Cows (5 page)

CHAPTER THIRTEN

O
n the line that morning a cow got loose, somehow slipped from a grabber before the slaughtermen put the bolt in its head, and came clattering into the process hall, half slipping on blood, scattering men, ramming the inverted dead bodies of its brothers. Looking for an escape from cow hell. But its terror must have made it blind and it ended by slamming its soft nose against a ventilation grille until Cripps came over and blew its brains out with a shotgun.

The ruthless efficiency of the killing took Steven’s breath away. Cripps moved without doubt or hesitation. He did not consider the phases of his attack, he simply saw a problem and removed it in a flawless, perfectly economic stream of action.

If Steven possessed such clarity, such sureness of purpose, ridding himself of the Hagbeast would pose no greater problem than crushing an insect. At breakfast he had decided to poison her as she was poisoning him, but now considerations of practicality had begun to cool the fire that had earlier singed his veins with the ecstasy of confrontation.

Could he force himself through it?

Would she really eat whatever he gave her?

And if it killed her, would his own body be strong enough to survive?

The resolve of just a few hours ago was becoming infested with the worms of doubt.

Cripps had spoken of mastering the self, of releasing a potential for action that benefited no one but the individual concerned. Of selfish epiphanies in blood. And Steven wondered, as he watched him carry his shotgun back to the slaughter room, if there might not be some crutch beyond those plastic strips that could support him through the killing of the Hagbeast.

The afternoon shift was half through when Cripps appeared at his side and took him away from the grinder.

“You look ready, boy. I’ve seen you watching the slaughter room and I know what you’ve been thinking—‘Is he right? Is there something in there for me?’ Well, I am right, boy. The slaughter room gives up its secrets to any man with the cock to ask. Are you asking? Have you got the cock for it, boy? Have you?”

Inside the slaughter room death was in full swing.

The place was a storm of bawling cows and goading, muscular men working with fierce precision. These men moved as Cripps had during the shotgun execution—without weakness, without even the thought that they might position a hand or a foot unsurely as they punched and kicked and prodded the animals with stubby electric lances along the alleys that led to a final bondage of pneumatic presses. Some were stripped to the waist, all were streaked with blood and wet cow shit. They sweated and wrestled cows into position, faces creased in tight grins of effort, taking pleasure in their own strength, calling to each other over the din, directing, pointing, clapping hands like it was all a play in some bloody contact sport.

Some of the cows in the alleys bucked against the rails, trying to turn and plough back into the reassuring brown and white and black cowmass, rearing up and scrabbling at steel and brick with slippery hooves, eyes white all the way around, nostrils wide, snorting in as much air as they could hold, knowing that its taste would soon be lost forever and trying to imprint it on some soul memory so it could be remembered after death, shaken out like a tablecloth and searched for meaning. Others trotted madly in a straight line, refusing to see the swinging V of the grabber in their path, running only for the blur of white light from the process hall that maybe looked like freedom. Like moths.

On the platforms by the grabbers slaughtermen worked the boltguns on their counterweighted chains … Swing smoothly forward over the rails, nudge the muzzle into the soft hollow behind the ear, look at the cow and wait to make sure it knows what you’re going to do, then pull back on the trigger and send a four-inch hardened-steel bolt through skull and into brain, swing the gun away with the bolt already retracted by recoil and watch shit squirt out of one end and blood out of the other.

Where the room had been empty and awkward that other lunchtime, it was now hot and bent to its purpose, seamlessly fusing the action it housed into an organic whole where airborne blood and shit and beasts and brick walls and steel girders became one in a designed and streamlined operation.

Steven watched it all and wondered what he was supposed to feel. It was obvious that these men moved within the flow of some connecting and energizing force. They shared a motive confidence that made them even more intensely alive than the others out here in the world. The sight of them roused him to envy, but the staggering deaths of the cattle as they collapsed against the grabbers did nothing to stir a corresponding sternness of self-direction in his own breast.

“Majesty, boy. The death of animals and the rebirth of men. You can feel it, can’t you? There is glory in this room. Look at them. Many were like you before they learned the secret that killing holds. Timid. Yes, boy, timid, but with the cock to push themselves beyond what they thought they could endure. They didn’t know what they would find, but they went looking anyway. And when they confronted their own uncertainty, when they crossed to the place weaker men had forbidden them to enter, they found a strength greater than they ever dreamed existed. Come close and watch.”

Cripps led Steven on to the low platform beside one of the grabbers and held him tightly about the waist while they watched the slaughterman work. A cow was driven between the iron jaws of the grabber and Cripps whispered harshly into Steven’s ear.

