Meat

Seventeen

Richard Shanti’s father had been a stockman too. He’d worked on the chain in the days before Magnus took control of the plant and the Chosen. Back then the Welfare had more control over the way meat was provided. Visits by the Grand Bishop and Parsons to the plant had been frequent and the air of sanctity around the rearing and slaughter of the Chosen was far greater. These days it seemed as though Magnus left the religious doctrines out of his working practices, merely paying lip service to them whilst trading ritual practices for higher chain speeds. It had become a production line.

Parson Mary Simonson doubted the correct prayers were spoken at the moment of stunning and exsanguination. In Shanti’s father’s time, those prayers were every stockman’s mantra from clocking on to knocking off. She wondered if the pious-seeming Richard Shanti remembered his prayers at work. Welfare inspections of MMP practices happened so rarely these days it was impossible to tell.

She rifled through the cards that recorded Albert Shanti’s life. Like his son he’d been an exemplary stunner – caring, efficient and quick. Still, back then the chain speeds had rarely reached ninety per hour. So much had changed in just a generation. She checked for irregularities in his behaviour, interventions by Welfare at any time and found that there was a file showing some Welfare involvement. She checked the dates. It was around the time of Elizabeth Shanti’s second tragic pregnancy that the Welfare had visited. Reports of screaming and fighting in the Shanti house – a property nearer the town centre where neighbours could listen in.

It could have been a grudge – someone making trouble for Shanti by telling tales and bringing the suspicion of the Welfare down on him. She couldn’t rule that out. Or it might have been genuine unpleasantness between a childless couple with no more chances.

Further reports to the Welfare were made by the plant when Albert Shanti’s stun performance dipped. No visit was made, as it was the province of the then Meat Baron, Greg Santos, to deal with employees in his own way. But other reports were made – not by Albert’s superiors but by other workers in the plant – of inappropriate behaviour. It was stated in the records that he had been seen spending his lunch hours watching cows nurse their newborn calves. Parson Mary Simonson’s heart went out to the man as she imagined what it must have been like to lose two children and see so much life being brought into the world where he worked.

And then there was a final report.

At least there was space for another report, a dated card divider with an incident number, but there was nothing in the file. No actual record of whatever it was Albert Shanti had done. The incident number was coded with a ‘C’ which meant whatever it described had occurred in the plant and was related to the Chosen. The Parson shook her head in disbelief. Someone had tampered with Welfare files. She’d never come across such a thing. Never even heard of it.

It had to be a mistake. Likely hers. She hadn’t been concentrating and had either dropped or moved the file along with the others. She checked through every entry in Albert Shanti’s record box then checked it again. Then she checked each inserted card to be sure there weren’t two sticking together. The more she looked the more it became clear that something was amiss. Interfering with Welfare files was suicidal. Utter madness. She stood back and got her breathing under control. It wasn’t possible. She had to be wrong.

A final check turned up nothing.

‘Whittaker!’

The old man arrived with surprising speed, churning up dust devils in his wake and not seeming to notice at first.

‘Yes, Parson?’

‘Look at this file box, would you? Find me the report C:127:42.’

She handed him the box and leaned against a bank of shelves as she watched his ratlike fingers scurry through the cards. The pain in her stomach swelled like a sphere of teeth. She clutched herself.

Whittaker made a tiny mew of disappointment and flicked through the record box again. The Parson’s legs weakened beneath her, the muscles in her thighs quivered and she began to sink down.

‘It’s not here,’ announced Whittaker. ‘But that can’t b–’

She looked up at him from the dirty floor, her head leaning to one side and saliva dribbling onto her shoulder. She wanted to move, to talk to him, but her body wouldn’t obey.

‘Parson? Whatever’s the matter?’

Whittaker closed the box and placed the file carefully back in its place on its shelf. She noticed how reverently he handled the records and felt bad for ever having been unkind to him. Only when the box was in position did he kneel beside her and try to help her up. He looked genuinely worried. None of his pulling or hauling did any good for her. She could neither move nor speak.

