‘You seem to know the women of Abyrne very well, I must say,’ said Magnus, laughing. ‘I’ve had hundreds of them over the years and many match your description, I was disappointed to discover.’
‘They all use cosmetics that originate from Magnus Meat Products. You’re part of the lie too.’
Collins had a sense of humour sometimes and sometimes he didn’t. Magnus couldn’t work it out. He laughed at the prospect of his own death and pissed on Magnus’s light-hearted asides. He wasn’t going to be any fun until it was time to get physical.
‘Keep going,’ said Magnus.
‘If you go back to the start of all this –’
‘Wait, Collins.’ Magnus held up both hands. He didn’t want Bruno hearing what he thought was going to be said. ‘Bruno, untie him. Get him a chair and a blanket or something.’
‘Sir?’
‘Then wait downstairs in the hall until I call for you.’
‘But what if –’
‘Now, Bruno. Just do it.’
The big man leaned down to release Collins’s bonds.
‘I’m fine as I am,’ said Collins. ‘I don’t need anything.’
‘You’re mine now, son, and you’ll do as you’re bloody told.’
Bruno left the room and returned with a moth-eaten blanket.
‘Is that the best you can do?’ demanded Magnus.
‘I’m sorry, sir, I thought –’
‘Piss off, Bruno. But don’t go far.’
When they were alone in his study, Magnus drew a straight-backed wooden chair over from the other side of the room and placed it beside Collins.
‘Make yourself comfortable,’ he said. ‘Don’t get used to it, though.’
Collins, blanket wrapped around his middle, sat crosslegged on the chair with his hands in his lap. Magnus shook his head. The man was like rubber.
‘There are some things no one else should hear,’ said Magnus.
‘Believe me, Mr. Magnus, enough people have heard this already. Heard it, believed it and acted upon it. The town is changing. The world is changing.’
‘I doubt that. Not because of some skinny Mary-boy like you. You’ve held your secret little meetings and probably bent the minds of a few weak townsfolk but the rest of them, the rest of us, will forget your words and move on. By the time I’ve eaten my fill of you, sucked the marrow from your bones, shat you out over the next few weeks, you’ll be history. The kind no one remembers.’
‘The writing of history is important, it’s true. Written history – written anything – is what people tend to believe and remember. Whether it’s lies or truth doesn’t appear to matter much.’
‘You’re not as stupid as I thought.’
‘I’m the stupidest man you’ll ever meet,’ said Collins. ‘I’ve followed the calling of some tiny inner voice that tells me what is right. I’ve allowed myself to be railroaded into a premature and unpleasant death because of that voice. A voice that no one else can hear or prove exists. Even I can’t prove it. But I’ll tell you something, Mr. Magnus, being this stupid feels good. You see me as a man throwing his life away over some small point in a forgettable argument but, to me, it’s the most liberating, joy-creating thing I could have done with my life.’ Collins laughed to himself in a wave of private astonishment and continued, ‘I mean, I’m sitting here and I know what’s going to happen to me. I know what’s going to happen to you and to the town too. You, Mr. Magnus, you know nothing of this. And even though I sit here and I tell you it willingly and against my better judgement, even though I give you the means, perhaps, to prevent it by forewarning you, you will not listen to me and you will not understand. That’s destiny’s work. I can say what I like to you, betray every nuance of my mission and you’ll still make the mistakes you were fated to make.’ Collins laughed again. ‘You have no idea how happy it all makes me. Even the promise of the knives and the bone cutters. I give myself joyfully to set others free. You could join them if you wanted but I don’t believe you will.’
Magnus was unimpressed but he admired the man’s strength. His delivery wasn’t bad either. Perhaps Collins, despite his wasted body and his lack of respect, was a worthy adversary after all. All the better. In defeating him, Magnus would become that much stronger. That was why he had lasted all these years at the head of MMP and at the head of the town. He took his strength from the vanquished and grew in power each time.