“See how it comes, so full of life—eyes seeing, mind thinking. Life! Prized above all other things. Touch it, feel it breathe.”

Steven leaned over the guardrail and put his hand on the cow’s back. The slaughterman watched, ready with the boltgun but waiting. The cow felt solid and warm.

“Keep your hand there.”

Cripps nodded and the slaughterman put his gun close against the straining bovine head. Steven felt no particular affection for the cow, but the fly-shooing tremors that jerked in waves across the animal’s hide shook his arm and jarred loose within him broken-glass splinters of panic. He was about to feel something die.

When the gun went off the cow threw itself forward and collapsed like an enormous rubber toy, pumping steaming liquid shit down the inside of its thighs … Off into cow darkness.

Steven snatched his hand away and looked quickly to see if it had absorbed the mark of death, some dark contagion that might multiply beneath the skin and come searching for him.

There was no mark, but the shock of the killing sent small blurts of bile into his throat. Cripps was laughing and pressing a hardon against the side of his leg.

“Did you feel it, boy? Did you feel it just … stop? It’s like a switch, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“You must be aching to try it yourself.”

How far did he have to go for this magical awakening, this unleashing of strength that Cripps talked about? He was already flecked with blood and shit. He had seen the bolt punch into cow head, rip away a circle of hide and bone, and slam deep into cow brain. He had smelled the fear and the last rush of breath and the emptying bowels and the wet-newspaper mustiness of the inside of the cow’s skull. And there had only been horror at the ease of it all, the sickening backward flip of approaching fugue—not the sunrise of a new way to live. But might the secret be waiting a little further on, standing elegant and incurious beyond a bleeding threshold of flayed beef, needing only a little extra letting-go to be caught?

The boltgun swung heavy and smooth on its supporting chain, its butt warm from the slaughterman’s grip. The chipped gray enamel of its surface was brightly caught in the purple-white net of light that fell from the halogen spot above the grabber. Steven could see the thickness of the paint, and the minute shadow this thickness cast on the scratched patches of bare metal. The slaughterman helped him guide it to a new cow, his hands were hard and crusted with blood.

Everything narrowed down. Steven saw the muzzle of the gun and a tight oval of light brown hide immediately beyond it. There was nothing else. The activity of the slaughter room rolled away like stage scenery into some distant other world and he was alone with white noise hissing in his ears.

In this blurring, roaring cocoon he felt the weight of the gun, and he felt Cripps against his back, arms circling to the front of his pants, unzipping, pulling down.

Then Cripps was in him, pounding at his ass, whispering encouragements he couldn’t understand but which filled his head with a mounting pressure, and the gun felt more real than anything he had ever touched. He had both hands on it and Cripps’s breath hot on his neck, and he knew the cow was pissing on the floor with the agony of the stretching seconds and then … time … stopped … Until something sucked away every sound that had ever been made and the world zeroed to aching curled fingers and the shadow of the gun on the cow’s skull and he pulled the trigger as Cripps shrieked somewhere a long way off and sprayed seed into his ass.

Slumped over the guardrail. The end-of-shift horn sounded dimly out in the process hall. Steven felt the flaccid length of Cripps’s withdrawal and opened his eyes to the twitching, fallen carcass of the cow and its dark collar of blood. Strong arms pulled him upright, tearing the white crepe of his half-faint, shunting him back to the din and the killing and the mad, channeled exertion of the slaughter room.

“That’s it, boy, breathe deep, breathe deep.”

Cripps’s voice was gentle as he led him to the observation platform overlooking the slaughter floor.

“Lie down.”

Steven curled himself on the concrete, looking down on the men who still appeared to be working despite the end of the shift. Cripps sat beside him, touching his shoulder.

“The nausea is normal, it will pass. Your body is reacting to change. You have killed, you have started to learn.”

The work on the slaughter floor had changed. The men stood close to a single cow held helpless in a grabber, passing around an instrument like an apple corer. Each in his turn used the serrated steel circle to cut a hole in the side of the animal. Blood ran down the curve of its belly and pooled between its feet, but it remained conscious and standing, bellowing its humiliation to unseen cow gods who couldn’t be bothered to answer.

The room went dark at the edges and Steven felt again a tightening of vision that excluded everything but the spotlit cow and the crowding men. Gummy had appeared from somewhere and was bent close to the animal’s hindquarters.

When all the holes were cut the slaughtermen pulled out thick, hard cocks and stuffed them into the wounds. Steven watched buttocks clench. Three men on either side, linking arms over the back of the cow to counterweight their thrusts.

“Do you see, boy, that you still have some way to go? Your killing was a stumbling first step. These men have learned to run.”

