Playing the Bass with Three Left Hands

by Will Carruthers

  I failed to thank him for giving me this once in a lifetime opportunity.

  ‘We’re only doing the building anyway. We aren’t going to be working in the slaughterhouse,’ he said, continuing with the pep talk as we pulled up to the security gate.

  Midland Meat Packers had fairly high security, as it was sometimes targeted by animal rights protestors.

  ‘C’mon,’ he said. ‘It’ll be all right.’

  ‘You cunt, John,’ I muttered, as I got out of the car. ‘They probably won’t even let me in anyway. I look like a member of the ALF.’

  He laughed, and we both walked towards the security guards, who were eating biscuits in their little guardhouse. We went inside and the two security guards looked us up and down. John did the talking, while the security guards eyed me with a mixture of amusement and suspicion. ‘Who’s the hippy?’ they said, laughing.

  ‘He’s my labourer,’ John replied, which prompted more laughter from them. I laughed too.

  We got back in the car and the guards pressed the button that lifted the barrier, allowing us to drive into the car park beside the factory. John parked the car as I whined and moaned and tried to deal with my terrible feelings of impending doom.

  He laughed. ‘Stop fucking moaning,’ he laughed again. ‘You’re here now. You might as well have a look.’

  He was right. I was there and I wasn’t about to walk home. I thought I needed the money. We got out of the car and grabbed the tools out of the boot. We walked into the main courtyard and I cursed every rebellious sense I had as I took the first breath of death and shit. John made some reassuring noises as I struggled to make sense of my new environment. There was a lot to take in and I did not want to get any of it inside me. We walked into the main courtyard, which was surrounded by looming buildings. Over to our left there was a pen full of cows, wedged tightly together. Their eyes were wide. The beasts were skittish as they awaited their turn on the efficient line of production that would see their various body parts neatly wrapped in plastic within the hour. They knew they were fucked. I almost knew how they felt.

  The concrete floor was stained with blood. Bloody plastic curtains were hanging over the various entrances to the surrounding buildings concealing what was happening inside. We passed a big metal container and I dared a glance inside. It was full of ears. Hundreds of them. It was a skip full of ears. Next to that one was another one full of hooves. I didn’t look in any of the others. We kept walking.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ I said.

  The grey buildings loomed over us through the noise of invisible machines and the final bellows of the doomed animals in their pens. The stench thickened into a taste that clawed at the back of our throats. We passed a huge steel drum up on a little hill, and the stench deepened to a physical sensation.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ said John finally. ‘That stinks.’

  I could see him holding back retches. I was doing the same.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘Fucking hell.’

  We kept walking, until the processing factory and the slaughterhouse were about a hundred metres behind us. The air had less of the taste in it as we passed through a farm gate and crossed a little stream. I looked at the stream and noticed it was a sickly yellow colour. ‘Do you think that’s piss?’ I said to John as we crossed over it.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said grimly. ‘Pure piss.’

  Even John’s usually undentable cheerfulness seemed to be failing him.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ I said.

  We arrived at our building site, three torn and treeless fields that held a few half-finished silos and the first courses of a small brick building surrounded by thick drifts of mud and puddles of dirty water. John looked over towards a little shed and a dirty cement mixer in the corner of the field. ‘That’s our place,’ he said. ‘We can dump our stuff there.’ He pointed at the half-finished brick building that was standing just proud of the earth a hundred metres away across the potholes and churned-up ground. ‘That’s the building we’re gonna be working on. It’s going to be the control room for these storage containers,’ he said, pointing off to the big metal silos. ‘That’s where they are going to store all of the blood, piss and shit. It is all going to be controlled by computer from the place we’re building.’

  It all sounded very sanitary and reasonable, as long as you were totally unaware of the reality of the place.

  We looked back at the factory we had just walked through. The tall chimney rose up out of it like an unholy church spire, puffing dirty smoke into the grey December sky.

  ‘They kill a thousand cows a day up there,’ John said. ‘It’s the biggest slaughterhouse in Europe. That’s a lot of piss and shit. Get a mix on and we’ll get started. We’ll do a couple of hours and then go for a cup of tea up at the café in the plant.’

