by Kim Westwood
A strong smell emanates from an opening, far right. As Inez, Brigid, Lydia and Nagid busy themselves in the yard area, Cicada, Max and I move to what waits beyond. The smell gets stronger. Breathing through my mouth, I steel myself; there will be nothing clean or kind about this production line.
There are three rows of stalls with two aisles between, seven horses to a row. A tube snakes from each stall to a collection can on the ground behind. We enter the first aisle. Face in to the wall and haunches to us, the animals are effectively blinkered, but they sense our presence and shift nervously, ears twitching. Dung is piled high in the stalls, and the stench of manure and piss and sickness is terrible.
I inspect a jerry can. Its scummy plastic is one-third full. But it’s where the tubing attaches at the other end I’m more worried about.
Every mare is confined in a space hardly bigger than her body. A harness arrangement attaches to a cage-like structure above and loops down around her haunches. This keeps the UCD — urine collection device — in place. She’s haltered and tied in front as well, with just enough length to allow her to reach feed and water troughs, the latter being almost always empty, the water meted out in miserly doses to keep the oestrogen saturation in the urine high.
Cicada leads the way to the first stall. He slips inside the gate and works his way along the mare’s flank to her withers. She brings up her head and rolls her eyes, but he soothes with his hands and calms with his voice, murmuring the sorts of things that only he and horses understand.
On his nod, Max and I move in beside her to begin the task of disconnecting the UCD. We’ve done this on over a dozen occasions together and have a system. First I snip the plastic line to the collection can, then Max releases the buckle straps our side of the urine bag and slips a hand between the mare’s legs to ease away the rubber perineal seal. This is supposed to stop faeces mixing with the urine, but the seal is perished and probably hasn’t worked for months. It will, however, have chafed her skin into weeping, scabby sores. I wait, ready with the anaesthetising antiseptic pads.
The bag drops down and swings against the far rails, a sodden mess. We bring our wrist torches up to inspect the damage. The mare’s urethra is pustular and swollen, the urine-soaked skin around it smelly and infected, while the insides of both haunches are red raw from where the UCD has rubbed day after day, week after terrible week.
Max motions and I pass across a hand-sized pad. He presses it to her vulva and we ready for her to try to kick. We wait a count of sixty, then he hands it back and I give him two more, these for her inside legs. Another count of sixty before the used pads go in a disposal bag, and we’re ready to try to move her.
We open the stall gate as Cicada continues his wordless conversation with the mare. While we’ve been working, he’s replaced her filthy halter with a clean one. We’re lucky the first one wasn’t embedded in her skin.
We start to back her out. This is a critical moment. If she goes down onto the concrete, she’ll be almost impossible to get up again. Persuaded into the aisle, she’s shaky but still standing, and we can lead her slowly to where the rest of the team is waiting with fresh water and hay.
We proceed like this, one horse at a time, until we have seven in the yard. They are meek and listless; their haunches show no muscle, their coats no sheen. The soft clop of overgrown hooves on concrete is followed by a thirsty slurping in the buckets. Apart from suffering what must be constant pain, each is badly dehydrated due to the miserly water regime. We can only hope they all make it to the sanctuary.
Max’s mobile beeps softly. The other cell has arrived.
We open the double doors. Cold air drags in — and a sight to warm it: three transports waiting silently, ramps down.
Six figures detach from the shadows. They extend hands to the horses first, allowing them time to smell the scents on their hands and clothes from the outside world, and then they turn to us. Briefly, cold hands clasp hello. None of us has ever met, or is likely to. It’s safer that way.
They glove up, and together we lead the mares out of the shed. Most have trouble walking on stiff, sore legs and stumble; some need a person each side as well as at the front; but none resist the ramps up into the truck. We’ve noticed this phenomenon before. It’s as if their wills are so broken, they don’t care where they’re being led. It breaks my heart to see, even if it simplifies the loading. Call me overly anthropomorphic, but what I prefer to believe is that the horses somehow know — whether by smell or aura or something else — that we’re not the farm workers here to inflict more hurt, but instead have come to help, and that the ramps into the trucks are their escape from pain and sickness and death.
