The concrete sarcophagus

A short story

Dylan sat on the concrete sarcophagus to eat his lunch. Until the day in May when things changed, he thought little of it, like sitting on a rocky outcrop in the Wren’s Nest nature reserve. It was just a place to perch and take some time away from others. He did not always care for company.

The concrete sarcophagus sat at the far end of the car park of Midlands Plastic Mouldings, referred to always as ‘MPM’. Behind it was a wiry industrial fence and, behind that, a big empty shed. If the fence was dismantled and the sarcophagus removed, it would be possible to drive right into one corner of that shed.

Although industrial, it was a peaceful spot to eat lunch.

Dylan knew snatches of the history of this place from the shop floor. Morris, an elderly tool fitter who liked to tell stories, had worked at ‘Mortimer’ Plastic Mouldings in the late 80s when it was being rolled out from the conglomerate that gobbled Mortimer Engineering a decade earlier. Back then, there were those still around who remembered the 60s and Morris would tell hand-me-down tales of lavish picnics at the old man’s place out in Shropshire. There would be sandwiches and bottles of beer laid out on trestle tables in the sun. Mortimer lived in a large Victorian folly and guests could take a guided tour.

There were tennis courts and a billiard room. A billiard room!

Did Mortimer have a wife? Morris thought he must have done but nobody could recall her. They did remember him arriving to work in a Rolls-Royce, a car young boys from the nearby council estate would marvel at and who he would sometimes allow to stand on the running boards for a ride around the car park. And then, on occasion, he would appear with his Morgan sports car.

Morris explained the entire industrial estate had once been the domain of Mortimer Engineering of which MPM was a direct descendent, albeit by way of a series of mergers and takeovers of an ever shrinking prospect. MPM now occupied about a fifth of the old site. Some of the site had been built over with the sheds of the other faceless companies that constituted this anonymous trading estate in the English Midlands. However, the big shed stood empty, owned, for what it was worth, by the same holding company that owned MPM.

It had once hummed with machine tools. Dylan imagined the noise. He would have been right at the heart of the site back then.

Mortimer’s father was a minor country gentleman and as a young man, Mortimer had developed a love of sports cars. At first, Mortimer’s sports cars opened up country pursuits. They gave him freedom to go rabbiting or find a pub down a country lane on a sunny afternoon. Then, the cars themselves became the pursuit. The destinations mattered less. This is what brought him to Halesowen in the Midlands where he set up a small workshop, fixing and improving cars.

Then war came for the second time in a generation. Old man Mortimer had just taken delivery of his first Morgan 4/4 sports car when the men from the ministry visited and asked if he could make parts for aeroplanes. Yes, he could. How many could he make? He was limited by the number of machine tools he had. How many machine tools did he need? He was limited by the space available. How much space did he need? Find a site, they said. And he found a large site in a bumbling, no-mans-land full of brambles between Halesowen and Cradley Heath. The area was cleared in a week by workmen from the ministry and the deliveries began.

This is what Morris had told him.

Dylan pulled a pocket knife out of his lunch box. He gently scraped it along the concrete and then used it to cut a cucumber into slices which he ate with cubes of cheese. Then, he gathered his things and ambled back inside.

It was still the lunch break and so he made a cup of tea with boiling water from the urn and sat down next to Morris. After some time to himself, Dylan was able to socialise and make small talk again. He asked Morris about his weekend and Morris gave a noncommittal response about mowing the lawn. Then he talked of Mortimer.

After the war, old man Mortimer kept hold of his plant and returned to the car industry. Only now, he could supply at scale. He set up a specialised foundry for making castings and was at the forefront of the great shift from rear- to front-wheel drive. Those were heady days. A new Prime Minister promised a manufacturing revolution forged in the ‘white heat’ of technology. With the end of rationing and a world that needed rebuilding, they were to have a peace effort to match the war effort they had emerged from, blinking.