‘Rawlins,’ he shouted. ‘Get some help for the Parson. Get Doctor Fellows.’

It was only then, as he waited with her, that the old man’s body remembered its allergy. He began to sneeze.

Shanti awoke in blackness long before dawn. It was too early to practise gathering the light but he felt agitated and enlivened. Maya was deep in slumber beside him, turned away as had become her habit. Silently, he rose and dressed, put on his long coat and walked out to the darkness through the back door. The wind had changed again. Instead of blowing the evils of the MMP plant towards the town, now the smells drifted out into the wasteland where there was no one to smell anything. He breathed deeply, grateful for the clarity of the air. Something pulled at him. Hard to define the feeling – a faint tugging in his stomach, an urge to move. He had nothing else to worry about, no work to go to, at least for today. Normally he would run, today walking would be the alternative.

He left the house behind, thinking only of his daughters sleeping so tightly curled in the lower bunk. At first the pace was leisurely and his steps cautious in the dark. But he’d run these roads so many times that he wasn’t too afraid of falling into the gorse or a patch of nettles. When he reached the main road where he usually turned left to run to the plant, he turned right and set off for the centre of the town.

From time to time there were potholes and uneven areas of road but, not really noticing, he negotiated them without a stumble. Soon he was passing the first houses of the town proper – most folk didn’t like to live as close as he did to the wasteland. A pavement became available, albeit cracked and subsiding in many places, so he stepped onto it from the road.

To his right and a little behind him, a faint light was born. It quickened his step. The houses became closer together and smaller. The smells of habitation – sewage, cooking, spent gas – grew stronger. It was still early and no one was awake except insomniacs, lovers and the sick. He liked it that way and hoped to be through the centre of town before the townsfolk began their business for the day.

On his left he passed the stone gateposts and black iron gates that marked the front entrance to Magnus’s mansion, its extensive grounds walled off and guarded but set very near the centre of Abyrne. Where the property ended he turned left and walked past the Central Cathedral, a dark gothic beast, frozen in the light of the approaching dawn. Beside it were the many offices of the Welfare and further along on the right most of the central businesses – butchers, flesh apothecaries, religious shops and various craftsmen.

He passed them all, turned right onto Black Street and walked out past the worst of the inhabited houses in the town. This was where the poorest of the townsfolk lived, barely scraping enough money together to buy a single cut of meat each week. If these people listened to Collins, many of the town’s problems would evaporate.

Black Street ended suddenly, as though a cleaver had swung down through it, removing the far section. Beyond it there was no more road, no pavement and for a long way, no buildings left standing.

Shanti stepped over the break in the street like a man stepping out of prison. For most townsfolk, entering the Derelict Quarter meant their lives in the town had been ruined and that they’d never return. He’d have to be careful to go home under the protection of darkness to avoid starting rumours. Magnus had spies everywhere and one never knew when a Parson of the Welfare might step out from an alley and enquire after your business.

Stepping over broken bricks and concrete and avoiding the spokes of steel that rose and twisted from the debris brought a smile to Shanti’s face. He stepped lightly, following all the time the encouragement of an unseen pull.

He passed many houses that were only half-ruined and sometimes had a sense of people living there, even though he saw no evidence of it. Further into the Quarter, the monolithic shadows of high-rise buildings towered in the dawn. Many of them were unsafe even to walk near because of falling masonry but others were more stable. None, however, had windows, any form of power supply or water from the town. They never had. Rumour implied that Collins – Prophet John as so many had come to call him – lived in one of the tower blocks but Shanti didn’t believe that was still true. To survive, Collins would have to keep moving.

He passed the familiar lock-ups – a strangely untouched part of the Derelict Quarter. It was down in a deep hollow and a road, in surprisingly good condition, led down in a spiral to the row of concrete units. Shanti picked up the pace; the lock-ups were nowhere to go alone, especially now that Collins had disappeared and the meetings had stopped.

