other from tree to tree, while mums and dads sit and chat on benches.

I hardly notice as a group of kids gather at the base of the wigwam, and start to rock it back and forth. But suddenly I feel the bar shift beneath me. The tarmac and concrete crack apart and the wigwam starts to tip over. Some kids jump off. I cling on. The air is full of bodies and metal and screams and sky. A foot hits my face, and the air billows out of me as I slam into the tarmac. Teeth shatter. Blood scatters. There is half a second of total silence (as if the world is a purple faced baby building up to one almighty scream). Then the wailing starts and the parents come rushing.

Dad (whose thoughts were probably preoccupied with some engineering conundrum) arrives a moment after the others. He hauls me to my feet and (quite unexpectedly) hugs me, relieved that I am unharmed. Trevor Oldenshaw is not so lucky. His collar bone pokes up against his orange T-shirt like the back of an African cow. The distant tinkling of ice cream vans, is replaced by blaring sirens. There are a couple of broken wrists, some mild concussion and lots of bruising. But fortunately no one suffers any permanent damage.

The council immediately fence off the playground. My dad remarks ruefully that had they been equally quick in resurfacing the tarmac, the accident would never have happened in the first place. Old Mr Power across the road nods his head in agreement. But really he’s pissed off that none of us actually got killed. He hates kids, and always shouts when stray footballs land in his flowerbed.

Some of the older boys ignore the ‘Keep Out’ signs in the playground, lever open the security fencing and build an impromptu wigwam from stolen scaffold poles and fence panels. But I am forbidden from going to the park again.

I still have a passion for climbing though. I scale up the poplar behind the house and leap from its lower branches. I even squeeze out of the bathroom window and parachute naked into the garden using my dad’s big towel. My knees and elbows are constantly covered in bruises and grass stains. But, I just don’t care. And on I climb into adolescence.

Then, one afternoon, when I am about thirteen, I am returning from after school football at Arthur Harrington Comp. As I cross the motorway bridge, I have a sudden urge to clamber onto the concrete wall and tightrope-walk the safety rails. I perch there with my Gola bag slung over one shoulder, and peer down at the traffic in a kind of trance. Suddenly, fear hits me like a million tiny juggernauts rushing through every vein. I start to shake and sway and I lean right over like I’m about to belly flop into the fast lane.

At such moments, other people claim they see their life pass before them or hear the distant fanfares of welcoming angels. All I can sense is a grey blur and the rushing sound of the traffic sucking me down into the concrete like some gangland grass. I jump back onto the pathway, and sprint panting to the far side of the bridge like a group of fifth former nutters are after me.

After that episode, I avoid bridges, ladders, cliffs - in fact anything higher than a chair. So the last place you would expect to find me now is eighty feet above a warehouse floor, surrounded by Scooby Doo shampoo, clockwork frogs and sponge basketballs. But that (through a mix of fate and stupidity) is where I am.

It’s my own fault really. When the lady at the Job Centre asked me if I was OK with heights, I should have admitted my weakness straight away. But I was desperate to pay the rent, so I bluffed and asked her:

“What kind of heights?”

She looked at her job description form and tapped away at her computer for a while (not wanting to admit that she didn’t really know).

Finally she said (rather vaguely), “Well, how are you with lifts?”

“Fine,” I said (which is quite true).

Next morning I find myself stood with a dozen other jobless reprobates in a futuristic warehouse that looks like the intergalactic cargo bay from some Sci-Fi blockbuster. Colin the warehouse manager leads us to a cage that looks like it was designed for a serial killer’s court appearance.

“OK, who’d like to give it a go?” he asks.

Unfortunately, just like my dad, I’m a day dreamy ditherer, and the slowest to step backwards.

“Good lad,” says Colin.

He propels me by the shoulder towards the cage.

I immediately go into bridge balancing panic mode. Colin mutters some instructions. My head spins. Before I realise what’s happening I’m in the cage and rising rapidly towards the roof.