Max and Cicada and I return to the stalls and begin on the second row of mares. When we’re done, we move on to the third.
Five hours after starting, we’re at the last stall. In it is a white Appaloosa, her head down, her breathing loud and ragged. The collection can behind her is completely empty: a bad sign. Cicada moves slowly along her flank, then looks back at us and shakes his head. This mare is nearly dead in her harness. Sorrow sits like a stone in my chest.
‘She’ll drop when we release her,’ Max murmurs.
The others are finished in the inspection yard, and join us in the stable area. The sight of the Appaloosa elicits gasps. Whatever we’ve seen on previous raids, it doesn’t inure us to the next cruelty.
No animal should suffer the last moments of its life tethered and alone. They busy themselves pulling hay from the feed bins to make a soft bed around her as Max prepares the hypodermic and gives it to Cicada. Then we ready ourselves on the harness straps.
Cicada gently rubs along one bony cheek to lay a hand on her withers. I catch a glimpse of something beyond his perpetually shuttered expression, and for a fleeting moment have a window through to his own injured soul. It’s too raw and intimate and I have to look away.
He slides the needle in and the mare’s legs buckle, her weight bearing down on the straps. We slip then release our hold and she drops where she is, barely more than skin and bones. There will be no proper burial for her; only an end, finally, to her suffering.
There’s one thing left to do.
Cicada stays with the downed mare while the rest of us yank the plastic lines off the urine containers and carry them back to the inspection yard for emptying.
At the end of the third row, past the Appaloosa’s stall, is an unmarked door that we’ve studiously avoided until now. We know from Lars that this is the laboratory where the mares’ urine is concentrated into its end products, ready for transport. Those evil bastards would have walked through the horse yards and past the Appaloosa every day to get to their place of work. Lydia lingers at the door. I know that look. I draw her away before she goes for the crowbar. No, I gesture firmly, and she doesn’t try to counter me.
I return to the Appaloosa mare, Cicada still crouched there cradling her head. Reaching through the stall bars, I stroke her coarse mane and say my goodbyes.
Outside, the trucks are loaded and waiting, their huge shapes delineated by the glow of their parking lights. Each has been refitted to take seven horses. We planned on twenty-one in all, but now there will be only twenty.
When the double doors have been swung closed, Inez sends the signal to Lars. Cicada, with a brief nod to us, jumps in the cab of the lead transport, and we watch as they roll forward onto the track and begin the slow climb out of the valley.
When their tail-lights have disappeared over the rise, we pile into the van and follow. No one speaks. Inez, beside me, reaches for my hand. Opposite us, Brigid leans on Max’s shoulder, her eyes closed, while Lydia, in the front seat beside Nagid, stares fixedly out the window. We pass the cottage, its metal roof sheening the light of the moon. The dogs yip half-heartedly. They would have smelt the horses as they went by in the trucks — and perhaps they sense something extraordinary is going on. No freedom in it for them, they fall silent at the ends of their chains.
7
My place with Inez, under the doona. I move aside the floppy purple plush that’s Nitro nestled on my pillow to go make coffee and toast for my girl, a déshabillé vision of loveliness in my bed.
Dawn, we’d cuddled each other to sleep, cocooned in the knowledge that Greengate Farm would be waking to find Lars and the horses gone, the warning beep of its security system bringing up the APV message on all the monitors. Now we devour brunch, then shower, comparing bruises from the raid, before deciding on a stroll to the Good Bean — my Saturday tradition.
We lounge in the sun at one of Frank’s tiny outside tables, sipping more coffee as we envisage our rescuees delivered into the care of the sanctuary workers, their illnesses and injuries being tended to at last by experts. The deeper stuff — the effects of so much suffering — will take a lot longer to heal, but right now I feel like a kid with presents: another successful raid and basking in the miracle that is Inez.
An easy sensuality flows between us, hand casually brushing hand, foot resting on foot beneath the café table. Attraction vaulting over caution, there may as well be a neon light above us flashing, Transgressors HERE!!!
