His hair, all of it, was gone.
Shanti watched the bull through a crack between the gate and hinge. It was on its side and curled tight like a giant baby. Amazing, he thought, how different they are asleep and awake. The bull’s number was 792, stencilled onto a blue tag that pierced the flattened area of flesh between its Achilles tendon and anklebone. The tag bolts were made of stainless steel about half a centimetre thick. Removing them was impossible for the Chosen but a stockman could do it with a specially made pair of pliers. The tags were attached to newborns around the time many of the other rituals were performed, whilst they were young enough to forget the pain. Once the piercing had healed, new numbers and colour codes could be attached as necessary depending on the animal’s ultimate purpose.
BLUE-792 was a prize bull. His genes had created hundreds, possibly thousands, of calves over the years and some of his offspring, a very few, had become bulls too, siring even more calves to keep the herds going. Shanti recognised every one of BLUE-792’s descendants. They weren’t the beautiful cattle of the herds. They were the heavy-boned, hardy strain. They were the ones that survived disease and the cold, regimented routine that was herd life. They were the ones that fulfilled their purpose. All of them shared his blue eyes and round face. Most of them had his swollen bulb of a nose. They were in the dairy herds, in the bullpens, in the veal enclosures and in the meat herds too. Only bulls and dairy cows would live as long as BLUE-792 and of those, only the very finest bulls would lead such a long and prosperous existence.
Shanti watched the bull sleep and wondered how many of its offspring he had already dispatched. So many times the access panel on the conveyor had opened and he would find himself looking into the eyes of BLUE-792 passed down one, or sometimes two, generations. And here was their predecessor, still alive. Still kicking, as the stockmen would say.
BLUE-792 stirred causing the straw he was lying in to rustle. Shanti froze in position. If the bull knew it was being watched it could cause problems. Cattle that formed any kind of relationship with their human overlords tended to alter their behaviour patterns, to become unmanageable. Many words were synonymous with meat at MMP. ‘Unmanageable’ was one of them. Shanti liked watching this particular bull. He didn’t want to find himself looking into its eyes as he pressed a pneumatic weapon to its head. Not yet. Not until BLUE-792’s time was well and truly up.
The bull sat up, as though waking to a sudden loud noise. Shanti shrank back away from the crack and held his breath for a few moments. More scratching and rustling came from inside the pen as the bull raised itself heavily onto its legs. For a few seconds afterwards there was total silence. Shanti planned to back away quickly and noiselessly if he heard the bull come towards where he was standing. Instead he heard the swish of straw as BLUE-792 walked to the far end of its pen and began to tap its finger stumps on the wall. Shanti heard the whispered hissing and sighing coming from the bull’s mouth. He wondered how many other Magnus Meat Processing employees had noticed the Chosen signalling each other this way. He doubted anyone had the time for observation. None of them took the same interest he did.
The not-quite-random taps and breaths continued and Shanti crept back towards the crack. Inside he saw BLUE-792 with one ear laid to the aluminium panels. There was a smile creasing its face. Perhaps it was comforted just to hear the response of other animals and know that it was not alone.
Nauseated and weakened by the chemicals in the dip, Snipe found himself barely able to struggle as Cleaver forced him towards one of the sarcophagus-shaped operating tables. The noose tightened, constricting Snipe’s windpipe and cutting off most of the blood flow to and from his head. Just before he reached the table he blacked out.
It must have been part of Cleaver’s method for handling his charges on his own. When Snipe came round, the hard lights came back into focus above him; he was spread-eagled on the slab. Cleaver was tightening a strap on his ankle. His other limbs were already secured but Cleaver appeared to want no movement at all to disrupt his work. A leather strap came over his chest and was pulled so taut he had to breathe from his solar plexus to get any air. Another was looped over the bones of his pelvis, another locked his knees flat. The final strap was for his head. He tried to fight this one because it would mean he could no longer see what was happening. He didn’t want to look but it was the last modicum of control he possessed. He swung his head from side to side trying to evade Cleaver’s grip and for a while he succeeded in preventing the last strap being fixed. It was only when Snipe felt a smooth section of timber slide under the back of his neck that he realised Cleaver wanted him to struggle so that he could arrange things according to his requirements.
With the block of wood there, his struggles were restricted but he didn’t give up. The tip of a knife appeared large and distorted only millimetres from his right eye.
‘You’re going to make me late with all this fucking around. Blinding isn’t part of the ritual,’ breathed Cleaver. ‘But I’d be happy to include it at your request.’
Snipe stopped moving.
‘That’s more like it.’
Cleaver drew a strap across his forehead and pulled it tight. Because of the block underneath his neck, Snipe’s throat was extended and exposed as the broad loop of leather shortened against his brow. He could breathe but he could no longer swallow.
When Cleaver thrust the tip of a scalpel into his larynx, Snipe screamed for the first and last time. The sound was cut short.
Rory Magnus sat back in his chair with a creak so familiar he didn’t notice it and put his booted feet on the scarred oak of his desk. He lit a cheroot from the previous one he’d been smoking and dropped the first one into his ashtray without bothering to crush it out.