It was only beyond the lock-ups that he began to question why he’d risked coming to the Derelict Quarter at all. Being seen here could affect his status. It was crazy when his job at MMP was already on sandy foundations.

He had been called. That was it.

Something had reached out to him and he was following the prompt. There was only one thing he would find out here among ruins that could not be considered part of the town. Instead of pretending he didn’t know what it was, he began to look for it. He concentrated on the drawing sensation in his belly and felt it strengthen in response.

Ahead were more shattered terraces of what had once been houses. He walked towards them. Sick looking weeds grew occasionally from cracks and rents in the grim landscape. The earth below held little or no nourishment and the weeds appeared to survive on light, air and tenacity.

He passed between the remains of houses, crossed what once had been a street and passed through more houses on the other side. Beyond them the destruction appeared total. He merely wandered between unrecognisable piles of mortar, tile, brick and block, every hillock of wreckage thick with grey dust and grit. Here and there rusted steel or charred wood frameworks rose like broken fingers reaching towards the sky. The damage stretched out to the horizon.

A few feet in front of him, the ground dropped away at a shallow angle for a few paces. He slid in the debris as he scrambled down. Looking back he could see nothing of the town centre from this depression in the land. Only the very tips of some of the tower blocks were still visible. He moved on feeling safer now that he was less likely to be observed.

The sun had been up for several minutes but there was nothing it could do to make this part of Abyrne cheerier. All it did was lighten the grey all around him. The ruin seemed to go on forever.

He stopped walking.

What’s out here? What could possibly exist in all this destruction and decay? Am I crazy walking out here like this? What’s wrong with me?

He looked down at his long black coat. The lower half of it was grey now with the dust of the Derelict Quarter. He’d snagged it on some sharp protrusion and there was a tear in the back of it.

The landscape is changing me. Making me like it. All it takes is a few minutes and it’s taking me over. I have to get home. For the girls. They’re all that matters now.

He turned back towards the slope and began to walk back, panic moving his feet.

Then he saw the opening.

It was a very definite thing. Not some accident of the shifting rubble. It was several yards to the left of where he’d slithered down the incline. Coming down the slope he hadn’t noticed it. It was a broad hole, once perfectly rectangular but now bitten and ragged like everything else out here. He walked towards it and the opening grew, more of it becoming visible as he approached. This had been some kind of entrance way.

When he stood on its threshold all he could see beyond was darkness descending. A few steps were visible leading downwards. That was all.

Moments before it had seemed that no environment could be worse than the Derelict Quarter. Now there was nothing worse than darkness. He tried not to think about it.

To guide himself, he ran his hand along the wall and felt with his feet to make sure there were more steps and that the ground didn’t disappear into a drop. Every few steps he turned around, reassured himself that he could still see the light from the entrance and that he would keep going deeper while that light was still visible.

The Derelict Quarter. He realised now, as he tried not to think about what he was walking into, that the name was completely wrong. The area covered by the tumbledown buildings and tracts of formless demolition was vast. The part he’d seen was larger by far than the town centre and many of the other districts put together. It stretched into the distance for what must have been several miles. He’d seen near the horizon something that looked like a ladder on its side and he tried to guess what it might have been. Not a bridge exactly but something similar. It would have been enormous if he were closer to it. Perhaps some kind of walkway or road built through the air. But for what purpose he couldn’t imagine.

He felt for the next step with his right foot but there was no next step. He’d reached a level floor. The sole of his boot crunched over the grit. The sound echoed. The space around him was large then. What must it have been? He put his back to the wall and edged along it. This way he could still see the sliver of light where he’d entered. A few sideways paces and the entrance itself disappeared from view. Still, he could see the glow coming from it. Just a few paces further and then he’d go back.

The sensation in his guts intensified. Maybe it was because the darkness had made him concentrate on what he could feel rather than what he could see. The feeling drew him deeper into the black space.

Shanti stopped.

