Communion Town

by Sam Thompson

  I didn’t mind working double shifts. I needed little money, but I did not like to abandon my responsibilities. It wasn’t easy to get the stroke right every time. Most workers I had seen took several attempts to get the job done and let the pace of the production line overwhelm them so that, often, the beasts received the barest of flesh wounds and were sent dazed but awake into their turmoil. Not when I had the knife. I couldn’t sleep if I knew someone else was trying to manage the kill.

  What saddened me most was not the change itself, but that they never even consulted me. One evening I arrived at the slaughterhouse to an atmosphere of uneasy holiday and rules unseated: lorries we hadn’t seen before were shunting in the loading bays and the forklifts were moving crates stamped with unfamiliar symbols. The older women, the ones who ruled the packaging rooms with their ribaldry and favouritism, had gathered to watch, dragging on cigarettes and passing comment, while this week’s immigrants waited at a distance because no one had told them where to go.

  My hand ached. It had knitted but not yet healed, and though I bound it hard for work, the cut itched. It was impossible to see how the shift was going to get started on time, but then the bell screamed, the old hands flung their fag ends at the ground and we trooped in to find that everything was different.

  The new floor supervisor, Fischer, was a compact man with a sarcastic turn in his mouth and sparse blond hair scraped back into a greasy ponytail. As we entered, his stare searched us for resistances and weaknesses. I could see what he was and what he meant for the plant, and I was not surprised when he told us procedures had been reviewed and modified. We were being moved around for no good reason, but you can’t argue. It doesn’t matter if you’re an artist with your tools and you have more experience than the rest of them put together. You go where the supervisor tells you, do the job you’re given.

  That night a lanky agency worker I’d never seen before was assigned to my rightful post. As for me, my task now was to drag the stunned animals along the trough from the knocking pen and hook them on the bleed rail. All my expertise and they wanted me hauling carcasses. But there’s no arguing. The shift was about to start. In the holding pens the animals debated their suspicions. Soon the floor would grow gluey, the drains would inhale without relent and the flow would leap across the insteps of steel-toed rubber boots. The air would choke with waste heat. All would do their tasks: the bleeders, the scalders, the dehairers, the eviscerators, the splitters, the washers, the deboners, the carvers and the sorters. The bolt gun would crack, the workers would gag and the new supervisor would stride back and forth behind the scarlet chorus-lines.

  I settled my goggles and pulled my hard hat on so tight that the cartilage crackled in my ears. Strapped into my apron, belt and rubbers, I was a golem, crude but potent. The machinery groaned, strained and locked into action.

  Before the shift was an hour old, the quality of my replacement’s work began to degrade, and soon he was botching fully half his strokes, though he did not seem to notice. There was nothing I could do about it. I had work of my own, and the muscles in my back were already beginning to quiver.

  Fischer stalked the floor all night, yelling instructions over the crashing of the machines. His barrel body seemed spring-loaded on its small legs, and the cords twitched in his neck and forearms. I could picture him lifting weights to make up for being shorter than he wished. The surprise was that he and I were the same in one way. He was a talented slaughterer who handled the knife beautifully whenever he was called upon to step in and correct a mistake. It pleased him when they lost the run of the work and, in panic, blew their air-horns to call him over. He would respond to the summons at a measured pace, shoulder the workers aside and make the necessary incision.

  In the canteen, halfway through the shift, Fischer spoke to me. His gaze travelled all the way from my breastbone up to the top of my head, and he asked: ‘What do they feed you?’ But before I could answer he turned his attention to a couple of new arrivals, skinny young men with livid faces, and told them a story from another place he’d worked. A rookie slaughterman on his first day there had slipped in a puddle, cracked his head on a steel rail and fallen into the knocking pen. The other slaughterers were in such a hurry they grabbed him by the ankles, strung him up and sent him along the line. His lights were down the chute and his two flanks swinging in opposite directions before anyone knew what had happened.

  The young men gazed at the tabletop, at the headlines telling us FLNEUR KILLS AGAIN. He was full of stories like that, I would discover, about slaughterers being knocked into scald tanks, or mistaking hands for trotters, or stepping outside in their work gear and sending grown men into hysterics. He didn’t mind that half his audience couldn’t understand him and the other half didn’t want to know.

  ‘One place,’ he said, ‘it was swine same as here, but we stunned them with carbon dioxide. They go through the well, get a lungful, don’t feel a thing. But that night there was something wrong with the mixture. They were halfway down the line, some of them, but they started waking up, and I promise you they sounded exactly like people when they screamed. Whole place echoing like a church. No one knew what to do. In the end I had to go round with a knife. It was an hour’s work before the noise stopped. And when we took off our helmets you know what had happened? The hair of every person on that floor had turned pure white.’ While he spoke I sat silent, slouched in my own thoughts of the night Market, stains spreading black in the lamplight and a white-haloed, featureless face. He ended his story with a laugh and turned to me as if I’d challenged him, but I had nothing to add. I didn’t doubt that what he said was true.

