Meat

Six

It was dusty in the records offices. The further back through the years the Parson went, the dustier the filing boxes and the shelves around them became. The silence in there lay like dust also, strata of it pressing down and muffling the wood, the cardboard, the paper.

A records officer had stamped her Welfare pass; a flaky-skinned man with white hair curling out of his ears and nostrils, an air of ancient overuse about his faded green tank top and the worn edges of his collar. He had the smell of a man who lived alone. A records clerk assisted him. Between them they recorded all the births, deaths and marriages in the town and filed them in manila folders in brown boxes on racks of shelves.

Parson Mary Simonson’s trip to the far end of the records office took her deep into territory where the dust had remained undisturbed for years, possibly decades. There was rarely a reason for anyone to go back there and very few Welfare workers had clearance in the first place. White-haired Whittaker, the records officer, and his clerk, Rawlins, were paid to keep accurate records not clean the place. It showed. Her feet scuffed trails in the dust and her robes swept the linoleum. She had to lift up her hems to keep from taking all the grime with her.

It was no different with the cardboard archive boxes. Disturbing them created clouds of irritating particles that made her choke and sneeze. Following the spasms of her airways, more clouds were created. She wanted to give up. There was dust in her hair and in her eyes and ears. Dust all over her clothes. But by then she’d found the box containing surnames beginning with S in the year that she was curious about. There was no reason not to continue. She could satisfy her question and get out of there. Get away and get clean. She put her thick red sleeve across her nose and mouth and removed the lid from the archive box.

Inside, the manila folders became the brightest, newest things in the entire records hall. They almost glowed. Glad she’d persevered, she walked her fingers through to Shanti and pulled the file. Inside there was no birth entry as she’d expected. Instead, the record of the death of a child named Richard Arnold Shanti. The boy had suffocated during labour and was stillborn to his mother Elizabeth Mary Shanti.

She stood staring through the record card for several long moments, no longer taking in the information typed there. A little layer of the disturbed dust settled on the gleaming folders and when she returned the file to its proper position the dust was trapped there by her replacing of the box lid.

A small delivery truck took Snipe back to the MMP factory. There was nowhere to sit and the space was not high enough for him to stand. These were the smallest of his discomforts.

The stumps of his fingers and the spaces where his thumbs had been were cauterised shut by Cleaver’s white hot irons. If nothing else, the man had worked with tremendous speed, clipping digits at the knuckles and sealing them in seconds. The pain had been a revelation. Where his testicles had been, metal staples held the remains of his scrotum closed. Pinkish drool seeped from his mouth: he had no teeth left.

He could see the clear plasma that still welled at his finger joints, and the drips of still warm blood that dropped from his crotch to the floor of the wagon. Staples also held closed the wound in his throat but that was the least painful of them all. The dirt from the bed of the truck was getting into the blackened ends where his big toes used to be and there was nothing he could do to prevent it.

The truck bounced over the barely maintained country roads that led out to Magnus’s plant, swerving to miss potholes and lurching over lumps and subsidence. Snipe was thrown against the walls and dashed to the floor many times and there was no way to stop himself without causing more agony.

The truck slowed and turned and he knew he had arrived at the main gate. He heard voices outside – the driver showing his card to the security guard. And then the truck moved on more slowly.

When the back doors opened he was looking into the slaughterhouse crowd pens. A ramp led from the truck to the slaughterhouse floor and a larger ramp led from there down into the pen. It was full of the Chosen, milling and jostling very gently, almost caressing as they swirled among each other.

Cattle. Cows. How swiftly we are made the same.

Some of them saw him and stopped moving. Soon the entire herd was still.

A burning electrical sting on his buttock sent Snipe stumbling down both ramps and he was amongst them. Their eyes took him in. Their noses testing the air he brought with him. Many of them shrank away. He saw their eyes differently now. These were eyes like his.

My God, what’s behind them? What are they thinking?

It was impossible to tell.

He was frightened to move forward but gates closed behind him, forcing him on. He limped on incomplete feet to be among them but they parted whenever he came near and turned their backs to him. Hundreds of smooth bodies, fatter than his and somehow more beautiful. They stayed away from him, would not let him touch them. He looked at his own body and then looked at theirs. They were larger, more whole-looking even with their amputations. They were serene.