The light from the entrance was now very faint indeed. He felt very far from familiar, safe things. The darkness became aware all around him. It was alive. There was something down there with him, coming towards him out of the depths. He couldn’t see it but he could –

– feel many hands taking hold of him, pressing him into the wall so that he could not move. By the time he tried to struggle, he was pinned. He felt the warmth of faces in the darkness, the breath of others. And then the tones of a familiar voice.

‘Glad you could join us.’

They led him across an open space and down more steps. This happened three times. They left the light far behind. Some insane corner of his mind fantasised that they were taking him to a new world. Somewhere down in all this darkness there would be a door and that door would open into a better place, a place without slaughter and violence.

It was the fear making him think that way, he reasoned. After all, he had no idea what they were going to do. He had discovered their secret place. They might wish to prevent that secret from ever being known.

No one spoke and he didn’t try to make use of their silence to beg for mercy or plead his innocence. Instinct told him to keep quiet. There were several of them; he could tell by the footsteps in front and behind. He considered trying to tear from their arms and run away but he’d only end up hurting himself. They seemed to know the way to walk without putting a foot wrong. He’d probably run straight into a wall or break his legs on unseen stairs. There was nothing to do but go along with them.

They came to a halt in a space that had no echo. The arms let go of him. Many footsteps retreated away but he sensed he wasn’t completely alone.

‘Why don’t you sit down?’ suggested the voice.

Shanti felt around and below himself for something to sit on. There was nothing there.

‘Sorry,’ said the voice as if the person speaking had forgotten to provide milk with tea. ‘Just a second.’

In the dark Shanti heard a hiss and smelled the familiar odour of gas. A match flared and the lamp lit up the room. He was standing opposite a smiling John Collins.

‘Welcome to our temporary new home.’

Shanti looked around in the yellow gloom. They were in some kind of small office or storeroom cleared of all furniture except for a cot on the floor and some blankets folded into makeshift cushions. Collins gestured towards one and Shanti sat down.

Richard Shanti didn’t run the next day either. He rose again when he sensed the sun ascending toward the horizon and went outside with a new sense of purpose. An hour later he returned when the sun was well up. Maya rose and woke the girls, made their breakfast of grilled steak.

He assumed they all ate meat every day now. It had gone on long enough that he had begun to appreciate the irony of it rather than shouldering the guilt for them. There was another way to live and in time he would show them. First he had to prove it to himself. As a vegetarian he was halfway there already. The next step ought to be easy for him.

He’d usually left for work by the time his wife and the girls were up, having made breakfast for himself. Maya seemed to resent his presence. When she spoke, her tone was grudging.

‘Do you want food? I’ll make you some rice gruel.’

‘I’m fine.’

He watched Hema and Harsha sawing through slabs of steak and forking lumps of grilled meat into their mouths. They chewed hungrily and efficiently. In just a few weeks they’d been transformed into carnivores by the determination of his wife. The steaks oozed clear juice tainted brown onto their white plates. At least she cooked them all the way through. Or maybe she’d done that because he was here watching them.

It didn’t matter.

Finally, after so many years of hopeless wrestling with the implications of his job and the sickening realities of the town, there was a new hope for him, for the girls; something beyond his imaginings, beyond what seemed possible.

It could be the answer to everything. A chance to start again. To atone. Never in his life could he have believed this might come to him and yet, now that the time was near, it seemed predestined. It was everything he could have voiced in petition but never knew how to say.

‘I’m going to go back to work today.’

‘I thought Bob told you to take more time than this.’

He didn’t reply for a few moments.

‘Mr. Torrance’ll know when he sees me that I’m ready to start back. He’s an experienced judge of character.’

‘If he’s so experienced, he must have given you the time off for a reason.’

‘True. But he’ll be pleased to have me.’

She shrugged like she suddenly didn’t care and busied herself at the kitchen sink. He watched her back. There was language in the movement and he thought he understood it now like never before in their fifteen years of marriage. He knew what people’s bodies said, what the bodies of the Chosen said. Maybe he’d never allowed himself to read her before.

