Meat Read online

  Richard lay on his back, eyes closed, already asleep. Maya had banished the girls to their bedroom upstairs. She shut the door behind her as she entered and stood watching the long, shallow breaths coming and going from her husband’s diaphragm. He was so thin it hurt to look at him. He seemed not to have smiled at her in a decade. He could be on his deathbed, she thought, looking at his pale skin and the lines stitched deep into his face.

  She undressed quietly, not wanting him to wake yet. When she was naked, she looked in the mirror, turning one way and then the other in order to catch the curves of her buttocks, stomach and breasts. Dear Father, I’ll be as thin as the rest of them soon. She put her palm to her mouth to stop the sob that wanted to come out. Recovering herself, she cupped her hands under her breasts and felt the weight of them. They should have been fuller and heavier like they used to be, but now they were slim and less shapely. Narrow. She hated to see it.

  Richard had only been in bed for ten minutes. She slipped in beside him and slid down below the covers. He wore a night shirt but he was naked from the waist down. She kissed his soft, lifeless penis and took it between her lips. As gently as she could, so as not to wake him too quickly, she worked it around inside her mouth with her tongue until it began to swell. Soon it was throbbing the way it had every night in their early years of marriage. For the first time in as long as she could remember, she too felt the warm rush of erotic interest and tension fill her belly and seep from inside her.

  He stirred. A moan came from him that sounded like pain or torment. She didn’t stop. He gasped and she knew that he was awake now. Awake and not stopping her. She made her attentions lighter to prolong it. In the old days he had never wanted it to end and she would tease him until he almost cried for release.

  He spoke:

  ‘I don’t have the energy to reciprocate.’

  She paused:

  ‘This is just for you.’

  For the next fifteen minutes she worked on him until the skin of it was so tight it seemed it might burst. She knew the final pulses were not far away.

  She stopped again.

  ‘Please, Maya. Don’t stop now.’

  ‘I want you to do something for us. For me.’

  ‘No, Maya. Don’t. You know I can’t do it. I won’t do it.’

  She took him back into her mouth, brought him back to the edge and took her mouth away.

  ‘Can’t you see how thin they are? They depend on you. We all do. I’m begging you, Richard, just this once. Don’t let us starve like this.’

  Her head moved over him again. The muscles in his stomach and thighs tightened.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  She sucked him harder, stopped again.

  ‘Please, Richard, we need it. Just a few kilos. You can bring it in your backpack. Fill it up.’

  ‘Do it to me, Maya. Let me come.’

  ‘Meat. Say you’ll bring us meat.’

  He was crying, shaking his head but agreeing. Shaking his head and saying, ‘I will. I promise.’

  He put his hand on her head and urged her downwards.

  She took him in deep.

  Two

  BLUE-792 pads a rhythm onto the aluminium wall of the bullpen with the tips of his incomplete fingers. The rhythm is interspersed with ‘hhaa’ and ‘ssuh’ sounds that issue like panting from his half open mouth. The padding is too stuttered to be the tapping of a rhythm, too lumpy to be the notes of a tune. Yet the stumps of his fingers are dextrous. The whispered shapes of his exhalations are not practised, repeated lyrics. They are manic sighs of focussed intensity.

  BLUE-792 stops padding and sighing and leans his fat, muscular bulk against the cold metal panelling. It bends outward a little but it is strong; reinforced by criss-crossed bars. The metal sends gooseflesh outward across his body in a wave of pleasurable discomfort. He lays his right ear to the steel. His hairless head reflects rows of dim yellow lights above. He is never quite warm enough.

  He hears a padding, a sighing within the metal and a smile breaks his face open. BLUE-792 is a bull; a heavy set, club-boned reproductive giant – a fighter honed by generations before him to physical and sexual superiority.

  BLUE-792 is round-headed. He is grim-mouthed. He is bulldog-faced. Three hundred pounds of meat and between his legs swings a rare set of testicles. He is twenty-two years old and can procreate all day without tiring. It is this that keeps BLUE-792 alive and he knows it. None of this is enough to make him smile, not even the dutiful rutting.

