by Archie Hind
‘The unpurged images of day recede;
The Emperor’s drunken soldiery are abed.’
If he hadn’t slept in it would have been funny, but the dirty psychological trick seemed no less dirty for its irony.
He rolled over and shook Helen by the shoulder. ‘Helen,’ he said, ‘Helen.’
Helen woke up. She was lying on her side with her back to him and as she sat up and turned her face towards him she looked slow and drowsy with her lips in a swollen sensuous pout from her sleep and her wide set eyes blank and peering. She was smiling. Mat could have lain down with her in his arms under the warm covers had it not been for the de-sexing effect of his anxiety and coursing of the adrenalin in his blood. Suddenly Helen gave a little cry. ‘Oh!’ She put her hand to her mouth. ‘You’ve slept in.’
‘I’ve not half.’
Helen peered at the clock. ‘What time is it?’
‘Eight o’clock.’ It was amazing how he had put his head back on to the pillow to think for a couple of minutes and when he looked at the clock again another half-hour had passed. He thought of the slaughter-house and wished that right now he was there with his knife kit on and working away with everyone else. ‘Right now they’ll all be getting steamed into it.’
Later on when they got up Mat began to feel a little less guilty. Helen sent him round to the bakery to buy a twisted loaf with the poppy seeds sprinkled over the crust. It was a lovely clear morning, though still a little chilly. The streets were quiet with only the schoolchildren going to school and when Mat went into the baker’s shop the smell of the baking, seeing the variety of toasted and brown crusts on the baker’s boards and the old-fashioned sprawl of cheeses, rolls, sausage, butter in the shop had a soothing effect on him. As usual when he went into this shop he couldn’t resist buying half-a-dozen of those hard doughnut-shaped rolls which the Jews call bagels. When he got back to the house there was the rich mixed smell of coffee and ham and eggs.
While eating breakfast Mat became full of optimism. ‘There’s no use crying over spilt milk. You know what I’m going to do?’ he asked. ‘I’m going to sit all day and write. In fact I’m going to finish a story.’
‘Good!’
They cleared away the breakfast and washed the dishes, then Mat helped Helen to make the bed. On a normal day Helen would do these domestic chores in a leisurely way, but today Mat hurried her on, being anxious to get them done and past so that he could have more time to work. But on finishing the chores and with the house all tidy he sat for an hour or so just smoking and staring in front of him. He was sitting idly thinking and dreaming. The surfeit of words which he had suffered the day before had left him dry and exhausted. He felt that he wanted to write but it was out of a feeling of obligation and duty and not through the pressure of his imagination. Rather the imaginative excitement which usually forced him to write was completely absent. He should be writing yet the thought of getting up from his seat and putting pen to paper was too much for him. Instead his mind seemed to be absent and he was merely a cold recipient of sensation; just sitting staring at the empty cleaned out fireplace and listening to the clock ticking. He stared at the blank wall, at the patterns on the wallpaper or out through the cold window frame to the colourless sky outside and the yellow tops of the buses which were parked in the garage on the other side of the brick wall which bounded the bleak backyard outside. He felt bored and his boredom was confirmed by the clattering emptiness of the sound of trucks shunting in the railway yard. The sound recalled to his mind the railway line which had been at the bottom of the street he had lived in as a child. What he thought of in particular, and the memory seemed to spring from his dry mood, was how this monotonous clanking had been the background to so much of his life, had set the mood in which took place this curious absence of feeling which he had experienced so often. He remembered how he used to stand at the close mouth, leaning against the wall, with all the weight of his body on one leg until his hip became sore. Sometimes as he stood there an engine would pass with its train of goods trucks and Mat would watch the trucks. He would be bored, perhaps a little chilled through standing dreaming at the close mouth with nothing to do. And he would count the trucks; count them in that same monotonous automatic way which one reads the writing on the tomato sauce bottle or the jam pot when rising too early in the morning. As each truck appeared to his view from behind the corner of a high tenement Mat would count and say to himself, ‘The next one will be the last’, in the hope that he’d be released from the obsessive addition. Yet this trivial experience was the mark of a severe dissociation which he felt between himself and the world in which he lived.