At this point, I should be shitting myself. There’s nothing but a couple of cables and a brittle wire mesh between me, the concrete and the consequences of gravity. It would be only natural to feel some anxiety about what mess my minced flesh might make were I to hit the floor at 100 miles an hour. However, I find it strangely relaxing just dangling there, like I’m nine years old again, suspended in a cube of frozen time, while the rest of the world busies itself below me.

Amazed by my mysterious calmness, I feel my pulse rate descend with the cage. As I climb out, I smile smugly at the other job seekers (a couple of whom have turned the colour of day-old mushy peas). And that afternoon I’m offered a temporary contract riding the Storeglide 2000.

The Storeglide is supposedly a miracle of modern lift technology - the ‘Aston Martin’ of industrial storage systems. It’s based on an elaborate grid of tracks, bolted to the ceiling like an inverted light railway, which allows the cage to move back and forth and left and right at speeds of up to forty miles an hour (although, in my experience, it never goes more than four).

Every few feet there are junctions where the cage can move up and down as well, gliding past the diagonal green girders that rise up through the roof and meet in a point high above the town, forming a pyramid of emerald glass like a vast Tiffany lamp shade.

Drivers - who catch their first glimpse of the warehouse as they whizz along the ring road - often presume the spire belongs to some futuristic church. And I’m sure the religious overtones are no coincidence. The warehouse and the huge Bakers & Macey shopping mall it services are definitely designed as a retail shrine - a place for the weekly worship of brand and fashion (in the name of the fiver, the store card and chocolate muffins, Amen).

During the official opening of the mall, at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve, a column of green light was beamed from the tip of the spire straight up into the darkness. The laser beam really did look like a homing beacon for angels, a digitised stream of prayers reaching all the way to heaven, as the roof exploded with a thousand white fireworks.

Like the rest of Westing, who spilled drunkenly out of pubs and homes to witness the display, I was grudgingly impressed by the futuristic grandeur of that cathedral to consumerism. However, I never imagined that a few weeks later I’d find myself working beneath that spire as a cage rat (the nickname of us temps who are assigned to the Storeglide).

Our job is to zip up and down the warehouse all day long, gathering up goods for the shops in the mall. At least, that’s the idea. Most of the time neither the cage nor us rats go anywhere. The main problem is that the control system is just too sensitive. Originally, the cage was designed for use by robots. Unfortunately, while robots can perform highly predictable tasks with frightening precision, when it comes to fitting boxes of bone china and power tools in the same space they tend not to be so reliable. So, the cage has been adapted for use by humans (or, at least, that sub species, the cage rat).

Basically, this means there is a flimsy plastic seat for us rats to sit on. And in front of the seat there is a control system, Storequest II, which consists of a mini computer screen with half a dozen buttons. The software tells you the type, quantity and location of the goods you’re supposed to be collecting, and gives you some control over the speed and direction of the cage. The steering system is supposed to be based on technology originally developed for docking space shuttles. But it reacts more like a dodgy Scaletrix controller.

As if that wasn’t worrying enough, on the side of the Storequest unit there is a big yellow button labelled ‘Press to Exit’. The label has a skull and cross bones on it, and we’ve been warned never to touch the button, as it overrides the side door safety lock and opens the cage in mid air.

To cover their arses with Healthy and Safety, the developers have added infrared sensors to the outer edges of the cage. They’ve also revamped the central control software, so that the cage immediately freezes in mid air if it encounters any hazard. Inevitably, such hazards include any trailing wisp of cobweb, the merest smear of grease and lightest puff of dust.

Each time the cage freezes (which happens at least two or three times a week, and sometimes two or three times a day), the emergency response procedure is triggered. First, the lift alarm shrieks like a guinea pig being electrocuted by a poorly earthed PA system. Then, after half-an-hour, the ‘rapid response’ engineer, Rob, arrives clutching a polystyrene cup of black coffee and a tool bag (which no-one has yet seen him open).

