by Rebecca Tope
A Death to Record
REBECCA TOPE
For Sue
and for my beloved fellow writers,
whose support has been so greatly valued:
Julia, Martin, Jennifer, Gavrielle, Susan, Jeff,
Janet, Katherine, Mandy and Pearl.
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
AUTHOR’S NOTE
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
About the Author
By Rebecca Tope
Copyright
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AUTHOR’S NOTE
This book was written over the summer and autumn of 2000, when TB in cattle was the prevailing concern of West Country farmers. Since then, the cataclysm of foot and mouth disease has overtaken those same farmers. I don’t think anybody anticipated this development, although in 2000 there was very much a mood of ‘What next?’. My hope is that this story will serve to remind us that things were already bad before February 2001. And now, perhaps inevitably, with this 2012 reissue we are once again embroiled in the same arguments and dilemmas surrounding TB and the role of badgers.
PROLOGUE
The men approached the barn from every direction, climbing over gates, following age-old footpaths, in ones and twos, until fifteen of them crowded into the near-derelict building. Muffled in thick jackets and body warmers, there was a uniform colourlessness to them that would have made them difficult to recognise, even for someone who knew them. A shuffling schoolboy nervousness would have alerted anyone to the unorthodoxy of their activity.
The two dogs were snuffling eagerly. Men slapped them genially, encouraging their bloodlust. One of them was brought forward. ‘Go to it, Brewster!’ said a thin-faced man. ‘Attaboy!’ Brewster strained on his length of bale string, eyes fixed on the hessian sack five feet away. Something inside the sack was growling, thrashing to and fro.
Quickly, three or four men arranged a rough circle of musty hay bales in the middle of the small barn, leaving scant space for themselves between their ring and the walls. Fiercely cold air invaded the building through the many holes in the cob walls. It had once been a well-built store for fodder, nearly half a mile from the farmhouse. Now the house belonged to a computer programmer and the land was rented out to neighbours. Nobody used the barn any more. Except every second or third Sunday evening, these men who gathered for their illicit pleasures – and had done for years.
‘Okay, mate. Let him out.’ The sack was lugged into the middle of the makeshift ring and its mouth untied. Hastily the men retreated behind the bales and the dog was released from his string.
The two animals were of much the same size. Both bared their teeth aggressively, neither showing the slightest tremor of fear. The men had been unerring in their selection of natural enemies: two species programmed genetically to fight to the death.
Which they proceeded to do, taking twenty-five minutes from first to last. Before Brewster could become too exhausted, the second dog was released, shooting into the ring like a cannonball. There was only one outcome to be contemplated and fair play was never intended to be part of it. Now both dogs tore into the victim, sending it blindly snapping in two directions in a noble attempt to defend itself.
Open wounds poured blood; teeth clashed, claws flashed and sliced; an eye was lost, an underbelly ripped. They snarled and panted and spat bloody froth. And still they fought, seemingly oblivious to the frenzied encouragement from the men, who crouched scarlet-faced, rocking with the thrill of the fight. Together they moved, shoulder to shoulder, elbows out, fists clenched, in a rhythm that was visceral and universal. The rhythm of the war dance, the heartbeat and the sexual act.
As the wild animal from the sack finally sank defeated under the locked jaws of the dogs, the men exhaled as one. The long post-coital breath of release carried with it a weight of shameful anticlimax that had to be denied with grins and back slaps and promises that it wouldn’t be long until the next time. Just give Brewster and Jasper time to get over their injuries.
CHAPTER ONE
The computer had packed up again. Gordon hovered impatiently as Deirdre struggled with it, tapping in vain on the unresponsive keys. ‘You’ll have to do it by hand,’ he told her. ‘I can’t wait any longer. It’s three already.’
Savagely, she slammed the laptop’s lid down, making the farmer wince, and scooped up the two vivid orange boxes full of small plastic pots. ‘All right, then,’ she snapped. ‘I’m ready.’ Then she paused, and looked at him. ‘Sorry,’ she muttered. ‘It’s not your fault. Just me losing my temper again.’
He cocked his head in a curt sympathy. ‘It was better before they started giving you those things,’ he commented. ‘Funny the way everything seemed better then.’
‘Tell me about it,’ she sighed. They indulged in a moment of nostalgic intimacy: two people nearing forty and feeling inescapably middle-aged. Five years ago, milk and beef prices had been high, computers in the milking parlour a distant possibility and bull calves a valuable source of income. ‘Awful how quickly everything can change,’ Deirdre added, after a few moments. ‘Still shooting your calves?’ She knew the answer already – she’d seen the pile of pathetic bodies out in the yard, waiting for the local hunt to collect them as food for the hounds.
He made an inarticulate sound of disgust and nodded. ‘Only three or four stragglers left to calve now,’ he said with relief. ‘Worst thing I’ve ever had to do, telling Sean to shoot the poor little buggers.’ He paused. ‘Even worse than sending the TB-positive beasts for slaughter. BSE hardened us to that. At least with TB you know they’re sick and liable to infect the others.’