He used to read books like Ernest Thomson Seton’s Two Little Savages in which the world of ‘nature’ was described. To Mat then the world of ‘nature’ was the Canadian backwoods of Ernest Thomson Seton’s; a world which was malleable and responsive to human activity, a world in which his skills and resiliences could be tested, a world in which owls and rabbits could be caught and stuffed, arrows fletched, wigwams and tepees erected, campfires built, food hunted and caught and eaten. And the vicarious experience of all these things in reading a book was not enough. He wandered about the closes and backyards in which there were no coons or feathers or tracks or bushes but only the lucid plumb lines of human building; gables, brick walls, iron railings, cobbled streets; then he ended up mooning at the close mouth and counting trucks. In his frustrated passion for making he did in the end try wildly to emulate the backwoodsman. He got a pair of rabbit skins from the fishmonger and decided that he’d tan the skins himself and make a pair of Indian moccasins. After he’d bought the skins he started to look around for some oak bark, bone and deer sinews and the rest of the things needed for curing, tanning, cutting and sewing the hides. He couldn’t find any oak bark anywhere, still less the deer’s sinews. When he asked around nobody could suggest any place where he might find some, and he wasn’t all that fussy as an elk’s sinews would have done just as well. He nearly got caught by a park-keeper for stripping the bark from a twisted old hawthorn. The hawthorn’s leaves had the same twisted curly look as the pictures of oak leaves which he had seen in a book and he thought that it might do just as well for tanning. Meanwhile the rabbit skins were wrapped up in a newspaper in his drawer. Now Mat smiled to himself as he recalled how the skins had given their presence away. He hadn’t thought that the smell was so bad, but he got a severe licking for it all the same.
Mat was sitting smiling to himself, remembering the hard, stinking smell which had seemed to rise out of the drawer in slabs, and the satisfaction which he had felt from it, as if some of the ‘nature’ which he had so hankered after had entered into the refractory reality with which he was surrounded. Then the thought came to him that all this would make a good story. He got up from his chair and found pen and paper.
It was late in the evening when Mat finished the story. He had sat writing while he was having lunch, then while having tea. There were exciting possibilities in the story. For one thing, in his vivid remembrance of the appearance of the place where it had happened. The front of the tenement where he had lived was a rich red-brown sandstone but it was all scuffed with rubbings, covered with chalked graffiti and spotted with muddy ball marks; there were the neat scrubbed closes from which you were chased when you played, the funny drystane dyke which had been built at the end of the row of macadamised courtyards and on the other side of which was a piece of waste land full of grass and dockens. He remembered how the hard grey stone of the dyke warmed from the sun, how in a particular bit of the waste ground the grass under a wall grew luxuriant with a pale waxy green colour, how underneath the sandy soil there were layers of pure creamy clay which could be worked into shapes like plasticine. He deliberately worked all this into the story. The child’s vivid and sensuous apprehension of the world was contrasted with the meagreness of the world’s offering to him; the creative excitement of the child and his pathetic attempts at creation with all the lack
of apparatus and resource. And, of course, the severe beating which he received for all his efforts in attempting to do something which, besides being dirty, was impossible and unnecessary.
When he was finished Mat put the pieces of paper together and made a rough calculation of the number of words in the story. It was somewhere between two and three thousand words. This surprised him as he seemed to have been writing intensely and quickly the whole day. In his weariness he thought of those prolific people who could churn out that number of words every day and he wondered how they did it. However, he had written the story and he thought that it wasn’t too bad. He took a piece of blank paper, clipped it over the rest of the sheets and wrote the title with some satisfaction, The Realist.
