by Daisy Waugh
‘Nasty surprises?’ he said coolly. ‘At Fiddleford? Certainly not.’
The Ministry vet checked in with Jo and Charlie at the end of the same day. He’d not completed his inspection yet, he said, and he would be back first thing in the morning to finish off.
‘No signs yet, though,’ he said. ‘So fingers crossed.’
It gave them false hope. They all four drank too much that night. And then in the morning the vet returned and within minutes he’d found one of the heifers was limping.
She could have trodden on a sharp stone. More than likely, she had trodden on a sharp stone. Or one of the other cows might have kicked her. Or she’d woken up feeling stiff. It could have been any number of things. But the people from the Ministry weren’t willing to take the risk. Later that night came the official confirmation. There would be no need to take further tests. The limp was evidence enough. Death warrants had been signed and the slaughtermen were booked for Wednesday morning.
Since then, time for everyone at Fiddleford had been passing abnormally slowly. Jo wandered the house with her notebook, making obsessive and pointless notes about facilities which might be required for her future paying guests. Grey and the General, for lack of tabloid newspapers to argue over (their favourite – almost their only – pastime for several months now), were reduced to watching housewives’ television. Charlie, meanwhile, dealt with the animals, the farm workers, and the people from MAFF.
On Monday evening he telephoned the Ministry to inform them that the heifer’s limp had disappeared. On Tuesday evening he called again to inform them there were still no signs of infection among any of the other animals. But it was too late. That night the last of the animals were herded together into outhouses. The pyre was already built, and the sheep crushes and the cattle stocks lay waiting.
The snow turned to sleet that evening, and a cruel wind blew. Grey McShane, in a futile attempt to lighten everyone’s spirits, had lit a fire in the dining room. There was no food in the house, since the garden was covered in three feet of snow, and nobody was allowed out to go shopping. But Grey found an ancient tin of spaghetti at the back of the larder, which he plopped into a saucepan and burnt and then, with absurd fanfare, carried through to the dining room.
He doled out a plateful to Jo, who looked at it for several minutes and then suddenly leapt from her chair and ran out of the room. Charlie found her vomiting over the kitchen sink.
‘Are you all right?’ he said.
‘I’m fine. Completely fine. You go back in.’
‘Was it the spaghetti, do you think?’
She laughed.
‘Oh Christ, Jo, I’m so sorry. This must be awful for you.’
‘It’s fine. Please. Never mind me. I’m fine…I’m fine.’
‘We could get a licence and you could go and stay in London until it was over.’
‘Certainly not!’ She made an effort to smile, but the smile turned into a retch. ‘Oh, God—’ She retched again. ‘I think I’ll go upstairs.’
Jo ran to her bedroom and only just reached the basin in time. She stood there for a while, recovering, thinking, examining the splashes of vomit at her lovely, Mexican-tanned feet. She straightened up, wiped her mouth and, before she could change her mind yet again, headed over to the wardrobe and pulled out the testing kit which had been languishing there, driving her crazy, since the day before the MAFF people first called.
Afterwards she didn’t quite know what to do. Call her mother? No. Anyway she was away in El Salvador, taking artistic holiday snaps. Burst in on Charlie – and Grey and the General – in that freezing cold dining room? Definitely not. Have a bath?
There was no hot water for a bath. She decided to go straight to bed. She took off her uncomfortable urban clothes (skintight jeans @ £125, stripy cashmere jersey with pointless zip and hood), which were so incredibly ineffective in her new rural life, and replaced them with a pair of pyjamas and every jersey she could find in Charlie’s cupboard.
She lay awake for what felt like hours after that, trying to persuade herself it was real, trying to feel what she was meant to feel – fulfilled and magical and womanly and blessed, trying not to feel terrified of how her life, which until she met Charlie had always been so painstakingly well structured, seemed so quickly to be slipping out of her control. But then somehow she must have fallen asleep because she woke with a start at about three o’clock to discover that Charlie still hadn’t joined her.
Out on the icy landing she could find no sign of him either. The house was quiet. The vast, stone-floored entrance hall beneath her was shrouded in black. She bent over the banister and thought she saw a faint crack of light coming from beyond the back lobby, and then suddenly, from the same direction, she heard the muffled sound of something large crashing to the ground.
