Mastitis was a common problem among the milkers. Some recovered from it and others did not. The priority was that milk should flow. If a little pus was drawn from a few teats, it was no big problem. Pasteurisation and homogenisation took care of it. The milk was safe and no one would ever realise it was anything other than the healthiest and most nourishing liquid a person could drink. Milk-drinking townsfolk knew better than to ask questions about how it was produced as long as it tasted good. So, the occasional dead white blood cell did make it into the stomachs of the population. But the milk was safe. It tasted great. And that was all that mattered.
Mastitis caused swelling of the udder and teat in the first instance. Passing milk would be accompanied by a more intense ache than the milking machines usually caused. As the days passed and the infection worsened, a discharge would begin to leak from the affected teat. Typically this discharge would contain some milk, some blood and some pus. Milking would continue regardless of the contamination. The increasing pain caused to the milker was not taken into account.
Sometimes, the teat would harden and crack like baked mud. Blood and pus would then flow freely. At this point, most milkers would be given a day or two of rest because the flow of their milk was retarded by the infection. This was their chance to recover if they were going to. A few did. Most didn’t.
It was cheaper for Magnus to sell his milkers as meat than it was to treat them for the infection. Milkers whose mastitis worsened into fever were slaughtered, their meat sold for the most basic burger and sausage mince. In the long term, all milkers were headed for the grinder but those who made it through an episode of mastitis had a few more years of service to look forward to before they faced the bolt gun.
Richard Shanti watched the trucks grumble out of the packing department.
What had been living, what once was sacred, would now become the nourishment for thousands of townsfolk. Halves, hindquarters and forequarters being taken for further processing. Bloodless pink fillets, steaks, chops, ribs and roasting joints transported to butchers where they’d be arranged on sloping, glass-screened displays. Packets of mince, low-grade sausage and retrieved meat heading for the pie makers. There was no soul in the meat, no spirit. As far as Shanti was concerned, the sanctity of the flesh had died with its owners.
Where did that preciousness go, he wondered? Not with the meat in the trucks. Not to the tables of the townsfolk.
From time to time the magnitude of what he was part of and the daily repugnance of it washed far into the hinterland of his awareness, into the exposed avenues and byways of his conscience. How could such violation occur in such great numbers? In those rare moments, he could almost comprehend what it was he contributed in terms of suffering and how that weighed against what little good he did.
On those days he took extra ballast in his pack.
Greville Snipe lived to work. It worried his mum.
‘I’ve got no friends, no hobbies and no vices,’ he would often boast to Ida Snipe as he slipped her a few extra groats and a free two-litre carton of milk. He visited his mum once a week for Sunday tea and always took her some of the ‘bounties of his endeavour’ to keep her happy.
‘You should settle down with someone,’ she would tell him as she twisted a greasy hanky between gnarled, quivering fingers; her face an atlas of concern.
‘I couldn’t be more settled,’ he’d reply, annoyed that the good things he provided were never quite good enough. ‘I’ve got a decent job, plenty of money. I’ve got my health,’ which is more than you’ve got, he always wanted to add. ‘And I’m happy as I am.’
Ida knew her boy worked hard.
‘I’m proud of you,’ she’d say, little tears at the corner of her eyes. ‘You’ve always been a good boy. Good to me.’ But who was going to look after him? He had no time to find the right woman. A man took a good bit of looking after. She knew that because of Greville’s father, Anderton Snipe.
‘One of those poorer girls from the northern quarter would be perfect for you. Quiet, obedient. Good cooks, I’ve heard. And they keep a tidy house too, you know.’ She’d sigh to herself but loud enough for him to hear the wistfulness in it. ‘I’ve got nothing against poor people, Greville. Just remember that.’
Visiting on a weekly basis, Greville found it hard to forget his mother’s class-based forbearance. He told her he’d take a trip to the northern quarter and look into it.
There were things his mum didn’t understand. Things he could never tell her.
Greville Snipe lived to work. His mum would have worried a lot more had she known why.
The numbers of the Chosen were vast, more than ten thousand. But their numbers fluctuated in response to the town’s demand and also to diseases that occasionally afflicted them.
In warm weather, they roamed the fields to the far south west of the town in herds totalling many hundreds of head. Their pale bodies moved in swathes against the grass and mud. When it rained or if it was cold, they crammed into the huge, arch-shaped barns that had been there ever since the town began. The barns were ancient and rotting and there were holes in the roofs and in the walls. They gave the only limited shelter and the Chosen pressed close to each other to stay warm.
Around the perimeters of the fields there were wooden towers where stockmen could observe, count and keep the herds secure. Impenetrable hedges of blackthorn formed the borders of each field. Access gates were high and spiralled with barbed wire. The security measures were unnecessary, though. None of the Chosen had ever tried to break through a fence or a hedge in Abyrne’s history.
Closest to the plant were the dairy herds that needed to make the daily trip for milking. They were kept corralled in the plant to be milked twice in the course of the day and then returned to their fields in the evenings.
