this is chapter two from a ton of malice.
the interview that landed me a job working on britain's most toxic nuclear site.

Monday, March 5, 1979 ​

I pound a fist on the drawing board, and startle half the office. I don’t know what I’m doing here. I’m surrounded by skilled architects, structural engineers and designers. —I am an island of incompetence in an ocean of technical talent...

Dave Rennie stands at the desk beside me. He is a 28-year-old Londoner with a mass of draughting experience. A little while ago, he leaned across the gap between our desks and asked, with genuine curiosity, “How did you ever get this job?”
“Simple,” I said. “The man who hired me is trying to fuck me.”

Dave Rennie laughed, but a pain shot through his heart. He is not a handsome young man like yours truly and therefore has no option but to rely on his ability. And, as everybody knows, ability fades.
Two months ago, I came to this off ice on the Uxbridge Road for an interview with the project manager. Mr Longley wore a loose wedding ring that slid back and forth on his finger like a bead on an abacus. When he reclined in his swivel chair, his neck disappeared into the striped material that was part shirt, part optical illusion. He looked up from his notes, and was clearly surprised by my youth.
“Oh!” he said, eyes dragging over my body like a stoker’s rake. “You’re quite… splendid. Please do sit down.”
I found my attention drifting towards a framed photo on his desk. It showed a debonair and rascally gent with a spotted tie, trimmed moustache and a large toss of wavy hair. I wondered if it was his father, or perhaps a lesser-known villain from Edwardian vaudeville.
Did I mention I was stoned?
“So, Barry,” he said. “You have worked in the nuclear power industry before?”
“Yes,” I replied, “I worked for a French uranium company, back in Ireland. Exploration, that sort of thing.”
“Parlez-vous français?” He asked.
“Oui,” I responded nonchalantly. “Un petit peu.”
He was impressed, but he had just witnessed the usage of my entire French vocabulary.
“You are familiar with Calder Hall?”
“Calder Hall,” I replied. “Yes, of course.” I pictured a great, stately pile occupied by Mr Toad. Nearby, a lake with Ratty and Mole in a rowing boat.
I was incredibly stoned.
“We need somebody to oversee the decontamination systems at Calder Hall. In addition, there is a cladding maintenance issue – straightforward stuff, five-millimetre stainless steel. You’ve worked with that?”
“Absolutely,” I replied, my teeth parting slightly to allow the giant lies to escape. Then, he moved off in a completely unpredicted direction.
“I’ve never been to Ireland,” he said. “A lot of British people are put off. The political thing, you know. Things are difficult.”
I agreed. Things were difficult.
“You don’t have any…?”
He was too polite to finish the question, but I shook my head anyway, assuming he was referring to evil paramilitary affiliations.
“No, no. I’m from the Republic,” I said, as if that explained anything.
“Yes, yes,” he nodded, with a combination of embarrassment and geographical confusion. “You’re miles away.”
“Miles,” I echoed.
He decided to return to a more comfortable topic.
“I should give you a little info about the company. What you see on this level is a little less than a third of our operations. We’re spread over four floors in the building. Upstairs, engineering; downstairs, civil. We’re the technical chaps. You’re the second new man. Raymond over there joined us about four weeks ago. Wife left him. Messy, messy, messy business. You are not married, are you?” “No,” I said.
“I expect you have a girlfriend?”
“No,” I said, thinking of Kim Sutton and Roland Nice-Arse squirming around in a knot of dirty sheets, their bodies slapping each other like wet rubber gloves, their party-parts slurping each other’s juices. “No,” I repeated. “I’m as free as the day I was born.”
The temperature rose slightly in the cubicle. He stubbed out his half-smoked Rothmans and lit another. We had a moment of silence as he searched for words to cover his desire.
“We’ll soon be changing the project name,” he said, “but it’s just a PR exercise. Around here we’ll continue to call it Windscale.”
A mushroom cloud parted inside my head. The recruitment agency had said very little about the job. They’d simply referred to it as a “prestigious life-changing opportunity.” They had entirely forgotten to mention the giant outlet pipe that crapped, like Godzilla’s arse, great radioactive turds into the Irish Sea.
“Sellafield will be the new name.”
“Sellafield,” I said, nodding my approval. Sell-A-Field. It sounded so harmless, like something a farmer might do if he were strapped for cash. Mr Longley continued to talk, but my mind was elsewhere. I had a mental image of a giant atomic shockwave blasting across the ocean, picking up trawlers and ferries, flinging saltwater and mackerel into the heart of the Irish midlands. I pictured drowned cats and floating coffins, pulled from the soil like loose fencing pickets. I watched partially fried dogs yelping on half-submerged rooftops while men and women, as ragged as their migrant fore- bears, crawled with exhaustion onto islands of bobbing debris. I saw a perfect globe of brilliant light, flashing like hot magnesium, eating up all the colours in the world, swallowing everything, even shadow. Only a moral dwarf would even consider accepting a job like this.
