Meat

Eleven

His mind could hide his new knowledge but his body couldn’t. It got harder bleeding the Chosen, gutting them, quartering or boning them out. But he could disguise that because he was further along the chain and the killing was done. On the stun, though, it was impossible to disguise his misgivings. It didn’t show in his face or his demeanour or in the things he said to his co-workers but it showed and it was impossible to do anything about it. The familiar shout from Torrance’s steel overlook made Shanti want to disappear.

‘Chain speed, please.’

He kept his voice even.

‘One eighteen, sir.’

Torrance must have thought he’d misheard.

‘Say again, please, Ice Pick.’

‘One eighteen.’

In the pause he could hear Torrance thinking. The next yell was aimed at the filers moving the Chosen through the crowd pens.

‘You men, keep those cattle moving. Rick’s standing here with no heads to break.’

One of them yelled back:

‘Everything’s moving fine over here, sir. Got a good steady stream.’

‘Ice Pick, what’s the problem?’

‘No problem, sir.’

‘Why aren’t we turning ’em over quicker?’

‘I thought we were. I’ll get us back up to one thirty in just a few minutes.’

Torrance didn’t shout any more, so Shanti hoped he was satisfied. Something in the man’s silence worried him, though. It wasn’t just the low chain speed – that happened to everyone once in a while. An off day was an off day. But Torrance had been looking at him recently. Not looking at him strangely but looking at him more. Noticing him. Watching him. Maybe he already knew something. If he did, Shanti knew his days at MMP were coming to an end.

He ground his teeth down upon each other. The access panel opened. He didn’t hesitate. By the end of his shift they were working at one twenty-eight. Good enough to keep Torrance off his back, but only just.

‘It’s very simple. The old man had plenty of time to think about food and survival as a loner in the Derelict Quarter. He realised that, in theory, cutting a vegetable and eating it was not so different from eating meat. Either way, you ended the life of the thing you wanted to devour. Unlike the meat-eating folk in the town, he could look with new eyes. He was prepared to think about things differently. He wondered if there might be a way for folk to survive without causing harm to any other living thing. He experimented with prayer, meditation, and exercise and came up with a basic system for nourishing the body using only light and breath.’

‘Wait a minute,’ said Magnus. ‘You’re telling me that this man ignored everything written in the Book of Giving but that he still prayed? Who the hell to?’

‘It’s not the writings in a book that prove or disprove the existence of a higher power. It’s our deep experience of the world that informs us of such things. In this town there are believers and disbelievers that have no interest in the writings of the Book.’

‘Do you believe in a higher power?’

‘Isn’t it obvious?’

Magnus had to think about that.

‘It isn’t as obvious as you might think. You’ve come here and spouted so much nonsense that it’s hard to define anything about you. Except that you are highly motivated and a bit of a head case. You say you eat God, and I suppose that means you believe there is one. It hardly appears to signify your respect for such a being however.’

‘I apologise for not being clearer. One is sometimes… so overwhelmed by truth that one forgets to speak it. In answer to your question, yes, I believe in a higher power and I respect it beyond all other things. It feeds me, it nourishes me, it… supports me. It shows me a path every single day of my life.’

‘The old man, you said he survived on light and air. But you say you live on God. How is that possible? What does it mean?’

‘Perhaps you have an image of me munching my way through a fragment of divinity. But it isn’t like that. You see, the first thing you have to do is give yourself completely to God. That act, if genuine, is a sacrifice of great value. You can’t imagine what it means at the moment, Mr. Magnus, but it is within all of us to have that understanding and for each and every one of us to make that very sacrifice. The result is that God gives you everything you will ever need. It’s as plain as that. My daily nourishment involves a routine which is some combination of prayer, calmness of mind and gentle movement of the body, but, unlike the old man, I took it all a step further. I sacrificed myself to the Creator and in return the Creator has given me everything. Absolutely everything.’

Magnus crushed out another cheroot, his lips downturned in judgement and scepticism.

‘He hasn’t given you freedom though, has He?’ said Magnus. ‘He hasn’t delivered you from the hands of your enemy. And He hasn’t saved you from slaughter. You’ll pardon my ignorance if I don’t see your hands overflowing with His gifts.’

‘The value of things changes when you live in the care of the Creator. The things you’re talking about have no value to me. The Creator might give them to me or He might not. It doesn’t matter because He has already filled my life up. I am content and rich beyond your imagining.’

Magnus nodded and stood up. He stretched his massive arms behind his back and audibly cracked a few joints into place before walking over to Collins.

