Under the vines

You will get off the coach on a Sunday in January, around five in the afternoon, with a rucksack and a pair of trainers that will be no use to you at all.

Valmor will collect you from the road in the pickup and will ask you nothing, because he takes on forty people a season and gave up learning names before Wednesday a long time ago.

The bunkhouse is behind the shed. Twelve beds, two bathrooms, a television that gets three channels and a washing line that never dries anything, because up in the hills it rains every afternoon in January.

You will sleep badly the first night. Everybody does.

On the Monday the alarm goes at twenty past four, and you will think somebody is being cruel.

Nobody is. Grapes picked warm arrive at the shed already fermenting on their own, and grapes picked cold arrive whole. So the crew goes out to the vines at five, in head torches, and the best hour of the entire day is over before the sun comes up.

You will be handed a pair of secateurs, a twenty-kilo plastic crate and a row.

The secateurs cut the stalk that holds the bunch. The bunch drops into your hand and you have to take it by the shoulder, not by the fruit, or you bruise it, and bruised fruit oxidises before it reaches the scales.

You will bruise about thirty on the first morning. Nobody will say anything.

By midday your back will hurt in a particular place, level with your belt, which is what happens to anyone who spends seven hours bent over at ninety centimetres off the ground.

It gets better on the fourth day. Genuinely better, not encouragement.

On the Tuesday you will notice Dalva.

She is forty-four, she has come up every January since 2016, and she picks nearly twice what you are going to pick on your best day. That is not strength. It is that she does not look at the secateurs.

New people watch their hand. People on their eighth season are already looking at the next bunch while they cut the one in front of them, and that is why the gap between you and her will be sixty crates to thirty-two.

She will teach you to take the bunch by the shoulder on the Wednesday, without being asked, because she has got tired of watching you bruise fruit.

To teach you that, she will hold your hand. About four seconds.

You will spend the rest of the Wednesday thinking about it, and you will pick thirty-nine crates, which is your best number so far, and you will not connect the two things until much later.

About the geography, which matters more than it sounds.

The property has nine blocks. From the shed you can see one to six, because the ground falls away towards the valley and the whole thing sits in front of you like a grandstand.

Block seven is behind a rise, with rough scrub on one side and the reservoir on the other. It is the only one not visible from anywhere, and that is why it is always picked last: carrying crates out of there is a nuisance.

In the second week Valmor will send two people to seven while the rest finish four.

He chooses on output, not on anything else. He will send Dalva, who is the best, and he will send you, who by then will be on fifty crates and will have learned not to watch the secateurs.

It will be thirty-one degrees that Thursday, which up there is a great deal.

Overhead training is not the same as wire: vines trained overhead grow across the top like a roof, and you work underneath them all day, in a green shade two metres high that deadens sound and hides anybody at all from about ten metres away.

You will work that out around ten in the morning, and you will work out that she had worked it out earlier.

The ground in block seven is red earth covered in pressings, old leaf and dropped fruit, and it is soft in a way no vineyard floor has any right to be.

The crate that was half full will stay half full for a considerable while.

You will come back to the shed at ten past four with forty-one crates, which is fewer than you had been doing, and Valmor will look at the number and say nothing, because seven is far out and everybody's output drops there.

That is what he will think. He takes on forty people a season.

The season has eight days left in it.

The two of you will go back to seven on the Friday and the Saturday, because the block is big and because Valmor does not break up a pair that is producing, and it will not occur to him that he made this one.

Nobody in the bunkhouse will mention it. Twelve people sharing two bathrooms know everything and discuss almost none of it, and that is the only etiquette there is in the place.

On the last Sunday the coach leaves at six in the morning, and it takes everybody down to the bus station at once, with the same rucksacks and the same smell of must that will not come out of the clothes in three washes.

Dalva will get the one going south. You will get a different one.

Neither of you will ask for a number, and that will not be an oversight.

You will come back next year. Nearly everybody comes back, and Valmor counts on it when he does the payroll.

She will come back too.

And block seven will still be behind the rise, out of sight from anywhere, picked last because carrying crates out of there is a nuisance.

I have been coming back for eleven years, and it is not for the day rate, and you will understand that around the fifth day.