  A cup of tea and a sandwich had never sounded like such a daunting prospect. I started the cement mixer and shovelled in the sand and cement as John slithered his way through the mud to the jagged fledgling walls of the little control room we were building. I stared into the mixer and allowed myself to be hypnotised out of my immediate surroundings. When I looked away from the mixer the whole world was turning at the edges of my vision at the same speed as the turning mixer had been. The things you see have an effect on the things you see afterwards sometimes.

  I snapped out of it, squirted a dash of fairy liquid into the mixer, and then poured the whole lot into the wheelbarrow. It looked like dark grey chocolate mousse. The first bricklayer I ever laboured for told me that good bricklayer’s muck should always look a bit like chocolate mousse.

  I grabbed the barrow by the two plastic handles and set off across the mud towards John. I must have looked pretty funny as I stumbled and slid through the mud and the maze of trenches, pushing the reluctant wheelbarrow in front of me. I hoped somebody, somewhere, was having a laugh at my expense. Some cruel ancient goddess on some windswept corner of eternity had to be getting some laughs out of this. It couldn’t be for nothing, or, even worse, for the sixty quid a day I was getting paid so I could cover my rent and keep myself in lentils.

  I finally reached John with most of my delightfully mixed chocolate mousse still in the barrow. I grabbed the shovel and dropped some on his spots.

  ‘Get us some bricks, would ya?’ he said. ‘They’re over by the mixer.’ I trudged back through the mire with my feet getting heavier and more mud-caked with each step. I filled the barrow with the freezing bricks and then made my way back to John in a slapstick fashion. I stacked the bricks for him and then went back for more, as he put the corners in and set his lines. That was pretty much the routine for the first two hours: him laying bricks and me flailing about through the mud with a wheelbarrow full of whatever he needed for the job. He was a fast enough brickie to keep me fairly busy, which was good because it meant I wasn’t spending too much time standing around getting cold. Eventually he said, ‘Fuck it, let’s have a cup of tea.’

  We both clumped back through the mud towards the bridge that crossed the stream of piss. Both of us looked down at the pretty yellow trickle.

  ‘We should wash the mud off our boots,’ he said.

  So we washed out boots in the river of piss and headed back to the slaughterhouse for a cup of tea.

  Normally on the building site you look forward to a tea break like a prisoner looks forward to release. Ten minutes of comfort, sitting on your backside ‒ a little respite from either the heat of a hot day or the biting cold of winter. It’s a chance to rest your bones, have a sit down and a smoke. We plodded back up the path towards the factory and, as we approached the deadly tank of the permanent stench, we both held our breath a bit.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ I said again, through gritted teeth and with a rapidly dwindling appetite. ‘What the fuck is that smell?’

  Neither of us knew, nor had we smelt its exact like before. We walked past the dog-food factory and entered the main courtyard that held the dirty steel containers full of the carefully sorted bi
ts of cow people didn’t like to eat. We headed for a door in the corner of the courtyard. There were random bits of flesh and unidentifiable soft things under our feet, as the cows mooed in their miserable corner and a lorry pulled up with the next load of their unlucky brethren.

  We opened the door, stepped inside to the relative warmth, and were met by rows of bloodstained, chainmail aprons hanging on hooks in front of us, which were dripping red over shiny stainless steel. We climbed the stairs into the café. It was filled with workers and it had that hot, happy, chattering atmosphere that workers’ cafés sometimes have. The pots and pans from the kitchen were clattering along with the sound of cutlery on plates and the air smelled of fried food and stew. It was steamy and comforting despite the prevailing grot outside. We joined the line of people waiting to be served, obviously not fitting in with the slaughterhouse workers and meat packers around us. I was doing my best to appear inconspicuous when John piped up, loud and clear, ‘Fucking hell, I bet they don’t do veggie burgers in here, eh, Will!’

  I wanted to disappear into a bloodstained crack in the floor. ‘Shut the fuck up John,’ I hissed in a vehement whisper. ‘That’s not funny.’

  John cackled loudly. He thought it was hilarious.

