Meat Read online

  Some bulls didn’t show enough mastery with their nervous heifers and mated successfully only a small percentage of the time. Others, in ignorance, hurt their cows with their clumsy approaches. A few bulls, despite robust health, off-the-scale sperm counts and great size, were so inept in the mating pens that they were dispatched for immediate slaughter. It was too expensive to keep such animals alive – their meat would fetch good money and offset the loss invested in their upkeep.

  BLUE-792 was a bull of a different calibre. Literally. Its huge pizzle was the joke of the stockmen. They’d even made up a song about it that began ‘Oh, what a man could do, with a cock like BLUE-792’. But it wasn’t merely his size. He seemed to lull his cows into a willing trance before he mounted them, stroking and manipulating them to his will. The sighs from the cows were so harsh that Shanti knew they’d be deafening as screams. But somehow they were happy screams, screams of mingled pain and pleasure, silent screams lifting every moment of the mating to a level of experience Shanti could only imagine. As if they were drawing from the mating something that would last them their short lifetimes. Dairy cows usually mated only once and they were the ones that ‘screamed’ the hardest. Even the meat cows, that would produce a calf every year for as long as they were able, sighed as though the pleasure and the pain of mating was the last they would ever have.

  When BLUE-792 was involved, the sighs were harshest of all.

  Shanti suspected the other bulls were well aware of BLUE-792’s abilities. Bulls were always kept separate and in this case it was a particularly good thing. He didn’t like to imagine the fight that would have ensued if BLUE-792 ever had contact with any of the other males. There were places in the town where smuggled bulls were baited to fight each other to the death but he’d never been tempted to attend. Even watching the magnificent BLUE-792 sleep was enough entertainment for him.

  Shanti had been watching the matings the day that BLUE-792 entered WHITE-047’s mating pen. It was subtle; he didn’t know if any of the stockmen even noticed – they were too busy shouting encouragement and laughing at BLUE-792’s huge pizzle. Something was different about the process that day. The bull sniffed at the air in the crate as he always did but Shanti saw him freeze without taking a single step further. At first, he thought his favourite bull was afraid. Instead of hiding timidly in the corner, nervous and tense like most of the other young cows, WHITE-047 was standing upright and facing BLUE-792. She was staring at him and the bull was staring back.

  ‘Watch this now,’ said Freeman, the burly head stockmen. ‘Gonna be messy, this one. Gonna be a fight.’

  The other stockmen pressed closer.

  Shanti stayed where he was, near the crate but to one side of the small group of onlookers. Freeman was wrong. From where Shanti was standing, he could see the side of BLUE-792’s face. He could see the expression there. He’d watched the bull through the cracks in his pen and in a dozen situations – so many times he understood its behaviour. This wasn’t a moment of aggression. WHITE-047 was standing unusually straight for a cow, her shoulders back and her young, unused udders thrust forwards. Her legs were apart so there was nothing she was hiding from her potential mate. But it was her eyes that gave it away, at least for Shanti.

  Her eyes flashed excitement. They signalled astonishment. A kind of hunger and recognition. And a softness that no one had noticed but Shanti and BLUE-792. It was as though the pair had known each other for years and were reuniting after too long apart. Then the young cow noticed how Shanti was observing her and her expression became guarded. BLUE-792 tensed in response to her lead and his face hardened into simple determination – down to business.

  The bull advanced. The heifer, playing a role now, retreated to the far wall and lost her confident posture.

  ‘Guess the fight’s off, sir,’ said one of the younger stockmen. ‘I should have put money on it.’

  Freeman grunted, unhappy to be wrong in front of his crew.

  ‘Not over yet, boy.’

  But Shanti could see the man knew there wouldn’t be any fight. He glanced over at the younger stockman, a new man he didn’t recognise, and wondered if he was the kind that watched the illegal bullfights in the town. He was a small man but he wore his mean streak like a tattoo across his forehead.