Yet it did not last. Countries obliterated by the war began again, building their factories from scratch. The hotch-potch patchwork of English factories that quickly mushroomed as a response to the war, each one with its own idiosyncratic brand, could not compete on efficiency. One had a main road running through it. Another was split in three by a pub and a post office. There were too many walls at different angles and orientations and not enough open space for the newer, larger, more efficient machines.

Despite the urgings of those like old man Mortimer, the car companies failed to invest in new models, preferring this year’s profits, a first class carriage to London and a cigar at the club. It was a long, slow death, but by the time the last remnants of Britain’s native car industry where packed up and sent to China, Mortimer engineering was no more, succeeded by a series of spin-off companies which then took their own time to die. MPM was the last of those.

“And this is where all this comes from,” said Morris, gesturing at the shop floor in front of them, “but where’s it going?”

MPM needed a plan to survive and it was on a Monday in May that Dylan became embroiled in that plan. MPM did not have a night shift and so it was a surprise for Dylan to be approached by Howard, the general manager, and asked to work Wednesday and Thursday evening. It was a good wage.

However, Dylan had made plans to watch the Champions League with his five-a-side team.

“It’s sensitive” added Howard, “Could you keep it to yourself?”

Forget the football, Dylan thought, as he completed the calculations on his take-home pay. It wasn’t as if Wolves were playing.

When Wednesday came, Dylan learned what the job involved. He and Morris would be adapting an unused line at the Southern end of the factory. Yet, they could just as easily have done this during the day so it must have been because it was ‘sensitive’.

Howard, an engineer by training, had designed the changes to the line, but there was a problem.

“This drill jig is going to end up being too high,” explained Dylan, pointing at a section of the line. “You don’t wanna be pulling down on that all morning ‘cause you’ll get the dead arm.”

Morris agreed and so worked paused as Howard figured out a workaround.

Dylan had brought a snack — a cold roast pork sandwich — so he put on his long parker and went outside to sit on the sarcophagus, the oddness of which he noticed for the very first time. It must have been due to seeing it in a different light.

A block about five feet tall, he had to scramble up onto it using all his gangling six-foot-four length. Tonight, the sarcophagus felt warm. Not hot — warm. It was subtle. He ate his snack then returned to the shop floor.

“What is it? The concrete block in the car park?” Dylan asked Morris, as they stood around waiting for Howard, who was up in the drawing office, to return with his new plan.

“No idea,” said Morris. “It’s always been there.” It was unusual for Morris to be so laconic. It was unusual for Morris not to have a story.

“I do remember when Keith Chester crashed into it, though. He had been out drinking that morning and the gaffer back then was a bloke called Hawthorne. I can picture him now in his brown suit. Well, he was a demanding man. No humour. He would just go around demanding this and demanding that and he wanted Chester in to fix some design the lads couldn’t follow. It would have been a Friday and at that time, Chester would have been having his Friday off and coming in on a Saturday. I think that’s how it was. Anyway, it was a paint line. Did we have a paint line, then? I think so. So Hawthorne calls up Chester who has popped home from the pub for his cheese and pickle sandwich and just demands he comes in. It’s his responsibility, he says. So Chester jumps in his second generation Ford Sierra, swerves all the way here, no doubt, and as he is pulling in, Hawthorne watches him arrive. Chester sees Hawthorne and his foot slips off the brake and so the Sierra goes into that block. Not too hard or far but enough to shatter the lights. Chester reckoned it only happened because Hawthorne was watching him but Hawthorne — who was, of course, a bloody teetotaler, such a sour man — blamed Chester and the drink.”

“What happened to Chester?” asked Dylan.

“Well,” replied Morris, “you’d get the sack now but back then he just had to wear the cost of fixing his car which was a company car. He didn’t stay long, though. He went to Solihull somewhere. He never really got on with Hawthorne. We never had a Christmas do when Hawthorne the Methodist was running the place. That was unusual back then — everyone had a Christmas do where the bosses would treat the workers a bit, you know — but he’d fit right in now —Health and safety, diversity and all that. We were glad to see the back of him.”