The talk drifts gradually into more serious territory, Inez hunching her singleted shoulders over a newspaper. The frown lines between her brows deepen. She jabs a finger at a headline. ‘The government says they’re winning the war on infertility and the fight against perverts.’ She makes a face. ‘They’re using the endocrine disruptor stuff against us again. Another NF-owned scientist is saying she’s proved a link between exposure to pesticides and sexual deviance.’
The argument against transgressives is replayed across a dozen different scenarios, all with one aim: to prove that we, in our many variations, have been put together wrong.
The latest round began with whelks on boats. Shortly before the H5N1 virus mutated to transmit efficiently human to human, and its catastrophic antigen slashed the birth rate, a colony of female whelks was discovered to have penises. Scientists concluded the anomaly was caused by environmental contaminants — in this case, a component in the anti-corrosion paint used by the boat owners. They called the endocrine-disrupted creatures an ‘imposex’, and cited similar examples in the world’s polluted water and landways: male alligators exposed to pesticide spills in the Florida lakes born with half-size sex organs; rodents in the grasslands downwind of heavy industry developing mutations in their DNA and passing them on to their young; frogs turning hermaphroditic in a logged and farmed Amazon … It hadn’t taken long for the wowsers to pick up on the notion of imposexes multiplying everywhere in the ecosystem and apply it to the human community. By their reductionist logic, anyone who deviated from the ‘standard’ physiology or accepted behaviour for their gender was likely heading the same direction as the whelks. But it was the Nation Firsts who took this one crucial step further by connecting the phenomenon of endocrine disruption and adjuvant-induced infertility to the erosion of God’s Law, blaming society’s wanton and libertine ways for finally bringing Divine punishment down upon itself.
‘Listen to this.’ Now Inez is angry. ‘Neighbourly Watch is advising prayer groups to “seek out transgressors and lay on hands if necessary to help them cough up their demons”.’ She tosses the paper onto the unoccupied table beside us. ‘That’s blatant permission for harassment and physical attack.’
I stroke the fine hairs on her forearm, not knowing what to say.
There’s so much hypocrisy in the current fertility predicament. The preoccupation with appearance — plump and curvaceous for the women, muscular and ‘well-hung’ for the men — means the skills of the deregistered hormone doctors and cosmetic surgeons in the Red Quarter are increasingly being called on to help. How ironic that Inez, who’s never had a day, pre-or post-pandemic, of being called — not even whispered to — by her ovaries, just happens to embody the current female ideal; meanwhile, I know only too well how I don’t fit either category. Unsurprisingly, the androgynous look is out — verboten — helped by Nation First’s decree that any deviation from the ‘standard norm’ is the work of the Devil, even though the ‘norm’ itself is no more than a construction.
Inez stiffens suddenly. I remove my hand from her arm and turn to where she’s looking. Coming up our side of the street are five people in hessian shawls, chanting penitence. They monopolise the pavement, others detouring around them. The prayer groups have no manners now they think they’re God’s police.
My hand goes below the table onto Inez’s thigh. I feel it tense as if she’s about to spring up. ‘Don’t,’ I murmur, squeezing gently.
Her anger radiates out as the prayer group arrives beside us. Silent now, they mark our presence. I concentrate on my cup as they stare down. I wonder if they’re going to help us cough up our demons like in the newspaper report.
Before they get the chance, the Good Bean’s glass door opens and Frank appears, solid and undeniable, hands on ample hips. He bustles over, placing his considerable bulk between them and us.
‘Shoo,’ he says loudly.
Put off, they move away. Out of Frank’s territory their chant starts up again.
Inez’s thigh muscle relaxes.
Frank gathers up our empty cups. ‘Same again?’ he asks.
We nod, and the Good Bean’s door bangs behind him, rattling the glass.
I feel the passing of the rock meant for Frank’s window. It’s a woeful shot, and rolls beneath the adjacent table. I lean down to pick it up. A piece of paper is attached to it. I snap off the rubber band and read: LEAVE THE DEVIL’S EMPLOY. SAVE YOURSELF WHILE YOU CAN.
