The Dear Green Place

by Archie Hind

  ‘People have to eat that beef,’ Mat said, deliberately repeating Wullie’s phrase.

  ‘That carcase would maybe have been cleared if you had kept your mouth shut,’ Wullie said.

  ‘You’re a big firm. You can stand it.’

  Wullie shrugged. He wouldn’t admit that he could be touched by any financial loss. In fact the loss of the carcase would make no real difference to him. Much less than the loss of a day’s wages to Mat. Wullie wouldn’t have to do without anything, yet Mat knew that he’d brood and concentrate on his loss, that it really hurt him. He showed his anger at Mat with a huffy silence.

  After the next felling Mat was finished in Wullie’s room. By this time it had spread around the slaughter-house what had happened and several benefit men had come into the room to gloat at Wullie and give Mat the thumbs up sign. When the two carcases were hung up and the offals cleared, Mat cleaned the fat from his knife under the hot-water tap. Wullie was standing at the top of the rooms steeling his knives and putting on a sad reproachful look. He shook his head and clicked his tongue. ‘I didn’t think you’d do a thing like that.’

  Mat felt the hilarity bubbling up inside him, he put his hands to his mouth and bawled at Wullie. ‘You’re nothing but an effing big hypocrite.’

  Wullie picked up a foot and slung it viciously at Mat who ducked giggling behind the wall of the room. Mat heard the thud of the foot against the wall, then poked his head round the corner of the room and made an obscene gesture at Wullie but Wullie had turned and was poking away at the carcase with his knife.

  In the next room where Mat had to work there was only a single killer and Mat gave him a hand to get the cattle out of the pen and tied up in the room. These were the last two beasts to be killed that day as far as concerned Mat. The killer with whom he was working now, Jimmy McGuire, was a slightly built elderly man, a very good tradesman whom Mat liked. He was the kind of man who’d look up from his work and say, ‘Gie’s a song,’ or when he was standing steeling his knives he’d grin at everyone and say, ‘Are you all right?’ Otherwise he didn’t talk much but just whistled and sang all the time. After they had got the beasts tied to the stunning posts Jimmy waved to Mat. ‘Don’t shout on the gunner. We’ll have a smoke first.’ They stood facing one another across the room, leaning against the haunches of the beasts and smoking their cigarettes. Mat felt relieved to be away from Wullie’s room but the depressing thought came to him that everyone’s approval of the trick he’d played on Wullie came from the fact that Wullie was so unpopular and not from the fact that he was right to point out a diseased beast to the inspector. Also he thought of Wullie’s remark. ‘He’s saving up for a fiddle.’ This was part of a general feeling of aggressive philistinism that he was always having to put up with. He felt so disgusted with this attitude that it was worse to have the taint of fiddler than it was to try and hide a diseased beast. He had sometimes found himself at the receiving end of contemptuous remarks from people other than Wullie, sometimes from the very ones who were laughing at Wullie now. If he didn’t know how to defend himself it would be worse. He thought of the invitation he had received from George Duncan, to visit him the following Sunday. It would be a pleasant change from people like Wullie.

  They finished their cigarettes and brought the gunner into the room. Both beasts were dropped to the floor. On one side there was an Aberdeen Angus bullock and on the other a bull. Mat took the rope from the bullock’s neck and hung it up; then took the cane down from its hook, pithed the bullock and went over to where Jimmy was loosening the rope from the stunning post next to the bull. It had fallen badly and was lying, its forequarters slumped against the wall, its feet tucked beneath it and its haunches pointing out into the room at an angle. Jimmy was standing inside this angle between the bull and the wall trying to get a purchase with his feet on its shoulders and pushing with his back to the wall. Mat was busy thinking of the violence of the humane killer, the bolt gun with its tiny brass cartridges which could slap the big bulls on to the floor so easily and he was searching in his mind for words that would express the locked spasmodic pose of the bull as it lay shuddering against the wall. He took the bull by the horns and started to pull, trying to help Jimmy roll the beast over on to its other side and away from the wall. It came half way over until its feet were tucked directly under it.

