by Michel Faber
‘Hoi, Isserley,’ he said again, as if the effort of coming up with this much of their shared language was too good to waste.
‘I thought I’d better have a meal,’ announced Isserley in a businesslike tone, ‘before I start work. Is the coast clear?’
‘The coast?’ The mouldy man squinted at her in confusion. His head turned unconsciously in the direction of the firth.
‘I mean, is Amlis Vess safely out of the way?’
‘Oh yeah, he don’t bother us,’ drawled the mouldy man in an accent twice as thick as Ensel’s. ‘He just stays down in the food hall, or down in the vodsel pens, and we get on with the loading up here, no problem.’
Isserley opened her mouth to speak, couldn’t think of anything to say.
‘He won’t do nothing now,’ the mouldy man assured her. ‘Yns and Ensel take it in turns to watch him. He basically just hangs around and talks crap. He don’t care if nobody’s got a clue what he’s on about. Goes and talks to the animals when the humans get sick of him.’
Just for an instant Isserley forgot that the vodsels were tongueless, and was alarmed at the thought of them communicating with Amlis Vess, but she calmed down when the mouldy man laughed coarsely and added, ‘We says to him, “Do the animals talk back to you, then?’”
He laughed again, a despicable whinny tainted by half a lifetime in the Estates. ‘Funny bastard, good for killing the boredom,’ he winked in summation. ‘We’ll want him back when he’s gone.’
‘Well, maybe … if you say so,’ grimaced Isserley, making a break for the lift. ‘Excuse me, I’m starving.’
And she was away.
Amlis Vess was not in the food and recreation hall.
Isserley verified this, by casting one more glance across the sterile, low-ceilinged barracks, then resumed breathing.
The hall, though large, was a simple rectangle, crudely excavated without nooks or recesses, and containing little except for the low dining tables; there was nothing big enough to hide a tall man with strikingly beautiful markings. He simply wasn’t here.
Though the hall itself was empty, the long low bench outside the kitchen was already laid with bowls of condiments, tureens of cold vegetables, tubs of mussanta, loaves of newly baked bread, cakes, pitchers of water and ezziin, large plastic trays of cutlery. A divine smell of roasting was coming out of the kitchen.
Isserley pounced on the bread and cut herself two slices, which she spread liberally with mussanta paste. Pressing them into a sandwich, she started eating, pushing the food past her insensate lips into her yearning mouth. Mussanta had never tasted so delicious. She swallowed hard, chewing energetically, impatient to cut more bread, spread more paste.
The smell from the kitchen was intoxicating. Something much better than usual was cooking in there, something more adventurous than potato in fat. Admittedly Isserley was rarely here when the cooking was being done; she often took her meals cold after the cook had left and most of the men had already eaten. She’d pick at leftovers, trying to look inconspicuous, concealing her distaste at the smell of cooling fat. But this smell today was something else.
Still clutching her sandwich, Isserley edged up to the open door of the kitchen and peeked inside, catching a glimpse of the great brown back of Hilis, the cook. A notoriously sharp-sensed character, he was aware of her presence immediately.
‘Fuck off!’ he yelled cheerfully, before he’d even turned around. ‘Not ready!’
Embarrassed, Isserley made to retreat, but as soon as Hilis swung round and saw who she was, he threw out a singed and sinewy arm in conciliation.
‘Isserley!’ he cried, smiling as broadly as his massive snout allowed. ‘Why must you always eat that crap? You break my heart! Come in here and see what I’m about to serve!’
Awkwardly she ventured into the kitchen, leaving the offending sandwich on the bench outside. Ordinarily, no-one was permitted in here; Hilis was protective of his gleaming domain, beavering away in it alone like an obsessed scientist in a humid and luridly lit laboratory. Oversized silver utensils hung all over the walls like the tools in Donny’s Garage, dozens of specialized implements and gadgets. Transparent jars of spices and bottles of sauce on the shelves and workbenches added some colour to the metallic surfaces, though most of the actual food was stashed away inside refrigerators and metal drums. Hilis himself was unarguably the most vividly organic thing in the kitchen, a thickly furred, powerfully built bundle of nervous energy. Isserley barely knew him; she and he had exchanged perhaps forty sentences over the years.
‘Come on, come on!’ he growled. ‘But watch your step.’
The ovens were inside the floor, so that a human could tend to the food without overbalancing. Hilis hunched over the biggest of them, looking down through the thick glassy door into the glowing recess. Gesturing urgently, he invited Isserley to do the same.
She knelt next to him.
‘Look at that,’ he said with pride.
Inside the oven, shimmering in an orange halo, six spits rotated slowly, each loaded with four or five identical cuts of meat. They were as brown as freshly tilled earth, and smelled absolutely heavenly, sizzling and twinkling in their own juices.
‘Looks good,’ admitted Isserley.
‘It is good,’ affirmed Hilis, lowering his twitching nose as close to the glass as he could short of touching. ‘Better than what I’ve usually got to work with, that’s for sure.’
Everyone knew this was a sore point with Hilis: the best cuts of meat were always reserved for the cargo ship, and he was allotted the poorer-quality mince, the necks, offal and extremities.
‘When I heard old man Vess’s son was coming,’ he said, basking in the oven’s orange glow, ‘I assumed I’d be free to put on something special for a change. I wasn’t to know, was I?’