From the door at the back of his study he could hear the faint sounds of struggling, the rush of bodily evacuations and inevitable dunking and wet thrashing. He’d heard it all a hundred, a thousand times, before and he never tired of it. This was how to rule the town. This was how to maintain high standards at the factory. This was how to command respect and destroy dissent.
The curtain by the door shifted in an air current and soon Magnus could smell shit and bile and the acidic tang of the dip. It was unusual in so far as there had been no words of pleading from the cow-poking dairyman. But soon, though. Any minute now there would be –
The scream.
The first incision was the easiest to abide but they all screamed. Every single one of them. And then the scream would cease as though someone had swept an axe down upon a block. Efficient Mr. Cleaver. He smiled.
And after the scream there was a different sound, just as intense. More so perhaps. A desperate sibilation that struggled to be heard. Magnus could imagine Snipe’s lips moving as his words no longer came. The silent begging and the wordless hisses of transformation.
Deeper, more complete cuts would follow.
Magnus listened as if to a familiar duet played by unfamiliar musicians.
He listened and it was good.
Six
It was dusty in the records offices. The further back through the years the Parson went, the dustier the filing boxes and the shelves around them became. The silence in there lay like dust also, strata of it pressing down and muffling the wood, the cardboard, the paper.
A records officer had stamped her Welfare pass; a flaky-skinned man with white hair curling out of his ears and nostrils, an air of ancient overuse about his faded green tank top and the worn edges of his collar. He had the smell of a man who lived alone. A records clerk assisted him. Between them they recorded all the births, deaths and marriages in the town and filed them in manila folders in brown boxes on racks of shelves.
Parson Mary Simonson’s trip to the far end of the records office took her deep into territory where the dust had remained undisturbed for years, possibly decades. There was rarely a reason for anyone to go back there and very few Welfare workers had clearance in the first place. White-haired Whittaker, the record
s officer, and his clerk, Rawlins, were paid to keep accurate records not clean the place. It showed. Her feet scuffed trails in the dust and her robes swept the linoleum. She had to lift up her hems to keep from taking all the grime with her.
It was no different with the cardboard archive boxes. Disturbing them created clouds of irritating particles that made her choke and sneeze. Following the spasms of her airways, more clouds were created. She wanted to give up. There was dust in her hair and in her eyes and ears. Dust all over her clothes. But by then she’d found the box containing surnames beginning with S in the year that she was curious about. There was no reason not to continue. She could satisfy her question and get out of there. Get away and get clean. She put her thick red sleeve across her nose and mouth and removed the lid from the archive box.
Inside, the manila folders became the brightest, newest things in the entire records hall. They almost glowed. Glad she’d persevered, she walked her fingers through to Shanti and pulled the file. Inside there was no birth entry as she’d expected. Instead, the record of the death of a child named Richard Arnold Shanti. The boy had suffocated during labour and was stillborn to his mother Elizabeth Mary Shanti.
She stood staring through the record card for several long moments, no longer taking in the information typed there. A little layer of the disturbed dust settled on the gleaming folders and when she returned the file to its proper position the dust was trapped there by her replacing of the box lid.
A small delivery truck took Snipe back to the MMP factory. There was nowhere to sit and the space was not high enough for him to stand. These were the smallest of his discomforts.
The stumps of his fingers and the spaces where his thumbs had been were cauterised shut by Cleaver’s white hot irons. If nothing else, the man had worked with tremendous speed, clipping digits at the knuckles and sealing them in seconds. The pain had been a revelation. Where his testicles had been, metal staples held the remains of his scrotum closed. Pinkish drool seeped from his mouth: he had no teeth left.
He could see the clear plasma that still welled at his finger joints, and the drips of still warm blood that dropped from his crotch to the floor of the wagon. Staples also held closed the wound in his throat but that was the least painful of them all. The dirt from the bed of the truck was getting into the blackened ends where his big toes used to be and there was nothing he could do to prevent it.
The truck bounced over the barely maintained country roads that led out to Magnus’s plant, swerving to miss potholes and lurching over lumps and subsidence. Snipe was thrown against the walls and dashed to the floor many times and there was no way to stop himself without causing more agony.
The truck slowed and turned and he knew he had arrived at the main gate. He heard voices outside – the driver showing his card to the security guard. And then the truck moved on more slowly.
When the back doors opened he was looking into the slaughterhouse crowd pens. A ramp led from the truck to the slaughterhouse floor and a larger ramp led from there down into the pen. It was full of the Chosen, milling and jostling very gently, almost caressing as they swirled among each other.
Cattle. Cows. How swiftly we are made the same.
Some of them saw him and stopped moving. Soon the entire herd was still.
A burning electrical sting on his buttock sent Snipe stumbling down both ramps and he was amongst them. Their eyes took him in. Their noses testing the air he brought with him. Many of them shrank away. He saw their eyes differently now. These were eyes like his.
My God, what’s behind them? What are they thinking?
It was impossible to tell.