‘I’m surprised, you know,’ he said in a matter of fact tone. ‘You’ve really made me think about things differently. I thought you were just some lunatic that had enough energy to fool the stupid people of this town. But you’re a lot more than that, Collins. You’re intelligent. You’re passionate. And you’re dangerous. You’ve taught me a lesson about myself and you have, against all the odds, changed my mind about what I’m going to do with you.’

He looked at Collins’s face, still so placid and open. The man was listening but he didn’t seem to have taken in that Magnus might be hinting about some kind of leniency, some kind of arrangement. He wasn’t, but it annoyed him that it didn’t seem to matter to Collins one way or the other. The man’s face was lean, serene and bright. Magnus smashed one hammer of a fist straight into it and felt the nose break and flatten beneath his knuckles with minimal damage to himself. The chair sailed over backwards spilling Collins onto the floor and separating him from the old blanket. Magnus expected him to lie there and check himself over before begging not to be hit again.

Collins’s naked body rippled and tightened as he rolled over backwards with the momentum of the spill. He was on his feet and half crouched ready to defend himself before Magnus had finished inspecting his knuckles.

It was a short walk from the office of records back to the main cluster of Welfare buildings but the way she felt, it was an effort to return. Why they hadn’t located the archives nearer the rest of the Welfare offices and Central Cathedral she couldn’t understand. She pulled her gowns closer around her, struggling to get warm again after hours of studying records. It was hard to tell now whether she was shivering with cold or because of her sickness. Her stomach kept up its jagged griping; worsened, she felt, by her frustration.

The records had revealed nothing of any use to the investigation. There had been two hundred births in the town the year that the baby Richard Shanti died. Of those, thirty were stillborn. Twelve mothers died in childbirth. Of the surviving children, only eight – a very few – were orphaned by poverty, calamity or neglect. It had been a good year for the population. However, each of the orphans was accounted for in the records and nothing seemed out of place. There was certainly no connection between any of them and the Shanti line.

Right now Parson Mary Simonson planned to obtain eight warrants, one for each of the orphans, and visit each of them to be certain nothing underhand was going on.

But first, an audience with the Grand Bishop of the Welfare.

The steps that led up to Central Cathedral were fifty yards broad at the base, narrowing as they neared the tall entrance. Sixty steps. She waited at the bottom composing herself, gathering breath, and then began the ascent. Her muscles complained, her chest laboured, cold was replaced by a sudden prickly sweat. Three times she stopped. Parsons passed up and down to her left and right. None helped.

On gaining the cavernous main entrance, she rested again with her back to the ornate stone of the pointed arch rising high above her. The great wooden doors had long ago rotted beyond use and been removed. Now the Cathedral’s entrance yawned like a huge toothless mouth whilst the Parsons scuttled in and out of the darkness beyond.

She queued outside the Grand Bishop’s chambers with many other Parsons of varying rank. Most of them spent no more than a couple of minutes inside and so the queue moved swiftly. Just before it was her turn to go in, her stomach twisted and tightened around its hub of spikes and she put a fist there to control it. Sweat broke again, not long dried from her trek up the steps.

The spasm was still in control when the Grand Bishop’s door opened and her name was called from within.

She hid it as best she could, knelt before him and kissed his hand.

‘Mary,’ he said. ‘It’s good to see you.’

It was good to see him too, as far as looking went, but the reason she was there made seeing him no good at all.

‘And you,’ she managed.

She raised her head to look at him and saw the man that had inspired her into the Welfare years before.

‘You may rise now, Mary.’

He was looking at her with concern. She must have been kneeling there for longer than she thought. She tried to stand and understood why she hadn’t already – it was a task even to lift her own weight. Seeing her struggle, the Bishop offered her his hand again and this time she took it and used it to haul herself upright. She smiled but she knew he could see past it.

‘Why don’t we sit for a while,’ he said.

‘What about all the others?’

‘They can wait. That’s what the queue’s for.’

Instead of sitting behind his desk and keeping her on the opposite side, he walked her over to the fireplace where a few sticks were almost burnt out. Still, the warmth was what she needed; it eased the pain off a little to be so comforted. They sat facing each other on straight-backed wooden chairs in which the woven straw seats had been replaced by rough planks.

‘I’ve been keeping watch over you in my way,’ he said after they’d been quiet for a few moments. ‘I’m told you’re not yourself these last few weeks.’

It was months but she didn’t bother to correct him.