He heard the hissing, sighing sounds they made and it sounded like language in a way it never had before. He tried to speak to them but at the sound of his hissing, their faces became twisted and ugly as though he’d done no more than scratch a fork across a blackboard.

My name’s Snipe. Greville Snipe. I work… I used to work in the dairy. I took care of the cows there. Perhaps you’ve heard of me.

They backed away, his whispers making no impression.

Dear Father, I am not even worthy of cattle. They will not accept me as their own. What am I Lord? What have I become?

The steel gates pressed against his back and he could not resist. The metal pushed him into the ranks of animals. Yet still they parted, none of them allowing closeness. He was alone among the Chosen for he was not Chosen.

Out of their ranks, a bull appeared. It dwarfed Snipe in height and width. As a dairyman he’d never been so close to one before. He knew their reputation though. Between the bull’s legs a huge pizzle swung and below it the biggest pair of testicles Snipe had ever seen. The bull was layered with fat but the giant musculature was visible beneath it. It locked eyes with Snipe and he looked down and away. He wasn’t even as alive as this creature now. The bull’s bulk was terrifying, even through the pain of his trauma and injuries.

It gestured to Snipe with a flick of its enormous bald head. The meaning was clear.

Snipe edged forward and the cattle in the crowd pen opened before him. The bull stepped in behind, giving him no choice but to keep moving. His body, remembering only the intrusion of blades and the biting of clippers and the yanking of pliers, moved onward. He had no strength to turn and fight the bull and even if he had he no longer felt the self-worth it would take to stand firm. The crowd pen narrowed until it became a corridor and then a chute. He saw a cow step forwards into an alcove and then the alcove slid out of view. An empty one appeared in its place.

Snipe hesitated and turned. The bull was right behind him. Nowhere to go but forwards. He took a few more hesitant steps and stopped again, his body refusing to do what was required of it. The alcove disappeared and another took its place. And another.

A shout came from somewhere outside the pen.

‘What the fuck’s going on in that crowd pen? Get these fucking animals moving. That’s two – no, wait – three misses in a row. Come on, lads, keep them moving.’

A new alcove appeared. The bull stepped forwards and pushed Snipe into it.

He saw the blood on the floor as the alcove began to move forwards leaving the bull and the crowd pen behind. A steel frame settled over him, locking him into a standing position and preventing him from turning his head. The alcove stopped with a jolt.

A small rectangular hatch slid open and he saw the face of a man he vaguely recognised from the staff canteen. The man’s eyes were somehow blind. He lifted a gun to Snipe’s forehead.

I am meat.

Jones was a new bolt gunner and it was an insult that he had to put up with empty restrainers. How was a guy supposed to get a bonus if the filers didn’t do their job? The panel opened and finally he had a cow to whack. He glimpsed the eyes for a fraction of a second and thought they looked familiar.

‘God is supre—’

He realised this one was not Chosen and cut the blessing short.

He pulled the trigger. The gun recoiled smoothly.

Hiss. Clunk.

They all looked so similar.

Bob Torrance was incensed at the speed of the chain. Something was going on in the crowd pens but he couldn’t tell what.

He bawled as he descended from his steel balcony:

‘What’s the problem?’

A stockman with a cattle prod shouted back from the pens:

‘Delivery from Magnus, boss. It’s taken care of now.’

Torrance nodded to himself as he reached the factory floor. Magnus’s deliveries always fucked with the chain speed but there was nothing he could do about it. Tomorrow he’d move the new boy further along the chain and get Ice Pick back on the bolt gun to make up lost time. Every second counted. The demand for meat rose every day as the population of the town grew and it was up to Torrance to see they got what they needed. At least, that was what everyone believed. Torrance was paid to believe it too.

He marched past Jones to the bleeding station. There was always a backlog here. Between stunning and exsanguination cattle were hung by their ankles in loops of chain that hung from a giant steel runner. The runner was like a well-greased curtain rail suspended from the factory ceiling. The cattle swung upside down along this runner from one station to the next as they were broken down into food and by-products. The first port of call was the bleeding station.

The bleeder’s job was to sever the neck of each cow from throat to neck-bone and push it along the runner. A broad trough caught the drainings from the Chosen and funnelled it into collecting vats. Later the blood was used in making MMP black pudding. The delay between stunning and reaching the bleeding station sometimes resulted in the Chosen regaining consciousness before their throats were cut but there was no way around this. It had always been a weak area of the chain.