He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a slim silver case. Prising it open with his butcher’s fingers, he removed a dainty cheroot, engulfed it with his teeth and lips and lit it from a candle that burned on the desk. Even the tallow of the candle was made from the rendered fat of those he had disposed of, those he had eaten, thereby removing their bloodline forever. The flavour of liquorice and burnt leaves filled his mouth and he drew it into his lungs before exhaling a cloud towards Collins.
‘Carry on, son,’ he said, ‘I’m going to enjoy this.’
‘You know, Mr. Magnus, it doesn’t matter whether people remember me or not. By the time I’m dead, I’ll have done all I ever needed to do to change things in this town. There won’t be any need to write it down for posterity. There won’t even be any need for me to be talked about as some kind of legend –’
‘Failed legend,’ said Magnus, wagging a sausage finger in reprimand.
‘Failed or otherwise. What I’ve done matters right now. For today. In the future it won’t have any relevance. The point I want to make about history is an important one because it explains everything about the way the townsfolk live. The Book of Giving is a lie. How’s that for blasphemy?’
Magnus chuckled.
‘You talk about destiny. If I hadn’t got to you first, the Welfare wouldn’t have been far behind. You can’t go around talking like this and expect another birthday.’
‘I know. But we all have our parts to play. I’m happy with mine.’
Whatever, thought Magnus to himself. Talk it up while you’ve got the chance, son. You won’t be so happy when I cut your play parts off.
‘The Book of Giving was written by men. Men lie. Men want the world and their God to be a certain way and so they write their lies accordingly and call it the word of God. The townsfolk have altogether too much belief in the written word. I’m here to change that. You have to take all the books away and see what’s left. You have to ask yourself what’s right and wrong inside yourself. Then the world will start to work the way it’s meant to.’
‘Yeah?’ Magnus was unimpressed. ‘Well, so what, Collins? What do I care about books anyway? The Book of Giving serves my purposes. It makes my business indispensable to everyone. In turn, I support the Welfare – on a monthly basis and very handsomely. Sometimes I take out the trash for them, like I will with you. Everybody’s happy. Everything works.’
‘Yes, but everything is wrong. The Welfare is wrong. What they tell the townsfolk is wrong and what you do is wrong. It’s hard for me to believe, sometimes, just how far from simple righteousness and decency we’ve wandered. You cannot kill your own folk, Mr. Magnus. And you certainly can’t live off their flesh. It’s the very purest wrong there is.’
Magnus raised placatory palms.
‘Collins, Collins. Calm down, son. They’re not our ‘own folk’, as you put it. From the point of view of the townsfolk and the Welfare they’re the Father’s sacred children and they’re His gift to us. They keep us nourished and strong to do the Father’s will. You and I both know that’s as much bullshit. And as far as I’m concerned, they’re just animals. They exist purely for our benefit.’
Collins was pale. It was the first time Magnus had seen a serious expression touch the man’s face. So, this is the nub of it, he thought, this is what touches Collins’s pain centres.
‘You can’t tell me you’ve never eaten a nice bloody steak or a few sausages at breakfast time. A bit of pâté on your toast?’
Collins put his head down, chewed his words back.
‘Come on, Collins
. Confess, old son. Tell your uncle Magnus everything.’
Collins looked up, crying.
‘When I was a kid, I ate meat all the time. My mother wanted me to grow up strong and healthy. Like everyone else she believed that meat was the only way to ensure that.’
‘Ah, well, if it was your mother that made you do it…I mean, you can’t possibly be held responsible. You were just a little boy, after all. Not old enough to know any better. I’m being unfair. I couldn’t possibly expect you to account for the fact that you willingly ate the flesh of the Chosen for several years of your life. Could I now? I could never expect you to take the burden upon your shoulders. All that suffering, the captivity, the squalor, the exploitation. You were just one of tens of thousands eating the meat, so of course it wasn’t down to you. I couldn’t blame a little innocent boy for all that. That would be…excessive. Don’t you agree?’