‘I need… guidance,’ she said.

‘Whatever I can give, I give gladly.’

‘There’s a… not a problem exactly, but an issue with someone who is a great server of the town. I am not sure how to proceed. If I pursue the issue, there’s a chance I’ll discover an irregularity.’

‘How serious an irregularity?’

‘Serious enough to revoke status.’

‘I see.’

‘My concern is that the individual in question, judging by his exemplary service to us all, is entirely unaware that the irregularity exists. Even if my concerns turn out to be justified, this individual may have no knowledge that his very existence is… blasphemous. My question is: do I allow this situation to exist and hope that no one else ever discovers it or do I take my investigations further and risk destroying a man who, in his own mind, is entirely without fault?’

The Grand Bishop’s face didn’t change outwardly but she could see that her question had caused him to access some deeper part of himself. His eyes still made contact with hers but were focussed somewhere else, somewhere far beyond his chambers.

‘What does your heart tell you?’

‘My heart tells me that if a wrong has been perpetrated, it was by someone other than this individual. If he has no knowledge of what has gone before, then he is as innocent as he believes himself to be.’

‘And what does your God tell you?’

‘My God tells me that only townsfolk may feast upon the Chosen. Only townsfolk may undertake the husbandry of the Chosen. Regardless of this individual’s impression of himself, my God tells me that if he is not one of us, then his status must be revoked. He must face the truth and all it brings with it.’

The Grand Bishop nodded very slightly and smiled to himself. Then the elsewhere-focussed stare returned to his face. He remained silent for some time.

‘Sometimes the heart and God are in accordance and sometimes they are not.’ He wasn’t looking at her when he said this but she knew what he was referring to. ‘As you know, I have always based my decisions upon what God dictates. Because of that I look back on my life without regret.’ He let his eyes meet hers. Somehow, he suffered his own inner barbs. She thought she could see dampness around his eyes. ‘Without regret, Mary. And I know without question that I am saved. That I go on to glory. Adhering to the will of God makes life so much simpler. It relieves us of complexity. It makes suffering unnecessary.’

She sat in silence letting his words cover her as they had so many times throughout the years. She knew this was what he would say even though she’d hoped he would say otherwise. It was no different from before. His response in all matters came down to the simple acceptance of God’s law as laid down in the Book of Giving. She found it both disappointing and reassuring to discover that he had not changed. That he would never change.

‘Thank you, Your Grace.’

He seemed to become suddenly aware of the long line of Parsons waiting outside his door. He stood and helped her to her feet. She wanted to ask for help in the other matter, the matter of her illness but she knew that his answer would centre around the idea of selfless service at the expense of one’s own Welfare. That was what being a Parson of the Welfare was all about. Maybe he knew she wanted more from him or maybe he just took pity on her. Or could it be that despite the words he said, some part of him would have liked very much the complexity and suffering of acting against God’s will? Whatever was the case, she did not expect what came next.

‘I’ll make sure your dutiful rations contain something particularly sacred and nourishing from now on. I’m sure it will make you feel a lot better.’

She went to kneel and kiss his hand but he stopped her.

‘That’s really not necessary, Mary. Go and get some rest now. Start again tomorrow.’

She smiled and left.

Torrance watched the group of four workers exiting the dairy while he smoked a cigarette against the back wall of the slaughterhouse.

Beside him a truck had backed into a loading bay, its engine idling. He could hear the wet sound of vats being emptied into the stainless steel compartments of the wagon and the rumbling thud as hollow units filled with valuable flesh.

‘Hey, boys!’

He held up a packet of smokes as he beckoned them. They changed course and approached.

‘What’s the rush?’ he asked when they were close enough. ‘Got something better to do than milk cows?’

‘No, sir,’ said Harrison. ‘We were just…’

‘It’s all right, there’s no need to explain. I get out of here as quick as the next man when my shift’s over. There’s more to life than MMP, am I right?’

They nodded, relaxed a little.

‘Here, smoke with me.’

Torrance offered the pack around. They hesitated and then all reached out together. He flicked a match and four heads leaned in to draw on the flame.

‘Thanks, sir.’

Torrance nodded. Respect was right and proper. They had it for him but not for their previous boss. That too, was right and proper.

‘How are things in the dairy now?’

‘A lot better without that freak Snipe,’ said Roach. The others looked at him and then at Torrance. Roach realised he’d gone too far and looked down at his feet wishing he didn’t have such a big mouth.