He was frightened to move forward but gates closed behind him, forcing him on. He limped on incomplete feet to be among them but they parted whenever he came near and turned their backs to him. Hundreds of smooth bodies, fatter than his and somehow more beautiful. They stayed away from him, would not let him touch them. He looked at his own body and then looked at theirs. They were larger, more whole-looking even with their amputations. They were serene.
He heard the hissing, sighing sounds they made and it sounded like language in a way it never had before. He tried to speak to them but at the sound of his hissing, their faces became twisted and ugly as though he’d done no more than scratch a fork across a blackboard.
My name’s Snipe. Greville Snipe. I work … I used to work in the dairy. I took care of the cows there. Perhaps you’ve heard of me.
They backed away, his whispers making no impression.
Dear Father, I am not even worthy of cattle. They will not accept me as their own. What am I Lord? What have I become?
The steel gates pressed against his back and he could not resist. The metal pushed him into the ranks of animals. Yet still they parted, none of them allowing closeness. He was alone among the Chosen for he was not Chosen.
Out of their ranks, a bull appeared. It dwarfed Snipe in height and width. As a dairyman he’d never been so close to one before. He knew their reputation though. Between the bull’s legs a huge pizzle swung and below it the biggest pair of testicles Snipe had ever seen. The bull was layered with fat but the giant musculature was visible beneath it. It locked eyes with Snipe and he looked down and away. He wasn’t even as alive as this creature now. The bull’s bulk was terrifying, even through the pain of his trauma and injuries.
It gestured to Snipe with a flick of its enormous bald head. The meaning was clear.
Snipe edged forward and the cattle in the crowd pen opened before him. The bull stepped in behind, giving him no choice but to keep moving. His body, remembering only the intrusion of blades and the biting of clippers and the yanking of pliers, moved onward. He had no strength to turn and fight the bull and even if he had he no longer felt the self-worth it would take to stand firm. The crowd pen narrowed until it became a corridor and then a chute. He saw a cow step forwards into an alcove and then the alcove slid out of view. An empty one appeared in its place.
Snipe hesitated and turned. The bull was right behind him. Nowhere to go but forwards. He took a few more hesitant steps and stopped again, his body refusing to do what was required of it. The alcove disappeared and another took its place. And another.
A shout came from somewhere outside the pen.
‘What the fuck’s going on in that crowd pen? Get these fucking animals moving. That’s two – no, wait – three misses in a row. Come on, lads, keep them moving.’
A new alcove appeared. The bull stepped forwards and pushed Snipe into it.
He saw the blood on the floor as the alcove began to move forwards leaving the bull and the crowd pen behind. A steel frame settled over him, locking him into a standing position and preventing him from turning his head. The alcove stopped with a jolt.
A small rectangular hatch slid open and he saw the face of a man he vaguely recognised from the staff canteen. The man’s eyes were somehow blind. He lifted a gun to Snipe’s forehead.
I am meat.
Jones was a new bolt gunner and it was an insult that he had to put up with empty restrainers. How was a guy supposed to get a bonus if the filers didn’t do their job? The panel opened and finally he had a cow to whack. He glimpsed the eyes for a fraction of a second and thought they looked familiar.
‘God is supre –’
He realised this one was not Chosen and cut the blessing short.
He pulled the trigger. The gun recoiled smoothly.
Hiss. Clunk.
They all looked so similar.
Bob Torrance was incensed at the speed of the chain. Something was going on in the crowd pens but he couldn’t tell what.
He bawled as he descended from his steel balcony:
‘What’s the problem?’
A stockman with a cattle prod shouted back from the pens:
‘Delivery from Magnus, boss. It’s taken care of now.’
Torrance nodded to himself as he reached the factory floor. Magnus’s deliveries always fucked with the chain s
peed but there was nothing he could do about it. Tomorrow he’d move the new boy further along the chain and get Ice Pick back on the bolt gun to make up lost time. Every second counted. The demand for meat rose every day as the population of the town grew and it was up to Torrance to see they got what they needed. At least, that was what everyone believed. Torrance was paid to believe it too.
He marched past Jones to the bleeding station. There was always a backlog here. Between stunning and exsanguination cattle were hung by their ankles in loops of chain that hung from a giant steel runner. The runner was like a well-greased curtain rail suspended from the factory ceiling. The cattle swung upside down along this runner from one station to the next as they were broken down into food and by-products. The first port of call was the bleeding station.
The bleeder’s job was to sever the neck of each cow from throat to neck-bone and push it along the runner. A broad trough caught the drainings from the Chosen and funnelled it into collecting vats. Later the blood was used in making MMP black pudding. The delay between stunning and reaching the bleeding station sometimes resulted in the Chosen regaining consciousness before their throats were cut but there was no way around this. It had always been a weak area of the chain.
Of the seven Chosen that were hanging waiting for the bleeder’s knife three were twitching. The movement reminded Torrance of escape artists that hung upside down in straight jackets and chains, trying to get free within a time limit. The cattle were going nowhere though. It was merely residual impulses travelling down the nerve pathways from brain to body and was a sign that death had occurred. It was when they started to breathe again – making their rhythmic hisses and sighs – that was the sign of the bolt gunner getting it wrong or sometimes just a particularly strong animal refusing to die quickly.
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