As far as he was concerned, she could eat all the meat she wanted and live in ignorance of the suffering she perpetuated. But the twins were a different matter.

When the time came, they were the ones he’d look out for. Veal.

Torrance couldn’t have given him a worse job. Shanti hoped he’d picked it because it represented a reduction in pace and pressure and not because Torrance knew what was troubling him.

The veal yard was a self-contained building, smaller than the dairy and the slaughterhouse. Once veal calves arrived and were installed, they remained there until they weighed enough to be slaughtered, which also took place on the premises. Even the butchering was performed on site giving Magnus total control over veal quality.

This meant the calves, secured for years in their darkened crates, could hear the sound of their own kind being killed every day of their lives. They used similar sounds to communicate but their language differed from the rest of the herd because they were isolated and had created words for things only they experienced.

Shanti didn’t understand all of it and he was glad. There was so much innocence to their communication, so much acceptance of their end that it broke his heart to listen. The older calves, usually the respected teachers among them, would become frightened as they neared their time and then the hisses and taps would become a kind of harmonised prayer to give them strength and courage. The dusky halls of the veal yard throbbed with their muted rhythms and Shanti was nauseated.

Torrance, knowingly or not, had given him the job of stunning the calves. The frequency was entirely different from the slaughterhouse. There was no chain speed – no chain even. They killed no more than eight or ten calves a day which meant one every hour or so. Shanti had plenty of time to think about what he was going to do to them.

They took each ready calf from its crate and laid it on a stretcher. None of them had the musculature necessary to stand straight or walk. They could barely support the weight of their own heads. The only strength they had was in the four short fingers of each hand, fingers that had become their tongues. Because the calves were kept in near blackness every day, the lights in the veal yard were always dimmed. Even so it must have been like looking directly at the sun for them. Two stockmen would haul them out onto the sawdust and then roll them onto a stretcher face up. The calves would struggle to hide their half-blind eyes. The low hissing and tapping would increase all around the yard as the stockmen ferried the helpless calves to Shanti.

All it took to stop the calves struggling to protect their head or wriggle away was a couple of weighted belts laid over their arms and legs.

One thing was the same:

The bolt gun.

Same design. Same recoil. Same noise.

A wedge on either side of the head was enough to stop the calves from shaking Shanti’s target. He was fairly certain that after only a few seconds in the light they could still not see. Therefore they could not see him. This was scant consolation because he could see them. He could look into their eyes as he killed them. All he saw were the curious, trusting eyes of children.

He couldn’t stand there thinking about what he had to do. He couldn’t allow the other stockmen to interpret his hesitancy as a sign of fear or weakness. Nor could he allow the calves to suffer the torment of anticipation a second longer than necessary. All the same every muscle in his body resisted his mind’s programming to apply the pneumatic gun to the centre of the forehead and pull the trigger. But he did it for the sake of speeding the little ones on their way and for the sake of saving his own skin a little longer.

‘God is supreme. The flesh is sacred.’

Hiss. Clunk.

Immediate rolling of the eyes to show pure white. A tension tightening up their soft, fatty bodies followed by the spastic jerks of confused, dying muscles working against each other. Then stillness. And with it relief.

At least for Shanti.

But it didn’t stop then. One calf an hour meant that Shanti accompanied the calf on its journey from wholeness and life into dismemberment and disembowelment. His stockmen hauled them up by their ankles and Shanti bled them with a sure, single stroke of steel across their voiceless throats; between the juvenile Adam’s apple and chin, straight back to the neck bones. A single small vat collected the blood for very holy Welfare rituals.

Shanti walked the hoisted, bled calf down to the scalding vats to remove their skin. He pulled their bodies on motorless runners, assisted in the skinning, beheaded them by hand, helped to gut them, quarter them and bone them out. Shanti even knew how to create the most prized veal cuts from either side of the lumbar vertebrae. Other stockmen dealt with the hands, feet and heads. He let them sort the offal themselves too. But he was still with the calves when there was nothing left but bones to one side and fresh cuts to the other.

