Meat

Nineteen

Sometimes Bruno studied his own hands to see if they were trembling. He did this now as he stood outside Magnus’s bathroom. He was sure he could see some kind of vibration, at least in the very tips of his fingers, but he knew he could have been imagining it – morbidly willing it upon himself. So many townsfolk had the Shakes these days. If it wasn’t his imagination then it was… better not to think about it.

From inside the bathroom he could hear splashing and Magnus’s curses interspersed by giggles and cries of pain from his two maids. He’d gone in there to remove the blood that had dried onto his hands and hair and beard. By the sound of it, now that he was clean, he’d found other things to do in the bath.

Bruno had been standing there waiting for a long time. He’d come to announce an important visitor – still waiting in the downstairs drawing room – and Magnus had said he’d be right out. Bruno had never minded waiting in the past but these days he found it harder and harder to stand or sit and do nothing while Magnus did whatever it was he did behind closed doors. A change was coming; Bruno could sense it in everything that was taking place.

Magnus’s gruntings seemed to reach their conclusion. Bruno knocked on the door again.

‘Sir, he’s still down there.’

‘All bloody right, Bruno. I’m coming.’

The door was unbolted from inside and the two maids left, both of them avoiding Bruno’s eyes and one of them still crying. A few moments later Magnus appeared in his dressing gown and slippers with his long hair dark and dripping. He wore a towel around his shoulders to catch the water.

Magnus started to shuffle along the hallway and Bruno followed. From behind Bruno was able to study his master a little. The man had shrunk unless he was imagining that too. He looked unsteady on his feet and Bruno was sure it wasn’t due to his bath-time fun.

‘What does he want anyway?’ asked Magnus.

‘I don’t know, sir. Says it’s important. Said you’d want to know about it.’

Magnus descended the stair using the banister for support. Bruno had never seen him do that before. Bruno followed until they were in the downstairs hall.

‘Do you still need me, sir?’

‘No, Bruno. You piss off for a game of cards or whatever.

I’ll call when I want you.’

Bruno turned to walk away. When he heard the door of the drawing room close behind Magnus, he crept back and stood with his ear to the wood. Magnus was no more polite with the doctor than he was with anyone else.

‘What’s so bloody important it can’t wait until tomorrow, eh, Fellows?’

There was a pause and Bruno imagined Doctor Fellows taking in what he saw of Magnus and making an on the spot diagnosis. He’d realise there was no need to take offence in Magnus’s manner because soon enough his primary services would be required. For now, though, this was all about Fellows’s secondary function.

‘Quite a lot, Magnus. Quite the sort of thing that absolutely cannot wait until tomorrow.’

‘I’ll believe that when I hear it.’

The doctor cleared his throat. Hesitation? Embarrassment?

‘I’m trebling my fee for this.’

Magnus let out a genuine laugh.

‘Treble? For the hearsay of a quack?’

‘I want them delivered to my chambers tonight.’

Someone sat heavily in a chair making it creak. Bruno guessed it was Magnus; his legs betraying him.

‘I don’t think Bob Torrance is going to like losing three bullocks in a single day, Doc.’

‘Take it or leave it, Magnus. This information is going to save or destroy you depending only on whether you hear it or not.’

‘Tell me why I shouldn’t take you round the back and cut the information out of you.’

‘Because it’ll be the last time you’ll ever use me and I know for a fact you’ve got no one else in a trusted position like mine.’

Bruno could hear the slight tremor in the doctor’s voice. He must have had something pretty solid to be bargaining like this with Magnus. Or perhaps he sensed Magnus’s weakness. His approaching downfall. He heard a sigh from Magnus.

‘All right, Doc, you can have your toys but only if, at the end of our meeting, I feel satisfied that what you’ve told me is worth it.’

Bruno heard the other man take a seat.

‘I’ve been doing a nursing job over at the Cathedral.’

There was excitement in Magnus’s too-quick response.

‘The Grand Bishop?’

‘No, Magnus, not him. Give me a chance. There’s a Parson he must think rather highly of.’

‘Oh, yes? Male or female?’

‘Female.’

‘Hm. That’s a surprise.’

‘She’s got the Shakes and the canker. Serious case. She won’t last much longer. Anyway, the Grand Bishop called me in specially and told me to spare no expense in treating her sickness. Turns out she’s been doing some kind of investigation and she’s found some irregularities. An incident record is missing from the archive. To listen to them it sounds like it must be a serious infringement.’

Bruno heard the sound of a cheroot being lit which was a sign that Magnus was already losing patience with the doctor’s story. Might mean his boss would have reason for a second bath.

‘I trust all this waffle is leading somewhere juicy, Doc.’

‘I’m getting to it. The individual the Parson was investigating is one of your top men. Richard Shanti. Ice Pick Rick. His whole family, in fact, going back through generations.’

