• Method of slaughter preferred in the UK: percussion stunning using captive bolt. Carbon dioxide asphyxiation is preferred in Halal slaughterhouses. Argon gas is gaining in popularity. The unit, once inert, is strung upside down by one hind leg on the processing line. Main arteries are severed in the neck causing exsanguination. Horn removal must follow immediately for health and safety and quality retention purposes.
• Owing to the exotic origins of European unicorns (Mr Randolph estimates that, at the time of Columbus, there were 50 million head on the eastern seaboard of America, compared to 40 million under intensive rearing today), British farming has long struggled with such climate-induced diseases as tuberculosis and pupura hemorrhagica.
• Other health problems occurring in intensive herds include labyrinthitis, pyoderma, Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, niggles, blort (rarely fatal with new antibiotics), recurrent uveitis, proxworm, hoof blight, horn wilt (an especial problem in the damp west of Scotland), horn canker, rotavirus infection, cystic mites and vertical fissures or “sandcracks” in the cloven hooves.
• Massive investment in genetic testing, spearheaded in China and Texas, promises solutions to some of the more costly ailments. The difference of climate will also need to be factored in before northern hemisphere breeds can be raised here. The success of the unicorn industry in Brazil bodes well on this last point; see forthcoming report from S.J. Sundaram and Anwar Ng.
• Retail equivalent value of UK industry: £2.8 billion. UK meat exports as percentage of production: 12.4 per cent. UK commercial slaughter: 4.365 million head (including 3.722 million colt and filly, 0.643 cull mare, stallion and gelding).
Mr Randolph of UniT was candid in his revelations concerning the declining state of the British industry. A detailed study of the failings and hindrances to profitability in the UK would benefit our own enterprise. Pending my more detailed report, here are two recommendations:
• How to counter the rising costs of feed? Research should be undertaken into the viability of palm oil derivatives and sugarcane as alternatives. Successful outcomes would boost the oil palm division of our company at a time when allegedly adverse impacts of oil palm expansion are impacting export sales.
• Possible appeal of unicorn meat to Chinese, Tamil and Eurasian sections of the domestic market. The recent Swine Riots in Kedah and Kelantan have discouraged minority groups from their usual pig-eating ways. I am assured by Mr Randolph that unicorn meat is an excellent substitute for pork, and being acceptable to all sections of society, we can hope to sell it to both Muslim and infidel stockists. A major (perhaps government sponsored?) campaign to promote unicorn might stimulate domestic demand for a product which is currently viewed as foreign, corrupt and undesirable.
Ahmad Ibrahim, London
Cut is the branch
Enter Mephostophilis in his own shape.
MEPHOSTOPHOLIS. Now, while my master entertains himself
Kissing the face that launched a thousand ships,
Let’s be thick as thieves and spare your hisses:
Drop the moral noises, you are waiting
As am I for Faustus’s comeuppance.
Why else would you bide this pitiless rain
If not to watch another come to grief?
You groundlings there, still reeking of your trade,
Take comfort from this warning to the wise:
For in the world there are no greater fools
Than scholars fed on books and starved of sense.
Four-and-twenty years have I served this one,
That still can dupe himself without my aid,
Calls “sweet” and “gentle” Mephostophilis
That only waits to tear him limb from limb:
The sort of intellectual, in short,
Who thinks this tragedy is somehow mine.
A devil sick of sin? As fish hate water!
I thrive on sin; it is my daily bread,
Manna from Earth in the deserts of Hell.
Leave paradox to angels: I am straight
As an arrow fired at an innocent.
I have no pity for you – why should you
Regard me, your enemy, as a friend
Knocked out of kindness by Heaven’s fury?
One instance, if you please, to prove myself
The hateful creature that I mean to be.
List, list, O list!
We devils are as thick as flies in June:
Some dwell in throne rooms, others rectories,
I, seats of learning, where I chanced to meet
In Wittenberg two thinkers of renown,
Fellow students, though Faustus the older,
The younger born and raised to be a prince.
Difference of rank meant nothing to them;
Equals in the Republic of Learning,
They wallowed in analytical thought
And took delight in Aristotle’s works.
Faustus, greedy for inhuman knowledge
Sold his soul in exchange for my service;
But he meant to share his discoveries
With an intellect equal to his own.
One noble mind alone fitted the bill.
