Meat

Fourteen

For the first time in many years Richard Shanti walked home. He still wore the sand-and brick-filled pack but he didn’t have the will to move any faster than a heavy-footed trudge. It took a lot longer; familiar landmarks he normally passed between in seconds took minutes to go by. When he reached the short drive of his out-of-the-way house, his legs felt wearier than on any arrival home in his life.

He saw Maya’s face in the window, concerned that he was home early. Already wondering why he wasn’t running and what it meant. He didn’t think she had any real concern for him. All she worried about was getting enough meat and staying a cut above the other women in the town. Her concerns meant nothing to him now. He realised that he didn’t love Maya any more. Perhaps this was the first opportunity he’d had both the time and energy to consider it.

Her face in the window was a cheap copy of what it ought to be. There should be a woman there who loves me or there should be no face at all. He walked past the window to the back of the house, shrugged off his pack and didn’t bother to wash himself off at the trough.

In the kitchen he smelled meat. She’d been cooking it for weeks now, more and more it seemed. The greasy taint of it smothered the kitchen curtains and adhered to the damp, flaky paint on the walls. He could smell it in her hair and clothes without going anywhere near her. She was sweating it, meat juice running from her pores, as she worked over the cooker preparing the family meal. She had raw meat on her hands and with those hands she was touching the vegetables he would later eat, rinsing his rice with the same unclean fingers.

He could tell she wasn’t sure whether to reprimand him for his early return from the plant or give him sympathy over whatever his problem was. She was deciding whether to care about him or not. That wasn’t love.

‘What happened?’ she asked eventually. On another day he might have believed it was a question of concern.

‘Where are the girls?’

‘They’re still at school.’ She dried her hands on a towel and approached him. ‘What’s going on, Richard?’

‘I’d like to see them when they come in. Wake me up, would you?’

He walked away from her to the bedroom.

‘Darling, I asked you a question.’

‘Don’t disturb me until they get back. I’m exhausted.’

In the bedroom he didn’t bother to change out of his running gear. He lay down diagonally across the bed and pulled a corner of the coverlet over himself as far as it would come. He could hear the confused silence in the kitchen while Maya considered whether to be angry with him or be safe and let him sleep. He knew she wouldn’t disturb him. She didn’t have the right.

He closed his eyes. All he saw were the faces of Chosen passing before him. Passive, loving eyes that did not even accuse. They spoke to him. Hhah, sssuuh. We know you. You are the one who blesses us with darkness before we give of ourselves. You are the compassionate one, the releaser.

He thought back over the years and the eyes that had passed before him. The souls. He knew what he had done. There was no way to atone for it. No punishment in this world that could repay him for his evils. In some unimaginable eternity, he would relive the death of generations of Chosen. He knew it was true.

Sleep would not come.

He saw mutilation. Skin punctured. Skulls breached. Blood wasted on floors and steel tabletops. The decisive thunk of cleavers through joints. The deft trimming of fat with long, fine blades. Chops and fillets tossed onto moving belts – separated from carcasses so swiftly the meat was still warm and steaming. Rainbows of viscera sorted into types by bloodstained hands. Drooping livers. Turgid kidneys. Fibrous hearts. He saw raw bones, obstinate nubs of flesh and ligament still attached, pale blue cartilage shiny with lubricant. Bones cooking in vats of simmering water, grey scum and pools of melted fat floating on the surface. He was paralysed. A panel opened in front of his eyes. He looked out from the restrainer, saw the bolt gun placed against his head, Torrance behind it smiling through his filthy beard.

‘There is no God. There is only meat.’

Hiss-

-click.

Hema and Harsha opened the door. He’d been in some weird half-doze, his unconscious mind believing the MMP plant as real as his own bedroom, his own home. He swallowed down the half-formed scream in his throat.

‘Hello, sweet peas.’

The twins stayed in the doorway.

‘Why aren’t you at work, daddy?’

He almost smiled. Kids had no time for subtlety. The dream faded quickly and he was glad.

‘Mr. Torrance gave me a couple of days off because I’m tired. I came straight home and went to bed.’

It appeared to be enough of an explanation. The girls edged closer to the bed.

‘Are you allowed to go running?’ asked Hema.

‘I can do whatever I want now that I’m at home.’

‘But won’t it make you more tired?’ asked Harsha.