‘…Charlie?’
The house was old – especially the back part, the part where the noise was coming from. Among her many strengths (her warmth, her determination, her well maintained contacts book and, though she felt far from beautiful that night, her delicate elfin good looks), Jo was a practical woman, not remotely given to superstitious anxieties. But she was terrified.
‘…Charlie?’
No response, just a distant shuffling, followed by a long, low moan.
‘…Charlie!’
Slowly, carefully, in almost total darkness, she followed the sound as far as the back lobby, where she paused for a moment. She could hear breathing very clearly now: heavy, quick-fire, phlegmy breathing, like a sleeping giant. The back lobby led on to the kitchen, and beyond that to the pantry and the boot room, and from there to the stairs which went down to the cellars. The thin stream of light was coming from the cellars, somewhere Jo and her notebook had not bothered to venture before.
Tentatively, she walked down the steps and found herself in a large, dank room cluttered with what looked like pieces of rotting furniture. There was a room on either side of her, both of them in darkness, and in front of her, a miserable, decaying corridor. She could hear the noises coming from beyond it: the breathing, someone hammering and then Charlie, ‘It’s OK, girl. It’s OK. Take it easy. Just a bit of noise. I’ll be done in a sec.’
Which was when she finally saw them. Dwarfing the corridor and the small room at the end of it, dwarfing Charlie: two old Highland cows, covered in cobwebs and flakes of rotting paint, puffing after their strange exertions.
Charlie looked up. ‘Jo!’ he said. ‘It’s—How are you? I thought you were asleep.’
‘What the fuck are you doing?’ she asked.
‘What? Me? Nothing.’
‘Nothing?’
‘Shh! You’ll frighten the girls.’
‘The girls?’ Gingerly, to ensure that she wasn’t dreaming, she edged forward and put out a finger to touch one of them. It responded with a friendly grunt and by wiping its damp nose on the sleeve of her outer jersey. She snatched her hand away quickly. ‘Charlie, they’re not girls, they’re cows. What are they doing in the cellar?’
‘Jo…You’re wonderful.’
‘What?’
‘I’m just saying—’ He hesitated. ‘This has nothing to do with you.’
‘Are you hiding them?’
‘Please. Mind your own business.’
‘What if they’re infected?’
‘They’re not infected. They’ve been nowhere near any other farm animals for almost twenty-five years. But I’m going to let them work out their quarantine down here, just to be sure.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Charlie. We’ve got to get these cows back in the shed where they belong—’
‘They’re not going anywhere.’
‘Apart from anything else it’s not—I mean they’re probably not going to make it through the winter anyway. It’s not worth it.’ Charlie glared at her and, without another word, turned back to his hammering. He was trying to fix a plank over a large air vent, but every time he hit the nail, chunks of wall fell out. She watched him for a
while. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be—’ She paused to think of the right word, but all she could come up with was ‘realistic’. She decided not to fill the gap.
‘You must be freezing,’ he said over his shoulder.
‘I’m fine, Charlie, my darling. That’s not really the point.’
‘I know it isn’t.’ He turned back to face her. ‘The point is I’ve got to get this place soundproofed before morning. So please. Seriously. I love you and everything. But either give me a hand, or – go away.’
She looked at the old cows, so gentle and decrepit, their heads and necks still bobbing rhythmically from the trouble of getting down the cellar stairs, flakes of paint the size of saucers hanging off their enormous horns. She looked at Charlie, so utterly in earnest. A year ago, in her more black-and-white days, she might easily, at this point, have decided to bring in the police. That night she didn’t know what to do. The cows couldn’t do any harm, working out their quarantine down here in the cellar, and the idea of getting them out again, and then tomorrow of watching Charlie lining them up for the stocks…
‘By the way, Charlie,’ Jo said sulkily about a minute later, sounding absurdly, self-consciously casual. They were squeezed between the cows and the decaying wall, trying together to fix the soundproofing plank without causing the whole rotten cellar to disintegrate. ‘I’m pregnant. Already. OK?’ (She was embarrassed; it was embarrassingly quick.) ‘I only mention it because we’d better not get caught. I mean I’m definitely not going to prison over this.’