Morris drew a packet of mints from his pocket and offered one to Dylan who declined. “It was a shame, really,” continued Morris. “Chester was like the big hope at the time. We were all going, ‘What was he thinking, getting in that Sierra?’ He had these plans and ideas for new lines. He wanted to get into wind turbines, was it? Something like that. It sounded futuristic but he talked a lot about it and it came to nothing. He wasn’t the future, after all.”

After a lengthy break, Morris and Dylan started work on assembling the redesigned line while Howard hovered around them, pretending he was more help than he really was. When 2 AM arrived, it was unfinished, but the shift ended and they went home.

Dylan was unfamiliar with night work, and struggled to settle in bed. As daft as it seemed to him, he was worrying dawn would break before he fell asleep and he would then be kept awake by the light. But it was this worry that was keeping him awake. After at least an hour, his mind gradually started to slow and ease and he drifted away.

Perhaps due to the unusual circumstances, Dylan knew he was dreaming. He was lucid, in a 1980s car commercial for the Austin Maestro. He was driving along an empty country road but he was also watching himself drive along the road. Synthesisers and sporadic drums accompanied him. “Low oil pressure!” said an electronic voice installed in the Maestro, as the commercial cut to him pulling into a garage and purchasing some oil from a smiling sales assistant. Then he was driving through an empty industrial landscape. He turned a corner and stopped. The concrete sarcophagus was ahead of him and he could drive no further without shattering his lights.

He awoke, blinking, as the sun broke in through thin curtains. He looked up at his flags, the black sash of Trinidad and the cross of St George, then down and across to the clock. It was 10 AM.

The following evening, Dylan and Morris finished the jig and tool line then stood back as a small team began to operate it. Dylan went outside again and sat on the sarcophagus to eat his snack — a pork pie. Again, the sarcophagus felt warm and he wondered whether it housed a water tank, but he could not see any pipes.

He looked behind him into the big empty shed. He looked around. This landscape was his inheritance. He was to pick it up from here. Whatever the mistakes and victories of the past, the sum total of them were his starting point.

When he had eaten, he headed back to the shop floor.

Dylan wasn’t just an apprentice tool fitter. He also worked in maintenance — which was part of the tool fitter’s job but at MPM, sometimes involved painting plant. He also helped out in dispatch and even on the lines themselves. And if there was ever an issue with the firm’s pretty basic IT system, he would be the first person anyone called for before phoning in the IT support team who cost a bomb. After starting as a temporary labourer, Howard quickly determined Dylan was worth holding on to and created a job around him while encouraging him to further study. Dylan was happy enough, although he did not like anything that felt like school.

Right now, though, there was nothing for him to do.

As he leant against the wall, he looked down onto Howard’s desk. There, he noticed a document. It had, ‘confidential’ written diagonally across the page in large, grey letter and was titled, ‘British Standards Authority, BSA#201880, DRAFT.’

Howard followed Dylan’s gaze. “It’s a little bit of Brexit and a little bit of who you know,” explained Howard, conspiratorially. “Why shouldn’t we get an advantage? Nobody is going to buy a yacht on the back of this but we might continue paying our mortgages.”

Dylan did not have a mortgage. Houses were expensive.

“Anyway, we’re not there yet,” continued Howard. “The housings need to be sent for testing. Let’s pallet them.” He sighed, “Let’s hope they all pass.” He gestured to the bin at the end of the line that contained about 80 plastic boxes with a series of holes and square apertures in them. “They need to go to MekTek. When we run this in anger we’ll need to add a packaging line. They can’t be dispatched loose in bins, these ones.”

