by Nick Fisher
“So we do nothing?”
“We were sitting in the squad room now, phone’d be ringing off the hook, with people begging us to help them,” says Tug. “We asked him. He said ‘No thank you’ even when we was offering.”
“What about the girlfriend?” says Chin.
Tug looked at the dried froth around the inside rim of Chin’s cup. If it was his cup he’d run his pinky round the inside and suck at that froth. He could even see some chocolate dust around the edge from the sprinkle stuff the waitress put on the top of Chin’s coffee. Next time, he must remember not to have the Americano, because he really liked the froth. The flat stuff he had was just like regular white coffee. Only in here you pay best part of three quid a cup. Jesus that must be some mark-up they got going.
“Didn’t make a lot of sense,” says Tug. “What he says about the girlfriend. He really didn’t want to tell us where she’s at, did he?”
“That’s if he even knows,” she says.
“What d’you mean?” asks Tug. “Like, you think maybe she’s run out on him. Walked out and he don’t know where she’s gone?”
“No,” says Chin, her voice flat as she looks out at a grey-haired man in shorts, tying a big plastic owl to the mast of a yacht with cable ties. “Like maybe she’s been kidnapped. And he’s sweating it, in case someone cuts her head off next.”
Helen had a pig. A small pig. Oxford Sandy and Black. Runt of the litter. Stunted. Bullied. Always hungry. Every time it sucked on a teat of its fat supine mother, a brother butted it out of the way. As the brothers’ bellies grew tight and chubby, the little pig shrunk. As it shrunk, its squeals swelled to a knife-slash shriek of hunger. Piercing the air with pity. Pity that none of its brothers felt. Pity that its pink mouth-drained mother easily zoned out, as she lay eyes closed, head flat in the crusty mud, letting her fat-filled juice flow into her strongest babies. Not her hungriest. Suck to survive. Squeal and you die. A mouth full of nipple lives. Mouth full of scream doesn’t.
When she was nine years old Helen wasn’t scared of pigs. Big boars could be mean to each other and to their young. Snapping. Butting. Stealing food by menace and brute strength. But they seldom snapped at Helen. She was an ally in the supply chain of food. And she never had her face in the trough ahead of theirs.
Plus she had a kick. And a stick. And she knew how to use them.
Piglets were no problem to Helen. Even as a wiry streak-of-piss little girl she could toss them around the sty like scatter cushions. She’d pull a swollen wet-mouthed fat boy, its whiskers creamy with clotting milk, off a teat to let the squealing piglet runt get a turn at the dripping nipple tap. Doing this, shuffling pig boys off the breast to let a sickly runt get a suck, was the only time a pig ever scared Helen.
Wasn’t the tusk-snouted old boars. Or the hyperactive, ear-piercing piglet boys. But a mother. A sow. A huge fat-bellied vessel of birth and cream. When she got fucked off with Helen disrupting the natural order of mouths on her teats. Moving off the strong to make way for the weak. When Helen interfered with her spawn. Swapping a winner for a loser, one too many times, she’d raised her head out the mud, broke off her flow of creaminess, and stared at the spindle-thin-legged girl who was fucking with her babies. Pig eyes glowering hot hate.
Helen might be some sort of misguided wannabe surrogate mum to a milk-starved runty piglet, but this 100 kilo sow was the real mother to nine fat butter-ball piglets. Survivors. Suckers. Not squealers. Helen understood that look. Read it in the sow’s eyes. Felt it in the marrow of her bones. No mistaking the message: I am hot. My tits hurt. I am having life drained from me by my selfish starving progeny, so fuck off now, or in a heartbeat I will hurt you. I don’t care how many buckets of growers’ pellets you’ve poured into my trough. Come between me and my babies and I will tear chunks off your bones.
So, Helen backed out of the sty. Closed the gate. And bolted it. Folding the bolt key flat to lock it in place. As the sow’s head returned to the mud, nine-year-old Helen walked towards the back door of her house, a little skip in her step, a plan forming on her lips.
“Never give a pig a name,” said her granny. “Not if you’re going to eat it.” To attach a moniker to an animal that is destined for the abattoir or the freezer, or the sausage pusher, is not a good idea. So goes the accepted wisdom. To assign a name to a meat-bearing animal is only going to make the killing, cutting and rendering to flesh all the more difficult.