“What’s the salary?” I asked brightly.
“Starting at £14,000 per annum, and please call me Chris.” A cluster of amphetamine crystals dissolved inside my head like temporal-lobe popcorn. My eyes opened wide and sparkled, and a grin flashed on like a spotlight. Mr Longley seemed to interpret this behaviour as a small flirtation. He lost his way with words and grasped at the first notion that drifted into reach.
“I g-g-go to the theatre, sometimes,” he stuttered. “The West End. It’s rather fabulous.”
This harmless statement came to my ears, deciphered and translated.
“Are you interested in sodomy?” it said.
I said yes, yes, I was. I liked it very much, though I admitted that I’d grown up in a small town and we didn’t have a whole lot of it. Theatre that is, I couldn’t be sure about the sodomy.
“There’s nothing quite so wonderful as live theatre,” he said.
I nodded with enthusiasm, keeping a lid on my opinion that theatre was nothing but fat people in wigs with loud voices. Or was that opera?
“We must go sometime,” he said. “Together.”
“Oh yes,” I replied. “We must.”
Meanwhile, the amphetamine pixies pulled back the skin on my cheeks and gave me an expression of deranged curiosity. I imagined I looked like a barracuda in a wind tunnel. Chris Longley found himself matching my intensity of speech. He asked me a flurry of questions about my home life in Ireland. Was I enjoying London? How long had I been here? I told him only a week, and he trilled,
“A week! Oh my goodness, you are seeing everything through such new eyes, new eyes!”
He stared into my new blue eyes and transmitted a bright red laser of lust.
“Still, I’m sure you were upset about leaving home.”
I left home on a Sunday night. The platform was clotted with Sparrow Mammies, tiny women who peck at their children, mostly girls in striped UCD scarves. Smoke and jostling filled the carriages. Three men in crumpled suits, who looked like they had spent a losing day at the races, drank small bottles of Guinness. A folded newspaper with an abandoned crossword rested on the table between them. People coughed, for fear that silence might take hold. Athy… Newbridge… Kildare…
We picked up speed, then stopped just as suddenly. Doors opened and slammed shut as more excited students climbed aboard, heading for their cold-water bedsits with the barred basement windows, mildew-speckled ceilings and the bathtubs discoloured with oxidised swirls.
The poverty of rural Ireland swept past the windows in a dun-coloured diorama of decay, pockmarked with abandoned rusty tractors and unpainted bungalows where men in dirty shirts plotted suicide by hanging from a rafter.
No. I did not feel sadness for all that I’d left behind.
“I have to ask you about secrets,” said Chris Longley, regaining his composure. His words were mysteriously hushed.
“Secrets?” I replied, wondering if he was about to quiz me on my dismal academic results or the bank loan I’d never repaid. Prompted by my blank expression, he slid a printed sheet of paper across the desk.
“Official Secrets,” he said.
The page was a bad photocopy and the words bled together like melted wax. The large print at the top of the page referred to the “1920 Act”. Chris Longley unscrewed a fountain pen and I signed without bothering to decipher the molten gibberish.
“I think you will be happy here,” he said.
I looked into his eyes and said yes, I thought I would be very happy. He pointed to the dapper gent in the framed photograph on his desk.
“Tom Tuohy,” he explained. “Your fellow countryman… Well, he was born in the UK to Irish parents… A personal hero of mine.”
He went on to tell me the Tale of Tom Tuohy in all its detail. It was a story so outrageously crazy that only a Paddy could be at its centre. During the great Windscale fire of 1957, when it looked like the whole place was going up in smoke, Site Manager Tuohy was the man who saved the day. He pulled on his protective gear, climbed the burning reactor and peered into its very heart. He listened to its breath as it sucked in air from every corridor. He patted its heaving hungry belly and then made the decision to shut off the cooling fans and pump in thousands of gallons of water.
“Outrageous!” exclaimed Chris Longley. “This was eleven tons of uranium, burning at over 1,000 degrees Celsius. The concrete shielding was withering under the extreme heat. As you know, molten metal causes water to oxidise. Hydrogen, explosive hydrogen, expanding into every nook of the cauldron! Tom Tuohy ordered the evacuation of the building, except for himself and his fire chief. Then he turned on the hoses, and miraculously the inferno was extinguished.”
Chris Longley took out a handkerchief and dabbed his cheeks, which were now quite rosy, as though he too had been standing close to the flames. He was breathless as he asked me, straight up, whether I thought I could fill Tom Tuohy’s radioactive shoes, and without the slightest hesitation I said, “Yes, sir.”
He looked into my core, past the smouldering amphetamine fire, through the pressurised cloud of unshakable confidence and into the fast-breeding madness of a 20-year-old who was ready, willing and able to light a fuse and burn up the world. We shook hands. I turned and left Chris Longley’s office, sensing that his eyes were all over me, but I didn’t care. I now had something special, something almost beyond belief. I had something that half of Ireland would kill for.

I had a job.