LIZ ELSON
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Egg on his Face
We had a new guy on the night shift last week. He was real quiet, hardly said a word to anyone. Just smiled and nodded and said ‘yeah’ or ‘no’ like. It wasn’t like he was stupid. He cottoned on to the work quick as. Me and Joe reckoned he was just out-of-sight up himself. He had some sort of scars on his face and a bit of a limp. On Thursday night, when we was all going off at tea break, he was hobbling real bad.
‘Hey, Frank! What’s up with your leg, mate?’ I said.
He just shrugged.
‘I broke it,’ he said and sat down with his tea.
‘That’s no good, mate,’ I said. ‘What happened?’
Frank took a few slurps of his tea and didn’t answer.
So Joe thought he’d wind him up a bit and we were joking and making a few remarks we shouldn’t have about Scarface and Hopalong Cassidy, but Frank wasn’t rising to it.
I opened my snack box. Maggie had made me a couple of ham sandwiches and a hard-boiled egg.
‘So, mate,’ I said, ‘what do you do for fun at the weekend?’
‘Not much.’ He looked away.
‘Is there anybody in there?’ I asked, as I tapped my egg on his noodle.
The egg bust, but the missus had short-changed the cooking time. The inside of the egg was still soft and the yellow was running down Frank’s face. Joe was falling all over the place laughing and Frank went bright red and stood up and whacked him one, straight to the jaw. Joe reeled back and sat down hard and the tearoom went dead quiet. And then the bell rang and the belt started up and we all went back to our work.