With a name comes feelings. With feelings comes attachment. With attachment comes the desire to protect and preserve. You won’t want to eat what you once loved. You can’t kill what you called by name.
Only the breeding stock had names on Helen’s dad’s little farm. The big sows, and the occasional boar. The babies, the piglets, the animals due to be fattened and slaughtered remained anonymous and nameless. Distinguished only by their ‘kill weight’ at the abattoir.
Helen’s plan was to raise the runt piglet in the lambing pen in the corner of the tractor shed. Wean it on cow’s milk and mashed growers’ pellets, mixed with a tub of out-of-date molasses stacked in the garage between rusting tins of red zinc primer and dock leaf spray.
Looking down at the skinny, squealing, starving piglet, her father hesitantly agreed. It wouldn’t survive without a teat to suck on. And once dead, its mother and the biggest of its brothers would only eat its wizened little corpse anyway.
She could wean it. She could raise it. But if it survives, it goes to the slaughterhouse just like all the others. It’s a pig. Not a pet. It’s meat. It’s money. Its days are numbered. And you’re not its mummy.
Little Helen agreed, as she filled a washing-up liquid bottle with soured warm milk.
“I’m not its mummy,” she said.
As she decided to call it ‘Bugsy’.
Bugsy grew fat on kitchen scraps. Garden waste. Crab apples and acorns. Fatter than her brothers. Helen siphoned off extra portions. Prime chunks and hunks that caught up Bugsy with her bullying brothers, and then took her beyond. Plumping her. Stuffing mini pillows of fat under her brown mottled hairy flesh. So that when Bugsy moved out of the tractor shed back into the pigsty, she was bigger than the bully boys. Her shoulders and her rump, swollen from love. Food love. Fat love. Love that gave her the edge in the battles over the feed trough.
A hard snout and a big arse are the winning weapons of a trough battle. Head down. Snout in. Hind feet anchored in the mud with bulging leg muscles is the way to keep your mouth full. Even with their hard heads and baby budding tusks, the boars couldn’t dislodge their once runty sister from pole position in the trough. Law of the sty: the fat get fatter as the weaker get less.
And it’s not just quantity. It’s variety. Greed. The ability to be rabidly omnivorous. Adapt. Eat anything. First.
Helen’s father would shoot rabbits with his Anschutz .22 rimfire. And once skinned, he’d keep the saddles and back legs for stew. Front legs, shoulders, skins, feet and heads – all surplus to requirements – would be tossed into the pigsty. As an experiment at first. To save arse-ache sweat digging a hole to bury the bits – only to have some fuckwit badger dig them up again.
Not all pigs will turn to carrion-eating quickly. Some never do. The hungry usually will. The greedy always. A rabbit head, ears erect, eyes fixed open in death, would hardly hit the mud floor before Bugsy’s teeth would crunch into its skull, hoovering brains, bone and fur into her acid-bubbling stomach juices, long before her hesitant brothers had time to make up their minds what sort of a pig they were.
Bugsy loved to eat. Loved to chew. To crunch and swallow. The smell of blood and gas-filled rabbit guts filling her with pig joy. Bugsy loved to eat. Anything. One rain-pouring Sunday afternoon, Helen’s mum took a washing-up bowl full of potato peelings and mouldy corn cobs to the sty. So thick and deep was the mud seeping up around the pigs’ elbows, that she hadn’t the heart to toss the peelings on the filth and watch the soaking wretched animals suck lumps of peel coated in mud and shit into their m
ouths. And unable to reach the trough, she laid the plastic bowl on top of the mud. Give them a fighting chance of a clean mouthful. She could always hose off the bowl in the morning.
In the morning, the washing-up bowl was gone. Casting an angry eye around the sty, Helen’s mum caught a guilty glance from Bugsy. There was no doubt in her mind that pig had eaten her washing-up bowl. No peeling-thin sliver of a doubt. Bugsy had munched her way through a third of a kilo of industrial plastic. Just because she could.