  In the mating pen, the bull reached the cow. She put her right hand up to his face and touched his neck. BLUE-792 recoiled microscopically. Shanti doubted anyone else would have seen it. The outreached finger stumps tapped and stroked from the bull’s neck to his shoulder. To anyone who didn’t know how the Chosen communicated, it would have looked like she was shaking with fear. Shanti saw the gooseflesh rise in a wave all the way down the bull’s left side.

  Usually, the bulls turned their cow brides away from themselves and entered them from behind. It was quick and required less effort, leaving them more energy for the many other cows they would have to service during the brief mating season. WHITE-047 remained facing BLUE-792. They achieved something approaching an embrace, with the bull burying its face in the cow’s neck. Shanti saw it’s pizzle, monstrously swollen and already dripping seed onto the straw, just before the bull lifted her up, pressed her back against the cold panels and did what he’d been bred to do. Shanti turned away, squeezing back tears, and left the barn.

  Now, WHITE-047 was alone with her pain. It struck him both how human and how animal Maya had seemed in the same situation. WHITE-047 was sweating and panting, interspersing her breathing with longer, angrier sighs that had come out of Maya as grunts of frustration and screams of pain. He was glad not to have to hear those sounds again but he could tell from its expression what the cow was going through. There was nothing he could do to help the agonised creature he saw in the calving pen. She would be left to die if her birthing was unsuccessful. All expense was spared when it came to cattle; when they died, their flesh became profit.

  The stockmen around WHITE-047’s pen, seeing that she was still a long way from giving birth, moved on to check other cows in other pens in the barn. Shanti stayed. When the stockmen were out of sight in a parallel run of pens, he tapped his fingers on the horizontal bars of the calving pen. WHITE-047’s head snapped around at him, eyes wide and disbelieving. Another spasm hit her. She crushed her eyes shut against the pain.

  Shanti took hold of one of the lower bars and used it to steady himself while he squatted on his haunches. When her contraction had passed and WHITE-047 opened her eyes, he tapped his fingertips on the bar again to get her attention. He looked from side to side, checking for the roving stockmen. The passages were clear.

  ‘Like this,’ he said, and bounced slightly on his heels before standing up and stepping well back from the bars. ‘Understand?’

  Another cramp coursed through her, eliciting more silent screams. When she’d recovered she rolled onto her knees and crawled to the bars of the calving pen gate and used them to help her stand. Shanti could see it was a struggle for her. She was no longer able to stand upright. She hooked her palms over a low bar, just as he had, and lowered herself into a deep squat with a hushed grunt of relief. Between her legs, her vulva swelled open. Moments later, the top of the calf’s head began to appear.

  Shanti nodded to himself. WHITE-047 was giving birth now; far too focussed to register him standing there. He walked away down the gritty passage between the calving pens and back towards the huge barn doors. Moments later he heard the only scream of the Chosen that was ever heard by MMP employees, that of a newborn calf. The stockmen would be coming now, coming to WHITE-047’s pen to silence her calf for the rest of its life. He wondered whether it would be male or female.

  Three

  At ten to five in the morning, Greville Snipe stood in his crisp white cow-gown at the back entrance to the milking parlour waiting for his four dairy boys; Harrison, Maidwell, Roach and Parfitt. They must have hated their job at the dairy to turn up so close to clocking on time and to leave so soon after their duties were complete. They spent as little time
in the milking parlour as they could and only ever did the bare minimum to keep the place running the way he wanted it.

  He tapped his watch as if it would make his absent crew arrive more quickly. The MMP buses for the early shift arrived well in advance of start time, but he knew they’d be off in a crowd by the gates smoking and laughing with their mates from other parts of the plant. Maybe they were laughing at him. He was fairly sure they joked about him behind his back but what could he do?

  Youngsters and the majority of low-level workers were lazy. Snipe had known this long before he was promoted to Dairy Supervisor. Subsequently, he’d devised standards well above what was required by management. When any of the dairy boys fell short of those standards, he knew that his procedures were still good enough to pass any inspection. Even so, he let them know how he felt about their shortcomings, sometimes threatening them with their jobs. They may have hated the Dairy but they’d never find as well paid a job anywhere else in the town and they all knew it.