This evening, to my growing annoyance, Rob is even later than usual. And the fact that I don’t really need to be up in the cage, is only adding to my irritation. The stupid thing is, I’m only stuck up here because I was nervous about meeting Sophie, and now it seems as if I won’t get to see her at all.

all about Sophie

I met Sophie during my induction week (which, in true Bakers and Macey style, had been postponed until a month after I’d started there).

Even though I am only a warehouse temp, I had to go through this elaborate training routine, which included spending a day on the shop floor. I felt a bit of a fool that day, shifting self-consciously about the soft furnishing and fabric department in a suit I’d borrowed from Paul, one of the guys I share a house with. It’s not that Paul is a foot shorter than me or twice as wide. And the suit wasn’t one of those Saturday Night Fever jobs with huge lapels and bum hugging flares. It was a smart three-button number in insurance clerk grey. The thing is, I’m just not a suits and customer service kind of guy.

I can be polite and everything. But I don’t have that swagger, or that ‘stay-in-place’ sales persons hair. And I’m not that good at talking to people I don’t know. So, I just lurked behind the sofas and rolls of fabric, fiddling with my tie and ponytail.

When one customer (duped by my ‘Sales Assistant’ name badge) did finally approach me and started gabbling on about the price of Liberty throws, I just flapped and bumbled like a one-winged bee, until she wandered away again.

I guess that’s why I’d been sent to soft furnishings. All the other warehouse recruits had been allocated in pairs to macho departments like sports and electrical goods. Typically, I was the odd-one-out, discarded soft and limp among the curtains and sofas - Newton Driftwood, the human cushion. On the plus side, the soft furnishings department was really quiet, and on the double-plus side, Sophie worked there.

I didn’t pay much attention to Sophie at first, other than to think that she seemed very efficient. However, as the morning progressed, I watched, fascinated, as she strode around organising things, positioning cushions, cutting lengths of fabrics. I liked the way she held her scissors, the way she made customers feel special, confident that they were in safe hands. I watched them enter the department, tired and pensive, with their minds on biopsy results, vandalism, divorced daughters, and gas bills. And I watched them leave invigorated, gambolling out to the customer lift clutching a yard of cloth or a duvet, the way a child clutches a favourite blanket or teddy, infused with Sophie’s charm and her smile.

Sophie didn’t seem to mind me cluttering up Soft Furnishings. But, it was clear she didn’t want me to actually do anything. At first, this made me feel slightly pathetic - like some creased piece of fabric she didn’t have time to straighten out, another sad pillow waiting to be plumped and fluffed. However, I didn’t resent Sophie for this. She didn’t put me down or try to bullshit me. And, like everyone else, I instantly warmed to her charm.

To show my appreciation, as the morning progressed, I decided to try and be of some assistance. I scampered around Sophie like a little lost mongrel running to fetch fabric swatches, trying hard to please. But I knew, really, I was just getting in her way.

At lunch in the canteen I met up with a few of the other lads who had just joined the warehouse staff - a big guy with tattoos and no neck who everyone called Nutter, a chatty black guy called Clem and a graduate called Martin.

Martin has floppy hair, a very dry sense of humour and plays in this indie band, Toaster, who have just signed to a record label called Feel the Force. Apparently the label and the band are both very trendy, but I’d never heard of either of them.

“All right Newt,” said Clem, chuckling, as I sat down with my mug of coffee and a kit kat. “Hey, I like your suit!”

“What’s wrong with it?” I said.

“Nothing man,” said Clem. “You look cool.”

“Yea,” said Martin. “And when you’ve finished your coffee, I’d like a word with you about my overdraft.”

They all laughed.

“Yea, yea, yea,” I said. I took off my jacket and hung it on the back of my chair. Then I muttered to Martin, “At least it ain’t lilac.”

Martin looked down at his sleeve.

“It’s not lilac, it’s...”