“Gummy … ?” Steven’s lips felt numb, it was an effort to speak.

Cripps laughed quietly and sneered. “No, not Gummy. We give him this as charity.”

Steven’s eyes were heavy but he kept watching. Down on the floor, while the men rammed in and the cow screamed, Gummy, his open mouth sucking the animal’s ass, slid a cattle prod into its cunt and triggered the electric charge. The cow’s rear legs lifted off the ground and Gummy fell backward under a blast of shit, vomiting in rapture.

The slaughtermen hung on and moved faster, blood on thighs and stomachs, howling through corded necks until one of them fired a boltgun and made the beast close like a fist and all six of them shot seed into the torn, dying guts that had hoped one day to swell with the weight of a calf.

Steven’s eyes closed.

CHAPTER FOURTEN

A
t home. In the kitchen Steven played his mind against itself, diverting it from the slaughter room obscenity with small domestic actions. And then, when the deception of these actions became too obvious, ricocheting back into curtains of blood and streams of semen splashing from jagged cowhide holes.

He drifted in the kitchen, blank-faced, picking up plates and wiping them, putting them down, wiping them again, polishing cutlery against the side of his leg. Somewhere at the back of the flat the Hagbeast made dim shunting sounds as she moved about, but Steven didn’t hear them.

The killing of the afternoon was stored inside him, weighted by the heavier, following torture, but he was afraid to examine it, afraid to search for its effects. That part of his brain was temporarily locked.

And he was afraid of what he was going to do now, with these plates and forks and spoons. This was the beginning he had wished for but never expected to see. Tonight the Beast would eat the first of the meals that would send her down to hell. But if he failed? If he hesitated or was weak? Then she would rise like a gorgon and split him open.

He had planned, on the bus the morning before Cripps’s horror show, to use some disguised ingredient subtle enough to escape detection and of a borderline virulence that would eventually destroy her but allow him, stanchioned by youth, to recover.

But now … ? But now … ?

As he squatted in front of the cupboard under the sink, staring at ancient and unused bottles of disinfectant, bleach and drain cleaner, trying to choose between them, he felt a sudden wild boldness flood his guts. Subtlety was pointless. She would eat whatever he did. She had to, her hate for him would not allow her to refuse the challenge.

He took two empty plates into the bathroom.

It was dark when the Hagbeast galleoned into the kitchen. The bare overhead bulb cut hard shadows into the sheets of newspaper tented over the plates on the table. Steven was seated and waiting.

“So, we have a new cook. What did you cook, Steven? Uncover it. Let’s see if you can match your mother.”

Steven drew away the paper and watched the tight compression of her smile, the narrowing of her eyes. On the plates, equally portioned, two curving lengths of shit lay dark against veined china.

“It won’t work, Steven. Do you think this is so alien to my system?”

It won’t work …
Steven went cold. She knew what he was trying to do!

But she was pulling her plate toward her, pressing her fork into the softness of the stool, lifting a piece to her mouth. Her eyes in their mean folds of fat held his, and for a second the stink of shit absorbed time. Between them space empted of all the mists that usually swirled there and Steven saw how well she understood him.

Then she moved and the stink was just stink again and Steven had to carry on, whatever she knew. He saw thin fibers and lumps of still recognizable food poking from the broken end of the shit and prayed that her destruction would be swift.

The Hagbeast waited for him to eat first. He put a section of the shit into his mouth. It rubbed his lips and the chocolate-smear drag of its entry made him shudder. He could not immediately bring his teeth together and the turd lay acridly in the hollow of his tongue, forcing its thick, boggy smell up behind his nose and into his head, cinching his stomach in a rapid serial spasm that threatened to send bile squirting from his nostrils. He forced himself to bite down and chew quickly, but speed didn’t reduce the appalling foulness of the taste.

The shit was gritty against the roof of his mouth and made crunching sounds with his teeth. It worked itself into a clogging paste that built up under his tongue and inside his cheeks, so stiff he had to use his finger to hook it out. He felt he was drowning in the anus of some dysentery-struck mammal, vistas of the world made shit opened before him. Then, at last, a small amount of vomit punched through his locked throat and mercifully allowed him to swallow.

He bent forward and gripped the legs of the table, screwing his eyes shut. Thin brown liquid ran from the corners of his clamped mouth and he jerked quickly on his chair, up and down, fighting his stomach, willing it to accept the returning waste.

Somehow he kept it down and when he looked at the Hagbeast again her smirk had faded. It was her turn. Shit in her mouth made her twist her head in a spastic half-circle and pump her neck into a tightly stretched red bag, like some obscene mating bird.