‘You’re right,’ said Torrance. ‘Snipe was a freak of the lowest order. Not fit to work here, not fit to be townsfolk. You know what happened to him, right?’

They shrugged.

‘Status revoked,’ said Maidwell.

‘That’s correct. And you all understand what that means, don’t you?’

They nodded but he could tell they were still too young to fully understand. They knew but they didn’t really get it.

‘If you’re not townsfolk, you’re meat, boys. It’s as simple as that. Let me show you something.’

He walked over to the truck in the nearby bay and they followed. They could now see the gas logo on the doors and the nature of the cargo. One by one, vats of intestines were being upended into the wagon’s open sections. Shiny ropes of pale pink, grey, white and blue innards avalanched from each vat. Stomachs, pancreases and gall bladders went with them. The natural twists and turns in the loops of large and small intestine made them look like links of strangely coloured sausage. There was something intimate and sexual about the way the intestines glistened and coiled around each other as they tumbled down.

‘That’s the power for the town right there. Those of us lucky to have electricity – this is where it comes from. Snipe, your old boss, is in there somewhere and that’s entirely fitting. He did something unforgivable by God and by Magnus. Now he’s going to give of himself to feed the townsfolk, light their stoves and power our trucks. He’s going to make sure the plant has power to keep processing the Chosen. One way or another we all make that contribution, boys. Best to make it the right way. Know what I mean?’

Parfitt was as pale as the spent organs slopping into the truck but the others were accepting, if a little grim-faced. They all nodded and said ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Well that’s fine.’ Torrance crushed out the cigarette under his boot. ‘And now that you’ve all been working here a few months, I think it’s time you enjoyed a little extra-curricular activity. Be at Dino’s tonight at ten o’clock.’

Harrison was about to protest but Torrance didn’t give him the chance.

‘Don’t be late.’

It wasn’t what Magnus had expected.

Collins moved like a cat. Not a startled animal. A very lean, confident and deliberate cat. The claret ran from both of his nostrils but Collins hadn’t even bothered to swipe the back of his hand across his face to see the extent of it. Instead, he breathed, far too slowly for Magnus’s liking, and the occasional blood bubble filled and burst above his upper lip, sending a brief scarlet mist into the warm air of the study.

His eyes were mesmeric – a full border of white surrounding each iris – and he seemed not to stare so much as allow everything in. Magnus had the feeling that Collins could even see behind himself. The odds, so screamingly in Magnus’s favour only seconds before, now seemed a little closer than he wanted to believe. Smooth and steady as a surgeon, he reached his right hand under his jacket and extracted the cosh he kept in a sling under his left arm. It was the head and first eight inches of a humerus, the marrow replaced with lead – everyone called it the ‘no-brainer’. The bone was polished to a pale yellow gleam and delicately monogrammed, R.M. It wouldn’t hurt to tip the scales further in his favour and Magnus didn’t want to use a blade on the man. Not yet awhile.

Collins’s eyes didn’t flicker when the no-brainer came into view.

Now he held the cosh, Magnus felt happier to approach Collins. He’d beat him like an expert now, rupture a muscle here and there, crack a few ribs and a facial bone or two but nothing that would spoil Cleaver’s work. Nothing that would prevent Collins from feeling every parting of his skin, every tear in his flesh, every snap of his ligaments and tendons and every crack of his separating bones and joints.

The overturned chair lay between them. Magnus would have to kick it out of the way before he could lay another finger on Collins. He stepped forward a pace gauging Collins’s response. Still nothing. Not a twitch of a muscle. Not a flicker of his eye. Magnus hefted his boot-clad right foot at the chair and sent it spinning away from them towards the wall. The way between them was now open. Magnus raised the no-brainer and advanced.

Of the orphans adopted that year, two were already dead. The others knew nothing about the Shanti family. Nor did they know anything about other orphans who might not have been accounted for. Those surviving were as ignorant and uninterested in her questions as the worst townsfolk could be. She reflected that perhaps orphans shouldn’t be adopted, losing status instead to be taken out to the plant. It would keep the numbers of worthless townsfolk to a minimum. Abyrne already overflowed with the ignorant. Ignorant of their religion; ignorant of their protectors, the Welfare; ignorant of everything it took to keep the town going.

Turning up nothing but dead ends, she made a final trip to the office of records. Whittaker and Rawlins rose from their seats whenever they saw her now and glasses of milk came without her needing to ask.

She was having a good few days. The trembling in her body had eased off and the pain in her stomach had also receded. She put it down to the Grand Bishop’s kind request for veal in her dutiful rations. She now ate it every day, usually at breakfast, and found it much easier to keep down.