The extermination process was a long and horrible one, beginning before dawn had properly broken, and not ending until dusk on the following day. First to be slaughtered was the dairy herd. It took seven men five hours to dispatch them. Les, the Fiddleford farm hand, would set each one on her journey, steering her the hundred-odd yards through the snow, down the steep path, to the makeshift stall where Charlie stood ready to slip her head into a brace. She would be injected with sedative and then led from the stocks to the land in front of the pyre, as close as possible to the body of the cow which had preceded her, where she would be shot in the head.
Nobody spoke much. The animals rolled in, the animals rolled out, the bodies piled up. The Ministry people had seen it all before. They’d been doing it every day for weeks, which isn’t to suggest that they were enjoying themselves. But it was a job with an hourly rate. It wasn’t their twin sister’s billy goat who was waiting in the yard to have its brain scrambled.
Grey McShane shuffled out to the killing fields just before noon, by which time the slaughterer’s regulation white body suits were soaked in blood. He should have been wearing one himself. One had been left by the back door for him. But Grey was not fond of orders.
In fact he was wearing a Prada suit which had lost its buttons and a pair of the General’s old gumboots. He was carrying a bottle of gin, as he always did, and his big black coat was dragging in the mud behind him. One of the Ministry men hurried across the field to intercept him.
‘It’s strictly no access without the suit,’ he said, inadvertently wiping the blood from his cuff across his nose and forehead. ‘I’m sorry, sir. Someone should have told you. The clothes will have to be burnt now.’
‘What clothes?’
‘The er—suit. Everything. Sorry. Regulations.’
‘Aye,’ muttered Grey distractedly, walking politely around him.
Having offered Charlie his help, and been greatly relieved when it was rejected, Grey had intended to play as supportive a role as he could in the proceedings, but from inside the house, as far away from the smell of blood as was supportively possible. Looking at the carnage, the rows of bodies, the white-suited men with their disinfectant sprays and bloodstains, the sound of the gun, he was finding it very hard to stay focused. He wished he could turn back, but a crisis was developing and he needed Charlie’s help. He took a deep swig at the gin to stop himself from vomiting. He looked back at the Ministry man. ‘Where is he, then?’
‘Who?’
‘Where’s Charlie?’
‘Charlie?’
‘Charlie,’ he said coldly, ‘is the man whose animals you’re in the process of exterminatin’. Charlie Maxwell McDonald.’ Grey glanced disconsolately around the field. ‘Where the fuck is he?’
‘He’s round the corner, by the stocks. But you really can’t—I must insist—’
Grey, thirty-eight years old that summer, had been quite famous once, when he was thirty-seven. Like his friend Jo, he was a refugee from London, from the successful people’s party circuit, but unlike Jo, who’d thrived in it for ten years or more before she pressed the ejector button, Grey McShane had lasted only a matter of weeks. An enormous, miraculously handsome Scottish ex-jailbird, alcoholic and former tramp, he was ‘discovered’ by a handful of fashionable opinion makers, drunkenly reciting his own poetry outside a well-known theatre in Islington. Not long afterwards, Phonix Records had hitched itself onto the McShane bandwagon and offered him an unheard of £1 million contract to make an album of his poetry. The marketing people proclaimed him a genius, a voice for a disenfranchised generation, a living embodiment of a modern generation’s pain. And Grey was one of the few people who had never believed them. Anyway the contract was withdrawn soon afterwards, when Grey was wrongly denounced as a paedophile, at which point (for about a week) he became the nation’s most hated figure, hounded and jeered at on the front of every newspaper. Nobody was surprised when, a week or so after that, the geniuses at Phonix suddenly came to the conclusion that Grey wasn’t a genius after all.