  He didn’t believe he was a harsh supervisor. He’d known far worse in his early days at MMP. He liked to think that Greville Snipe wasn’t just about threats and bollockings; he was a man who tried to instil a sense of pride in the work that went on in the dairy. When he thought the Dairy boys had done well, and admittedly that was a rare occurrence indeed, he arranged bonuses for them in the form of extra milk, yoghurt, butter or cheese rations – things he knew they’d be thanked for again when they arrived home.

  It was dark outside and the gas lamps were on. They illuminated circles of dirt all the way around the perimeter of the Magnus Meat Processing plant; all along the wide spaces between the pastures, the corrals, the barns, the outbuildings, the slaughterhouse and the dairy. He watched a couple of desultory moths circle and connect with the hot yellow bulbs again and again, believing that the light was a way out to somewhere when, in reality they were already free. Just like the Chosen, insects had stupid built into them. Nevertheless, Snipe felt a brief stab of melancholy at the futility of their attempts. When their wings were singed beyond usefulness, the moths would fall to the damp dirt and die, their efforts purposeless and suicidal.

  Footsteps thumped in the grimy soil, approaching. He checked his watch again. Three minutes to go. They were pushing it – hardly enough time to change and get out to the parlour before five.

  ‘Come on, you bloody shirkers,’ he shouted. ‘Don’t piss me about.’ They skidded past him to the punch-card machine, clocked in and scrambled for the changing room. Red-faced, half giggling, half panicking. ‘If any of you are even a fraction of a minute late onto the parlour floor, I’ll take half an hour out of every wage packet. We’re a team. We do not let the side down.’

  With a minute to go, they sprinted out to the parlour and the stalls still buttoning their stained cow-gowns.

  ‘And get those bloody uniforms washed!’

  The lock-up garage was big enough for a small truck and a row of tools and storage boxes along each wall but it had been empty for years. It was made of concrete blocks and had no windows. The doors were wooden; painted a dull green like the others in the row and where the wood met the concrete floor it was damp and splintered. Icy draughts and dampness made it their home and even in the summer when the temperature outside was almost warm, the interior of the lock-up had a dark December heart. To enter was to shiver.

  The other lock-ups in the row were doorless bothies to the miserable and the doomed. Too dangerous to sleep in, the transients did nothing more than shit there and move on before nightfall. It was a place where gangs brought rival captives and toyed with them throughout the long nights. It was far enough inside the Derelict Quarter, far enough from the nearest habitable houses that all screams went unheard. The sound of wood or glass or steel on flesh and bone might as well have exuded from some profound earthy pit.

  There was no light in the lock-up and John Collins only went there at night. Sandwiched between the dirt and threat of it, he found a place to begin from. He took candles with him, set them up at the far end where he would sit on a high, backless stool and talk. In spite of the cold and the danger, in spite of the cramped space and the lack of light, people came to the lock-up to listen.

  ‘In the flesh, as we sit here…as people,’ he would sometimes say, ‘we’ve all come from the same place, from the same beginning. That beginning is where we’re all going back to sooner or later. That makes us all brothers and sisters. All of us. No one exists outside that simple truth. Can you see that much?’

  If it was a new group, all first-timers, there’d be a silence then. Maybe one or two murmuring a faint ‘yes’.

  ‘I’m asking you an important question,’ he’d say. ‘So, I’m glad you’re thinking about it before you answer. Can you see we’re all branches with the same root? Can you see that we’re all brothers and sisters?’

  There would be nodding, more yeses. It was a simple premise. Even the reluctant ones would shrug a silent I-guess-so.

  John Collins would pause, take a sip of water, adjust the tattered grey scarf he always wore. Then he’d look back out at the six or seven rows of faces huddled, seated on the concrete. He’d look across each face and he’d know he’d seen some aspect of that face somewhere before and that he’d see other aspects of that face some time in the future. And there they sat, not recognising each other, fragments of a shattered self that had forgotten who it was.