‘Yes. It will make me tired. And that’s why…’ he pulled the coverlet tighter around him, ‘…I’m going to stay right here in bed for as long as I like.’

This elicited a small giggle from both of them and, though they still seemed wary – or was it shy? – they approached the bed twisting from side to side and knotting their fingers as though he couldn’t possibly notice them getting closer.

‘Papa?’

‘Yeeeeees?’

‘Will you tell us a story tonight?’

In the past he’d made time for stories before bed but over the last couple of years the routine had slipped. All his family habits had. He rarely saw the girls.

‘That depends.’

‘On what?’ They both asked.

‘Well,’ he said, feigning a long, broad yawn and snuggling further into the bed. ‘It depends on whether I wake up in time.’

‘Wake up in time for bed time?’ asked Hema.

‘Mmm hm.’

Harsha said, ‘But why don’t you get up now and then go back to bed after you’ve told us our story?’

Shanti yawned again. It went on for a very long time.

‘I can’t possibly get up now. I’m exhausted. Mr. Torrance has told me to rest and that’s what I have to do.’

‘Do you have to do everything Mr. Torrance says?’

‘Absolutely everything. He’s my boss.’

The girls seemed to like the sound of all that power.

‘Papa?’

‘Yes, girls.’

‘Please don’t sleep too long. Please come and tell us a story before bed.’

He stroked his beard as though lost in decision-making.

‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you a story if you come and give your papa a nice big cuddle.’

Without hesitation, they leapt onto the bed and squeezed him tight. They weighed a lot more than he remembered. All that meat. He squeezed them back and then patted their backsides.

‘Right. That’ll do. You’re crushing the life out of your poor old man.’ He pushed them off the bed, glad to see they were reluctant to leave. ‘Go on, off you go now. See you at bed time for a quick story.’

‘Not a quick one. A long one.’

‘We’ll see.’

‘Papaaaa.’

‘The longer you stay here, the shorter the story.’

Defeated, at least temporarily, they left him and shut the door.

The sweetness of their visit, and the renewed contact after what felt like years, quickly passed. All he could think about was the girls being pushed into the crowd pens, prodded towards the chute and restrainer. Entering the chain live and leaving it in anonymous pieces. He took the image down into sleep.

Parfitt dawdled getting changed out of his cow-gown and stayed back after the other dairy boys had clocked out.

It was drizzling as he made his way across the yards in his green overalls to stand near the loading bay. He felt uncomfortable loitering there on his own, dressed for work when everyone else was heading home. No one saw him though. The plant cleared swiftly at the end of each day. Everyone rushed for the buses and crammed in. The convoy then ferried them all back to their homes in Abyrne. A skeleton crew stayed behind at night to watch the herds and discourage break-ins. Not that any townsfolk would be crazy enough to break into MMP. As base as the townsfolk were, none of them would go looking for such a swift revocation of status and such a terrible end to their lives.

He was about to smoke a cigarette but then put away the packet. Spots of rain dappled his green work wear. He slipped inside the loading bay. He’d never known the place so quiet. Usually, the sounds of the slaughterhouse could be heard from all around the plant. Now there was nothing but the tapping of a chain that swung somewhere beyond sight. The crowd pens were empty for the night; the herds of the Chosen out in the fields, corralled or penned in other areas until morning.

But the smell of the place was exactly the same. He was used to the smell of the Chosen’s waste. It lingered over the whole plant. Here in the slaughterhouse, it was worse, as though in their fear, they shat and pissed out every toxin and hormone in their bodies. The result was almost chemically abrasive to the nose. Their blood had its own smell too. No one would have sensed it from a simple cut or when the Chosen were ritually docked during calfhood. However, released by the hundreds of gallons – eight or more pints from each carcass – the stuff stank. Hygiene was a buzzword in the slaughterhouse more so than anywhere, but blood, like water, flowed and sprayed and found cracks to seep into. No amount of scrubbing and pressure hosing found all of it. And though the sawdust was regularly swept out and replaced, the blood of the Chosen was bound into the concrete floors. The intestines of the Chosen were full of the slop they ate in various stages of digestion. They were full of raw gas, the sharp tang of bile and decomposition. The vaguely uric scent of kidneys lay below it, the ripe aroma of plump spleens and fatty livers, the ingredients of meat and offal pies and delicious pâtés. Standing in the empty loading bay, Parfitt found it hard to be excited about pâté even though he was ready for his dinner. The least offensive smell in the slaughterhouse was that of the butcher shop, of healthy meat parted from the still-warm bones it once held upright.