  The night after that, he strolled through the mayhem, took up a position a few feet away from where I was working and folded his arms. I glanced up at him, breathing hard, then stooped to the trough and hauled another half-dozen animals through. When I looked again he was still there, his safety goggles reflecting one of the striplights so that a glaring white bar hid the upper half of his face.

  I knew what he was at. He’d seen that I was different from the rest, and he didn’t like it. He knew that I was a craftsman, and that was unacceptable to him: he wanted nothing in this room but straining flesh and labouring blades. Very well, I thought. I didn’t make mistakes on the killing floor, so he could watch as long as he liked. I could work hour after hour without a slip. I wouldn’t be rattled. I knew the knocker would be gaping at this diversion and working even more sloppily than before, but I kept my head down. I don’t make mistakes, but still, this wasn’t fair: under Fischer’s scrutiny my boots and gloves were heavy, and cramps rippled down my back, stiffening my hand. I clenched my fist and the wound stung as the newly mended tissues came apart. All I needed was half a minute’s rest, but hooks were sliding past empty on the bleed rail and the animals were building up beyond the knocking pen.

  The knocker fired the bolt and opened the gate, and I swung myself heavily around, but the timing must have been wrong because my heel shot out from under me and I found myself lying on my back beneath a suffocating weight. My hard hat had cracked on the concrete and purple rings were spreading across my field of vision. I couldn’t catch my breath, or find enough purchase to free myself from the barrowload of hot wet flesh under which I was buried.

  A moment later the inert animal was rolled off my chest, and as I gulped for air Fischer braced, heaved, and hooked the trotter on the rail. Then he strode off in search of his next intervention. Job done. There was nothing left to see over here but a few splatters up the walls.

  After that I worked in a picture-show of revenges. Who would have guessed he had such a power to fascinate? Soon I was thinking of him all the time, his loose twist of a smile, his arrogant technique with the knife. I knew when he stepped on to the floor because my flesh tightened and prickled from scalp to fingertips. I had not spoken a syllable in his presence but I spent nights denouncing him in the private courtroom of my skull. I knew every detail of his face, with its pitted c
heeks and its nose that might have been squeezed out of a tube. When he humiliated an underling I could taste his satisfaction. I studied the torsion of his wrist: I could have sworn I’d known it always, that flick of the knife.

  Afterwards, I could not tell when the idea was born: the most important idea I have ever had. There was no flash, no revelation. Instead, as I was dragging on my street clothes at the end of another shift, I became aware of a notion lying hidden in a fold of my mind, waiting to be noticed. It was frail and incomplete, no more than a seed, but I could tell that if I took care of it it would grow. The idea offered itself in two images. First, Fischer supervising the shift, goggles unblinking, hands by his sides, feet planted wide on the killing floor as the production line thrashed all around him. Second, that faceless figure in the Strangers’ Market, watching across the body of his victim to see what I would do. Two images, and a question. What is the difference?

  The good slaughterer belongs only on the killing floor. At dawn, when he crosses the threshold of the abattoir, he must disappear. He must forget the version of himself which knows how simple it is to end the lives of warm-blooded animals, because that is not a person we want walking around the city.

  And yet, in the city, the Flâneur.

  SICK SLAUGHTER. The papers loved him. CARNAGE IN STONE LANES. When I found the canteen empty I opened the pages out on the Formica and caught up with developments. LAMBS TO THE SHAMBLES. They said that he must be skilled either in surgery or in butchery. COPS BAFFLED. The television that gesticulated away to itself on the counter had a fixation with him too, but I never dared turn up the sound. DON’T GO OUT AT NIGHT. I kept a eye on the images of police jerkins loitering near ambiguous sections of brickwork. RAW HEAD AND BLOODY BONES.

  Why did we want to know? The screen showed graphics of a figure with a question mark for a face, and on the radio in my lodgings, when I could coax voices out of the fuzz, they described his tools and his psychopathology. The papers had a photograph of the latest one to cross his path: it showed her young self in sunny times, her eyes slitted, the light intense. She thought she was in one kind of story until he proved to her that she was in another. And what is she now? A few facts, craning out like struts in the wreck of a burnt house. If I understood anything about the Flâneur, it was that his actions held no interest. He had nothing to tell us.

  The Flâneur of Glory Part. A stagy figure, with his straight blade and his risible air of Victoriana. Some crass newspaperman had awarded him the nickname because, if we knew nothing else, we knew that each of his victims had encountered him walking in the streets of the city. He was around every corner in the fogs which the season brought. When I set off for work with night fanning out across Glory Part, I knew I was entering his jurisdiction, and when I fell asleep in the early morning – so finished by the night’s work that oblivion came in the time it took my body to pass through a quarter circle, face first, into my bed – it was like falling into his arms.

  But it was pitiable, the way he scrawled his marks on the walls as though he expected us to look there for what he had to tell us. As though his clever clues would be puzzled over and then pursued along the alleyways by brilliant detectives and assiduous constables. There was no great mystery about him. Anyone can become what he was. Nothing. A mask stuffed with straw. A bad thing that happens.

