Not in Front of Them

Nico learned his English from films. He knew hundreds of words his teachers never gave him. He knew what they meant. What he did not know was when to use them.

His first job in England was at a small shop in a small town. The boss was a woman called Kay. The man who showed him the work was called Dan.

On his second morning, Dan dropped a box of bottles in the back room. Nothing broke, but the sound filled the shop.

"Oh, bollocks," Dan said.

Nico laughed. Dan looked up at him from the floor and laughed too.

"Are you going to stand there all day?" Dan said. "I am not doing this on my own while you sit on your arse, you stupid sod."

Nico did not know those words. He knew the face, though, and the face was a friend's face. He got down on the floor and helped.

By the end of the week he could do it too. The old machine at the till stopped working, the way it did every day.

"This machine is shit," Nico said.

"It is shit," Dan said. "It has been shit for two years."

They both laughed, and for the first time Nico felt like part of the shop.

Then came a busy morning. The shop was full. Six people stood waiting at the till, and at the front of them was an old lady with her card ready in her hand. The machine died.

"Oh, for fuck's sake," Nico said. "Not this fucking machine again."

The shop went quiet. The old lady put her card back in her bag and looked at the door. Dan did not laugh. Nobody laughed. The lady asked to speak to the boss.

Kay's office was small and cold.

"Sit down," Kay said. "I am not going to tell you that word is bad."

"No?"

"I say it ten times a day. I said it in this room this morning. Dan says it. Everybody in this shop says it." She looked at him. "You said it in front of her."

"It is the same word," Nico said.

"It is not the same word at the till. Out the back, with Dan, it is nothing. It is air. At the till, in front of an old lady who is already having a bad day, it costs me her, and she will tell her friends." Kay let that sit for a moment. "Do it out there again and I will have to let you go. That is the whole rule. Not the word. Where you are standing when you say it."

Nico's face was hot all the way to the back room.

"She is a bitch," he said.

Dan put his box down. He did not laugh, and he did not look at Nico.

"No," he said. "Not that one."

"Dan."

"You can call me anything you want," Dan said. "Not that."

The back room was cold for the rest of the day.

At six, on the way out, Nico tried again. "The word I used about Kay this morning. It was the wrong word."

"It was," Dan said. Then, after a moment: "She likes you, you know."

"Are you taking the piss?"

Dan laughed. "There you go," he said. "That one you can keep."

The next month a new woman started at the shop, Ruth, who had come over from New York. On her second day Tom, who brought the boxes in, came through the back door.

"All right, you cunt," Dan said, happy to see him, and Tom called him something worse, and the two of them stood there laughing.

Ruth had gone white. She put down what she was carrying and walked out to the street.

Dan looked at Nico. "What? Tom does not mind. I have called him that for years."

"She is from New York," Nico said.

Dan was quiet for a moment. Then he went out to the street and said sorry, and after that he kept the word for Tom and for nobody else.

That night Nico wrote in his book: it is never only the word. It is the room, and who is standing in it.

A month later Nico dropped a box of bottles in the back room.

"Bollocks," he said.

Dan laughed at him from the other side of the room. Then the shop door opened at the front, and Nico stood up, and his whole face changed.

"Good morning," he said. "Can I help you?"

Kay was watching from the office door.

"He has got it," Dan said.

"He has," Kay said. "Took him long enough."