Katie arrived at the new plant in a cotton shirt, and a skirt that extended to her knees. A sensible choice given that the heat from the pilot plant back at the R&D had been intense and a full scale machine was bound to generate a lot more.
She was there to supervise the first run, observe the differences and make appropriate changes to the procedure. The foreman was an experienced man of about fifty and the rest of the crew were all men, in their twenties. She gave them all a cursory glance; they were all rugged village men, dressed up in bright new overalls, leather gloves and boots, and shiny yellow helmets. But it was the ten tons of engineered steel that effectively kept her attention.
The deafening hum of the machine drove all thoughts out of her head. It would require some getting used to. She kept close to the machine recording the data at regular intervals and relayed commands to the foreman who in turn bellowed it to the workers. But the proximity to the machine meant that she had to be near the naked heat transfer pipes as well. Sweat began to drench her shirt and it stuck to her skin exposing the line of her bra. Another thing she hadn't anticipated was that the machine leaked oil and had lubricant slathered in the all the odd places. She worked through it all not minding how dirty and greasy her shirt had become. She didn't mind it, at least until lunch.
When the crew broke for lunch, Katie decided that she needed a bath and a change of clothes, which she didn't have. The workers on the other hand knew their way around the machine and were all relatively clean, and not one of them had a speck of oil on his overall. While she was standing by the machine debating whether she ought to go into village and buy a spare set of clothes, one of the workers offered her, his shirt. It was too good an offer to pass up and she accepted it with a look of gratitude.
The shower room was not built with women in mind and so she locked up the entire wash room and started to strip. She could hear the laughter and chatter from the other side of the flimsy partition. She was used to the quiet privacy of her own house and found the presence of men very intrusive as if they were right there with her, watching her naked form, touching themselves. Katie shook her head to clear away the errant image from her mind and turned on the shower, the patter drowned out the voices. She began scrubbing herself; it surprised her how the dirt had got into impossible crevices of her body. It was the probably the sweat that carried it, she reasoned. As she lathered soap onto her skin another image invaded her pretty head, the rough hands of the men outside, caressing and groping her. She banished that thought. It was not her, she chided herself. They were not her type. Not even close.
She dried herself and took the shirt she was given and she smelled it out of habit. She loved the smell of the flower scented detergent on her freshly laundered clothes. This one smelled mildly of sweat and cigarettes. She refocused her thoughts on the new machine; it ought to offer enough distraction. She took heart that she’d only have to endure this till the new workers were all well trained in the process, after which she would be back in the head office, tinkering with the pilot machine, trying to fine tune the process even further. She just had to hold out till the evening.
*
The trial run of the plant was successful. Of course there were a few glitches but nothing unanticipated or irreparable. Everyone left to celebrate in the small office. Katie was elated too but not too much. The glitches still needed to be sorted out and she needed to think. She walked out of the factory floor and into the cold November night. She was in that zone where nothing mattered except the thoughts in her head. She barely noticed the cloudless night robbing her body of its heat.
She wandered aimlessly on the factory grounds, visualising the various options that she could adopt to rectify the problems with the trial run. It was then she noticed a noise, sounds of scraping and hissing. It had a rhythm to it that interrupted her thoughts. She looked up from the ground and saw that she was at the plant's boiler room; it was set further away from the production area for safety reasons. The sounds were coming from inside it. She went in to investigate.
The instant she stepped inside the dimly lit room, the wonderful heat from the boiler it her. She gasped at the ethereal embrace. It reminded her how cold she really was. There was a man there, she didn’t know his name and didn’t care to either. He looked like the kind that switched jobs every month. He was shovelling the ash and embers out of the kiln and into a steaming bucket of water. The boiler was always the last thing in a plant to be shut down since the thermo-conductive oil required more than an hour to cool down. She told him to stand aside. He stopped shovelling and stood back, leaning on the shovel, without a word. She stepped closer to the boiler. The embers were still simmering inside the furnace. They were like broken pieces of a star, glowing and twinkling in orange, then crimson, sometimes white, in the dark furnace.
She stood there for a long time, soaking in the heat, staring at the hypnotic play of the embers. And she never remembered taking a step forward, towards the winking embers but a thick, gloved arm encircled her waist and pulled her back.
'Whoa, there!'
It was the worker. She crashed back into him just as the shovel hit the floor with a clang. His body was warm from all the long hours spent feeding the greedy furnace; the heat diffused into her relatively cold back and thighs. She leaned into him, trying to make the most of the contact, greedier than the furnace. The lowly worker's hand, the one that was around her waist edged up to cup her breast. He gave it a gentle squeeze. The heat from his gloved hand went straight into her nipple. Between him and the embers, she lost all sense of self. Arching her neck back, she kissed him. He had a week-old stubble that pricked her cheeks. He tasted of burnt wood laced with nicotine. She lingered in that kiss, not knowing for how long but she later guessed that it had lasted for quite some time since her borrowed shirt was crumpled from all the attention her breasts received the whole time.
She broke the kiss. He stepped back. She didn't even turn around to see his face and she didn’t remember it later on either. The moment was there and she savoured it; it was instinctive. But that would never happen again, she promised herself, at least not when she was totally aware. Besides, it wasn't her, she reminded herself; she would never go for the gritty kind. A silver of the indoctrinated guilt twanged. She drowned it by immersing herself back into the problems of trial run. She walked back out into the cold night, and he went back to shovelling ash out of the furnace.
***