Hamlet, his princely student, who was gone
In mourning home to bury his father
And scowl at the queen’s too hasty nuptials,
Was yet ambitious to rule in Denmark;
Whence Faustus sent me with the stern command
To make Hamlet despair of narrow crowns
And return to scholarship’s boundless realm.
This task I performed: appeared to the prince
In the groaning guise of his father’s ghost,
Slipped him a fib about brotherly greed,
A fratricide-cum-regicide I’d cribbed
From a play, The Murder of Gonzago.
We devils must perforce be good actors
And I surpassed myself that night. Alas,
How was I to know it would end in blood?
Hamlet fell for the trick and I was forced
To impersonate his uncle at prayer
Lest the first imposture be discovered
And Faustus lose the best mind of the age.
A subtle sprite should foresee all, you say?
I follow my orders to the letter
And give men rope, but do not make the noose.
Enough exegesis: Hamlet is dead
Along with most of Elsinore’s worthies
And another university wit’s
Mouthing now a tale to credulous ears
That value tragedy over a farce.
Some scribbler then will set it down in verse
And actors mouth it on a stage like this.
O, I’m wise to the workings of your minds:
I shift shape but only you look for it.
Godlike in apprehension? Well, perhaps;
But discontent to be without pattern
You force your lives into a story’s shape
And give us hooks with which to draw you in.
The constant in a devil’s work is this:
Men never learn.
But soft – here Faustus comes;
His will is signed, all earthly pleasures spent,
Time’s up, expired, he’s passed his hell-by date
And I must claim him. We shall meet anon.
Glass slippers are a health hazard
“Elle souhaitait à la fois mourir et habiter à Paris.” – Madame Bovary
If she so much as looked at another macaroon, she told herself, she would burst her stays. Why did they keep tempting her with sweetmeats? Was it the work of the king, who eyed her sometimes in ways that made her feel uncomfortable and insisted, too often and apropos of nothing, that he liked a woman to be substantial? The princess sighed and her ladies-in-waiting, like so many hens sunk in their feathers, straightened to watch her. Was her Royal Highness still feeling unwell? She performed a brief cough to prove it. Her husband was away in the provi
nces, opening some hospital or orphanage. She had been supposed to accompany him (people expected the courteous tilt of her beautiful head, the intimate and sidelong glances) but she had pleaded a heavy cold and was excused a tedious winter’s journey. Before his departure, the prince might have enquired himself into his wife’s condition; yet they rarely met in private. Acres of carpet and gilt separated their respective quarters, and besides, it was impossible to arrange a midnight assignation without summoning a dozen attendants from their beds.
The princess flattened with the heels of her palms the imagined bloating of her bodice. She stepped to the window. Each time she looked out, a crowd cheered, tossing its caps into the air and then trying not too obviously to search for them when they landed awry. It never ceased to surprise her that people had nothing better to do than press their noses against the palace gates. She made a gesture that might have been a wave or else aversion to a fly, and the people redoubled their celebrations. Slipping behind the silk curtains, she wondered who exactly was performing for whom.
One hundred clocks chimed in the palace: they resounded in canon through corridors and guardrooms and ceremonial chambers. Midday. The princess yawned and concealed her perfect teeth with her hand. She had expected marriage at such an exalted level to confer the privilege of at least some privacy; instead, she was perpetually scrutinised, so that she could not yield to the simplest physical need without attendance from obsequious courtiers. This led to a more intimate ailment. The princess had considered consulting the royal physician about her true complaint: the sleepless tedium of supposed felicity. But the quack was old and evil-smelling, a bewigged beetle obsessed with phlebotomy and the consistency of his patient’s stool. The physician could not help her: nobody in this place could.
Feeling restless, she thought about taking a turn in the garden; but it was so cold that venturing out would only undermine her story about feeling unwell. Oh, the fibs that she lived by! At first, flush with love and luxury, she had thought nothing of the world’s opinion of her. Not so that nebulous entity known to the world as The Palace, which, after several aristocratic scandals, had embraced the prospect of a union between the prince and a commoner of uncommon good looks. She had not seen, at the time, how thorough a job was done of gilding their love story in the public imagination. Even the name she took was invented for her by the royal historian. As if, in the days of her domestic servitude, she would ever have been careless enough to sit in the cinders! And that folklore about glass slippers, all stemming from a vulgar typographic error in the official proclamation. More preposterous still were the stories that circulated about her original family. Her father was still alive, thank you very much, while her stepmother had not been malicious for the pure hell of it. The truth was that there simply hadn’t been enough money for three dowries and, like any ambitious woman, she had attempted to focus resources on her own daughters. The princess no longer felt inclined to forgive her stepmother for this; but she sensed it was important – for reasons that she could not have articulated – that the complexities of her former life be acknowledged by those who document such things.