  Mat still had a grip of the horns and was still searching in his mind for words. He was tugging hard and only half aware of the bull’s growing resistance when he heard Jimmy give a sudden exclamation, three short rising expirations of the breath, ‘Ha, huh, huh!’ and Mat realised that the bull’s hindquarters were up and that its forelegs were scrabbling for purchase on the floor. He gripped the horns tighter, tugged violently at the head and tried to kick the forelegs away from under the beast, but the laxness had gone from its neck and Mat might as well have been tugging at a wall. There was a blur of impressions, the bull’s glaucous rolling eye, Jimmy’s surprised face, the vicious lowering of the bull’s head.

  Mat threw himself on to the bull’s head right between the horns just as it hooked at him, then was surprised by the soft ease with which his body flew through the air. He went flying backwards out through the door of the room just missing the wall. His steel described an arc in the air and hit him on the shoulder and he heard the slither of his razor-edged knives as they fell out of the wooden box. The thing happened so quickly that Mat’s reflexes took over and he twisted in the air to land crouched among a pile of feet and manyplies. He rolled over to break his fall and was up on his feet to face the bull all in one movement. His knives had fallen safely away from him and the bull had fallen again on to its side. It was lying further away from the wall now and thrashing its head up and down. The tip of its right horn had impaled Jimmy’s foot and he was standing on one leg holding on to the stunning post and working his impaled foot up and down with the thrashing of the bull’s head. His face was twisted in pain.

  Mat threw himself again at the bull, grabbing a horn as the head came up. He put as much strength as he could into taking the weight of the head and for a second or two held it twisted away from the floor. Jimmy jerked his caught foot from the horn and hopped away. Mat grabbed the pithing cane from the floor and jumped on the head kneeling on the animal’s face. He was shocked by the animal’s distress for he could see the little round hole edged with pink froth where it had been shot. As he went up and down with the motion of the bull’s head, he held on to a horn with one hand and felt for the little round hole with the other. He went up and down a couple of times before he felt the cane slip in and the head jerk throwing Mat off again. As the animal’s head went down again both Mat and Jimmy threw themselves on to it and Jimmy pushed the cane right in for its full length. The legs thrashed while Jimmy worked the cane in and out, then suddenly the animal went lax.

  Jimmy hopped over to the wall, propped his back against it and pulled off his boot and sock. The horn had gone in through the upper of his boot, scraped the side of his foot then stuck into the sole. There was a pink splotch on the side of his foot where a bruise was starting and he had lost some skin. Mat picked up the wellington boot and examined it. Jimmy was rueful.

  ‘A brand new pair of wellingtons.’

  Mat stood silent for a moment with his finger poked through the tear in the wellington, then said, ‘How the hell did that happen?’

  Jimmy looked down at the bull, pursed his lips and blew, ‘God knows. I thought you were away for it. You’re going to be sore wi’ that bump you took.’

  Mat laughed. He pulled his shirt away from his ribs and they both looked down. Over a large part of the front of his chest the skin had all flaked away and underneath the flakes of skin were tiny little spots of blood. He laughed again. ‘I never even felt that.’ Then he felt shaky and he went away to look for his knives. Usually when an animal is shot it is dead. He supposed that with the bull having an inch-thick hide covering its forehead and with its tough thick skull, the bolt had just penetrat
ed the skull and had temporarily stunned it without damaging the brain. If the animal had not fallen over on to the wrong side, if it had been pithed quick enough, then the thing would never have happened. Mat felt that he himself had been at fault for if instead of brooding about Wullie and thinking about bloody literature he had been paying attention, noticed that it was a bull that was being felled, he would have shoved the hindquarters against the wall and given the tail a pull as the pistol was fired. Then it would have fallen away from the wall in a position where it could have been pithed right away.

  To think that he had pretensions to being an artist. He blethered away to Jimmy Aitken about writing whenever he had the chance. Yesterday he had written a story and Helen had believed in him. The day before he had spent spouting about art to Sam Richards and his friends. If he really was an artist then surely one of the things he should be more sensitive to and more responsible for was the suffering of others, especially the innocent. Instead of mauling words about inside his head he should be paying attention. This attentive explicit attitude towards his surroundings and others should be part of his nature as an artist, part of his duty. It was surely enough that the animal had to be slaughtered for men’s sake without having to suffer this messy painful end as well. And besides, there was the innocence of the animal. It shouldn’t have suffered through any defection on his part.