  He’d go to work on them again with whatever it took.

  ‘Do you think your life is some kind of accident? Is it random? Nothing more than a grand mistake? Do you think our existence, the presence of intelligent humanity is nothing more than a casual coincidence?’ He’d pause. ‘Hands up if that’s what you think.’

  Sometimes there were hands. Usually not. To the hands he’d say, ‘Why did you come here tonight? You’ve risked your reputation if you have one. You’ve risked your friends if you have any. You’ve risked your family’s love. You’ve risked your life too.’ A pause. ‘You know what I think? I think your mind tells you that this life of yours is just a freak event in the lonely void of the wasteland and I think you’ve learned to believe your mind over the years. But I believe you’ve come here tonight because there’s another part of you. A quieter aspect that whispers in your heart and never goes away. I think that’s the part you’re waking up to. That’s the part you want to believe. Call it your soul. Call it your spirit. It doesn’t matter. That’s the part of you that makes you like all the rest of us. Spirit is where you come from and spirit is where you’re going back to. That’s what you know deep down to be true. But your mind wants to live in a safer world. Your mind wants footsteps on concrete and full stomachs and vodka. Your mind doesn’t even want to consider what will happen when you die or what you were before you were born. But your heart yearns for that knowledge. It yearns for truth and that yearning is a torment.’ A deep breath. A visible jet-stream of exhalation into the cold air. ‘You can speak freely, my friend. And you need not speak at all if you don’t wish to. The door’s as open for you to leave as it was for you to enter. Speak freely, please. Tell me why you came.’

  It was as if they were alone in the lock-up. One listener, one speaker. John Collins could make a person feel free just with his words, just with his smile, just with a look from his wounded, understanding eyes. They’d say:

  ‘There’s something wrong in the town. Something wrong with me.’

  ‘I came because I feel trapped.’

  ‘I feel bad about the way I’ve lived my life.’

  ‘I want to change. I want to be better.’

  ‘I’m sick. I heard you were a healer.’

  It was amusing to him how few of them ever said they no longer wanted to eat flesh. Perhaps the willing ones would have said it, but the ones who were uncertain had never come as far as that in their minds for the first meeting. They were still unable to admit to themselves what it was they wanted from Prophet John Collins.

  ‘If you thought this world
and your life were an accident, that it was meaningless, you wouldn’t have bothered to come would you?’

  No one ever disagreed.

  ‘It’s because this life isn’t meaningless, it’s because we’re all here for some special purpose; that’s why we’re all brothers and sisters to each other. When we die it’s natural that the special part of us goes back to where it came from, a place where we’ll all be closer and freer than we ever were here.’

  He’d let that idea float for a few moments. And then he’d ask the question again.

  ‘Can you see that we’re all brothers and sisters? Can you see that much?’

  All of them would say yes. All of them would smile a little and the smiles were always awkward strangers on their faces. They would look from side to side at each other and the smiles would widen and find a home having wandered alone too long. It could be a fathom below freezing on a winter’s midnight, breath fogging the air above their heads and John Collins would feel the warmth spreading out from all of them.

  That was where it began.

  Once a week, outside the lock-up on the littered and glass-strewn lot, there were no gang members divvying up the spoils of their battles, no rapes in the adjoining concrete cubes, no murders behind them, no suicides in the ruins beyond. Once a week, when John Collins was telling it, there was peace at the lock-ups.

  Dark December peace.

  The causes of mastitis were varied.

  A teat cup removed before the vacuum was released might burst superficial capillaries allowing ever-present staphylococcus bacteria to enter the blood. A sudden backflow in the milk tubes could have a similar effect. Something as simple as incorrect sterilisation or cracked rubber in the teat cups. These problems had been legion before Greville Snipe was promoted to dairy supervisor. Since then the incidence of mastitis had halved.