The force of her first retch blew snot into the air, but it didn’t part her lips. She lurched against the table, then steadied herself with weak arms while her belly shook. Bunching jaw muscles showed through the loose skin of her jowls and the sound of grinding teeth made Steven press his thighs together. How she must be damaging herself to compete with him!

Then she couldn’t hold it any longer and puked onto her plate in a screeching explosive torrent that spattered the front of Steven’s shirt. She heaved a few more times, until it came up dry, then sat, arms rigid to the edge of the table, shivering and silent, drawing breath. Steven felt dismay creep into his already churning guts. If the Hagbeast could not master a plate of shit, how could he fill her with enough poison to kill her? He saw his plans crumbling and was about to speak some desperate goading remark when her arms relaxed and she began to function again. She cut a piece of shit with the edge of her fork, speared it, put it in her mouth and swallowed. Her movements were deliberate, machinelike. She cut another piece of shit and ate it. Small tremors rippled across her breasts and shoulders, but they did not touch her throat. She looked at him and smiled ingenuously.

“Steven, I can’t keep eating without you.”

He slid his fork into the thing on his plate, thankful that it had escaped most of her vomit—her own plate dripped, the shit swam in it—and entered again the body rebellion of his first mouthful, and kept forcing it in.

“How is it?” He did not look at her as he spoke.

“It smells like your birth. I didn’t expect this from you, Steven. You’ve started a game with your darling mother, haven’t you? Those years in your room with that fucking mongrel and your precious TV, doing nothing but wanking and picking pus out of your face, and you think you can just crawl out and wipe off the slime? Just reach into your box of dreams and slip one on like a coat? You sorry fuck, you’re not strong enough to do it.”

“I think I’m getting stronger, Mama.”

The Hagbeast laughed and opened her mouth in mock surprise. Steven saw bits of shit stuck to her teeth.

“Strong? You were born a runt and you haven’t changed. How strong are you getting? Come on, show me.”

She finished the last nugget of shit and smashed her plate against the table.

“Get out of that chair and stand up! Mama wants to see how strong you are.”

Her bellow hit the dead walls of the kitchen and came back at Steven in a rolling chain of thuds, each one pushing him further upright, until he stood, arms limp at his sides, waiting for the coming humiliation. God, if he could be like Cripps for just one minute …

The Hagbeast moved close to him and their breaths combined in a sluggish cloud of shit and saliva. She was too close, he shut his eyes. He felt her fat fingers undressing him. His cells screamed, but his arms were too weak to fling her from him. Too weak to force her mouth apart until her jaws snapped, too weak to yank her head down so sharply that the spine broke a few vertebrae from the skull and stuck out into the air through the skin at the back of her neck. Too weak to enact a thousand killings wished a thousand times. He had spoken too soon.

He was naked.

“Look, Steven.” She hit his face. “Look at yourself.”

Steven looked down and saw what had always been there—soft white skin over bones, ribs, dick hanging.

She laughed, prodding his chest and stomach, lifting his balls to look underneath.

“I don’t see it, Steven. Where is this strength of yours?”

He stood mute. She was too powerful for him to survive direct and active confrontation.

The Hagbeast reached down and pulled her dress over her head. She wore nothing underneath and the sharpness of her crotch burned his throat.

“Are you as strong as this?”

She slapped her dimpled saddlebag hips, ran her hands over rolls of hard fat stacked from groin to breast. Steven looked at her matted gray cunt and the blood sticking in clots to the insides of her thighs.

“Look at this mountain of flesh, Steven. Throw yourself against it. Have you ever calculated its weight? This is strength, you whining bucket of piss. This is what you must measure yourself against. It stands between you and everything you want and you’ll never get past it.”

Steven knew she was wrong and he wanted to spit it in her face. Lucy was going to open up like a tunnel and he would crawl through her into a world impossible for the Hagbeast to touch. But it was too early yet to strut this before Mama, she could still destroy it at a stroke. So he stayed quiet through her ranting.

Later, in his room, the shit in his belly made him sick and he lay curled around Dog on the floor by the bed. Dog licked sweat from his master’s forehead and whimpered at his shiverings. Steven felt the animal’s nuzzlings through the gauze of his pain and dreamed he was somewhere underground with the velvet lips of a cow against his neck. In his fever he merged with it, knowing its thoughts, its fears, and the timeless species-desire for a place where men never came.

At dawn he was able to rise, pale and drained, and Dog yelped with joy and gave thanks to Dog God that there was still something left to love.

In the hall, as he left the flat, splashes of the Hagbeast’s vomit bloomed on the floor from the kitchen to her room, like flowers of hope. Steven felt good when he saw them.