  The edges of Mat’s knives had been turned when they fell on the floor and Mat started to put a new edge on them as quickly as he could. He held the hone at the end and used the ball of his thumb as a stop for the knife. He got a certain grim satisfaction out of the thought that if he didn’t pay attention while he was doing this that he’d take the fingers off himself. While he was honing the knives Jimmy had stuck both the beasts and was now working the crane lifting up the carcases to bleed. He was looking at Mat and smiling, making rueful grimaces and clicking with his tongue.

  ‘Tch! Tch! Matthew Craig! I thought you were a goner.’

  They looked at one another and shook their heads commiseratingly. Jimmy laughed.

  ‘These things can happen.’

  11

  WHEN SEPTEMBER CAME Helen gave birth to a boy. The birth took place a few days after the date on which the doctor said the baby was due. In spite of the fact that the boy was very big Helen had no trouble with the birth. Mat had gone with her in the ambulance to the hospital, had been given her clothes to take home and then had been more or less thrown out. He had walked all the way home. By the time he had arrived home, left Helen’s clothes in the house, and gone out again to phone the hospital, the baby had been born. ‘A remarkably easy birth,’ the ward sister had said on the phone and he wasn’t to worry as Mrs Craig was all right. ‘Mother and child are both quite comfortable.’ Mat accepted the comforting words with relief and went home to the empty house. Up until now he had thought only of the possible dangers of childbirth. While he was standing in the corridors of the hospital with its glazed tiles and its disinfectant smell he had felt anxious and afraid. It was the same hospital which the men from the slaughter-house went to when they had to have their fingers stitched and he had stood in the same corridor often before when he had taken men up to have their cuts repaired. He couldn’t help associating the place with injury. It seemed to him a focus, a kind of clearing house for all the accidents, the contingencies, the gratuitousness of life. All the cut, crushed and mutilated people who came in through the gates moaning, shocked and nauseated with bloodied clothes, or in white bandages with white shocked faces. The children struck with disease and fevers, the men dropping in the streets with strokes or heart attacks, the anxious frightened relatives. The clean surgical atmosphere which was suggestive of the soft vulnerability of flesh. The thought of all those shiny gripping, pinching and cutting instruments depressed Mat and all the way home he could only think of the danger of living. When he had gone to the phone box there was somebody in it already and he had had to stand outside and wait.

  Standing there in the bright lit street he was reminded of another incident which had happened once a long, long time ago. He had been standing like that night beside a phone box but not waiting to phone. He couldn’t remember when it was or why he had been waiting at that particular place, except that he had been sent on some errand by a neighbour. Vaguely he remembered that he had carried an envelope and that the faces of the adults concerned had been grave. He had sensed behind the gravity of the errand one of those serious, but mysterious cataclysms, which occurred in the adult world. Anyway, he had felt that evening a menacing sense of the awful possibilities of life. It must have been another September evening for there had been the same smoky chilly atmosphere, with the dusty air and the dusk light all grimy and diffuse. He had stood shivering at the tram stop looking down the long slope of the street towards the bend where the tram would appear. At the bend there were clusters of street lights, each one surrounded by tiny spikes which seemed to shimmer and move. Two women came up out of the dusk and one of them went into the phone booth. As he stood looking for the tram and shifting his feet impatiently he was only half aware of the women. One of them had come vividly to his attention as she dropped the phone and started to moan in protest. She had used the awful banal words, ‘He can’t be’ before she had dropped the phone and started to sob and moan. The accusing incredulous note in her voice had caused Mat to feel the same horror like a sharp grip in his breast where his heart was; then she had run from the booth leaving the phone dangling by its cord and had crossed the road followed by her friend, and disappeared into the dusk again. When a tram had come Mat had boarded it with his limbs still shaking. He had looked out of the window and from the lighted tram the sky appeared as a black void. For a while he thought that perhaps He wasn’t there, but he rejected, repelled the idea for its horrific nihilism. He couldn’t bear to think of that woman’s cries against that black nothingness. Instead he clenched his fists and found for the first time in his life a good reason for believing in Him, for He could be blamed. The little boy who was Mat vowed on Judgment Day he would throw it in God’s face.