  But sometimes, like now, he does allow an upcurling of the lips and an opening of the mouth into a grin. The smile reveals his slickened, toothless gums and behind them his yellow-coated tongue. Soft drumming comes to him. Rasps and sucks and breaths. His eyes close and the smile broadens. His face is that of a huge child – a deaf child hearing private inner music far to the back of its mind. Saliva spills from the corner of his mouth in a watery string and drips to the straw-covered floor.

  A monumental erection rises at his groin as he listens to the noises from the wall. It’s a frightening cock with a bulbous helmet, a shaft too thick for fingers to meet around and too long to be anything but painful when in use. He hears footsteps and pads three beats, three times on the panel before moving to the front of the bullpen.

  The erection is still beating a silent, swollen tattoo when a face appears at the upper hole in the door. The face is topped by a curly black mop with occasional corkscrews of grey. The beard is even thicker and much darker, no hint of steel or silver in it yet. The eyes in the face are dark brown. Soft, deep eyes. The face doesn’t speak. It does not smile. A hatch opens at the bottom of the door and a broad aluminium pan the size of a washing-up basin is pushed through. The hatch closes. The face moves away.

  BLUE-792 sits down in the straw, lifts the bowl in his palms and drops his head towards it at the same time. The same smell, the same taste, the same amount as always. Much like a dog with its snout bred flat, he attacks the warm thick mush that is his breakfast with his toothless mouth. The process of eating is more like inhalation. He cannot chew much nor does he stop to bother. In five minutes of chopsy slurping and sucking, the base of the bowl shines dully through. He wipes it out with the stumps of his fingers and licks them. He licks the inner surfaces of the bowl. He smears the mush left on his face with his palms and tongues them clean. The bowl drops from his stubby hands.

  He lies back in the straw and belches deeply twice. The erection is gone. Brown flecks of mush still stain his cheeks, chin and neck. Soon, BLUE-792 is snoring so hard that the panel nearest him vibrates in harmony with his breathing.

  The chain is long but the Chosen pass through it quickly.

  It begins in the crowd pens where herds are brought in directly from the fields and feed lots, just a few hundred metres away on the same mega-plot of MMP land. Even for this short journey, the cattle are loaded into gas-driven transport trucks to control them more easily. A ramp slams down from the back of the transporter at the entrance to the crowd pens and the stockmen use electric prods to encourage the cattle down from the truck.

  The ‘hotshots’ as the stockmen refer to the prods, create high voltage static that is harmless to the cattle but impossible for them to ignore. The trucks empty quickly, the speed at which they do so directly affecting efficiency and productivity. Hold-ups whilst unloading mean hold-ups for everyone else on the chain.

  Once the cattle are in the crowd pens, stockmen use their hotshots to move them, still as a herd, towards the single file chute. A series of high, barred gates are then closed behind the moving animals to maintain the herd’s density as they are funnelled towards the chute.

  At the mouth of the single file chute, there is a gradual narrowing until there is space for only one animal. The herd becomes a queue. The weight of cattle behind is usually enough to keep individual animals moving into the chute but sometimes extra encouragement from the hotshots is necessary. A stockman known as a ‘filer’ remains in position to keep things mov
ing and to prevent spooked animals from reversing out of the chute.

  The first in line at the chute will find a ‘wall’ of steel against which they will be pressed by those behind. When the wall slides open, they will be impelled through either by weight of numbers or by a final prod from the filer. On the other side of the wall, each animal finds itself in a tall, narrow steel box. The box is moving away from the queue in the chute and the animal has no choice now but to be swept along inside it.

  This is the stunning box or restrainer. As it moves, a small cage descends from above, trapping the animal’s head and preventing it from moving. At this point, the animal’s instinct is to bend its knees and sink downwards, away from the cage. However, the moving cubicle will now have encountered a rail at knee height that prevents leg movement. The stunning box is also too narrow to allow lateral movement so the animal is rendered immobile – more by the dimensions of its surroundings, than by actual bindings or shackles.