As they went to bed after supper Mat wound the clock and made a firm resolution to hear the alarm in the morning. During the last couple of days he had had a surfeit of words, also he had lost a good deal of money. There was the day’s wages lost and the money he spent while out drinking. He fell asleep thinking about both the story and the alarm. The feeling of pleasure about the story began to diminish and the thought of the alarm took precedence. One of the worst things you could do when you always had to get up early was to break the habit, even if only for one morning, and Mat knew he would feel uncomfortable for a few days until this breach in his habit would heal. Although his sleep that night was dreamless he did waken several times to look at the clock until he finally woke to see that it was only a few minutes before the alarm would ring. For a minute or two he lay there thankful that he was awake then he got up and pressed the button down on the alarm so that it would not go off and awaken Helen.
After the morning halt for breakfast Mat was working in a room beside two killers with whom he didn’t usually work. The benefit man who usually did their room had cut himself and as Mat’s own rooms weren’t too busy he took his place. One of the killers in the room was a big, coarse-built man with a slow sarcastic manner who was in the habit of baiting any benefit man who came into the room to work. He would take a gratuitous dislike to somebody and then he’d try to make their lives miserable with his malicious sadistic remarks. He had the knack of finding out the sore spots in people and the gift of probing them with his wheedling jocular manner. He started on Mat.
‘I see you had a day off yesterday.’
Mat had lost a day’s wages and the boss had bawled him out, so he didn’t want to talk about it. ‘Aye, Wullie.’
‘You’ll have lost a day’s wages. You’ll be feeling that on Friday wull ye not?’
‘Ach, not so bad,’ Mat said.
‘Whit? Are you rich then?’
‘I’m no’ rich. Just nut worried. There’s other things than money.’
‘Of course,’ Wullie said, ‘I forgot you don’t worry about money. You just worry about higher things.’ He gloated to people often about money because he himself was invulnerable on that point. Apart from his work as a killer he also dealt in cattle, buying beef on the hoof and selling it in the market to the butchers. ‘You wait till the bairnies start coming. Then you’ll worry all right.’
‘Right, Wullie,’ Mat said. ‘I’ll do the worrying.’ Mat didn’t want to needle with Wullie. In spite of the fact that he could be so aggravating Mat felt sympathy towards him. There was a feeling of intelligence which came from the man and Mat guessed that his awareness of other people’s vulnerability came from a genuine sensitivity towards them. Also there was this contradiction in the man’s make-up in that his bigness, his bulky powerfulness, exuded that kind of gentleness which is so often found in physically strong men and gave a feeling from him that belied his maliciousness.
Mat started to skin the head on Wullie’s beast. He cleared the thrapple up to the breast, cut the hide away from the cheeks, slit the nostrils and was about to skin down the last strip of hide from the nose to between the horns. He was bending down over the head when Wullie, who was clearing the hide from the breast, backed into him.
‘Oops! Sorry!’ Wullie said, and he stood up straight, stroking his knife and looking over his shoulder at Mat. ‘Are you nut finished that heid yet?’
Mat muttered at him. ‘How in the hell can I skin the heid when your big fat arse is in the road!’ He was sure that Wullie had backed into him to annoy him.
Wullie just grinned. ‘Temper, temper.’
‘Oot the road,’ Mat said, and he bent down and skinned the head.
Wullie stood back, ostentatiously giving Mat room. Mat’s knife had just been set and he had a good edge to it so that he cleared the last strip of hide in one stroke.
‘My, my!’ Wullie said. ‘Look at the knife flying. It’s a pity ye cannae keep up wi’ it.’
Mat felt his temper going, but he suppressed it and went on working. He looked at Wullie while he was working and began to think that his dryness and dourness was an affectation in the man – and Mat guessed that he held an image of himself as being like this – slow, indifferent, invulnerable, contained. There was a period of silence while the beasts were being hung on the cambrels. As the carcases started to lift from the ground Mat slit the belly in Wullie’s beast, cleared the fat, removed the intestine, punched down the swelling paunch to expose the gullet, deftly slitting the little pink tube and pulling the stomachs on to the floor. Then he went over to the other killer’s beast and did the same, working fast in order to keep himself ahead of the killer. Wullie had started to make a running commentary on Mat’s work. He was standing grinning behind the beast, clearing the vent and shouting in mock admiration. ‘Oh, look at him go. Mind yersel. Watch his knife.’ When Mat ran out of the room with the intestines draped over his arm he had to use that characteristic mincing gait as his feet slid over the greasy floor and among the piled-up hooves. Wullie shouted. ‘Oh! You’ll heat your watter.’