  Standing there at the phone booth all these years later Mat still thought of the streets as precarious and menacing. He seemed to associate this certain time of evening with the screeching of brakes, little knots of people clustered round someone dying on the pavement, drunkenness, voices raised in anger, blows, blood, broken glass, women’s voices raised in screams. Was it that he himself had too great a sense of his vulnerability or was it that the other people in the street had become merely calloused or vitiated in feeling through a continual assault on their sensibilities so that they no longer felt the alien menace of the world and of circumstance? But after receiving the comforting message on the phone the relief had dismissed his black mood and he thought how ordinary in fact the day had been. Even when Helen had felt her pains coming on and afterwards when they had gone to the hospital he had felt as if he was in an ordinary and interesting world. He had shared Helen’s feeling as she wondered what it would be like and they had shared silly jokes with the ambulance men. Being cut off from Helen in the hospital had made Mat feel like this.

  In the house he sat by the empty fireplace and smoked. It was by now too late to go out and let anyone know and he felt the sense of anti-climax. He thought that birth ought to be more of a celebration, that he should be connected to it in some way other than through the cold lines of a telephone and he felt the need to do something conventional, like buy people drinks and hand out cigars. It was difficult for him to realise that he was a father and he kept repeating to himself in a mechanical sort of way – ‘I’ve got a son.’ But this phrase had no effect of making him feel anything. He thought of a poem he had read once about the birth of a child and he envied the poet, not so much for his ability to write the poem as for his feelings which were accurate enough to write about. His own feelings were so exasperatingly unformed, diffuse, that he was hard put to it to know if he felt anything at all. Nearly indifference. Yet when he sai
d to himself, ‘I’ve got a son,’ he had a choking physical sensation as he tried to realise this slippery, elusive fact. ‘I’ve got a son,’ and he’d shrug, then get up on his feet and pound about the room.

  On top of the bed there was a pile of neat, ironed clothes, shirts, collars, peenies, underclothes, and Mat took them from the bed and put them on top of the wardrobe. Helen would have packed them all away in drawers but when he pulled the drawers they seemed already full. For some reason Mat started to rummage about the house pulling open drawers and cupboards and looking inside them. He found a biscuit tin full of buttons, screw nails, broken electric fittings, candle stumps, pins and coins and he sat for a while searching among the clutter of small objects, picking up a thimble and trying it on, spinning the George II penny, closely examining the tiny coin with the Slav characters stamped on it. When he closed the biscuit tin he pulled a small cardboard box from under the bed and went through all the papers in it. There were letters tied in bundles, pink income tax forms that had never been filled in, receipts and bills, some Christmas cards, letters, one or two sheets of paper which were closely covered in his small cramped handwriting which he held upside down and scrutinised carefully. Inside the food cupboard he picked up all the little round boxes of spice, bottles of essence and colouring, blocks of cooking fat, packets of sugar and other groceries and rearranged them all. Then he absent-mindedly made himself some eggs and a pot of tea. When they were finished he sat musing in front of the fire for such a long time that the eggs got cold and he ate them without enjoyment. He supposed that Helen, would be sleeping by now and he tried to imagine her lying in bed in the hospital and sound asleep, and the baby too would be all wrapped up and lying sound asleep in his cot. They had bought a cot for the baby and it was lying in the lobby still wrapped in sheets of corrugated paper. He took it into the tiny room and set it up, unfolding it and screwing in the long metal rods on which the side of the cot slid up and down. After he had placed the cot mattress on to the springs he didn’t know what to do as he wasn’t sure how to make up a bed for a baby. By this time it was really late and he went to bed himself. For a long time he lay there smoking in the dark. It was the first time in his life that he had ever slept in a room by himself and he felt lonely and rather as if he was only sleeping there on sufferance and that the house didn’t belong to him. Finally he fell asleep with his mind still trying to work out how it was that a baby’s cot should be made up.