  ‘I’ll have the poached eggs on toast and a cup of tea, love, please,’ I said to the woman behind the counter with my nicest, obviously not a vegetarian, smile. We collected our food and I scuttled off to a window seat as far away from everyone else as possible. John sauntered over and sat down, revelling in my obvious discomfort.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ I said, staring into my poached eggs and talking under my breath. ‘That’s not funny, John. You know what they do to vegetarians here? They’ll probably throw me in the blood tank.’

  Everybody who had grown up in Rugby had heard tales of people being thrown into the blood tank at Meat Packers. It was usually a special treat reserved for your birthday, or so I had heard, but who knew for certain? I was so far out of my comfort zone I had begun to wonder if I even had one. The whole blood tank thing was probably a complete myth, or one of those cruel initiation rites and punishments that brutal institutions sometimes have. I was familiar with the history of one person who’d worked at Meat Packers for quite a while. He sat next to me at school when I had first arrived in Rugby at the age of ten and he had punched me every day for about two weeks until I had finally punched him back. He never punched me again after that but he had gotten a job at Meat Packers when we all left school. He was eventually sent to jail for stabbing a taxi driver while trying to steal money to fuel his fruit-machine addiction. To be fair, I knew a few other people in town who had worked there and hadn’t stabbed anyone, so maybe the old British law that stated that no slaughterman was allowed to serve on a jury due to a diminished sense of reverence for life was completely unreasonable. They had repealed that law anyway.

  I was moaning again.

  ‘Oh, calm down,’ John said, stifling his obvious merriment. ‘Nobody gives a fuck if you are a vegetarian or not.’

  I gave a fuck.

  I gave a big miserable fuck.

  I prodded my eggs and gazed out of the window at all of the ruthlessly efficient slaughter. We were in a slightly raised building, so from my window seat I was looking directly into another skip full of ears, which was nice. We made some small talk, finished our food and headed back to the site. We passed the hanging bloody chainmail and left through the door we had entered. As we crossed the main yard I noticed another big steel container that looked like it held something weird.

  I couldn’t quite grasp it mentally. There seemed to be a small yellow hoof poking out of the top of the container, and some weird pale alien flesh that didn’t quite look like any part of a cow I recognised. My curiosity got the better of me.

  ‘What do you reckon is in there, John?’ I said.

  ‘Dunno,’ he replied, ‘let’s go and have a look.’

  As we got closer to the container we wished we hadn’t. We saw the bright yellow partially formed hooves, the pale almost fur, and the eyes that had never seen anything. This dirty steel industrial container was full of unborn cows. Full. There must have been thirty of them in there, all rudely piled and ready for some weird and occult part of the process. Maybe they had already been through the process.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ muttered John. ‘This place is enough to turn me vegetarian. That is fucking wrong.’ John had grown up on a farm in Ireland and was one of the least squeamish and sentimental people I knew. ‘Why would they do that?’ he said. ‘What’s it for?’

  I didn’t know. If I had to guess now, I would say it had something to do with foetal bovine serum, but we didn’t know about all that hi-tech stuff back then, not having computers and everything.

  ‘Let’s go, man,’ I needlessly said.

  We walked away from the skip full of foetuses, away from the chatter of the café, away from the cows that had actually managed to be born. We didn’t say anything until we reached the stinkiest tank in the world, which was being tended to by a man dressed in overalls standing on the little hill.

  John greeted him and the man greeted us in turn. ‘What’s in there, then?’ asked John cheerily.

  The man in charge of the source of the reek invited us up to have a look.

  In for a penny in for a pound, right?

  We climbed up the stairs to where the man was standing.

  ‘Have a look in there,’ he said.

  So we did.

  It was a huge circular tank of horrible-looking, foul-smelling glop, with an endlessly rotating mechanical paddle that was stirring the stuff up.

  ‘That’s mainly blood, piss and shit,’ offered our new friend. ‘We turn it into fuel and compost eventually. That paddle stops it clotting. Nothing is wasted here!’ He looked pretty pleased with himself, and why not, I suppose?

  ‘Fucking stinks, doesn’t it?’ said John.

  ‘Yeah, it does, but you should try getting some in your mouth. That’s really fucking horrible!’ Having said this, the man laughed a bit too loudly and weirdly, and for a little bit too long.

