Communion Town (16 page)

They were waiting at the far end of the room, the tall and the short one, turning bashfully away. I could see they weren’t going to be much help, but still I cleared my throat and offered them my first hello. I couldn’t think why they wanted to be the way they were. I gave another hello to this woman who was watching me so cautiously, and, because there was something about her I liked, to her I gave my first smile.

A sweet early feeling; it must be the start of the morning or the opening of a new season; I had all the world’s time to do what I needed to, or what I wanted. With each exhalation and inspiration I was discovering more about what that might be.

The woman was wary, but eventually she gave me back part of my smile, and told me I looked well. While I stretched my waking muscles, she spoke sharply to the men so that they shuffled out of sight. She went away too and for the first time I experienced abandonment, piercing and inordinate while it lasted; but she came back right away with a bundle. She told me – I drank up her every word – that these ought to fit well enough.

I hardly needed her help as I dressed, and with every garment I put on I shed a layer of simplicity until I stood revealed in my sophistication in the glass, in pillbox hat, sharp blouse, pencil skirt and ankle-strapped tango heels. I thanked the woman as an equal as I accepted another gift, a smart rectangular valise; I asked if she had a cigarette to spare and she gave me the pack.

There wasn’t much more to be said between us. We had no quarrel. I couldn’t blame her if, in spite of her kindnesses, she was reluctant to meet my eyes, but I was glad that as I prepared to leave she wished that I would take care of myself.

The men faltered in again, and began to collect the scraps of gold from the floor. They insisted on heaping them into my new suitcase, telling me they were mine and it was only right I should take them.

Before leaving I asked the tall one with the grubby cuffs for a business card. He spilled a whole stack in his eagerness. I used his pencil to scribble on the back of one the advice that the woman had given me; I thought it might come in useful.

There wasn’t much more to do before I left the city, only a few appointments to keep and engagements to make.

As I stepped out into heat and stench, bristling faces turned in my direction and became avid. The maelstrom tracked me as I passed. I went by a stoop where they were sitting, sweltering, their chest-hair pushing out of their vests and their legs planted wide apart. Friendly voices called over to me, but they were too friendly, they were insisting on their friendliness, and they were asking questions that my friends would not have asked. So I straightened my back and walked on without giving a reply, my heels clicking on the pavement. The voices grew loud and disappointed, and followed me down the street, telling me exactly what I was.

As I crossed the city, others, young and old, well-heeled and scruffy, called out, or barked doglike, or they darted close and made muttered suggestions. Some simply stared angrily, as if I had given them personal offence. One of them, his pink face perspiring above a collar and tie, followed me at a distance for several blocks, so I kept to the middle of populated streets. After a while he gave up.

I stopped in at a café, where, standing up at the counter, I drank a miniature coffee and a glass of iced water. The waiter wouldn’t let me pay. Instead I asked him for some local advice and he gave me directions to a certain establishment nearby. I smiled at him and his eyes grew hooded and secret.

At the place he’d told me about, I spoke to a stout, sad-faced man and his blushingly tongue-tied brother. I explained what I needed them to do and paid them in advance. After thanking them and promising to take care in the contaminated streets, I went out again, having more business to attend to.

Later in the afternoon, near the docks, I stopped to watch two figures in huge coats and long leather masks going into a tenement. They were more witch doctors than medics, with their bell and their stink of garlic that drenched the street. After only a minute they came out again and opened up their bulky toolbag on the pavement. On the white door they painted a red diagonal cross.

As the bell beat I caught sight of a man approaching on the other side of the road, his face concealed by the brim of his hat and by the handkerchief he held over his nose and mouth. I stepped into an alleyway’s shadow while he passed. It wasn’t yet the moment to begin. I had many things in mind that were my concern alone, nothing to do with him; in my thoughts were futures he could never have hoped to imagine. Soon now I’d set out for other places and for the rest of what I planned. Let’s try this one more time, kid … Before that, though, I’d find him, and give him what he needed never to cease from seeking.

Good Slaughter

Work stopped a heartbeat back. There’s no hush like the hush when the machinery shuts off. It’s an uproar of silence. We keep our thoughts private. The workers remove their goggles, hard hats and earplugs, peel off their spattered overalls, scrub their hands at the sanitary stations and file to the exits. The concrete gleams. Clear droplets form on steel points, swelling and falling, mechanical, slower and slower. They don’t want to count away the time that’s left.

Fischer is carrying out his inspection, now checking the overhead rails, the conveyor belts, the hooks, the chutes and the basins, now seeing that tools have been sterilised, drains cleared and work tables hosed down. It’s the same at the end of each shift. If he finds something out of order then heaven help the culprit. Any moment now he’ll see that one of the tools is unaccounted for. I watch for it. I’ve waited here, out of sight, watching, not moving: but now it’s time to move.

Hello, Fischer. Here I am, dressed for work, carrying the implement of my trade. The last of the others has gone, you see. I thought in this moment I’d find some words to say to you, to settle what’s happened between us in these weeks. But look, we’re here and I have no words to add. In my head it was easier. You must be pleased the things you’ve done to me have worked so well.