“No he’s right, it’s like lavender man,” said Clem.

“I’m free,” said Nutter.

We all laughed.

“This is fashion,” said Martin.

“Yea, in 1967,” said Clem.

After we’d finished taking the piss out of each other’s suits, we all agreed that we were glad to be in the warehouse, all except Clem who said he quite fancied a permanent job in Electrical Goods. He told us he was going to go and see Personnel, to see if there were any vacancies coming up.

At that point we stopped taking the mick out of the sales staff, and began to discuss the relative merits of the girls who worked in each department.

“There’s this unwritten rule,” said Martin, “the better the babes, the mangier the mingers.” He sipped his tea. “Take Leanne in Ladieswear yea?”

“The one with the blonde hair?” said Clem, “and the...” he whistled and traced a voluptuous outline with both hands.

“You got it,” said Martin. “And who does she work with? The pig girl!”

“Oh yea,” said Clem. He laughed and thumped the table in appreciation, then twisted his fist in front of his nose, miming a snout. “I know the one. Linda her name is. Linda the pig.” He almost collapsed with laughter.

“I go kick boxing with her brother,” said Nutter.

“Hey, no offence man,” said Clem.

“How about you?” asked Martin, turning to me. “What are they like in...?”

“...Soft Furnishings,” I said.

“Are they Leannes or Lindas?”

“I don’t know,” I said, shyly fiddling with my ponytail. “They’re all old. Well, except for one girl, Sophie.”

“What’s she like?”

“I don’t know. She seems very efficient.”

“Efficient?” said Martin. Clem collapsed into fits of giggles. Nutter shook his head.

“Well, you know,” I said with a shrug. “She seems good at her job.”

“You mean she looks likes she’s good on the job,” said Clem. He looked to Martin for acknowledgement. But the joke obviously wasn’t sophisticated enough for him, as he just flipped a cigarette into his mouth, and looked across at Nutter, a secret smokers’ look that said ‘are you coming outside for a fag?’ Nutter nodded and they disappeared, leaving me and Clem sat there. I didn’t mind. Clem is very easy to talk to. He isn’t always trying to be clever like Martin. He isn’t hard and silent like Nutter. He’s just a nice guy.

When I arrived back in soft furnishings after lunch, I gave up any pretence at assistance, and just stood and watched Sophie. And, as the afternoon progressed, I began to notice other qualities, beyond her professional capabilities.

She really did have a lovely smile - a big white grin like a cute cartoon bunny, which charmed the pants off everyone. Her teeth, were very white and neat, but all had tiny gaps between them and a fragile translucence, like fine porcelain, as if they had been individually crafted and inserted into her gums by some meticulous Oriental craftsman. She had a wide mouth and full lips, lips that seemed to permanently pout and were a deep crimson in colour even without much make up (partly because she had this habit of gently biting them whenever she was measuring out fabric).

Sophie’s hair was also very deep in colour, like raw chestnuts - a warm, ruby brown too dark to be considered truly red or ginger. Her hair was very long and ever so slightly wavy. And it gleamed as if she brushed it a thousand times each morning. To match her rich lips and hair, I would have expected Sophie to have deep brown eyes (which is what normally does it for me). But, instead her eyes were startlingly pale. Maybe it was the soft lighting in Soft Furnishings, but her eyes seemed to have no specific colour. They were like the multicoloured marbles we used to play with at primary school. In some lights they looked hazel and in others quite green. When she smiled they sparkled crazily like shattered gems. And when she looked at you it felt like she was shooting out laser beams (like the ones they shone up from the roof of Bakers and Macey on New Year’s Eve).

The look was so intense that when she glanced over at me from time to time I would turn away blushing (as if she could read my mind) and, in the end, I had to go and shelter behind the curtain displays. I did feel a bit like a peeping Tom as I peeked out at Sophie from behind the curtains, but I was bored and it gave me an opportunity to observe her more closely.