There was a trail worn through the dust where she had passed up and down the centre of the archives to reach the shelves of boxes. Having bid Whittaker and Rawlins a more cheery good afternoon than was normal for her, she went straight to the original record box that she’d first checked and took it down again. In it she found the details of the dead boy, Richard Shanti, killed by his own umbilicus as he was born. She then found, on looking more carefully, that Richard Shanti had an older brother named Reginald Arnold Shanti. This brother had been stillborn. The Shanti line had not been destined to continue, no matter how noble a name it had been when the town was first created out of the ash of the wasteland.

Two tragic pregnancies. Two dead boys. Dead on their first day in the world.

What would that do to a mother? What would it do to a father who wanted his line to extend and flourish? Surely they would have to admit to themselves that their lineage was finished. Once they’d accepted that, what would they do? Taking orphaned children would benefit the children by making them townsfolk and saving them from the plant or from a life as fugitives in The Derelict Quarter, but it would do nothing for the bloodline.

So what did it mean that two boys were dead? Was there another man out there in the town with a noble name who was not what he believed he was?

She went to check the records of the parents again to see what more she could discover.

Bruno sprinted into the study, knocking the door open with a violent shove as he passed through. The door connected with the inner wall and the handle gouged plaster from the wall.

‘Stay back,’ shouted Magnus.

Bruno noticed his boss was careful not to take his gaze from Collins’s face. The eye contact between them had become compulsory. A glance away at the wrong moment and either man might take advantage.

‘Me and Mr. Godhungry here are about to get a little better acquainted,’ continued Magnus. ‘I don’t want any interruptions.’

Bruno looked at Collins’s bloody nose and mouth, saw again how starved he looked and remembered how easy it had been to bring him in. He noticed the shining piece of human ivory in his boss’s right hand and relaxed a little. The no-brainer was legend in the town, a weapon feared by everyone.

The noise of the toppled chair and sprawling body had been loud downstairs. Bruno had thought for one panicked moment it might have been Magnus who had been overpowered. Now he realised how stupid that was, how needlessly paranoid. Magnus only needed a curtain of men around him to stop knives and rocks and spears. Magnus didn’t need any kind of bodyguard when it was man-to-man like this. He had the physique of a heavyweight boxer and speed utterly at odds with his bulky gut and chest. He’d seen Magnus take dozens of men over the years. This fight with Prophet John would be meat and drink to him. If they got too close for blows to be struck, Magnus’s sheer weight and power dwarfed Collins. The thin man had no chance.

He’d called in an extra shift of enforcers to check out the grounds of the mansion. There was no trace of any accomplices out there, no ambush of starving townsfolk, no heretical raiding party. The mansion was entirely secure. Collins was a man alone in the very worst situation. Magnus would bludgeon him with great skill and care, leaving him intact for an execution that promised to be the bloodiest the town had ever seen.

He compared them now; the pale wraith of a man – by his own admission an abstainer from meat and under-fed for months – with his crazy-sounding words and blasphemies, and his only strength coming from the intensity of his eyes. He was crouched, almost cowering. He faced a giant, the man Bruno had worked and killed for ever since he was a teenager brought in off the streets. Magnus looked bigger than the largest bull, his shoulders and chest always pressing out from his suits, as though he might burst his tailoring. And Magnus was a full man; full of rage, full of hunger and passion, full of the lifeblood and flesh of every man that had crossed him since he took his place as Abyrne’s Meat Baron.

He put Bruno in mind of some kind of ogre made human. His rust-coloured hair, thinning but still long, hung far beyond his collar. His beard was so full you could only guess at the shape of his mouth beneath it and the whiskers spread so far up his face they speckled his cheek bones. His shoulders were two arcs of muscle and his hands were as large as shovels. Hunger must have made Collins rotten in the brain. Only a total nutter would go looking for a fight with a man like Magnus.

‘That means, depart, Bruno.’

Bruno was reluctant to leave them alone. It wasn’t for fear of his boss’s welfare; he merely wanted to see this mismatch play out to its inevitable consequence. He wanted to see Collins beaten and humiliated before they gave him to Cleaver to dissect at leisure. It would be a slaughter no one would ever forget.

Bruno backed out of the room and kept the image of the two fighters in his mind. On one side, the ruddy bear of a man that ran the town of Abyrne. On the other, the whippet-bodied ascetic, soon to perish.

It was a shame he had to miss it.