  The box will be moving in a start-stop motion that depends on the skill and accuracy of the stunner. Each time the stunner uses the captive bolt gun successfully, he presses a button that advances the next stunning box in the sequence to a position in front of him. For the animal that has just entered the system, five stops and starts will bring it to a hatch directly level with its face. Within a second or two, this hatch will slide upwards and the animal will be looking briefly out onto the factory floor. The last thing it sees will be the stunner bringing the captive bolt gun towards its forehead.

  The captive bolt gun is a humane means of rendering an animal unconscious prior to exsanguination. It is a pneumatic handheld firearm that employs a sudden compression of trapped air to fire its captive bolt. The ‘bolt’ is a four-inch spike with a groove along the upper part of its shaft. The rear part of the bolt is mushroom shaped. This serves two purposes: first it acts as the piston that is forced forward by the compressed air and second it prevents the bolt from leaving the gun when it is fired. Hence, captive bolt.

  Firing the captive bolt gun into the head of an animal has two major effects. The first, obviously, is to pierce the skull and enter deeply into the brain. The second is to cause a massive and sudden rise in intracranial pressure; in other words, to create a very small but significant explosion of force inside the brain, bringing about immediate and painless unconsciousness.

  Occasionally, the bolt gun may need to be employed a second or third time. This is rarely to do with the design of the equipment. More commonly, poor maintenance or human error is to blame for the necessity of a second or third firing of the bolt gun. Bolt gun maintenance should be performed daily, between shifts, to ensure proper functioning and all stunners should be fully trained and certificated before being allowed to operate at this point in the chain.

  Once the stun procedure is deemed successful by the stunner – a process that should take no more than two or three seconds – the panel will close and the unconscious animal will proceed to the next station in the chain for exsanguination. Viewed from above, this machinery is like a waterwheel lying on its side, with each cubicle acting as a bucket.

  Next, the stunning box will open and the animal will fall and roll down an angled steel slope to the ‘bleeder’. A bleeder’s job is simple and must be performed quickly. They must loop a chain around one or both of the animal’s ankles and haul it vertical. In this position exsanguination will occur more swiftly than if the animal is left horizontal. Using a long thin blade, the bleeder must then cut both carotid arteries and the trachea in the neck of the unconscious animal. A bleeder’s skill lies solely in speed and efficiency. He should aim to complete the exsanguination process before the animal regains consciousness. Animals that have regained consciousness at this point should quickly lose consciousness again as blood loss continues.

  The animal will now move to the next position in the line where it will be dipped into a vat of boiling water for four seconds. This is long enough for the hide to come loose without cooking or damaging the valuable tissue below. It is extremely rare for an animal either to regain consciousness or still be conscious at this point in the chain. The scalded animal now proceeds for beheading – another automated process – then is flayed and disembowelled by skinners and gutters. Skins and organs are all placed on a conveyor for sorting into uniform batches of products and by-products. The lower intestines are reserved and sent for processing at the gas facility. The skin is retained for tanning.

  The body of the animal now moves onward for quartering, hanging and boning.

  The stockmen watched WHITE-047 on and off over two twelve-hour shifts without getting involved. She was a fourteen-year-old that had mated thirty-seven weeks earlier along with hundreds of others. Her calf would be BLUE-792 stock and it was for that reason that they let the labour continue unaided for so long. Assisted births rarely went well for cow or calf. Stock from BLUE-792 was among the best, and damaging or killing it would be an expensive waste of the bloodline.

  The first shift watched her face twist in tightened agony when her contractions came irregularly and infrequently. After the first few hours WHITE-047 was bent over, hobbling from one corner of the calving pen to another. She kicked up piles of straw exposing the dirt floor of the barn. She rocked her body, shook her head from side to side, thrust her hands flat against the panels and panted.