At first, I’d thought her bum was quite big. But, having observed it at length (from my floral hide) I concluded that it was in fact just pleasantly rounded. It was merely the narrowness of her waist that exaggerated the curves. Those curves moved in such a pleasing way inside her regulation navy blue skirt, by the end of the afternoon I was sure I’d started to develop a uniform fetish. And who could blame me, the way the outline of her knickers played against the thin fabric and her stockinged calves emerged from that crisp hem like the legs of a finely upholstered Queen Anne chair.

When I was called for telephone training at the end of the day, I was strangely disappointed at leaving Sophie behind. In fact, I couldn’t remember having felt so disappointed since the end of the first proper gig I’d been to - Nirvana at the Asylum Club in Westing, during their first UK tour, before they’d made the big time. Sophie and Kurt Cobain. It was weird they should have left me feeling the same way. But, at the same time, it was quite exciting.

Walking away from Soft Furnishings that afternoon, I gave Sophie a small wave. But she was so busy serving one of her precious customers she didn’t notice. I felt gutted then. I even thought about going back quickly, pretending I’d left something behind. But I decided that was just pathetic, and I dragged myself off to learn the correct way to pick up a telephone.

That evening, I felt really down, and lolled in front of the telly wishing I could be trendy like Martin, or big like Nutter or chatty like Clem. I felt like a real nobody. However, the next morning I was sitting by myself in the canteen during tea break when, I looked up and saw Sophie carrying a brown plastic tray with a cup of tea. It was quite busy and she seemed to be looking around for somewhere to sit down.

I eventually caught her eye, and it felt like I’d been shot through the head.

“Hi,” I gargled.

“Oh hi,” she said, as if she’d just noticed me.

“Uhm, there’s no one sitting here,” I said.

She put the tray down on the table, and I was instantly swept to a dervish-like state of euphoria.

“How’s life in the world of soft furnishings?” I asked.

“It’s OK,” she said.

“Sorry I wasn’t much help yesterday.” I fiddled nervously with my pony tail. “I’m not really cut out for that kind of thing.”

“You were OK,” she said. “It’s difficult when they just dump you there.” She frowned.

“It must be a bit annoying sometimes,” I said. “Having an idiot like me cluttering up the place.”

I grinned, but she seemed to take the comment seriously.

“It takes time to learn the job,” she said, eyes blazing. “We normally get trainees straight out of school, who think they know it all.”

I was beginning to realise why there weren’t any other young assistants in Soft Furnishings. I couldn’t see them lasting very long with Sophie around. But I rather liked her seriousness. At least she cared about what she did.

“Have you been there long?” I said.

“Six years,” she said. “I was in chinaware first, but then they needed a manager in Soft Furnishings.”

Shit, I thought, manager! I’d presumed one of the older ladies was running the department, but thinking back, Sophie had certainly been the one in charge.

I nodded matter of factly.

“It all seemed very well organised...not that I’m an expert or anything.”

“We hit target,” she said. “But we have a lot of customers who’ve been coming to the store for years. It’s not difficult.”

“What do you think of the new place,” I said. “A bit different isn’t it.”

“We’ve got more space.” She sipped her tea. “How’s the warehouse?”

“The Emerald City,” I said.

She smiled.

“Is the system running better now?”

“Actually, I don’t really know,” I said. “I’ve hardly been in there this week. I’ve been doing this induction, learning how to answer the telephone. ‘Good morning. Thank you for calling Bakers and Macey. My name is Newton. How may I help you.’”

“Very good,” she said seriously.

“Yea, well, I normally just say ‘Hi’. It’s quicker”

She nodded soberly. We said nothing for about a minute. I drank my tea and looked around.

Fuck, I thought, am I boring you or what?

Then suddenly she smiled, and the room disappeared.

“Are you going to the Social Club on Sunday evening?” she asked.

“I don’t know, uhm, yea, yea, probably will.”

