Chapter Forty
ADRIAN
The communications director wanted fourteen days and a script.
Her name is Amelie Roche and she is very good, and she came into my office on the Thursday with a document she had been up all night writing, and she put it in front of me, and it was thirty one pages long and it had a section headed Anticipated Employee Sentiment with a graph in it.
“We do it by letter,” she said. “Perama and Elefsina both, same hour, Greek and English, and the yard directors brief the shop stewards ninety minutes ahead so nobody hears it from a phone. Then a town hall in a fortnight, by video, and by then the shape of it is set and we are answering questions instead of taking a beating.”
“No.”
“Adrian, there are four thousand two hundred people and you have one story to tell them and you will only get to tell it once.”
“I am going on Monday,” I said, “and I am going to stand in the fabrication hall at Perama and tell them myself, and I am not taking a document.”
She sat down without being asked, which she has never done.
“They will destroy you,” she said.
“Yes.”
“You have never been to Perama.”
“I have been to Perama forty times.”
“You have been to the offices at Perama,” Amelie said.
“You have been to the offices, and you have had lunch on the first floor, and you have shaken eleven hands on the way to a car. You have not been on the floor of that hall in your life, and they know it, and they have known it for nine years, and on Monday morning you are going to walk into a building where three thousand people who have never seen you have been told to stop work for the first time since a man died under a crane.”
She was right about all of it and I went anyway.
They stopped the shift at eleven. A plate shop and a fabrication hall and a paint hall and a slipway, and a crowd standing in it the way men stand when they have been made to stand, with their arms folded and their masks pushed up on their foreheads, and half of them holding a hard hat they had been told they did not need to wear inside.
Elefsina came in on a screen, sixty kilometers away, a hall full of faces at the wrong frame rate.
Somebody had put a table out for me and I did not use it.
Somebody had put a microphone on a stand and it was too high and I took it off the stand and held it, and a man called Stavros, who has run that tannoy since 1994, gave me a nod from a window above the crane rail to tell me it was live.
I do not remember being frightened.
I remember it being very quiet for a building with three thousand people in it, and I remember the smell of the flux, and I remember thinking that the roof of that hall is a beautiful piece of structure and that nobody in the room has ever looked at it, and that Nora would have looked at it in the first six seconds.
“My name is Adrian Kastellanos,” I said. "Most of you have never seen me and you have been working for me for nine years. That is my fault and I am not going to apologize for it, because an apology from me is worth nothing to you and I would only be spending your time.
“I am here to tell you three things, and then I am going to answer any question anybody wants to ask me, and I will stay until there are none left.”
I told them about the note.
I told them in the flattest language I have, the way I would tell a bank.
In 2011, when this yard refinanced after my father’s stroke, an instrument was written.
Two hundred and ten million euros. It is secured against the ground you are standing on and the ground at Elefsina and the coastal fleet.
It is callable on demand. It has never been held by the company or by the family trust. It has been held, personally, for eleven years, by my mother.
I did not hear a sound out of them.
“Second,” I said. "On the ninth of November, four years ago, thirty seconds before four hundred people came through a door, my mother put that note on a table in front of me.
She told me she would call it that night unless I sat still and said nothing while she did a thing to my wife in public.
She gave me thirty seconds. I did the arithmetic. I sat still.
"I want to be precise, because you have been lied to by better men than me, and I am not going to stand in this hall and tell you that I saved your jobs. I did not save your jobs. Your jobs were never for sale. She would not have called that note, and I knew it by four o’clock the next morning, and I have known it every day since.
“What I bought,” I said, "was one evening. That is all it was. It cost one woman, in a room, in front of four hundred people, and she had done nothing, and I have let her carry it for four years, and I have let you carry a story about a man who runs a company and is very effective.
"You were the price I named. You did not agree to be the price. Nobody asked you.
"Third. Five days ago I served notice on that note under clause four.
It will be redeemed at par in twenty five days and it cannot be withdrawn.
When it is redeemed the security over this yard and Elefsina is discharged forever and no person living can ever put that folder on a table again, and that includes my mother and it includes me.
“To pay for it the company is selling the coastal fleet. That is a hundred and forty crew and it is going to a Dutch consortium and I am not going to stand here and tell you it will be fine, because I do not know that it will be fine. I have brought the crew list. Peter Ellis has it and he is at the back of the hall and he will sit here for the rest of today and the whole of tomorrow with every name on it and every term, and if you are on that list you will hear it from him today and not from a letter.”
Then I stopped, and I said, “That is all of it. Ask me anything.”
Nobody moved for about twenty seconds.
Then a woman about halfway back put her hand up and did not wait to be pointed at.
“My pension,” she said. “The scheme is charged, is it not. Under the note. Is my pension charged.”
“No,” I said. “The scheme is not charged and it has never been charged and I have the deed with me and Ellis has a copy. If you want to see it yourself, come to the table.”
“I will see it myself.”
“Good.”
A man near the front, a plater, fifty odd, with his hands in the pockets of an overall he had rolled to the waist, said, without putting his hand up:
“Twenty one days. And then?”
“And then the yard is unencumbered for the first time since 2011.”
“And you?”
“I will very likely be removed.”
“Good,” he said.
And there was a noise in that hall, a small one, and it was not laughter and it was not agreement, it was the sound three thousand people make when one of them has said the thing.
He was not finished.
“You should have let them take us,” he said.
I did not answer.
“You had no right.” He took his hands out of his pockets.
"You did not ask me. My name is Kostas Manias and I have been in this hall since I was seventeen years old and I have buried two men out of it, and you sat in a room in London four years ago and you put my name on one side of a scale, and you did not ask me, and I would have said no.
I would have said, let them take the yard, and I will find another yard, and you go and stand up in that room and you take your wife by the hand and you walk her out of it.
“I would have said that. Every man in this hall would have said that. And you did not ask, because you did not want to hear it, because you wanted the sum to come out the way it came out.”
He put his hard hat back on, which he did not need to do.
“You did not save four thousand people, Mr Kastellanos,” he said. “You used us.”
I stood in the middle of a fabrication hall in Perama and I did not defend myself, because I have not defended myself since the ninth of November, and because for once in four years there was actually nothing to say.
“Yes,” I said.
I took the letter out of my inside pocket. It is one page. It is dated and signed and it has no reasons in it, because reasons are a thing you put in a letter when you want it refused.
“This is my resignation,” I said. “I am not giving it to the board, because the board would rather remove me and they are entitled to. I am giving it to you first, in this hall, in front of the paint shop and the plate shop and Elefsina on a screen, because you were the four thousand two hundred people in the arithmetic and nobody has ever once stood in front of you and said the number out loud.”
I put it on the table.
“It is not conditional,” I said. “It does not expire. Anybody in this hall may pick it up.”
And they did not.
Nobody came to the table. Nobody touched it.
Stavros turned the tannoy off after about a minute of nothing and the screen from Elefsina went to a blue field with a logo on it, and then the crane started at the far end of the hall because a shift is a shift, and a man walked past me carrying a stinger cable over his shoulder and did not look at me, and then another one did, and then the noise came back up over the whole of it the way water comes back over a stone.
I stood there for seven minutes.
The letter was still on the table when I left. I have it in my desk. It is the most expensive piece of paper I own and nobody wanted it, and I understood, driving out through the gate with my grandfather’s name over it in iron, that a man does not get to be forgiven by four thousand strangers.
He gets to be seen by them.
And it is the first honest thing that has ever happened to me, and it took nine minutes, and it was worse than anything my mother has ever done to me in her life.