‘They’ve been a great line of stockmen. So what?’

‘So, whoever made that record disappear from his father’s file was covering up a crime or the allusion to a crime so serious that no one could ever be allowed to read it or hear of it. It’s of such concern to the Welfare that they’re going to bring Shanti in for questioning.’

‘They can’t do that. He’s my best stunner. With the power down we need him now more than ever.’

‘Magnus.’

‘What?’

‘They’re comparing him to Prophet John. John Col–’

‘I know who you’re bloody talking about,’ Magnus shouted. ‘What’s the connection?’

‘I don’t know. But they don’t know either. Whatever information Shanti has, you need to get it before they do. And you’ve got better access to him so it shouldn’t be too difficult.’

There was a silence in the room that Bruno couldn’t decipher. He considered moving away from the door and down to his quarters but he couldn’t let it go like this.

‘I’m not really sure this is worth three bullocks, Doc.’

‘I’m not finished. I’ve saved the best part.’

‘Get on with it.’

‘The Grand Bishop has every Parson he can spare out searching for Prophet John. He intends to get to him before you and make an example of him. A religious example, if you know what I mean. He wants to use the destruction of Prophet John to re-establish religious control over the town. He wants you, and the Meat Barons of the future to be the lapdogs of the Welfare like it was in the old days.’

Bruno had heard enough to know that Magnus might explode out of the room at any moment. He slipped away down the hall.

Behind him he heard the rants and screams of his master. The man sounded more like an animal every day.

Parson Mary Simonson was dying and she knew it very well.

In the small white convalescent room, she sat up in the cot and leaned her head back against the whitewashed wall. The Grand Bishop had been extremely kind. In the end she felt his reasons were more of a salve to his own guilt than they were out of compassion for her. Still, she was grateful for his care.

Doctor Fellows had come to see her at least twice a day and she had taken his meals and remedies patiently, though not without nausea. She knew the doctor meant well but she also knew that she was beyond his powers to heal. She could have lain comfortably there – comfortable, were it not for the pain in her abdomen and the jitters that now rattled inside her very bones – and let death come for her in its own time but that was not how she wanted it to end. One last time she wanted to be outside, about the town, anywhere but in that room.

There had been a lot of time to think while she’d lain there, sleeping, dreaming, imagining. She thought a lot about Parson Pilkins and what kind of man he might have been. She thought too about what it was he had discovered that was so dangerous or offensive or secret that he had removed it from the archives. But she had no access to records or witnesses or any other source of information and so she merely lay there and wondered.

Her mind scouted where her body could not. She imagined. She let herself fly above the landscape of all she knew to look for patterns on the ground. She swooped and upturned artefacts of memory. In facing her own death, she thought about the deaths of others, of all deaths. Her inner wanderings took her to unexpected grottos of peace and caverns of terror. She considered the nature of truth for the first time and was crushed by how little she knew.

The time had come for her to make one more journey, this time in the real world. She would walk the streets of Abyrne and where her feet led her she would finish her life. She felt certain that she might find one tiny truth out there that would comfort her on her way.

She swung her legs out of the bed.

It was hard. Harder than she’d expected and for a moment she thought about lying back and forgetting all this nonsense in her head, all this diseased madness, and sleeping her life away to the end. But the moment passed and her bare feet touched the cold, gritty stone floor. She examined her legs beneath her bed-shift. They were thin and wasted. Her arms were the same. But her stomach was bulging and firm. She was pregnant with disease. On standing she had to reach for the wall with both hands and lean there for several minutes until the whirling of the world and the whiteness across her vision receded.

Finally, she found her robes and gowns in the small woodwormed closet and dressed. She put on her Parson’s boots, laced them loosely for she did not have the strength to do more, and slipped away from the room and the Cathedral. Her small footsteps took her away from the centre of the town, away from the dirty, scrawny townsfolk.

She found herself on the road out to Richard Shanti’s house.

Trucks brought the men to work as usual but when they arrived it was chaos. Without power there were still plenty of jobs that could be done but no one was sure how to organise it. The electricity occasionally went out in the town but it never, ever, went off at MMP.

Even Torrance was stumped. He stood in a circle of worried men.

‘We can move the carcasses along by hand from station to station, I suppose. But skinning’s going to be harder.’

‘Fucking understatement,’ said one of the skinners.

‘What’s the word from Magnus?’ asked someone else.

‘Well, it’s two words in fact,’ said Torrance. ‘Keep working.’

‘How’re we going to stun them?’ asked Haynes.

‘Right,’ said another. ‘We can’t just haul ’em up and slit their throats. It’s against the teachings.’

Torrance had that one covered.

‘We’ll do it by hand. Lump hammer and steel peg. Same effect exactly. A little more elbow grease.’