Her ladies-in-waiting began to stir from their torpor. Soon it would be luncheon, followed by hours of tedium without the smallest menial task to distract her. Will Her Royal Highness play the lute or the virginal? Will she tousle the fur of a diminutive lapdog or test her fingers at embroidery? The princess sighed again and watched her arm extend towards the plate of macaroons. Happy endings are best, she decided, when they happen to other people.
The siren of May
It wasn’t fancy that set him on his knees in the chapel praying for a wife. Niall was the ugliest fisherman in Crail. Back home, even widows shunned him. Only at sea did he forget his faults; and so he had stowed his boat and braved the birds of the Isle of May. Razorbills laughed at him and tammies made lewd comments but he paid them no attention. In the chapel he screwed his eyes tight and begged for a miracle.
A wiser man, with a wife and bairns at home, would have called the catch uncanny and sent it back. Niall managed to untangle the fluke and the narrow fin that ran up the spine. He fastened the creature to the bottom of the boat, where it foamed and wailed and wrenched at the tangles of its hair. He reached overboard with his slops bucket and heaved gallons of water into the boat. The creature quieted a little: the bilge seemed to calm it.
Niall studied the mermaid. There was something catlike about the large eyes and their slanting pupils. He regretted the lack of lashes, and he shivered when a membrane clicked across the jelly of her eyeballs. Still, she was female; her breasts were heavy, the aureoles a greenish tinge. Contemplating them and the swelling of her hips where they fused with her tail, Niall searched himself for desire. Here was this marvel, an answer maybe to his prayers. Who was he to refuse the offering?
Fishermen eyed him as he came and went on the harbour front with buckets of sea water, with limpets and whelks and bundles of dulse. Try as he might, he could not make his captive eat. She sprawled in the bathtub like a landed fish. He talked of love but she mewled and cried, and Niall could make no sense of her salty blether.
Having worried about the noises she used to make and what his landlady might think, it got so that Niall longed for a yelp. But weakness put paid to the mermaid’s skirling. She would flop limply over the edge of the bath, her claws twitching in a way that reminded Niall of the foamy threshing of a landed crab. Coming with buckets of harbour water, he could not help scowling at the stink. He tried to dampen her torso, which was blizzened with lesions and blobs, and attempted to tuck the rotting edges of her fluke back into the bathwater. Previously, whenever he touched her, she would flinch and mutter; but now she was as silent as a fish, the black globules of her eyes fixed and fathomless.
He no longer worked for pay. He put out his nets for small fry: anything that might tempt his selkie-wife to live.
Her tail began to shrivel. Niall feared he would throw from the skelbs that scaled the rim of the bathtub and tinier flecks in the swats of the water. He decided to empty the lot, to start afresh as with clean linen. Within a day, the new water was barming over.
Niall wept that night over his tatties. He felt sick with shame. Though the mermaid’s face had turned plucky and cankered, he was the festering one. He gagged at the sight and smell of her. Oh, she was dying! Breathless, he ran to the harbour to fetch his oilskin. His heart tholed as he turned the key in the lock. Would he find a corpse in his bath? The passage of a candle above her eyes brought the membrane slithering over.
Niall paid no attention to her weeping sores. He felt a ligament tear in his back as he heaved the mermaid onto the oilskin. In agony, he dragged the heavy burden down the stairs, past Mrs Campbell’s room where the old hag was in her cups. It being early of a Sunday, there was no one about to watch him struggle with the mute and stinking bundle.
The sun was not yet up on the harbour when Niall set down his burden. He opened the oilskin with a grimace, like a boy peering into the crust of a wound. Her torso was pale, the fluke as dry as old leather. He flipped her over towards the water; the weight fell away and a plop, obscene and furtive, crawled about the harbour walls. Niall looked down; and it was impossible to tell, in the half light, whether the tail in the water kicked or merely turned over with the momentum of its fall.
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