Deirdre had heard it all before; not just from Gordon, but also from the majority of her farmers, forced to destroy newborns which until recently would have made good money as beef animals. Sometimes she had an image of farming as a dark underworld, full of suffering and despair, unceasing hard labour and wholesale betrayal. Even the media were beginning to take some notice as farms went out of business.
‘It’s a holocaust,’ the farmers told each other, thinking of the thousands of incinerated animals, the brutal suicide levels amongst farmers, the generally uncaring attitudes of the population at large. Nobody thought it too strong a word to use, in the circumstances.
‘What happened to number five-five-four?’ Deirdre asked, running down his list of events in the herd since her last visit, and finding dead written against that particular animal. A strangled sound made her look up at him. His face was twisted with the pain of the memory and she wished she hadn’t asked.
‘She had a bad calving,’ he said, looking away, his cheeks flushing.
‘I remember her. The one with the curly topknot. One of your favourites, wasn’t she?’ She knew she was hurting him, forcing him to tell the story, but curiosity prevailed over sensitivity, as usual.
‘We had to shoot her,’ he said, pulling his top lip between his teeth and visibly biting down on it. The tears that filmed his eyes were not the result of the bite. ‘The calf got stuck and she would have needed a caesarean.’
/> ‘Which costs two hundred quid these days,’ she supplied, understandingly. Another story she’d heard more than once in the past few months.
‘I didn’t let her suffer for more than a few minutes,’ he assured her grimly. ‘Now, let’s get started.’
The cows were crowding and jostling in the yard, their breath making clouds of vapour in the frosty air. Their winter coats made them look unkempt, an impression increased by the patches of drying dung on their sides and the swollen joints on many back legs. Wisps of straw clung to the muck, which extended to the soft area between the front legs, in some cases. Even to Deirdre’s eye, they looked a mess. ‘I see you’ve been economising on straw again,’ she commented critically. Mucky udders were bad news for her – it took the dairyman long minutes of washing to get them clean enough to milk and she got home proportionately later.
‘Long time till spring,’ Gordon said shortly. ‘Have to make it last.’
Deirdre knew she had no right to carp – Gordon was doing his best, and it was as frustrating for him to have to pick away the dung and get his hands chapped by the rapidly-cooling washing water as it was for her waiting for him to get on with the job.
He pressed the switch to start the motor. A loud throbbing erupted, enhanced by whistles and hisses which were eliminated one by one as he closed valves and established a vacuum. Of their own accord, twelve rubber, plastic and aluminium clusters rose into the air, ready and waiting for the milk-heavy animals. The routine was unvaried, twice a day, year in, year out. Except on Recording Day, when Deirdre showed up and the herdsman had someone to talk to, and someone observing every move he made.
She watched him now, as she watched all the men she worked with. He was one of the more vigorous, fast-moving and focused. Unlike most, he worked with bare hands even in mid-winter, dipping them into a bucket of tepid water every now and then to clean them. He sported a matted woollen hat pulled over his ears and a grimy brown scarf crossed at his neck and tucked inside his ancient corduroy jacket. As protection against muck and other excretions, he wore a long grey rubber apron. Farmers’ clothes were part of their camouflage, she’d long ago realised. Intelligent, efficient, courageous men disappeared into shapeless, colourless yokels when they donned their dairy garb. They became figures of fun in the public eye, sucking straws and scratching heads with grimy fingers. Deirdre knew better – she worked with a dozen or more of these men, glimpsing the complex individual beneath the camouflage as they made full use of her captive listening ear. The milk recording service monitored the quality and quantity of each cow’s yield in a typical twenty-four-hour period, giving official confirmation for the farmer to use when completing dossiers on his herd, as well as laboratory analysis of the milk. With the inexorable escalation of farm paperwork, the job of a milk recorder had also expanded. Every event during the previous month had to be entered onto computer files: births, deaths, sales, purchases, inseminations, health problems, lactation details. Everything was assessed and quantified and used for predictions until it was all too easy to forget they were dealing with living creatures. Nobody but the most stubborn old-timers referred to the cows by name any more, and it was a rash herdsman who developed close favourites amongst his animals. ‘Cull’ was a word used so often that it had its own keystroke on the computer.
The milking got under way. Gordon tolerated very little dithering from the animals, whistling them in and slapping them if they stood awkwardly or moved too slowly. Deirdre had never seen him hit a cow hard enough to really hurt it – which was more than she could say for some of the men she encountered, including Gordon’s own herdsman, who usually milked these cows. All the same, she suspected that Gordon was more self-controlled when she was watching him. She was dubious as to whether she ever saw the real man.
The herdsman, Sean O’Farrell, was employed by Gordon Hillcock, owner of the farm, to do the milking for five or six days each week, his time off forming a complex pattern that only he and his employer fully understood. It was fairly unusual for Gordon to be milking on Recording Day, but he generally joined Deirdre in the office for a ten-minute chat on her visits, and she met him now and then at markets or shows, or even in the local shops. She felt she knew the owner of Dunsworthy Farm nearly as well as she knew his herdsman.