There were shrugs around the group. Most of them weren’t stunning so they didn’t mind one way or the other.

Then there was general chatter among them.

‘Did you see the explosions?’

‘No. Heard them, though.’

‘They say it can’t be fixed.’

‘I heard that too. We might be working manually forever more.’

‘I’ll take a pay rise for that.’

‘Yeah right. Magnus’ll cut your bollocks off and eat ’em in front of you first.’

Laughter.

‘Did you hear what he did to the gas crew?’

The laughter died away.

Torrance filled the gap.

‘Let’s make sure nothing like that ever happens here at MMP, right lads?’

Everyone voiced agreement.

‘What about the dairy, Boss?’ It was Parfitt asking. ‘We can’t milk them without the equipment running.’

‘Only one option,’ said Torrance. ‘You’ll have to put calves on most of them until we think of something else. Meanwhile, do as many as you can by hand.’

‘By hand? Isn’t that a sacrilege?’

‘Forget the teachings for now, people need their milk.’

Parfitt looked dismayed.

‘Don’t worry, lad. You’ll work it out. And, all of you, don’t slack off because of this. It’s no excuse. Just remember Magnus’s words: keep working.’

Torrance watched the black bus turn into the main gate and park. It was full of black-coated figures. Only one of them disembarked. He recognised Bruno, Magnus’s top dogsbody, striding across the plant’s forecourt. Stockmen moved out of his way.

‘Somewhere we can talk?’ asked Bruno when he reached Torrance.

Torrance shrugged.

‘This way.’

He led Bruno into the slaughterhouse and up the stairs to his observation balcony. There was a small office up there with a desk and two chairs, glass windows all around.

Torrance parked himself at the desk.

‘Have a seat, Bruno.’

‘No thanks. I’ve got a message for you from Mr. Magnus. He says keep this place running no matter what it takes. Hire more men if you have to and he’ll budget for it.’

‘It’s not as simple as that.’

‘Mr. Magnus believes it is.’

‘We don’t need more men, Bruno. We need electricity and gas. Then the men we’ve got can work as fast as Magnus wants. We’ve only got one chain in the slaughterhouse and that chain goes as fast as we can stun cattle. It won’t go any faster no matter how many men you put on the job.’

‘He doesn’t want to hear this, Torrance, believe me.’

‘I’m sure he doesn’t. But someone has to understand what goes on up here and it ought to be him. I will do everything in my power to keep the plant working as efficiently as possible until Mr. Magnus gets the power back on.’

Bruno shook his head.

‘I can’t see that happening any time soon. It’s going to take years to fix the gas power station. We’re not even sure we can fix it.’

‘What? Why not?’

‘We’re short of the right kind of materials for a start. Mainly it’s a lack of knowledge. The maintenance engineers are going to have to learn how to put it all back together. They’re starting almost from scratch. When the Father created the town, I don’t think he was expecting a bunch of heretics to blow bits of it up.’

Torrance was quiet while he considered the implications of running the plant forever without electricity. It was possible but it would take a lot of doing. If Magnus demanded the same efficiency as before, they’d have to create more chains working manually in the slaughterhouse. They’d have to take men on for milking. If they couldn’t create gas from waste, none of the herds would move in trucks any more. Men would be hauling carts of meat into the town. Everything would change. Torrance felt the first naggings of doubt about the order of things, the first tugs of fear over the future.

Bruno interrupted his thoughts.

‘We’ve got to make sure that something similar doesn’t happen up here.’

‘You think they’re going to attack the plant? Why would they do that? It’s suicide.’

‘From what I’ve seen, this lot have death wishes. I’ve seen…’

‘What?’

‘Doesn’t matter. This guy Collins that leads them, he’s crazy. There’s nothing he won’t try. That’s why I’ve brought some of our boys up here. They’re going to keep an eye on your perimeters. Especially at night. Make sure you look after them, right?’

‘I’ll let the stockmen know.’ Torrance rubbed a hand over his mouth and beard. ‘You really think they’ll try something?’

‘I don’t know but we’re not leaving it to chance.’

‘I should arm the stockmen.’

‘Too right. Get them bladed up, Torrance. This place has got to stay on track or the town’s in big trouble.’

Bruno turned to leave.

‘Wait. What about the Welfare? Have they sent word? They must have an answer to all of this. They should send out the Parsons and seize this Collins man.’

‘I don’t know what the Grand Bishop’s response has been to the destruction of the power station but I know that Magnus has already asked Welfare for help and that they weren’t very cooperative. Him and the Grand Bishop… they don’t get on.’

‘Fuck me, Bruno. Two men with a disagreement is no reason to let the town be overrun by lunatics.’

‘That’s what I’ve been thinking.’

‘There must be something else we can do.’

‘If I think of anything, I’ll let you know. No reason why we can’t work together.’

Torrance nodded. No reason at all.