Bugsy loved to eat. Her favourite being anything that bled. Helen knew this about her. Knew she loved the dead things most, because of her tail. Bugsy’s tail was like all other pigs’ tails, a tight spiral corkscrew of muscle and cartilage, most of the time. Except for moments of deep pig joy. When Helen scratched her fingernails behind and between Bugsy’s ears, or raked at the hairy dimpled valley at the base of Bugsy’s spine. Or gave her a pair of rabbit skulls to munch. Then Bugsy’s tail was transformed. It was the barometer of her happiness. When Bugsy sucked on rabbit guts, or bit down on splintering bone, her tail uncoiled. Her tail stuck out straight behind her, semi-erect. Almost wagging.
At 65 kilos Bugsy was big enough to die. And by this time she would willingly follow Helen anywhere. All Helen had to do was shake a bucket of pignuts in Bugsy’s earshot and she’d come trotting. Snout high. Ears flip-flapping. Happy as a pig in shit.
Although she’d never been in a trailer in her entire life. Bugsy would follow Helen’s rattling bucket up and down a tailgate boarding ramp all day long, with just the rattle and a sniff of nuts.
Her brothers were suspicious. They smelled more than nuts. They smelled a far off whiff of treachery. A trailer-box, sprinkled with straw and stray feed pellets has a certain allure, but the boys didn’t trust it. Too weird. They would need much more tempting, coaxing, pushing, nudging and pulling, to get them in that box.
Not Bugsy.
If Helen, the girl who saved her from starvation and hand-raised her to fuck-off fatness, wanted her to trot across broken glass and barbecue briquettes, Bugsy would give it a stab, in exchange for a few pig nuts and a scratch behind the ears.
That Bugsy should trust Helen, even when all she was going to do was abuse that trust and lure her up the ramp into the trailer of her doom, unsettled young Helen. She’d given Bugsy love. Bugsy trusted her implicitly. And now that trust was her easy undoing. That love-fed trust made the biggest and most brutal of all this year’s pigs turn into the simplest to load in the trailer. And the first to die at the slaughter man’s bolt.
Love would be Bugsy’s undoing.
And so, Helen pleaded with her father. The pig she should never have named was the one she begged her father not to take to the abattoir.
Of every litter raised each year all but one would go to the slaughter man’s bolt. To be killed. Hung. Bled dry. And finally sliced in half. Snout to arsehole. Sold onwards wholesale, in two identical bookend halves, into the butchery business.
One pig each year didn’t go to the slaughterhouse. One pig stayed at the farm. To be shot in the forehead by her father’s .22 rimfire. Hoisted up on the tractor shed beam. Throat-slit and blood drained. Before being sliced and sawn and boned and bagged. Packed away in trays in the garage freezer for the family to eat through the coming year.
Helen’s dad naturally assumed what he was about to witness was the ploy of a broken-hearted girl. A ploy to prolong the life of her favourite pig. A ruse to dodge the trailer. To buy some days. To beg for the pig’s life.
But no. Helen knew Bugsy had to die. She just felt that as Bugsy had to die, she should die the best possible death. At home. Without the terrifying trailer ride and a bolt from another man’s gun. She should die at the farm. Amongst those who loved her most.
If Bugsy was going to die – which very soon she was – Helen just wanted to be there when she did.
So yes, she begged. Pleaded and begged. But not for her dad to spare Bugsy’s life.
Helen begged for him to let her pull the trigger.
Dressing up to meet a drug dealer is an irony lost on Matty, as he scrapes his chin with a blunt disposable BIC razor and some hot water, poured from the kettle into his grubby bedsit sink. Thing he uses the sink for most is taking a piss in the middle of the night – siphoning off a couple of pints of cider in the wee small hours.
There is a shared bathroom across the hall, which probably has hot water. But, there’s something about today’s ritualistic preparation for his step up into the big league of drug retailing that Matty wants to experience in private, without the poisonous bitch across the hall banging on the shared bathroom door.
Matty didn’t want to look, or smell, like a whelk potter from Weymouth today. OK, he wasn’t quite at the point of kidding himself he could look like a ‘player’. But, didn’t have to look like a complete waster-loser neither. Somewhere in the middle was where he was aiming, as he splashes ten-year -old Kouros on his raw, smarting face and eyes the grey jacket on his bed.
He last wore it to his dad’s funeral and the wake, where he got trashed and asked his Uncle Derek to give him a business start-up loan. Uncle Derek and Matty’s dad, although brothers, had not been friends. Matty’s dad thought Derek was a ‘sanctimonious prick’ and so, when Derek turned Matty’s drunken request down flat, Matty told Uncle Derek what his dad called him. Not that it was news exactly. Still, it rounded the ceremony off with a suitably familiar sour family note.