Not meant for Frank’s window, after all.
‘Bastards,’ says Inez.
Crumpling the message, I put it in the empty ashtray. Now I’m angry. Lobbing rocks with warnings at transgressives is evangelism gone feral.
My girlfriend leans her forehead against mine, her breath damping my cheek. ‘Don’t let them spook you,’ she murmurs. ‘They write that to all God’s good-looking queers.’
I slip my hand gratefully into hers, and slowly the sun reheats our day.
She tantalises me with coffee-flavoured lips. ‘Wanna get a bunch of sci-fi movies and be couch potatoes this evening?’
‘Can’t,’ I say soberly. ‘I’m working all night.’
‘I’ll save you some chocolate then.’
Inez never prods for details, accepting that she remains in the dark when it comes to my work activities for Gail, just as Gail never asks about the APV, even though she bankrolls its activities via a monthly stipend from her company profits. Today, however, Inez has some information I want, being one very sought-after expert in the Red Quarter, the reward for having built the security systems for many of the businesses on Madams Row.
I nuzzle into her shoulder. ‘Can you give me your impressions of Savannah Rose at the Shangri-La?’
She considers. ‘Smart. Charming. No-nonsense.’
I notice she’s used none of the adjectives that came to mind on my visit. ‘What about attractive?’
‘I suppose. She’s not really my type.’
‘Anything else it would be good to know?’
Inez considers some more. ‘Never take her up on the offer of a game of chess. She’s three times national champion.’
8
After uneventful snoop duty at Fishermans Bend, I sleep all Sunday and am back with Inez early evening, meeting Albee at the Glory Hole before the next overnighter with Anwar.
In her cloakroom nook, Marlene takes Inez’s coat with gracious aplomb, and spends a little time flirting with Albee. Me, she just glowers at.
The three of us stand above the bar area, scanning for a free space. The speakeasy is always crowded on a Blue Laws day. I look sideways at my bicycle-fixing friend.
‘You enjoyed that, didn’t you.’
Inez grins on Albee’s other side, and he looks sheepish. ‘She has a certain something …’
‘I’d agree with that,’ I say. I don’t divulge what
something springs to mind, because it isn’t nice.
We’re lucky enough to secure an alcove, and Inez goes to get our drinks. Albee says, ‘Back in a mo,’ and wanders over Marlene’s way to flirt some more. I make myself comfortable among the cushions on the padded bench seat, easing into the atmosphere of the place. I have to admit, while Anwar is everything I could wish for in a co-worker out on unpredictable ground, it’s nice to be back on home turf in more talkative company.
I’m suddenly aware that I’m no longer alone in my alcove. Mojo Meg has slipped past the half-open curtain, and her two pit-bulls are blocking my view out.
‘May I?’ She motions to the seat beside me.
I nod, caught off-guard.
‘Been watching you,’ she begins, and already I’m unhappy with where this is going. Meg has a reputation for putting the hard word on the young folk. ‘You’re a good worker.’
I do a fast one-eighty in my head. Not about sex then …
‘Your boss is likely going under with these latest troubles,’ she says, cutting to the chase. ‘It’s almost impossible to drag back a customer’s goodwill once it’s lost, especially when there are others around to offer guaranteed product.’
I’m incensed on Gail’s behalf, but say nothing, corralled as I am three against one. I wonder how much longer Inez will be, and wish I could telepath Albee to shift his rapt attention from Marlene’s many attributes for just a moment to look my way.
Meg fixes on me, her eyes hard as buttons. ‘Question is, do you want to go under with her?’
‘You seem to know a lot about it,’ I counter, and she smiles. The shape is not entirely successful. Must be an unpractised position for her mouth.
‘It’s my business to know,’ she says. ‘It’s all our businesses to know. Gail’s got herself an enemy, maybe a worm in the apple. If you jump ship now, you can save yourself. I can offer you good employ: bonuses, certain opportunities …’
Blimey. Can’t wait to hear.