All the while the veal yard was filled with low percussion on steel panels and harsh, muffled breathing as row upon row of calves fed, grew, waited their turn. He could hear them.

He learned their tongue.

We are soft for their points and edges, they said.We yield before them and we give ourselves. We are brothers through walls, brothers in darkness, prized above all others. Then one might speak alone. Brothers, I feel the fear that we all will one day feel. Surely my time comes. Strengthen me, brothers, for I go to give. And all would reply. Brother you go to give and truly we go with you. For, in time, we shall all go. We are with you brother. Trust those we serve for they will give you swift release. We have all heard it come, the end. A sharp hiss here followed by an abrupt tap mimicking the noise of the bolt gun. Then a shivering, faltering beat upon the panels as stumps of fingers imitated the nerve shudders of the brain-shocked calves. A soft scraping to mark the sound of chains hoisting a body, a HHHaaa, signifying the sweep of the bleeder’s blade. Incomplete digits pattering first the gush and then the dwindling trickle of blood from the calf’s neck wound.

And so it went. Their trusting acceptance of their situation and their deep commitment to each other’s emotional safety in all matters. They used their language to touch each other because their hands and arms could not.

We are with you. Here we are.

They said that so often.

None of it escaped him. He lived in the world of the Chosen veal calves while the stockmen around him lived in the world of the plant, their workaday jobs, their top wages and their families.

Vile.

Every last one of the meat-eating townsfolk was ignorant, vicious filth. They were the ones who should be slaughtered – at two hundred an hour, if only that were possible.

Yes and Bob Torrance should be first in line.

At three in the morning by the town bell they moved, silent as shadows yet full of light.

He took them all with him, wanting their numbers to be worth more than their might. He knew the best place to enter the facility’s grounds, far from the main gates where the truckloads of stinking intestines arrived for processing. They slipped through the badly maintained fences and he led them from one station to another, fairly certain which would be manned at night and which would not. They padded between storage tanks and chimneys, under wormlike ducts and around the edges of industrial blocks.

Where they found men they silenced them with non-lethal blows. The control room demanded more skill as they were forced to enter single file. The followers were strong, the struggle brief. When the operators lay quiet John Collins cut the power.

In the yards of the facility they took what tools they could find – wrenches, axes, cutters, screwdrivers and hammers and wreaked as much chaos as they could. Metal on metal made more noise than flesh on flesh. Time was short. He made sure he voided the stored gas tanks and cut every power line. They moved the unconscious operators out to the safety of the main gates, set a fire in the control room and left.

They were back in the depths of the Derelict Quarter with dawn yet to break when the first tanks exploded.

When she first regained consciousness she didn’t understand where she was. Why was she lying on a cot in a bare room with stained white walls? What was the last thing she could remember? Who she was – even that presented a problem.

Slowly, it came back.

The rows and rows of shelves and stacks of cardboard boxes, the smell of dusty decay, the feeling that there was something important she needed to find. This filmy recollection was interrupted by anxiety. Why didn’t she recognise this room? How had she come to be here? Her mind had lost its flexibility, pathways of memory hit sharp corners or dead ends. She started to remember and then found herself back at the beginning.

Here, in this dirty white room.

Each trip into memory brought her a little closer, though. She was a Parson. Parson Mary Simonson. She was investigating something.

Someone.

‘Damn it.’

It wouldn’t come.

She was surprised to find the mere effort of trying to think had caused a sweat to break on her upper lip, under her arms. Her face felt hot.

She tried to sit up but her head was a weight her neck barely supported. She managed to get a small way up and tried to use her elbows to push up further. The attempt made her triceps shudder with strain. Halfway up she was overcome with dizziness. Her elbows slid from under her and she collapsed back. Nausea followed the dizziness. The bed inverted itself. She gripped the thin, damp mattress with shaking hands. Over it turned until she was upside down, the ceiling the floor. She did not fall but she felt she would at any moment. She cried out, a gasp of desperation.