Collins’s tears seemed to have evaporated. The colour and equilibrium had returned to his face. Magnus was disappointed.
‘I’ll pay the price,’ said Collins. ‘And like I’ve said before to thousands of people, I’ll pay it gladly. I ate meat for decades, Mr. Magnus, if you really want to know. I ate it long after I left home. But I never stopped thinking about where it came from. At the back of my mind, the idea that there might be something wrong with the way we got our food never left me alone. We learnt about the Chosen, God’s sacred gift to us, when we were at school. The similarity between them and us seemed obvious but the teachers and the Parsons always played upon the differences – the lack of hair, the deformed hands and feet, the inability to communicate with us or each other. But I always had my doubts. I’m pretty sure that everyone does at some point before burying the doubts under the words of the Book forever. I started to think about what the fields and the processing plant must really be like. Of course, it’s hard; in fact it’s almost impossible to get any information about what really happens to the Chosen. No such information is available. To start with, I had to imagine everything.
‘The first thing I realised was that to make meat, you actually have to kill something. I can’t imagine why it took me so long to work that one simple thing out. You have to raise this living thing, feed it, breed it, fatten it. Then you have to find a way of killing it and cutting it up. I wondered about that for a long, long time. How do you kill something? Do you use a knife? Do you hit it with a club? Shoot it? All this I had to investigate purely in my imagination.
‘I took a job in the gas plant where excrement and intestines from the Chosen arrived by the truckload. After a few weeks I realised just how many living things must be dying each day to produce that volume of waste and off-cuts for conversion into usable methane. I tried to do the numbers in my head but I couldn’t. It made me sick, Mr. Magnus. It made me vomit to think of the amount of dead there must have been, and still are, whose shit and guts are powering parts of the town with electricity.
‘And then, one day, I got talking to a drunk in the Derelict Quarter. Turned out he was an ex-meatpacker. He told me what really happens at MMP. He told me everything there was to know about how you run your ‘business’, Mr. Magnus. That was the day I set out to find another way.’
Cheroot smoke drifted between the two men, connecting them somehow. Magnus listened without expression.
‘The first thing I did was stop eating meat. It wasn’t easy. There’s so little else to eat in the town. Most of the grain we produce goes to feed the Chosen. There are vegetables to be had, but the butchers sell them as decoration for meat. A couple of green beans and a small potato with your steak, a leaf of cabbage beside your chop, onions with your liver, some parsley to garnish a pie. Getting enough vegetables to make a meal was a struggle, especially with Parsons of the Welfare watching all the time. It took months to collect enough seeds and sets to start my own garden. But there are sources, places you can go. You’d be surprised just how many townsfolk enjoy vegetables more than they do meat, Mr. Magnus. Even though they would never admit it in polite company, possibly not even to members of their own family, but they are out there. And there are vegetarians too, people who have disappeared from the habitable quarters and gone to the derelict parts of the town to live out the rest of their lives without a single MMP item in their diet. They’re quiet, reclusive folk, Mr. Magnus, people like me. But they have a simple joy. You can see it in their eyes. It’s like they exude a sense of relief, as though the sacrifice they made in dropping out was worth it.
‘They welcomed me, those people. The real folk of this town. They’re the ones that have begun to see through the Book of Giving’s precepts.’
Hmm, thought Magnus. I’ll enjoy extracting the locations out of you before you die. A smile almost touched his lips but Collins didn’t seem to notice.
‘Among them was a very old man. There was no way to verify it but he told me he was a hundred and eleven years old. The average life expectancy of a male in Abyrne is, what, forty-five? Fifty?’
Magnus shrugged but said nothing.
‘I’ve never met anyone else, man or woman, that made it to sixty, have you? There’s one simple reason. Meat causes illness. Flesh of the Chosen is toxic. Removing it from the diet ensures a longer, healthier life. Imagine living twice as long as we do now, Mr. Magnus. Simply by removing one ingredient from our diets.’