She had been a milk recorder for five years, and it was axiomatic amongst farmers that Recording Day was a jinx. Something nearly always went wrong, either because of the need for additional equipment or because the cows objected to the stranger in their midst. Sometimes it seemed that any disaster waiting to happen would habitually choose Recording Day to make its move. Deirdre had grown accustomed to the sighs of half-suppressed reproach from the many different herdsmen and farmers she met, although none of them ever openly accused her of causing trouble. After all, they had opted to pay for her services – there was no compulsion.
Two lines of six cows lumbered into the tight herringbone rows on either side of the parlour. In a pit, three feet lower than the animals, the two people manoeuvred in a long-established routine. Gordon moved down each row, squirting a jet of water over the udders, from a nozzle hanging from the pipework overhead. Then he slowly worked back along the row, wiping a damp paper towel across each udder, pausing now and then to scrub a piece of dried dung from a teat or to inspect a suspiciously swollen quarter, before deftly swinging the unit of four simulated calves’ mouths underneath the udder and one-two-three-four, applying them in turn to each teat. The rhythmic sucking, like that of babies in a well-organised Soviet nursery, brought pause and relief.
Gordon wiped his hands and glanced at Deirdre, waiting with her rack full of small pots slung comically around her neck. ‘Bloody awful weather,’ he commented idly. ‘First frost of the year.’
The recorder merely nodded, waiting for more interesting conversation. When none came, she said, ‘Sean’s having a day off then, is he?’
Gordon hesitated, glancing along the double row of cows before replying. ‘He agreed to swap this afternoon and tomorrow morning, for Saturday. I want to … go somewhere at the weekend.’
She thought she knew where that ‘somewhere’ was, but said nothing. It ought to have surprised nobody that in that atmosphere of anxiety and frustration, farmers would feel compelled to fight back. In her awkward position as semi-spy with deeply ambiguous loyalties, Deirdre had learnt when to feign ignorance. So she gauged her reaction carefully and widened her eyes teasingly. ‘Well, well, that sounds unusually amicable for you two.’
‘It’s no problem to him. Doesn’t matter what day it is to Sean.’ He spoke over his shoulder, as he moved to reapply a cluster that had fallen off one of the cows before she’d finished milking. Watching him retrieve it and patiently reconnect it to the cow, Deirdre prepared to go into action herself.
Moments later, one of the milking units detached itself from a cow and swung free, up and out, in an arc calculated to catch an unwary person full in the face. Deirdre adjusted her rack, felt in her top breast pocket for pencil and dipper, and went to work. Squinting at the flask adjacent to the cow, she read the calibrated figure indicating the milk yield and wrote it in indelible green on the white lid of the appropriate pot, already carrying a black number to correspond to that on the cow’s rump. Then, with the manipulation of a sequence of switches and levers, involving the hissing of escaping air from the vacuum suction system, and several drops of milk trickling down her sleeve as well as into the dipper, she captured a few millilitres. This was poured into the pot, the lid raised and then pressed home with a practised flick of the left thumb. Finally, she kept one finger on the lever at the top of the flask until all remaining milk had drained away, leaving it ready for the next cow.
Thus was captured a record of the quantity and quality of Line Number 740’s milk for that afternoon. The recorder would have to repeat this performance for all one hundred and four cows currently in milk – and then laboriously transfer the yields to printed sheets in the farm office. Normally, she would k
ey them into the laptop – but the laptop was playing dead again. The same process would be duplicated in the morning.
Deirdre often wondered exactly what the men thought of her. They were usually friendly, glad to have someone to talk to for a change, and eager for the gossip she brought with her from her other farms. The chief topic of discussion these days was which farms had gone out of business since her last visit. Those hanging on would buy up the best of the dissolving herds at knockdown prices, and congratulate themselves on being amongst the survivors. Where once there had been friendly rivalry, there was now anxiety, grief and numbing shock, combined inevitably with Schadenfreude and self-righteous smugness – I never thought ’e’d make a go of it, borrowing as heavily as ’e did. Gordon Hillcock was the youngest farm owner in the district, by a decade or so. Farming was becoming an old man’s pursuit, which in itself sounded a death knell in many people’s ears.
Opportunities for conversation were brief. Gordon’s pace increased as time went on, but his mood seemed to darken. Deirdre’s own spirits were also far from sunny; since her computer had died on her, she was going to have to spend time she begrudged doing the job by hand afterwards. Gordon wouldn’t get his computerised print-out, either, with an assessment of each animal’s performance. But she didn’t want to appear stand-offish. Maintaining good relations with the farmer was all part of the job.
‘So you and Sean aren’t cross with each other any more?’ she prompted.
‘What?’ He turned to stare at her. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, last month you weren’t speaking; you’d had some sort of fight. It probably seems a long time ago now.’
Visiting only once a month, her perception of the passage of time was inevitably very different from that of the men who performed this same task something like sixty times between her attendances. No wonder they couldn’t remember what had been happening a month ago. And this time there’d been Christmas and New Year in between.