“Well I may see you there then.”

She got up, smoothed down her skirt and smiled. I choked into my tea.

“Bye Newton,” she said and gave me this little look.

“Yea, yea, see you,” I spluttered.

As I wandered back down to the warehouse, my head was in a spin. Maybe she was just being friendly, the way she was friendly with everyone. Probably she thought I had potential to be a good mate (rather than good potential as a mate). I knew there was only a minuscule chance she might actually wanted to see me see me. However, those few atoms of hope were enough to put a grin on my face for the rest of the week.

By the time Sunday came, my grin was so wide, the rats and the rest of the warehouse crew were all asking - ‘Hoi Sir Isaac (their hilarious comedy name for me) what are you so fucking happy about?’ But I just smiled quietly and went on stacking the cage with power drills, curtains and boxes of hand-painted figurines.

going down

As the afternoon dragged on, I became increasingly nervous about seeing Sophie. And at quarter to six, when Clem and Martin headed out to Burger King for a quick Whopper and fries, I decided not to join them. Instead, I went up in the cage one last time.

In hindsight, it was a kamikaze mission. The cage had been behaving itself for a couple of days, so odds were in favour of an imminent breakdown. And even as I took it up to level L, the second highest, I sensed there might be problems. But I kept on ascending anyway.

Although I wasn’t entirely surprised when the cage ground to a halt eighty feet from the floor, I still felt totally gutted. I knew what Sophie would think when I didn’t appear:

(a) I am a typical man, which I’m not,

(b) I have something better to do, which I don’t or,

As I continue to dangle, waiting for the engineer, I picture Sophie arriving at the social club, beside the staff canteen. I imagine her stood there at the bar with a vodka and orange, that bum and that smile. I see one of the older ladies from Soft Furnishings settle down beside her on the narrow window seat - the seat I had planned to occupy. Undoubtedly, this very moment she is being eyed-up (if not chatted up) by one (or more) of the sales guys (probably that smooth-skinned tosser from the bags department who looks like a male model).

She is probably already preparing to go home, dismissing me in her mind as just another bumbling git, who, like all the rest of my dick-wielding kind, pretends to be all sweet and pally, but ultimately can’t be bothered to turn up on time to meet her. I glance down at my watch.

Maybe if Rob turns up in the next ten minutes, and it takes ten minutes to get the cage down, and I sprint over to the social club, just maybe, I might still be able to get there before she leaves. But that doesn’t stop me feeling like my innards have already plummeted the eighty feet to the floor.

I rip a mini-basketball from its packet and start to bounce it violently off a stack of shrink-wrapped glitter hair gel. The cage swings back and forth, causing a couple of chewed biros to spill through the mesh and fall toward the roof of the security cabin eighty feet below me.

It is getting darker outside and, as I watch the pens descend, the cabin glows with an eerie blue light, as the banks of flickering screens within shift lazily between different cameras, (though not so lazily as the security guards, Len and Don, whose job it is to sit and watch them all day). As the pens clatter like lead shot onto the roof of the cabin, Len and Don rush out and shout furiously up at me.

“Oi! Stop pratting about up there. You bloody idiot.”

I catch the mini basketball as it ricochets off the Scooby shampoo, and peer down through the mesh at the two security guards. They look like a couple of Action Men.

“Hoi, where’s Nob got to?” I shout. “I’ve been up here fucking ages.”

“Oi less of that,” says Len, the shorter, stockier and (it has to be said) stupider of the two. He takes a notepad from the top pocket of his grey jacket, checks the time on his watch and starts to scribble officiously. “What’s your first name?” he says.

“Newton,” I respond automatically (although Len knows perfectly well who I am). “That’s one W two Ns and one T.”

Confused, Len pauses. He scribbles out what he has written, starts again, then returns his notebook carefully to his pocket. He looks up and waves his pencil angrily. “We’ll be reporting this. Throwing things down...you mental case.”