The meat herds spent much of their time in the fields and barns. Herds made up of pregnant or nursing mothers and their calves stayed corralled in the plant longer term. When their calves were old enough and their rituals were complete, they would rejoin the main herds as heifers or steers. The Chosen that saw the fields most rarely were the bulls. They were kept penned and separate to prevent fighting and stayed within the plant most of their lives. Veal calves, once in their crates, never saw the fields or any other cattle again.
Anticipation made his heart beat so hard he could feel the throbbing in his neck. His face was hot and his balls ached.
His alarm went off at four in the morning but he never pressed the snooze button. He was washed and dressed within five minutes and tucking into a breakfast of steak and black pudding. He needed plenty of protein for such a long shift. Accompanying his breakfast, Greville Snipe drank boiled milk with three large sugars. Thus fuelled, he was ready for a day in the dairy.
Not for him the clammy, dread air of the slaughterhouse that thrummed all day with stark, final seconds of anticipation. Not for him the blue rubber aprons and knee-high rubber boots. Not for him the captive bolt gun, nor the hoisting chain, nor the double-handled bone cutters. Neither the long-bladed knife nor the saw. Snipe saw himself as a kind man. A humane worker in an inhumane industry.
There was no death in the dairy. There were no struggles, no kicking, no letting of blood. In his working world he breathed a quiet air. Not quite serene perhaps, but certainly not a condemned air. Not yet. In the dairy, the milkers were in the prime of life with years of production still before them. In that time they would eat well and sleep well and the promise of their certain dispatch was far away. Snipe cared for them as best he could. They were valuable and they were his responsibility.
By five o’clock he was checking the herd over before the first milking.
He strolled with pride through the milking parlour. The cows stood with their wrists shackled to their ankles by a long chain. This prevented them interfering with the equipment or resisting the attachment of teat cups to their udders. Snipe’s team of four youths were quick and efficient because of his training. They ran from booth to booth
and within minutes were able to connect a hundred and fifty cows to the machines. None of Snipe’s team wanted to be there. If there had been any other job in the world they could have taken, they would have. It was not a time when people had many choices. The milking parlour, the cows, the machinery; all of it gave the youths the creeps. That was another reason they were so fast. Fast, but not careless. He’d trained that out of them.
They were young too, none of them over nineteen and they would, in time, come to understand and appreciate the importance of the job they were doing. They didn’t know it but they were privileged and, unlike most jobs in the town, working in the milking parlour actually meant something. They were helping to provide for others.
Once the equipment was attached, the milking session was brief; only twenty minutes to harvest half of the day’s yield. Then Snipe’s lads passed through the parlour a second time removing teat cups and collecting them for sterilisation. Collected raw milk was then pumped into vats for pasteurisation and homogenisation. As those processes were fully automated, his boys could take a long break.
He then had a solid hour to pass through the milking parlour checking every cow in the herd. This was what raised his pulse.
There were four rows of forty individual milking stalls, the two centre rows were back to back. Between rows one and two and rows three and four were two broad concrete lanes with a gutter that ran down the centre of each. Many of the cows would urinate or defecate during milking. After they’d returned to pasture, the whole parlour would be hosed down a stall at a time. Snipe was used to the smell but his four lads wore their masks for the whole shift.
During his hour alone with the herd, Snipe inspected every cow in every stall. In a herd, they all looked alike, but it was possible to pick up on little distinguishing marks and individual behaviours. Snipe knew every cow by sight and number. He passed along the stalls, hands behind his back like a general inspecting his troops. In turn, every eye in the parlour watched his progress. As a dairyman, Snipe’s interest was in a good milk yield and a healthy herd. He felt obliged to check the udders and teats of every cow.
In most cases, the initial check was a glance. Deflated udders with a ruddy rim around elongated teats was what he wanted to see. Healthy, spent udder tissue with a suction mark in the right place. But where he found the red rim too close to or overlapping the teat, he would pause to see if the suction had caused any damage. He would note the stall number and the number of the cow in a small white notebook that he carried in the outer pocket of his white cow-gown. Later he would have words with whichever team member possessed careless, rushed hands.
Officially, mastitis went untreated, excepting the antibiotic shots that every animal in every herd regularly received to keep them infection free. But Snipe ran a proud unit and he liked to do a little more for his milkers. Whenever he saw damaged, cracked or sore teats on his cows, he attended to them. In his trouser pocket at all times was a small jar of cream that his mother had used on his dry skin when he was a child. It smelled of honey and old leather and was called Beauty Balm. In reality, it was a product aimed at women to keep their hands soft and smooth. Snipe had learned to use it for other things before he realised it could help soothe the udders of his milkers.
It caused him a very complicated feeling when he stopped to rub the Beauty Balm into the sore udders of one of the herd. His eyes would defocus a little and he would enter a righteous, delightful, guilty trance. He would look away from the face of the cow and concentrate on the feeling of the swollen udder beneath his gentle fingers. Sometimes a final dribble of milk would exude from the affected teat and Snipe would pause and look at the cow’s face. Suffused with temptation, his penis painfully rigid and his testicles sharply aching, he would continue down the rows.