  * * *

  I lost my balance, teetered on a high catwalk for one long gasp, and fell. The stained concrete flung itself at my eyes, and I woke, the springs of the mattress clanking. Red figures on the clock told me I had slept longer than usual. Each dawn now I returned to my lodgings worn out by the lurid show in my skull: the bloody man striding up and down the killing floor and the shadowed figure walking the streets. Continually, now, the two of them met and merged and changed faces until they were one and the same. I turned the idea over and over, finding no flaws and no way to tell whether it was true.

  I sat on the edge of the bed, bewildered in the glare from outside, and put on my boots.

  Most evenings I went to the Rose Tree for a breakfast of fried bread, baked beans and dark red tea. I always sat in the same booth at the back of the restaurant, far away from the grease-clouded plate-glass window. I felt inconspicuous there. I could rely on most of the customers to ignore me; but sometimes, as I came in, Bill would turn from his usual place at the counter and greet me with a nod.

  Bill was an older man with an air of chronic ill health and outmoded bohemianism. His long hair and pointed beard were steel-grey, shot with white, and his face was netted with fine wrinkles. When he climbed off his stool and slid into the booth to talk to me, he moved painfully, pressing one hand into his belly. He wore faded floral shirts and always the same elderly corduroy jacket: I had seen him more than once in the Strangers’ Market buying a flower to thread through the buttonhole of the lapel. And yet he carried himself with the air of a man who had knocked around the city for long enough to know how things work. His pale lips pressed often into a sardonic line, and his china-blue eyes were steady and disbelieving. In our conversations he had dropped enough hints for me to understand that Bill was not his real name, and that in the past he had been a malcontent and a political radical. He implied that he had been suspected of involvement with the activities of the Cynics a score of years ago, and that, even now, he had to exercise caution because the authorities were not yet tired of persecuting him. But the clues he gave about his past all came with a teasing twinkle.

  He knew what I did for a living, and although I could not have said how, I felt that our occasional talks had helped me to see what it meant to be a good slaughterman. If I were to confess to anyone it would be to Bill; and now, as he slid into the booth, I knew that I could not remain silent.

  ‘You can’t go to the police,’ he said, as soon as I had blurted out my secret. He stared across the table for a long time, his eyes narrowed into an unreal distance, like a man performing a calculation in his head. Then he seemed to reach an answer that satisfied him.

  ‘Someone like you can never go to the police. You realise how it’ll look to them, if you go in saying you’re not sure, but you think you might have guessed the Flâneur’s identity? That you don’t have any evidence? That you think it’s your boss, but you can’t prove anything?’

  The crows’ feet deepened at the corners of his eyes.

  ‘I’ll tell you what happens. At best, you’re sent away with a clip round the ear for wasting their time. More likely, they decide you’re sick in the head and arrest you on suspicion of being the killer yourself.’

  He studied me thoughtfully until I looked away.

  ‘You’re on your own here, my friend,’ he said. ‘They can’t help you any more than I can. You can’t hand this on, and there’s no one else for you to persuade. You’re going about it the wrong way. You’re looking outside for a solution: but this isn’t happening outside.’

  I must have looked startled, because he checked himself and spoke more softly.

  ‘We’re talking about your conscience,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t matter how: find whatever proof you need, search your memory, watch for clues. But you have to tell yourself a story you can believe. You have to make an account. Then, only then, you’ll be able to do it.’

  I didn’t understand, I told him. Do what?

  He paused, choosing his words. Eventually, he said:

  ‘Something good.’

  Glory Part was a tangle of alleys, wynds and lanes, all built of sooted bricks, the surfaces opened by oblique evening light. In places the walls pressed so close together that they brushed your shoulders on both sides. The foundations were uneven, so that the pebbled lanes rose and fell in steep and unexpected ways and kept breaking into flights of steps. The houses, built up high because there was nowhere else for them to go, leaned together overhead and often enough they joined, turning streets into tunnels.

  I walked, led by Bill’s advice, and kept walking until I found myself standing beneath a lamp post on the Stranger
s’ Market. It did not look out of the ordinary. If there were signs that anything had happened here, I couldn’t see them. When I looked up, the glass held a searing green squiggle on my retina and the rest of the world was shuttered out. Still, this must be the place to find what I needed. I squatted to examine the cobblestones. The surface of each stone was a mountainscape, and the cracks between contained ecosystems of muck, moss and grit. The closer I looked, the more the simple stones of the Market broke down to a chaos of detail. I crossed to the far wall and, after some minutes, found an iron nail sticking out. It was low down, at my knees. I couldn’t tell what adhered to the rust.

  Then a jolt of panic straightened me up with my heart churning. A hand had closed on my shoulder. I turned around, expecting handcuffs, a lynch mob, a knife: but instead a stranger stared up at me, haggard and unshaven, his red-rimmed eyes filled with accusation. In the evening shadows and the low red light his face looked to have been hacked from the same bricks as the walls of the Market. For an instant I felt certain that I was confronting a personification – an envoy of all Glory Part, come to insist that I explain myself. What is your business, his eyes demanded, in the empty Market at sundown? How can you prove that you’re not guilty? My throat tightened, and as he began to speak I fell back from him, away from the lamp post, the nail and the stones, and fled.