‘Someone…’

In her belly, in the depths of her stomach, something swelled; as cold and spiked as the head of a mace. The pain expanded out of her control. She cried out again – anguish.

The door – she hadn’t even noticed there was one – opened. A man walked across what was now the ceiling without falling off. He sat beside her on the upside down chair. She stared, the ivory white around her irises marbled with bloody cracks.

‘It’s good to see you back with us.’

She could not speak.

‘How are you feeling now?’

Was he blind, she wondered? Could he not see the claws her fingers had become? Could he not see the sweat, icy on her face? Noises in her throat were not words.

‘Don’t worry,’ said the man. She thought he seemed familiar. ‘I’m getting something good for you. Something very special. We’ll get you right. Oh, yes indeed, we’ll fix you.’

She knew him: the doctor. A word formed.

‘Where…’

A soft, strengthless hand patted hers.

‘Well, my dear, someone must think very highly of you. You’re in the Grand Bishop’s personal infirmary. I’m sure he’ll be along to visit you very soon.’

Slowly, the bed slid from the inverse to the vertical and finally to the horizontal. The unclenching mailed fist in her stomach closed again leaving her some space to breathe. The vertigo receded and with it the bloated nausea. She took several deep breaths and then her eyes were able to swivel.

‘What happened?’

‘You collapsed. Among the archives. Kicked up a little dust storm all of your own.’

‘How long have I…’

‘A couple of days now. I wish I could tell you you hadn’t missed much.’

After a few moments she took his inference.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, I think I’ll let the Grand Bishop fill you in on that. I know he’ll be along in just a minute.’ The doctor reached down beside the bed and brought up a small glass and a chipped white bowl. ‘First of all, we need to get some healing done. Here, drink this.’

He held out the glass to her but she made no motion to sit up.

‘Let me help you.’

He slipped one hand beneath her head and eased it forward. With the other he tipped the glass towards her lips.

‘’tis it?’

‘Never mind that, just drink it.’

She sipped and gagged.

‘Hold it down! Don’t dare waste it!’ he commanded. ‘That’s precious stuff. Here, have some more.’

‘No.’

‘Do as you’re told. Drink it.’

Sip by sip he had her take the whole glass. The liquid had an evil tint of bronzy yellow mingled with a filthy green hue. It was syrupy in texture.

‘No smell,’ she said. ‘No taste.’

The doctor frowned, took the glass and sniffed it. She saw him turn his head away as though slapped and thought she caught him trying to swallow something back. Turning back to her, he was pale.

‘You can’t smell that?’

‘No,’ she said.

‘It’s a symptom of your sickness, I’m afraid. Not to worry.’ He put the glass down and took up the chipped bowl. With a tainted silver spoon he lifted up some porridgey mass and pushed it home. She chewed, unnecessarily, and then swallowed.

‘Good?’

She managed a facial shrug. He continued to feed her the remedy until the little bowl was empty.

‘Well done. That’ll give you some strength. We’ll have you up and about before too long, I’m quite sure of that.’

The doctor sat back, smiling at his good work.

‘Are you going to tell me what my medicines are?’

He puffed up in his seat.

‘Certainly. These are medicaments of my own devising based on the tenets of the Book of Giving. For your stomach ailment – with a liver involvement, if I’m not very much mistaken, I have prescribed the finest, freshest calf’s bile in a suspension of the very purest veal calf’s urine. For your Shakes, and I’m very sorry to tell you that the Shakes is my official diagnosis, I have dosed you with pulped brain – calf’s again, naturally, as that is the very healthiest there is.’ He leaned forward and lowered his voice. ‘Not to mention the fact that the Grand Bishop himself has insisted on providing your care, therefore putting the very best remedies at our disposal.’ He patted her arm with his limp hand. ‘You rest up, Parson. We’ll get you right. Oh, yes.’