A Heavy Lunch

Ray and I are asked by Urs to finish wiring the plant room at the Lutwyche Shopping Centre. Carriers are running behind and they need more people on site to move the project along. We get there and start in the plant room where the temperature is in the mid thirties. Lunchtime Ray says let’s go to the pub. We walk to the Prince of Wales Hotel in Nundah not far from the job. Ray orders a couple of pots, don’t worry about food, he says there is enough protein in each pot to keep us going all day. Several pots later, I am having troubles with my vision as we walk back to the job. I don’t feel so well. Ray, who is used to drinking heavily, doesn’t seem affected.

He tells me to lie on top of the large conditioner in the plant room and I’m off to dreamland, when Urs walks into the plant room. Where’s Willie, he asks. He’s gone to the hardware shop to buy some bolts, we ran out, he lies. Urs is not convinced. He smells Ray’s breath.

Have you been drinking, he asks?

Certainly not, Ray objects.

If I find out you’ve been drinking on the job, you’ll be looking for another position, Urs insists.

Ray is just hoping I don’t start snoring up on the conditioner. But I oblige and don’t make a sound. I only find out about Urs’s visit when Ray wakes me up to tell me, time to go home.

Ray is drinking heavier and heavier every week. He’s been transferred into the Test Department and is out on sites most of the time. I have noticed that when he has too much to drink, he becomes argumentative and aggressive and insults his friends around him, including me. But as soon as he is sober, he is all apologetic and feels bad about it.

There is a big project finishing in Papua New Guinea and Urs sends Ray up there to finish off and commission the plant. I’m unhappy to see him go and Zenya cooks us a great meal the night before he leaves. He doesn’t know how long he’ll be up there and I promise to keep in touch with Zenya from time to time.

We’re very busy at work. Brian, the foreman never does any work other than handing out new jobs to us, then he spends most of his time fixing transistor radios or other electronic appliances on his private workbench for people in the office. When he is not fixing transistor radios or other electronic appliances on his private workbench he just sits there reading books. Mostly electronic books.

There is a rumor going around that he takes his sister on Saturday nights up to Cloudland for a dance, but stays in his car reading electronic books until she is ready to go home. But he is good to me, so I don’t complain.