The sound of an engine jolted him into alertness. He put his head around the loading bay door and saw a truck approaching from beyond the dairy. Whoever was driving it flashed the headlights once. Without conviction he half held up his hand in response. The truck arced outside the bay and then reversed in. The engine died and the door opened. Torrance stepped down from the cab. Parfitt recognised the two men with him; they’d been among the crew at Dino’s.

‘Right. Let’s get this done and get home.’

Torrance’s men knew exactly what they were doing and hauled themselves up onto the loading dock. They ran into the gloom of the factory and Parfitt heard the sound of trolley wheels returning.

‘Get a bloody move on, Parfitt. I could eat a whole hindquarter right now. If we don’t get home soon, I may be forced to eat my wife.’

Torrance’s grin was humourless, his eyes shafts leading somewhere Parfitt didn’t want to visit. He climbed up to the loading dock in time to see the two men, each pushing a trolley filled with meat.

‘You’ll see where they are,’ said one of them. ‘Right by the end of the chain.’

They would have been hard to miss even if he hadn’t been looking for them. There were twenty trolleys, maybe more. They weren’t just full, they were piled high with cuts of meat. Parfitt tried to gauge how many Chosen it would have taken to fill the trolleys. When he took hold of his first trolley he saw it wasn’t a calculation based on simply chopping them up and dumping them in. These were good cuts of meat – chops, joints and steaks. The trolleys must have held between two and three hundred head in total.

Parfitt put his back into shoving it along. When he reached the truck, low rails caught hooks on the base of the trolley so that when he pushed, it tipped into the truck. An avalanche of meat slid into the back. Parfitt hauled on the trolley rope bringing it upright again. Dragging it with him, he went to retrieve the next.

With three of them shifting trolleys, emptying them all took less than ten minutes. Torrance looked on, smoking. Parfitt felt very much the focus of his attention. He worked accordingly but he was terrified. Moments earlier he’d been musing on how insane it would be for someone to break into MMP – for whatever reason. Now, here he was helping Torrance and his henchmen steal an entire truckload of quality cuts. No wonder Torrance had promised him ‘very decent overtime’. If they were caught they’d join the Chosen in the crowd pens just as Greville Snipe had done and with exactly the same amount of sympathy.

The loading done, the four of them squeezed along the seat in the cab and Torrance passed out smokes. Parfitt took one but his hands gave away his state of mind.

‘Bit young for the Shakes, aren’t you, Parfitt?’

There was no point trying to hide it.

‘I’m nervous, sir. Never thought I’d be… nicking meat.’

Torrance put the truck into gear and moved off. His men chuckled amongst themselves and Parfitt’s unease grew. He began to suspect he’d been chosen not because Torrance liked him or felt he could rely on him. At the end of this after-hours job they were going to let him take the fall.

Eventually, though, Torrance let him off the hook. At least a little.

‘We’re not nicking it, son.’

‘What are we doing then?’

‘You’ll see soon enough.’

They reached the front gates where, strangely, there was no one in the security guard’s box. Instead of turning left towards town, Torrance pulled out and went right. Parfitt had never been this way before. Never even looked in this direction. Beyond the MMP plant there was very little more land before the wasteland began.

It was dusk now. Almost directly behind them the sun was falling to earth behind Abyrne. Ahead of them, all was shadow but Torrance left the truck’s lights off. The road quickly deteriorated and he slowed down to negotiate the ruts and potholes assailing the suspension. Then the road ended and all Parfitt could see were two wheel ruts that led into the darkness.

To their right there were more tyre marks. Torrance stopped the truck and reversed it into these tracks.

‘Better get out and guide me in,’ he said.

Parfitt waited for one of the men that knew what they were doing to climb over him to the door.

‘I’m talking to you, Parfitt. Get a bloody move on. I don’t want to be out here a second longer than necessary.’

Parfitt opened the door and jumped to the ground. He walked to the back of the truck where he could see tracks continuing. At the end of the tracks the ground fell away. He stood on the rear driver’s side corner and signalled for Torrance to reverse. As the truck came towards him, he stepped back too. The tracks ended. Beyond them was a precipice deep enough to lose a truck in forever.