  ‘Obviously, we can’t process all of the blood,’ he went on jovially. ‘That’s why we are building the new waste management system down in the field where you’re working. At the moment, we collect a lot of the blood and put it in these big trucks, which inject it into the ground. Sometimes they inject fifty tons of blood a day into those fields where you two are working.’

  I tried to process that information. Some giant hypodermic syringe on a truck, injecting fifty tons of cow blood into the earth?

  We left the shit stirrer’s attendant on top of his little hill of shit and walked past the tidy piles of carefully graded compost that were ready for sale. They didn’t smell of anything at all.

  Jumping Ship

  To say I left because of money is too simple. It went much deeper than that. They say that craziness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting the outcome to be different, and I suppose I had hoped it would all turn out OK if I did my best. That stupid optimism that had been lurking at the bottom of the trench while I had been having my little tantrum in the hole I was digging after Spacemen 3 came back to bite me on the arse again ‒ and, you know what? Looking back, I’m glad. I don’t give a fuck that I was living in a caravan on twenty quid a week because I couldn’t sign on because I was on the run from the debts I had incurred in the band. I gave a bit of a fuck when one of the songs had been leased to an advert for Nestlé for seventy grand and I didn’t receive a penny. Now, I don’t give a fuck. Because I can look back at that work I did and feel happy with it. I can look myself in the eye and say, ‘Well, it wasn’t too easy sometimes but maybe it was worthwhile.’ And maybe that’s worth something too. I didn’t leave because I had no money. I left because I did not want to mix my soul with a thing that I believed was not fair. It costs you too much. And I ain’t talking about money. I left because I lost faith in the people around me to do the right thing
. We were divided and conquered and everybody lost something in the process.

  That was the hardest thing to take after two years of hard work. Really. I lived and breathed it and I loved it. But, it wasn’t the music that hurt me. It was the business. I made the mistake of confusing the making of music with the making of money, and for short periods of my life that made me hate music itself. That was one of the greatest mistakes I ever made. I can still imagine us making most of the music we made even if we had never been paid. Maybe we would have fought over who got what pittance from the beer-sodden hat at the end of the night, but I reckon we would have still done it. I hope so anyway. I like to think so.

  I poured my heart and soul into that music the same way I am doing so into this book.

  I have been holed up in an attic room in Zagreb now for over two months. Eating cheese sandwiches, agonising over what to put in and what to leave out. It matters to me. Art is sacred and you should never whore the muse. That music was sacred to me when we made it, and whatever happened afterwards … that’s just business. I do not believe that the business ever served the music as it should have.

  I finally decided that it was time to leave the band on a trip over to Dublin. It was to be my last show with Spiritualized but I didn’t know it at the time. We were due to play at a club in the newly opened Temple Bar district. We’d arrived a day early and I had a room to myself in the hotel, so I’d gone out drinking alone and made some new friends easily enough. Dublin is good like that. They’d taken me off to the Trinity College bar and we’d had a few pints and it was all good, but the way things were going in the band was gnawing at me. We played the show and it all went well. Afterwards we got drunk and danced in the club, and it was the first time I ever heard ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. We didn’t know what it was but we danced like idiots to it, and when it was over I pranced over to the DJ booth and demanded to know what the song was called. It was all good spirited and I really had no problems with anyone in the band, even as I was thinking about jumping ship. I jumped ship, metaphorically and damn near physically at one point, on the ferry on the way home. After sitting alone drinking myself into enough courage to actually say what was on my mind, I had called Mark over to a bar away from the other members of the band and I poured my heart out to him. I didn’t know what to do. I loved the band but I could see where it was heading and I knew there was no longer a place for me in it. Mark fetched the rest of the band and I spilled a few more tears and told them I couldn’t go on any more. I didn’t even mention the financial stuff, because I didn’t want to cause problems. I wanted the band to be OK and I thought the best way was to keep my mouth shut. On the way out of the ferry Jason came up to me and said, ‘Is it because Kate is in the band? It is more important to me to have you in the band than it is to have Kate in the band.’ I was kind of touched by that but, in another way, I was surprised he didn’t get it. I had tried to talk to him about my worries. Maybe he didn’t care. Maybe it doesn’t matter.