When Mat came into the room again he moved ponderously and slowly, keeping his face dour and in fact half-mimicking all Wullie’s mannerisms. He stroked his knife slowly on the steel, put it into its wooden sheath, then stuck his arms akimbo. He spoke in a friendly tone of voice.
‘Wullie, lad. You’re nattering away there like some auld sweetie wife.’ The other killer in the room looked up and grinned as Mat addressed him. ‘Tut, tut. What a chatter-box. His tongue’s goin’ like the clapper of a bell.’ He turned his back on Wullie and started to separate the stomachs on the floor. He affected an air of indifference. Wullie didn’t like the garrulous role which Mat had cast him in and his face only half hid his annoyance as he pulled viciously at the hide under the tail.
Wullie didn’t speak again until the next two beasts had been felled and he had just about finished. Mat had cleared the room, hung up the offals and was standing watching Wullie splitting the beast’s backbone. Both Wullie and the other killer were taking great care with the splitting as both the beasts belonged to Wullie himself. The carcases were from young bullocks and the bones were soft and easy to split. Wullie got back into his jocular mood again for he turned and smiled sarcastically at Mat.
‘You’ve got time to go down and get a haircut before the next felling.’
‘Go and get stuffed,’ Mat said. He turned and walked away to the door of the room and Wullie shouted after him ‘Look at the intellectual cheating the barber.’ Mat stood at the door of the room looking into the pass. He wished that the next felling was past so that he could get away from Wullie to another room. Wullie was still shouting at him ‘He’s saving up for a fiddle. He cannae get his hair cut till he gets an estimate from the barber.’
‘I thought,’ Mat asked, ‘that you had enough big deals of your own without worrying about other people’s business.’
‘It is my business.’ Wullie spoke with his voice full of moralistic viciousness. ‘You shouldnae be allowed to work wi’ food wi’ your hair that length.’ Wullie had stopped splitting the beast and was now stripping the pleural membrane from the inside of the ribs. Mat watched. There were two diffuse pink spots on the inner side of each rib cage and as Wull
ie removed the pleural membrane he was also removing these pink spots along with some little brown oval-shaped tubers. Adhesions and tubers.
‘Why?’ Mat asked.
‘Because people have to eat the beef,’ Wullie said, still moralising.
Mat looked at Wullie incredulously. He felt goose-pimples crawl all over him as he realised that as Wullie was reproving him with all the fervour of his moral indignation he could also remove this slight trace of tuberculosis from the carcase so that the meat inspector wouldn’t see it, and so that he wouldn’t lose the price of the carcase.
‘So they have, Wullie,’ Mat said and went over to where the lungs were hanging. He trimmed some fat away and cut through the lymph nodes attached to the trachea. In the centre of each gland there was a focus of yellow pus. Mat started to shout. ‘Inspector! IN-SPECTOR!’
‘Shurrup,’ Wullie said.
Mat went on shouting. When you are used to working amongst the clatter of bogey wheels, the crack of pistols, the grinding of gears, the bawling of cattle, you have to learn to make yourself heard and Mat had cultivated a clear mountaineer’s yell which pierced through the other sounds and could be heard in every part of the slaughter-house. Wullie came out from behind the hanging carcase with an expression of pain and disgust on his face. Mat started to shout again using his hands against his mouth like a trumpet.
‘Inspector! Inspector!’
When the meat inspector came in his white coat he glanced casually at the suppurating glands and gestured towards the door and Mat took the offals and dumped them on the floor outside. The rest of the carcase as well was condemned as unfit for human consumption. Wullie was furious and when the inspector had left the room he turned on Mat. He spoke slowly, and he seemed genuinely hurt. ‘Whit did you dae that for?’