He held up both hands.

‘Whoa!’

The truck’s brakes whined and it juddered to a stop.

Torrance shouted out from the cab:

‘Spring those catches and stand clear, Parfitt.’

Parfitt did as he was told. The back panel of the truck, hinged at the top, was now free to open. Hydraulics hissed and the bed of the truck began to rise. Parfitt looked into the crater-like abyss falling away behind the truck but he already knew what it contained. The smell, a hundred times more rank than any smell in the slaughterhouse, rose up all around them. In the belly of the pit, rotted the butchered remains of thousands of the Chosen.

The truckload they’d taken from the slaughterhouse slid down the steep incline to join its own kind in jumbled decomposition.

‘Make sure it’s empty, son.’

Parfitt reached into the back of the truck to clear the flesh that had lodged in corners or stuck to the panels. Not all of it was within reach. He walked back to the cab as Torrance let the truck’s bed descend to the horizontal.

‘I’m going to need a—’

Before he reached the cab a broom was passed out. He took it, leapt up and swept out the final obstinate cuts. Torrance revved the engine, impatient to leave. For once Parfitt felt the same eagerness. He ran to his door and climbed up. The broom was deposited behind the seat. They drove back to the plant in silence.

Torrance parked up.

‘Get changed and I’ll give you a lift into town,’ he said.

It was dark by then and a long walk. Parfitt didn’t have much choice.

He met them by the gate, this time Torrance was driving a smaller shuttle bus. Parfitt sat at the back. It was no surprise that Torrance drove them straight to Dino’s.

‘Quick cleansing of the palate,’ said Torrance.

‘I’d better get home for my dinner,’ said Parfitt.

‘You’ll have a drink first, son.’

Being a weeknight, it was quieter in Dino’s but there were still plenty of stockmen drinking up their high wages.

Torrance bought the round. The barman nodded his recognition to Parfitt and the four of them went to sit at the same table they’d used the first time.

‘Parfitt, this is Stonebank and Haynes.’

They shook hands.

Torrance:

‘To the blood of the Chosen. Long may it nourish the town.’

Everyone raised their glasses and drank acid.

There was an expectant silence. Parfitt knew they were waiting for his questions.

‘What have we just done?’

‘We’ve done two things. We’ve cleared the surplus and we’ve followed orders.’

Parfitt was incredulous.

‘Surplus?’

‘Keep your voice down,’ snapped Torrance. ‘You work for a very efficient organisation. MMP are so good at what they do,’ he gestured around the table. ‘We are so good at what we do, that the Chosen are breeding at peak rates and production is the highest it’s ever been. In order to stop the price of meat going down, we have to dispose of some of it from time to time.’

Parfitt tried to take it in. As far as he knew, there were plenty of townsfolk on the verge of starvation precisely because meat was at such a premium. Torrance had to be wrong. Or lying.

‘There’s a meat shortage, Mr. Torrance. We’re struggling to provide enough.’

‘Not true,’ said Torrance. ‘Not true at all. We’re talking about economics. We’re talking about business. People may not be able to buy meat but that’s not because we can’t provide it. MMP thrives – our wages are so good – because of the price of meat.’

Haynes, who, Parfitt realised, must have heard this very conversation a hundred times, left the table to buy another round.

‘But, surely if Magnus dropped the price of meat then more people would buy it, therefore increasing turnover.’

Torrance nodded.

‘You’re a smart lad, Parfitt. In a way, you’re right. That probably would be the outcome of a drop in prices. However, the whole situation turns on people’s attitudes. If people think that meat is costly, they respect it and those who can afford it. If anyone could buy it, it wouldn’t have the same perceived value even if Magnus could still turn the same profit. Do you see?’

Parfitt nodded. He did understand. He just didn’t understand the point of it.

‘What have the Welfare to say about this? Surely God’s word is that the Chosen are here for all of us, not just those wealthy enough to afford their flesh.’

‘Abyrne’s business and its religion, as you’ll discover, are strange bedfellows. They tolerate each other because without each other neither would survive.’

Haynes returned with vodka. They swallowed once. It wasn’t worth sipping.

‘I think we all need some dinner. Want a ride home, Parfitt?’

‘No thanks, sir. I can walk it from here.’

‘Fine. You’d better come out to the shuttle and collect your pay first, though. After which, you’ll be well worth robbing.’