Of the seven Chosen that were hanging waiting for the bleeder’s knife three were twitching. The movement reminded Torrance of escape artists that hung upside down in straight jackets and chains, trying to get free within a time limit. The cattle were going nowhere though. It was merely residual impulses travelling down the nerve pathways from brain to body and was a sign that death had occurred. It was when they started to breathe again – making their rhythmic hisses and sighs – that was the sign of the bolt gunner getting it wrong or sometimes just a particularly strong animal refusing to die quickly.

A fourth carcass shuddered and its ribcage expanded and contracted spastically. Torrance shrugged; it wouldn’t last long after the knife. Looking more closely he saw the damage on the reviving animal. Its finger stumps were black and red and castration could only recently have been performed. The heel tag still trickled blood back towards its knee. So, this was the Magnus delivery. The thing, neither Chosen nor human, began to struggle by pumping its pelvis backwards and forwards. It nudged the stunned cattle on either side of it causing ripples through the bodies. The swaying caused the body to turn on its chain and Torrance saw the thing’s face.

He knew the man, of course, though it was difficult to place him now that he was bald. The hole in his forehead had bled freely so there was a slick of gore drying both above and below it making a mask of the face. Torrance thought back and remembered the rumours that had been coming out of the dairy for the last few weeks. Someone there had been getting a little too close to the milkers. Now he remembered. Greville Snipe; the best dairyman MMP had employed for years. Torrance shook his head to himself. What a shame the man had overstepped the boundaries. Devaluing stock was the stupidest, most dangerous thing anyone – MMP employee or otherwise – could do. It was suicidal. Snipe appeared to have found that out for himself. Well, almost; he wasn’t quite finished yet.

Snipe’s shocked eyes focussed on Torrance but the slow spiralling of the chain twisted his strange gaze away. The sound of runner bearings sliding in their housings brought Torrance back from his musings. The bleeder was pulling Snipe into position. Snipe hissed at the man – it was Burridge on the bleed this shift – and Burridge drew the knife across his muted throat. Torrance watched Snipe’s eyes widen, white orbs surrounded by blackening blood, and the hissing became a bubbling. Burridge swung Snipe away to bleed out over the trough. There the motorised section of the chain caught hold of his loop on the runner and hauled him, gently swinging, onward. By the time he reached the scalding vats that would loosen his skin for removal, he would be eight pints lighter.

His struggles continued.

Fascinated, Torrance forgot his inspection tour and followed Snipe’s progress across the trough. What had begun as a gushing fountain was already slowing to a leak. Snipe’s body was as pale now as the milk of the Chosen. Steam rose and bubbles burst on the boiling surface of the scalding vats. Snipe’s eyes still swivelled in his head. The only place in his body that could possibly contain blood now would be his head. That, thought Torrance, was the only explanation for why Snipe was still alive. Could any creature – man, Chosen or otherwise – be so terrified of death that it would will itself to survive through all this? Snipe tried to bend away from the roiling water below him but there was no strength in his muscles.

The automated runner dropped him headlong into the vat. Torrance stepped back from the splash. Four seconds later, the runner drew his body up again, the skin now reddened and loose. Snipe’s boiled eyes no longer moved in their sockets but here and there, his muscles twitched and jumped and Torrance knew it was no simple nerve impulse.

The wide wound in his neck had congealed in the water, the blood turning grey and gelatinous. Snipe’s head flapped from the end of his body and the wound looked like the mouth of an inverted puppet.

Torrance had stopped walking.

Now it will be over. Now. Surely.

Snipe had reached the spinning blade that would remove his head. Torrance didn’t care what kind of willpower the ex-dairyman had, when the steel slipped through the vertebrae of his neck that would be the end. Unusually, Torrance felt a wash of relief. He massaged his forehead with one rough hand and marched along the rest of the chain to make his hourly inspection.

He found it difficult to concentrate.

That night Parson Mary Simonson ate tripe to ease the pains in her stomach.

For a while they abated but less than an hour after her meal, the stabbing returned. She felt that the Father was punishing her for something but she could not understand what it was she had done, or not done, to deserve his ire. She followed the flesh codes as written in the sacred texts; she enforced Welfare upon as many in the town as her working days would allow. It hadn’t been easy recently with rumours of a heretical messiah coming from every quarter. All this she did faithfully and still the Father sought to make her suffer. The pain in her stomach was a ball of jagged glass. Thrusting her fist deep into the flesh there seemed to quell it a little.