Maybe the jacket would even bring him luck, he thinks, as he slips it on over the River Island shirt he’d bought from the boot of Black Dave’s car, one night outside The Sailors. With this ensemble he wears the only pair of jeans he possesses that haven’t been splattered with pot bait.
If he actually gets to meet Max the Sikh, he wants Max the Sikh to feel he’s talking to a man who really does have access to a lot of very high quality black hash – at the right price. Didn’t want him thinking from the outset that he was talking to just another fucking pikey tyre-kicker. This, today: this is business. And Matty needs to look like he means business.
The funeral shoes didn’t look right with the faded jeans though. Like they were from two different outfits; two different men, and shouldn’t really ever be put together. Only option was his trainers, but he’d worn them one day last week on the Kitty, after an all-nighter. And they reeked of pouting guts. If he’s going to be in a confined space with Max the Sikh, like in his office or his car, the trainer smell would definitely become an issue.
The funeral shoes would have to do.
Matty looked at himself in the reflective window of the Clinton Cards shop in the High Street, on his way to the station. He just glanced at his reflection in Clinton’s window, which freaked him out a little bit. So now he stops and has a proper good look when he gets to Greggs the Bakers. His reflection superimposed on a backdrop of pasties and jam doughnuts isn’t any better. He looks like a fucking Jehovah, or a guy selling replacement PVC windows. Or, a plain-clothes cop, he thought.
Was that a good thing? Or a bad thing? Does dressing like a plain-clothes cop make you seem less likely to be one? Yes, definitely, he decided. If he was a real plain-clothes cop, he certainly wouldn’t dress like one, especially if he was about to go and set up a massive drug sale. No way. So, in a strange sort of round about way, looking a bit like one was the perfect disguise.
As he passes the Spar shop, Matty checks the money in his pockets, again. It is still 18 pounds and 47p. A return to Bristol was 16 quid. He knows that. He’s taken the train up enough times to buy skunk and sell it again back in Weymouth. All watered down with some shitty home-grown and some old stalks and seeds to give it extra bulk.
He’d punt out the watered-down skunk in ‘wraps’ rather than by weight, in order to make his money. Selling late at night round the back of the pub, or in Monty’s Nite Club. Selling to people already so fucked they didn’t really know what they were buying. To be honest, he thought, they probably expect to be ripped off. It comes with the
territory of buying drugs in toilets and car parks. Drugs bought in toilets and car parks are meant to be over-priced and underpowered. And Matty’s ‘primo Bristol Skunk’ was certainly that.
Matty did get the irony of the fact that during this visit he was completely turning around the normal tide of drug flow. He was going to sell puff to the place where he usually bought puff. And it’d be truly primo puff, at that. Was something to be proud of, he told himself. Putting right the wrongs of so many other crappy deals he’s done. Stepping up in the world.
Matty needs to save back at least a quid, minimum. In case he needs to buy a cup of tea in a café somewhere, up in St Paul’s or Fishponds, while he’s out scoping for Kelvin. He needs to find Kelvin and persuade him to intro Matty to Max. Which in itself isn’t going to be easy. Kelvin being very wary of upsetting Max the Sikh. Keeping back a quid would leave him enough to buy one can of Scrumpy Jack or White Lightning. Matty so wishes he could afford vodka, even if it was only one of the little cans of Vodka and Tonic Mixed Doubles. That way he won’t turn up at Max’s smelling of cheap cider. Which isn’t cool. Not when you’re doing business.
Matty looks across the road at Kenny’s Tackle shop. He could see Fat Kenny in there, standing behind the till, weighing out lugworms into a newspaper parcel. Matty thinking to himself how Kenny’s just like a big old drug dealer himself too. Weighing up his skanky wraps of lugworm. Matty thinking how Kenny’s shop till would have more than enough cash inside it to buy a bottle of vodka, a bottle of tonic and a packet of breath mints to chew afterwards. With a few quid out of Kenny’s till, Matty could have a proper drink on the train. Arrive all mellow and buzzed up. Ready for anything.
But Kenny would no sooner lend cash-money to Matty than he would stir his big old mug of tea with his dick.