That was back in October. He’d been hiding out with his friends at Fiddleford ever since, the living inspiration for Charlie and Jo’s new business venture, a lonely, private figure who insisted on paying over the odds for his board and lodging, and who so far displayed no signs of ever planning to leave. He was bad-tempered, lazy, reckless, argumentative, funny, brave and, when he thought someone deserved it, heroically loyal. The General adored him. Charlie and Jo, both several years his junior, often suggested that he find somewhere else to live, but they no longer expected it and in fact they would have been quite sorry to see him go. He had been instrumental in bringing the two of them together, and now, as he picked his way through the carcasses, swallowing his own bile and dodging the bossy men in suits, he was about to fight for their interests once again.
‘Ah. There you are, Charlie,’ he said. ‘At last. How’s it goin’?’
‘Hi Grey,’ muttered Charlie, without looking up. There was a cow’s head lodged between his forearms. He was watching intently while a vet emptied his syringe into the vein beneath her tail. A moment later Charlie released the cow and stood back, patting its fat, healthy rump for the last time as it was ushered away. Grey leant towards Charlie. ‘Something’s come up,’ he whispered. ‘You’re needed at the house.’
‘Is it Jo?’
‘Excuse me,’ interrupted the vet, ‘but you need to be wearing one of the suits down here. Someone should have told you.’
‘I know that already,’ said Grey helpfully. ‘I’ve come to fetch Charlie.’ He looked back at the space where Charlie had been standing. ‘…Charlie?’
Grey didn’t catch up with him until they reached the boot room door. ‘It’s nothing to do with Jo, you silly sod,’ he panted irritably. ‘Calm down. It’s yer bloody cows.’
‘Cows? What cows?’
‘Och, for God’s sake! You woke the whole bloody house last night. What bloody cows do you think?’
Just then, from almost directly beneath them, came an unmistakable, ground-shaking bellow. Charlie removed his cap and tugged with embarrassment at his dark hair. ‘Oh. Those cows,’ he said feebly. ‘Has anyone else heard, do you think?’
Grey chuckled. ‘The General and me have bin ignorin’ it all morning, shouting at each other to pass the marmalade, pretending there’s always cows bellyaching through the kitchen floor at us. I swear they’ve been making the fuckin’ windows rattle…I don’t know
about Jo, though. I haven’t seen her.’ Grey looked as tactful as he could, but he, like Charlie, had known Jo in the olden days, when she was as priggish as all her fashionable friends. Ex-friends. She was much more laid-back recently, but there were times when she still reverted – especially when she was under pressure.
‘Oh. No. Don’t worry about Jo. She helped me,’ said Charlie. He looked at Grey and smiled slightly. ‘Jo’s fine. Has anyone else heard?’
‘I don’t think so, no. Mrs Webber’s not in today. I checked. Anyway she’s totally deaf. Have you noticed? She can’t hear a bloody word.’
‘What about Les?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Mr Tarr?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Have any of the MAFF people used the lavatory?’
‘Fuck, I don’t know. What do you think? I’ve been standing guard here all mornin’? If they had they would have said something. So I suppose not.’
There came another earth-shattering groan from beneath them. ‘Aye,’ said Grey matter-of-factly. ‘It’s happenin’ about every couple a’ minutes. It’s pretty constant. Sometimes they just keep goin’ on. Did you not think about the soundproofing? What were you bloody doing down there all night?’
Neither of them had the faintest idea how many sleeping pills each cow needed but since Grey had only twenty left, they gave ten to each. They ground them into bowls of warm milk and Charlie took them down to the cellar while Grey and Jo – whom they’d found wandering the boot room with her notebook – kept guard and each other company at the back door.
The cows looked resentful, bewildered and slightly mad when Charlie found them. They were covered in sweat and a thick layer of ceiling plaster, which rained onto them every time their vast horns knocked against any of the walls. But they drank the milk without any trouble and Charlie stayed with them talking, reminiscing. They seemed to draw comfort from the familiar sound of his voice.
After a while Jo grew worried that the MAFF people would be missing him, and decided to go down and fetch him out. She found him sitting on one of the straw bales they had carried down together the previous night. He was leaning his long legs against the rump of one of the animals, holding his dark head in his hands, deep in thought. He looked so sad it stopped her in her tracks. She watched him for a moment, unsure how to break the silence. She felt like an intruder.