Magnus blew smoke and replied:
‘Look, Collins, just tell the bloody story. Don’t try to give me your spooky sales pitch alongside it. I am the producer, the processor, the distributor and the salesman. You are merely the product. If there’s any selling to be done, I’ll do it. To put it another way, I’m the butcher and you’re the meat. You’d do well to remember that.’
‘You wanted to know the details and I’m giving them to you. Taking meat out of your diet is the most natural way to extend your life.’
‘It hasn’t extended yours,’ laughed Magnus.
Collins conceded the point with an inclination of his head and continued.
‘This old man had learned a lot over his years of exile. Trying to survive without meat was harder when he started out. He spent a lot of time close to starvation. The fasting was unintentional, but he found that it brought him a good deal of wisdom and knowledge. He discovered that refraining not only from eating meat, but from eating anything at all, changed the workings of his mind and gave him access to different levels of consciousness.’
‘You mean he went mad with hunger,’ said Magnus, enjoying each interruption.
‘Of course you’ll see it that way. You don’t know any better and how could you? But ignorance is no substitute for experience, Mr. Magnus. It’s no match for hard-won knowledge. I’m sure you’d agree with me on that.’
‘No one has ever spoken to me the way you have today, Collins. When I’ve finished with you, it’ll be a cast iron guarantee that no one ever does again. A little ‘history’ about you might actually serve my purposes. I’ll suggest to the Welfare that they write your story down in the Book of Giving so that no one ever forgets. Hell, they can put me in it too. I’ll be a ruthless king and you’ll be my flawed subject. The tale will exist forever more, as a parable for the foolish, explaining what happens when you disrespect those who hold the reins of power.’
‘It’ll make just as good fiction as the rest of the Book does.’
‘Finish your story, Collins, and make it quick. I’m getting restless.’
‘There’s not much more to tell. The old man –’
‘What was his name, this old man?’
‘It’s not important.’
‘It’s important to me.’
‘The man is dead now, Mr. Magnus. He can do no harm.’
‘Starvation, was it?’
‘Hardly. He passed away peacefully as he slept. He was a hundred and seventeen years old.’
‘I want the man’s name.’
‘No.’
Magnus gritted his teeth.
‘You’re going to wish you died in your sleep
, Collins,’ he said.
Collins nodded.
‘I know.’
For a moment Magnus thought Collins looked frightened. No, it wasn’t that satisfying. It was resignation. Acceptance. The man was just too bloody relaxed. Suddenly it occurred to Magnus that there might be a real reason for such equanimity. Did Collins have a plan? Could it be that he had some group of skinny vegetarian activists on his side, people ready to fight and die for their leader like the guards and enforcers in Magnus’s employ? It was too outrageous. But perhaps it was true. It certainly explained a lot about Collins’s behaviour. Maybe there was some signal he was going to give to his empty-bellied followers. Something to do with the fight he was trying to engineer. Magnus was forced to reconsider Collins’s stature. He wasn’t telling him everything and he’d never intended to. What if Collins had allowed himself to be caught so easily for exactly this reason?
Magnus tried to keep his face even and unmoved. If there was a mob waiting in ambush outside the mansion, he’d need to bring them down before they had the opportunity to use his lack of preparation. Shit, how could he have been so stupid? He’d underestimated his enemy. It was the first and last time that would ever happen – he promised himself that right then. Never again. No more convivial chats. No more discussions. Collins would be the last. But there was just a little more he wanted to know.
He picked up a small brass bell from his desktop and shook it between his fat fingers. The noise from it was clear and piercing. Seconds later there were thumping footsteps on the stairs, louder along the hallway outside and Bruno burst into the room panting.
‘Everything all right, sir?’
‘Fine, Bruno. Absolutely fine. I wonder, would you mind closing the curtains for me?’
‘Sir?’
‘The curtains, Bruno. It’s getting dark and I don’t like the curtains open after six o’clock.’
‘But, surely, Juster –’
‘Juster will be preparing the dining table at this moment. Close the bloody curtains.’
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