Four
Hema and Harsha were sick the next day.
Richard had left while it was still dark, every muscle on his emaciated frame standing proud as he hoisted the pack of bricks and sand onto his back. Maya watched him with anticipation, knowing that by the evening the pack would be full of something other than her husband’s misplaced burden of guilt. She ate an apple for breakfast, not resenting it for once, and she sang a song she’d learned as a child while she prepared chopped fruit and porridge for the girls.
When she went upstairs to rouse them, she found them both in Harsha’s bed, clinging to each other and shivering in their sleep. Sweat blackened their already dark hair. It made her think of Richard, his temples dripping each night at the dinner table. She felt their brows. Her girls were burning up. Damn you, Richard, she thought. Their sweat was his sweat. Somehow he had passed his craziness into them. The craziness was damp on their foreheads.
She ran downstairs, pulled on a heavy coat and rushed out the door. She’d be exhausted by running for the Doctor. Why couldn’t they have lived nearer the town?
Snipe noticed the condition of WHITE-047’s teats immediately. There was no broken skin and no cracking of the aureoles but they were too swollen – even minutes after milking – to be healthy. If he didn’t do something about it now, it was almost a certainty that an infection would set in.
Snipe noticed certain cows in the dairy herd more than others but he had never been sure why that was. The ones he noticed were the ones he gave most care to. WHITE-047 was one of those cows and, as he looked at her now, he tried, as he often did, to work out why it was that some milkers were easier to look at than others.
She had the same stumps of fingers as all the others. Her big toes were missing like the rest of them. She made the same sighs and hisses. She limped because of her heel tag, but so did every Chosen in every herd. She was toothless and hairless and had the same hunched, weighed down posture that all the Chosen displayed. She was big in the hips – not all were shaped that way but most of them were – but there was something different about her shoulders. They were delicate somehow. Not the heavy-boned shoulders that milkers usually possessed. Ordinarily, weaker-looking stock was culled out of the herds to keep the offspring strong. WHITE-047 was slender at the top and that ought to have been noticed and taken care of. Perhaps it was the eyes that had saved her from a premature visit to the slaughterhouse. Her eyes were strong and, unlike almost every other cow in the herd, she risked making eye contact from time to time. That must have taken other stockmen’s attention from her finely boned shoulders. She was a lucky one. Or she had been until now.
Snipe approached the stall she was in but she didn’t try to step away. Like many of them, she had come to trust him. Instead, she looked at him for a split second and then turned her head away. She tried to stamp one of her feet but all it did was clank the shackles.
‘Easy there,’ he said. ‘Mr. Snipe’s not going to hurt you.’
He stepped into the stall with her as slowly and smoothly as he could. Cows were skittish and liable to hurt themselves if they felt threatened. He didn’t need a damaged milker on his shift.
‘Steady, girl. Steady now,’ he breathed.
He was right beside her now. Even after the milking her udders were round and plump. She was younger than a lot of the others. It was another thing he often noticed, the ones with the fuller udders. His pulse pumped in his neck and a flush of heat rose to his cheeks. He reached for the Beauty Balm in his cow-gown pocket with trembling fingers.
The population was hungry. But that was no excuse.
And the ones that were starving – the ones that might really have needed the protein to survive – they rarely got it. Meat went to those who could afford it. Life went to those who could afford it and so it had always been.
Richard Shanti had blood on his hands. Unlike his coworkers he didn’t deny it. He didn’t pretend it was okay. While they absolved themselves with placatory readings from the Book of Giving or the Gut Psalter, he bore his guilt fully, at least in his own mind. He never spoke of his culpability to anyone. He did not share his horror at the part he played each day. Instead he made himself suffer in every way he kne
w. In this manner he planned to punish himself for his wrongs while he was alive. Perhaps his next life might not be lived in a similar sort of hell to the one he was employed to create every day of the working week. And if there was no next life, some small justice would still have been served upon him.
His understanding of animals had been obvious from the outset. He began his career an untrained casual worker. They made him clean up blood and off-cuts. Even then, he’d been drawn to the more agitated of the Chosen, the ones that struggled and resisted. He wasn’t authorised to be anywhere near the chain but in his first week a young steer went crazy in the crowd pens, halting the chain. Shanti walked straight over to the panicking animal and calmed it in moments, delighting the stunner who managed to recover a decent chain speed. Similar incidents happened many times in those early days. Soon Magnus Meat Packers gave him a permanent position: Shanti the pacifier, Shanti the whisperer, as he’d been back then.
‘Oi! What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
Greville Snipe’s roar echoed around the milking parlour. Roach and Parfitt jolted inside their cow-gowns with the shock of it. They turned off the high-pressure hoses and turned toward their boss. In the corner, against the white tiled wall, WHITE-047 cowered, shivering; water running off her reddened skin. Neither of the lads could look him in the eye.
Snipe approached with deliberate slowness and stealth letting them know they were his prey. He lowered his voice to a whisper:
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