She lived alone, as all Parsons of the Welfare were required to do and so her evenings were her own to do with what she pleased. She liked it that way. Something about the idea of a man lounging in the house from night until morning and the incessant tug of noisy children made her uncomfortable. Better to be alone. Better to serve the Father in every moment that she was able.

That night, instead of embroidering, she sat down with her books and read the scriptures. Perhaps, she thought, I’ve been embroidering too much after work and not spending enough time meditating on the sacredness of the flesh. Perhaps that is the reason the Father gives me this pain.

She lit a small fire and pulled her hard wooden chair up close to it. On her lap she opened the Book of Giving and read aloud to herself from it:

‘The Father sent his own children down to earth so that we, his townsfolk, might eat. He made his children in his own image and laid down the commandments of the flesh so that we might be worthy of their sacrifice. Thus He commands us:

‘Thou shalt eat of the flesh of my children. My children are your cattle. Break their bodies as your daily bread, take their blood as your wine. By sharing daily in this bounty shall you be united with me.

‘Thou shalt keep my children silent by paring the reeds in their throats at the time of birth. Their silence is sacred and they must never speak the words of heaven.

‘Thou shalt keep my children from mischief by taking two bones from each finger in their first week.

‘Thou shalt keep my children from wandering by taking the first two bones from the first toe of each foot in their second week.

‘Thou shalt keep my children hairless by baptising them in the fragrant font.

‘Thou shalt keep the mightiest male calves as bulls, that more strong children may be born.

‘Thou shalt keep all other male calves chaste by castrating them in their ninth year.

‘Thou shalt keep their mouths toothless.

‘Thou shalt keep a sacred stock of male calves away from light and unmoving. These shall be my tenderest gift to you.

‘Thou shalt drink the milk of the cows and from that milk make butter, yoghurt and cheese.

‘Thou shalt allow all my sick children to return to their father but while they are in your care, thou shalt keep them from harm.

‘I sacrifice my children for each of you that none shall ever be hungry. Their flesh is sacred. Thou shalt not dishonour me by wasting it.

‘My children are divine. Thou shalt not lie down with them, neither taint their flesh with thine own.

‘By eating of the sacred flesh of my children, may all mankind be one day sacred themselves and join me at my table. The suffering of my children is as nothing when compared to the suffering of mankind. They give themselves freely, knowing they return to me.

‘Thou shalt, at the time of sacrifice, face my children East, that their souls may fly to the rising sun and so to me.

‘My children are your medicine. To heal your eyes, eat their eyes. To heal your stomachs, eat their stomachs. To drive out madness, eat their brains. Heal yourselves; my children are your medicine.’

She sighed and pulled her chair closer to the guttering flames of the fire. There seemed to be no way to warm herself and she feared she was sickening with something. The reading she’d chosen for the evening gave her no comfort, certainly no answers to the conundrum of Richard Shanti. The child Richard Shanti had died and yet Richard Shanti the man was here in Abyrne. Alive and well, though painfully thin, and claiming ancestry to the old families. It was a bold statement to make. Not a risk he would have undertaken carelessly.

There were only two explanations that made sense. He’d either lied, thinking that she wouldn’t be interested enough to check out his claims, or he really believed he was a Shanti from the first families. What was the truth? Surely he wasn’t a stupid man. Quiet, certainly, but not stupid. There was too much knowledge behind those eyes of his. She didn’t think he was deluded either. He had a wild look about him, the ascetic frame of a priest, but that was no reason to suspect he was delusional. No, she would bet anything that Richard Shanti believed he was the true son of Elizabeth and Reginald Shanti, that he had no idea anything else might be the case.

That cleared part of it up. But if he wasn’t in the lineage, if he wasn’t their son, then who was he? And was his identity an important factor in the Welfare of his children?

The centre of her gut twisted and she almost punched herself there to push back the pain. Without any warning at all, she was nauseous. No time to make it to the lavatory. She knelt before the fire and rucked the undigested contents of her stomach into the brass wood bucket next to the hearth. Seeing half-chewed stomach lining sticking to the logs and kindling made it all worse. She heaved and heaved, trying to force the spiky knot of pain from her own belly but once the meal she’d eaten was gone, dampening and tainting her wood supply, nothing was left inside her but a lump of thorns.

She forgot all about Richard Shanti.