“Yea, yea,” I mutter to myself, “I am quaking in my boots.” I throw the basketball at the cage so violently it sends waves along the cable, which rattles against the girder above me.

“Oi,” shouts Len again. But, fortunately, before our exchange can escalate, Rob finally shows up to perform his usual breakdown ritual/farce.

The way it normally happens is this. Rob sits in the cabin for a few minutes tapping away at the main computer, sipping coffee as he tries futilely to get the cage going the safe way by adjusting the sensitivity settings of the sensors. Eventually, he loses patience, and with a gulp of coffee, he casually presses the restart button on the front of the computer, wiping the back of his hand guiltily across his mouth as he temporarily disengages the jammed safety systems, and leaves the cage hanging by its own devices. Shortly after this, the cage rumbles back into life with an epileptic jerk, like it’s suddenly waking from a bad dream. Then the inquest starts.

Typically, the problem is blamed on a build up of dust or grease or cobwebs. Me, Clem, Martin, Nutter and all the other rats are gathered like prisoners of war in the middle of the warehouse, while grey haired men with tailored suits and posh accents trundle down from the fifth floor. They stand around like extras from some 1950s public information film, looking up at the lift, gesturing with grim faces at stacks of boxes and pointing knowingly at certain girders.

Then, a yellow sit-on sweeper, the size of a small bulldozer, is driven slowly from its parking bay in the despatch area. We are handed brooms and sponges and scrubbing brushes, and made to clean the floor and the cage. The senior managers watch us for a while and then return to their offices on the fifth floor for a meeting. After twenty minutes or so, when the big wigs are safely out of the way, the sweeping and cleaning is called to a swift halt by Colin the store manager.

Colin is a former Westing United goalkeeper, who once saved a penalty that put the club into the semi-final of the FA Vase (which they lost three-two in extra time to Barton Rovers). He walks with a pronounced limp, having dropped a palette of kitchenware onto his foot in the old Bakers and Macey warehouse. But he still insists on wearing retro Gola trainers instead of safety boots.

Having assembled everyone in the despatch area, Colin then chooses a couple of rats to go back in the cage. He acts as if he’s bestowing some great honour upon them (rather like a P.E. teacher picking captains for a game of five-a-side). We then resume riding up and down, putting boxes in, taking boxes out, until the next time the cage brushes against a cobweb and the whole rigmarole is repeated. However, on this occasion, Colin and everyone else have already buggered off home or to the social club. The mall is closed except for the bars and pizzerias down by the river, and the seven screen multiplex-cum-bowling alley.

In a kinder universe, that is where I’d be now, sharing popcorn and little intimacies with Sophie. Although I know the chances of that happening are receding faster than Nutter’s hairline, a small spark of hope still fizzles.

“Yo,” I call down to Rob as he makes his way across to the cabin. “Yo Rob!”

He reluctantly stops and looks up at me. He seems suitably tired.

“Look, forget pretending to find the fault. Just switch the bloody thing on and off and get me down from here.”

Rob shakes his head.

“Sorry mate,” he says. “Can’t do that. But don’t panic, It won’t take long.”

As Rob disappears into the cabin followed by Don and Les, I despondently resume my ball bouncing. But then a minor miracle happens.

Either Rob has, for the first time ever, managed to fix the sensors. Or else he has decided it is too late to muck around. Or he thinks my increasingly violent basketball throwing is getting out of hand, and he better get the cage down before I do any serious damage. Whatever, the Storequest II screen suddenly goes blank. The background hum of the lift system drones to a halt. And the warehouse is plunged into a moment of eerie silence, broken only by the creaking of cables, as the cage swings like a giant pendulum. Then, with a dramatic buzzing of wires and clanking of gears, the mechanism hums into life again, and the cage slowly starts to descend.

With fresh hope bubbling up inside me, I begin to tidy my ponytail and unbutton my green coat, when, fifteen feet from the floor, the cage again judders to a halt.