  From time to time Richard Shanti passed by the calving pens. Though he tried not to, he couldn’t help but be fascinated by the arrival of new generations of Chosen, especially the stock from BLUE-792. It was the only time he disengaged that part of himself that was a calm dealer of an endless pack of death cards. It was a fantasy he engaged in, he couldn’t help himself. Perhaps, he thought, it’s a natural response to all the slaughter. In the fantasy, the calves weren’t taken from their mothers to be ‘worked’. Their fingers weren’t clipped down to the second knuckle, their thumbs weren’t removed, their tongues were whole and their vocal cords intact. The males weren’t castrated and none of them were hobbled by the removal of their big toes. They were not dipped. They became children not cattle, and they did not die by Richard Shanti’s deft, compassionate hand.

  It was a dangerous fantasy. The kind of mental process that could cost him his job and more. While the bored stockmen leaned against the walls talking and smoking, Shanti’s eyes were drawn to the moment of birth again and again. Maya hadn’t made it to the hospital when she’d given birth. If she had, he wouldn’t have been allowed in during the labour. Welfare didn’t like men, especially MMP employees, to see their wives’ birth processes for themselves. They knew how similar it looked to calving. But Maya had gone into labour with the twins on a Sunday when he was at home and though the Welfare had arranged to collect her, by the time they arrived, Shanti had already delivered the twins himself, cut the umbilicals, wrapped the girls in towels and handed them to their mother for their first feed. The midwife, arriving half an hour later, had looked at him with awed contempt. How had a man done this? There was nothing for her to do except weigh the girls, ask the exact time of birth and perform the ritual prayers. Somewhere, he guessed, a note was made that the father had been present for the entire labour. His behaviour would be monitored.

  But Richard Shanti’s name was already an MMP legend. He was the Ice Pick, the most efficient and cool-headed stunner there had ever been. Nothing could cast doubt on his abilities, not even a Welfare midwife’s report. Knowing this, the midwife’s disgust didn’t worry him.

  As he walked along the calving pens, spending a moment at each one, he knew he was also the only man in the barn who understood what it was about human labour and bovine labour that was so similar. Would the stockmen have been even a little bit disturbed by it? He doubted it. Every MMP worker in the town was far too inured to systematic cruelty to give it a moment’s attention. Look at them now, he thought, not even moved by the sight of new life coming into the world; unaware of the potential and unresponsive to the pain of the cattle as they gave birth to their ca
lves. The stockmen were unmoved by what the future held, not only for the newborns but for the calving cows themselves. After their time of service in the dairy, when their milk yield began to decline below acceptable levels, they would be slaughtered. Their meat, being of a lower standard, would go into pies and sausages and pasties. That would be the end of their story.

  He came to WHITE-047’s pen and recognised her immediately. This was a cow that had mated with BLUE-792. He remembered their encounter very well.

  It had been chilly in the mating pens that day. Another unseasonably cold morning at the beginning of Abyrne’s short-lived summer. What little heating there was had already been turned off and many of the Chosen were shivering in their stalls. BLUE-792 had been mating with the newest herd of mature cows for three days by then; taken from one stall to the next by an entourage of stockmen and closely scrutinised to make sure he inseminated every cow.

  It was another process that Shanti watched from time to time when his week on the stun had passed and he was freer to move around the various buildings of the plant. BLUE-792 was his favourite bull of all time; a powerful, noble creature that went about its business with uncommon energy. Shanti kept an eye on the bull whenever he had a chance. During the annual mating season, BLUE-792 was pushed to the limits of his stamina.

  Without exception, BLUE-792 would enter each new mating crate and sniff the air. At the far end of the narrow cubicle would be a young cow of between 12 and 16 years of age, ready for its first mating. Shanti always thought the cows paired with BLUE-792 were the lucky ones. The bull knew exactly what it was doing and always spent time relaxing and coaxing the skittish cows into their duties. He was the most efficient bull in MMP history; larger, stronger, more fertile and able than any other.