The flesh of his face looks heavy under the lights. As I stump towards him his lips twitch and he tilts his head a few degrees, letting me know that what’s happening is well within his expectations. He’s quite sure he has the upper hand. He tugs each fingertip in turn and draws off his gloves, then lays one on the other and bats them against his thigh. He’ll take his time and decide what to do with me.

We all know Fischer’s floor is run to the hardest standards. No second chances: you let him down and you’re finished. He smiles that lazy, dangerous smile as the distance between us closes. But he fails to understand that I do not make mistakes here on the floor. I’m good at my job.

Now we’re within arm’s reach, I can see where the hairs are thinning on top of his head and how his pate glistens under the lights. There’s a mark where the hard hat has been clamped into the skin. He looks up at me and his mouth shows the rough line of his teeth. He thinks I’m slow, but that’s only because I never know how to answer him.

Puzzlement shows in his expression. Odd that so small a delay, just long enough for me to walk across a sloping cement floor, can add up to the error he now suspects. He should have acted differently, but now it’s too late. His eyes are the colour of dry concrete. The pupils contract to pinpricks as they note the implement in my hand. I’ve sharpened it according to good working practices. All the others are hanging in the racks across the floor. I wonder what I’ll do next, but the action I’m taking is all in one piece, impossible to dismantle. A sharp edge with a sharp point, that’s the tool of the trade.

With my glove I cover his face, gripping hard with my fingertips on temples and orbits, forcing his chin up and his head back in a subduing hold no different from the hold I use a thousand times and more in every shift I work. With the edge at his throat, he comes to attention.

Wait now.

My hand is moving, but wait. Stop. Riffle backwards through nights and days, the glare of the abattoir and the dark of dawn in Glory Part. Find me, walking alone in a small hour of the morning, in the Market where I saw what I saw. I wish it wasn’t so. The hand is moving, I can’t take it back, but I need to explain. This is my account, slipped in before the stroke of the knife.

If I had taken another way back to my lodgings that sole time, all the rest would have been different. But my habit never varied. Each morning I walked home ahead of first light. I left the meatpacking district by the back streets, passing the canal, the dockland warehouses and the garment factories, then cutting down the length of the Strangers’ Market. I liked that time of the day, the maritime atmosphere that filled the district for an hour and the sense of depletion before sleep. The air opened, the dew fell, and the decaying industrial hindquarter of the city showed another side: you saw that, beneath the wear and the work, it was pretty. The silhouettes of the chimneys and derricks were one shade darker than the sky.

Bread was baking, and I could hear birds in a strip of parkland two streets away. Work fell further behind as I walked. Weariness trickled through my limbs to settle in my hands and feet. A din of dying nightlife rose from the city centre, far away across the river, but around here the night was bleeding out undisturbed.

A gust of stale wind got up in the street, and the loose front page of a tabloid newspaper tried to stand upright: it was dragged a short way along the cobbles towards me, showing a headline about serial murders, before it was sucked into the backwash of a waste lorry that jolted across the intersection with men hanging off its tail.

Once I was outside I didn’t remember much about what I’d been doing in the slaughterhouse. It was like sleeping and waking: each evening, I knew I’d surfaced from a region as complex as the city of waking life, but I could no more retrieve my dreams than I could tell you what I’d soon be doing in the abattoir. That made me very good at my job.

The Market was a broad, kinked half-mile of cobbled thoroughfare as old as the city. Soon it would be jammed with stalls and the daytime folk carrying on their transactions, but for now it was all desertion and stone. Sodium lamps at intervals blotted the dark. Shadows wriggled behind sheets of vapour. Try the wrong alley or underpass and you could meet the Flâneur.

The Flâneur of Glory Part. You had to know that name by now. There had been four victims, so far.

I was halfway along the Market when I saw figures approaching. Between one spill of light and the next they turned from imperfections of my eyesight into a pair of shapes, male and female, with their arms linked. He was wrapped in a long coat, but her legs were bare. I relaxed, and my heart, always slow to catch up, unclutched and flurried in its cage. A man and a woman strolling in the Market by night only wanted to be left to themselves. I would pass on the far side of the road, I decided, to reassure them. They hadn’t seen me. She leant into him and whispered, then tugged at his arm, keen to get somewhere. He was dragging his feet in playful or real reluctance. I was hurt they hadn’t taken any notice of me, but I kept my eyes fixed straight ahead and kept walking.

When I looked again, they had stopped, and the man was holding the woman, taking all her weight. She had wrapped her arms around his neck, but they slipped open as I watched and he lowered her to the ground. Her limbs began to quiver, and he released her, sinking to his knees to cradle her head and shoulders. He lifted a gleaming hand. I saw the glint of the edge and the stain blooming over them both, black in the artificial light. Even at this distance, I could tell it had been a proficient stroke and that the outcome was beyond doubt.

My boots were drifting a mile down. I missed my footing on the kerb, and would have fallen except that I caught myself against the wall, raking the palm of my hand. The woman seemed listless, groping at his arms as he kept her head off the pavement. She grew still, and the man rose to his feet.