MekTek’s testing service was expensive and this bothered Howard. He had tried to get the directors to agree to investing in their own testing machines, his figures showing this would start to pay off after six years, but they weren’t interested. ‘Core competencies’ was the dogma — strip it back, then strip it back some more. Howard didn’t like dogmas. He liked earning money to support the families that depended on this place. He was exhausted.

At the end of the shift, Morris went along the line, shaking each jig to see if anything had come loose. As he did so, he told Dylan the story of Evelyn who started on the shop floor in 1990 and who had blue eyes and jet black hair. All the lads courted her, he claimed. She had a sweet, sad face and men wanted to look after her — protect her from the world. But she made off with about seven thousand pounds from the safe and moved up north.

He’d thought of her, Morris claimed, because she’d had an accident when a jig came loose and he’d got the blame from those protective men. He never liked her.

Dylan also struggled to sleep on Thursday night and, again, when he did sleep, he knew he was dreaming. This time, he was a ‘man about town’. Later, when awake, he recalled this dream and could not remember what town he was a man about or what he did, but dreams did not have to make sense like that.

As a man about town, he was driving around in an Austin Maxi. He was going to parties and down country lanes to pubs. He wore a leather jacket that made him flush hot with embarrassment. Honky Tonk Woman crackled over the radio. He was drinking a warm beer. He was lost in woodland. He was back in the car, smoking a cigarette and tapping the ash into the ashtray. But he didn’t smoke.

There was a girl with him but when he turned towards her, she was gone. When he turned back, he had to slam on the brakes because the concrete sarcophagus was standing before him.

*****

“I think it’s just a block of concrete,” said Howard. He gestured to a large sheet on the desk. “Look at the plans. There is nothing going to it or from it. I don’t know what it’s for.”

“Aren’t you curious?” asked Dylan. He was overtired and wired on coffee, gripped by a gurgling unease.

Howard screwed up his face. “There’s nothing in there,” he said. “It’s just a block — a bollard — but it does take up a lot of space,” he nodded. “Look, if you want to break it up then that’s fine. You get the tools and you can do it. If there really is anything inside it, you can have it, but you are responsible for cleaning up the mess and getting rid of the rubble. You’ll need a skip.”

At the end of the shift at midday on Saturday, Howard hung around while Dylan and his friend, Brody, lifted the hired pneumatic drill out of the back of Dylan’s Ford Focus. A skip from Finnegan’s, a firm based on the industrial estate, had already been deposited next to the sarcophagus. Dylan scrambled up on to the top of the block and Brody handed him the drill.

“I’m not sure about this,” said Howard, but he let Dylan proceed regardless.

As Dylan drilled, it became clear the sarcophagus comprised a relatively thin layer of concrete and formwork, under which was a rough, rusty iron cage. As they cleared the rubble away and started to load the skip, they could see that within the cage was a wooden packing container. One end of the cage was once gated but had rusted shut. It was relatively easy to release with an angle grinder from the shop floor.

It swung open.

Behind it, Dylan set to work on the exposed end of the packing case which quickly fell flat on the ground.

It was dark inside the case, but as they crouched down and their eyes adjusted, they saw it. A little worse for the years and in need of work, there sat a 1939 Morgan 4/4 sports car in deep racing green. Dylan fumbled around, released the handbrake and, with Brody, slowly heaved the small car out of the case.

There was a metal Thermos lunch box on the passenger seat. Inside the lunch box was a diary, dated 1964. Flicking through, Dylan could see lists of appointments - ‘Mr Sinclair,’ ‘Jameson and sons’. The lunch box also contained a large pocket knife. Dylan levered it open and surveyed the blade and its patina.

“It’s a time capsule,” suggested Howard, stunned. What had he given away?

“Or a tomb,” said Dylan.

Howard watched Dylan for a moment. “Whatever it is, clean up this mess and it belongs to you. It belongs to you, now.” Howard smiled, “It’s like an inheritance or something.”

The afternoon sun glinted off the large, sliver headlamps. Dylan thought about the future.