For what seemed a long time we faced each other across the Market. I did not breathe. The lamplight outlined him from behind, and his face was invisible, a dark mask with a pale halo. He stood as though now he was his victim’s protector. The knife was no longer in his hand. He did not move: he only watched and waited.

As I stood there, I felt future time crowding into the present moment. A kind of serenity came over me as I saw that by doing nothing I was agreeing to a burden of guilt that would not lessen for as long as I lived. It was all quite clear: how in this instant my sole chance to intervene was passing, and how bitterly, later, I would wish to turn time back and do it differently. One more breath and the city would sweep the waiting figure away from me. I was making a choice. Stale in the back of my throat, I could taste the self-condemnations to come over years and decades: why did you stand there? Why did you not do something good when you had the chance? I saw what a tiresome riddle it would become, why I had bowed my head in apology, turned and continued to my lodgings.

As I left, he raised a hand in salute.

In my coat pocket my own hand was stinging. Something sharp had been fixed in the wall where I stumbled, and I’d be picking rust-flecks out of the cut tomorrow. My boots struck the pavement and the Market slid by. Daybreak slipped a notch closer, and my guts twisted: I braced my hands on my knees and coughed a cupful of fluid on the cobblestones. When I raised my head there was movement a way off. Men in donkey jackets were unloading boxes from a van while others trundled handcarts across the stones. One was sorting through polystyrene trays wrapped in clingfilm. They worked without talking, their faces tense against the dawn chill. One of them came towards me, holding what looked like a shovel.

I was a craftsman when it came to my work, you see. I was good at the job. Not everyone can slaughter well. It may look like medieval warfare in here, but don’t be fooled. I never blamed the others for their shortcomings. It wasn’t easy work. They were sent by their agencies without choice in the matter, and lasted a month or two among the churning conveyor-belts and chains and the knives that sawed and squeaked inches apart. The plant was crammed everywhere with wet carcasses and labouring bodies, jammed up against each other and pouring off heat. When they slipped, it cost fingers. They were knocked off catwalks to the concrete by the half-carcasses swinging past. Sweat ran off them even in the refrigerated rooms: dozens squeezed bodily together, shin-deep in the flow sluicing ceaselessly down the gutters, fingers snatching past the blades, fighting wall-eyed through a double shift in the hope of keeping their jobs. They had been known to soil themselves at their posts because they dared not fall behind. Most spoke only the languages of their homelands. When they broke open the digestive tracts and polluted the meat, the line managers screamed in their faces.

Once a week they collected flimsy printouts with perforated edges which they tore open to be reminded what their labour was worth. Sometimes, though, the payslip was pink instead of white, and then you knew the worker would not be coming back tomorrow. There was no notice period, no explanation, no appeal against the printed sheet. Each week I watched to see who received a pink slip. I would avoid the ex-worker’s eyes, not wanting to intrude, but at the same time a small warm feeling would melt luxuriously inside me. I didn’t know why.

What could I do for them? Their existence had two poles. In here, inferno under striplights. Outside, Glory Part waiting for them with open jaws: their rooms, their naggins of oily gin, some fighting and copulation, the cold stinking canals and, above all, our friend the Flâneur, preying on their thoughts because they knew well what he might do to each one of them if he chose.

Nothing I could do. In his own life, the good slaughterman cannot involve himself with the single principle by which the world proceeds. He hates how the workmen tear up the street for the new metro line; he is wounded by the sight of snails broken on wet pavements, and he doesn’t like the way the children shriek by the padlocked park.

When the animals entered the slaughterhouse they came to us one by one along a concrete alleyway, and were guided into a rectangular pen as high as my waist and just large enough to hold one at a time. As it entered, the newcomer would pause, still wet from the spray, hiding its face beneath two big hairy leaves of flesh. It would be smiling to itself, a Chelsea grin, as the knocker pressed the captive bolt stunner to its brow. One side of the pen was a steel gate that would swing open under the weight of a body.

Every station had its own importance, but my job was the crux of it all. I say this without pride or bias. After being incapacitated by the bolt the animal was hoisted on the mechanised rail by its back legs and would begin to move down the processing line, struggling violently, more often than not, because the bolt stunner is a barbarous tool which leaps in the hand and inflicts unpredictable kinds of damage. My task came next: I used a sharp knife to sever the carotid and the jugular, resulting in exsanguination. With the proper expertise the animal was gone in three heartbeats, beyond unhappiness. I euthanised one every twenty seconds and it was an inflexible point with me that none suffered in its time on the killing floor.

I didn’t mind working double shifts. I needed little money, but I did not like to abandon my responsibilities. It wasn’t easy to get the stroke right every time. Most workers I had seen took several attempts to get the job done and let the pace of the production line overwhelm them so that, often, the beasts received the barest of flesh wounds and were sent dazed but awake into their turmoil. Not when I had the knife. I couldn’t sleep if I knew someone else was trying to manage the kill.