‘But …’ frowned Isserley, puzzling over the delay between Amlis’s arrival and these wonderful steaks revolving in the oven now. Hilis interrupted her, grinning.
‘I had these steaks marinating for twenty-four hours already before the mad bastard even arrived! What was I going to do? Rinse ’em off under the tap? These little fuckers are perfection, I tell you, they are absolute bloody perfection on a skewer. They are going to taste fucking unbelievable!’ Enthusiasm was making Hilis hyperactive.
Isserley stared down at the roasting meat. Its aroma was pushing through the glass and floating straight into her nostrils.
‘You’re smelling it, aren’t you!’ Hilis proclaimed in triumph, as if he was responsible for conjuring up something that had, against all odds, managed to penetrate her pathetically tiny, surgically mutilated nose. ‘Isn’t it glorious!’
Isserley nodded, dizzy with desire.
‘Yes,’ she whispered.
Hilis, unable to keep still, paced around his kitchen in tight circles, fidgeting and fussing.
‘Isserley, please,’ he implored her, transferring a prong and a carving knife back and forth from hand to hand. ‘Please. You’ve got to have some of this. Make an old man happy. I know you can appreciate good food. You hung around with the Elite when you were a girl, that’s what the men say. You didn’t grow up eating garbage like these dumb goons from the Estates.’
In a state of exhibitionist excitement, he flipped open the lid of the oven, releasing a richly flavoursome blast of heat.
‘Isserley,’ he begged, ‘Let me cut you a slice of this. Let me, let me, let me.’
She laughed, embarrassed. ‘Fine, OK!’ she agreed hastily.
He was quick as a spark, his carving technique a performance that could be missed in an eye’s blink.
‘Yesyesyes,’ he enthused, springing up. Isserley recoiled slightly as a steaming, sizzling morsel appeared inches from her mouth, impaled on the razor-sharp tip of the carving knife. Gingerly she took the meat between her teeth and tugged it free.
A soft voice sounded from the doorway of the kitchen.
‘You just don’t know what you’re doing,’ sighed Amlis Vess.
<
br /> ‘No unauthorized fucking personnel in my kitchen!’ retorted Hilis instantly.
Amlis Vess took a step backwards; to be fair, very little of him had been inside the room in the first place. Only his startling black face and perhaps the swell of his white breast. His retreat didn’t even look like a retreat, more like a casual realignment of balance, a shifting of his muscles. He came to rest technically outside the room, but with the undiminished intensity of his gaze still taking up a great deal of space inside. And his gaze was directed not at Hilis, but at Isserley.
Isserley chewed what remained of her delicious morsel self-consciously, too unnerved to move. Luckily the meat was virtually melting in her mouth, it was so tender.
‘What’s your problem, Mr Vess?’ she said at last.
Amlis’s jaw tensed in anger and the muscles in his shoulders flexed as if he was considering attacking her, but instead he relaxed abruptly, as if he’d just given himself an injection of something calmative.
‘That meat you’re eating,’ he said softly, ‘is the body of a creature that lived and breathed just like you and me.’
Hilis groaned and rolled his eyes in despair and pity, for the pretensions and dopey confusions of the young. Then, to Isserley’s dismay, he turned his back on it all, applying himself to the work at hand, seizing hold of the nearest cooking pot.
With Amlis’s words still ringing in her ears, Isserley took courage, as she had done last time, by focusing on his upper-class accent, his velvety diction groomed by wealth and privilege. Deliberately, she recalled being petted and then discarded by the Elite; she pictured the authorities who’d decided she would be more suited to a life in the Estates, men with accents just like Amlis Vess’s. She invited that accent in, listening to the sharp chord of resentment it struck deep inside her, letting it reverberate.
‘Mr Vess,’ she said icily, ‘I hate to tell you this, but I really doubt there’s much similarity between the way you and I live and breathe, let alone between me and’ – she passed her tongue over her teeth for provocative effect – ‘my breakfast.’
‘We’re all the same under the skin,’ suggested Amlis, a little huffily she thought. She would have to aim for this weak spot of his, his filthy-rich idealist’s need to deny social reality.
‘Funny how you’ve managed to keep your looks, then,’ she sneered, ‘with all the hard backbreaking work you’ve had to do.’
A direct hit, Isserley noted. Amlis seemed poised to spring again, his eyes burning, but then once more he relaxed: another shot of the same drug.
‘This is getting us nowhere,’ he sighed. ‘Come with me.’
Isserley’s mouth fell open in disbelief.
‘Come with you?’
‘Yes,’ said Amlis, as if confirming the finer details of a venture they’d already agreed on. ‘Down below. Down where the vodsels are.’
‘You … you must be joking,’ she said, uttering a short laugh which she’d intended to be contemptuous, but which came out merely shaky.
‘Why not?’ he challenged innocently.
She almost choked on her reply; perhaps it was a tiny thread of meat lodged in her throat. Because I’m so scared of the depths, she was thinking. Because I don’t want to be buried alive again.
‘Because I have work to get on with,’ she said.
He stared intently into her eyes, not aggressively, but as if he was judging the distance, the logistics for a leap into her soul.
‘Please,’ he said. ‘There’s something I’ve seen down there, that I need you to explain. Honestly. I’ve asked the men; none of them know. Please.’
There was a pause, during which she and Amlis stood motionless while Hilis kept the air generously stocked with banging and clashing. Then, astounded, Isserley heard her belated response as if from a great distance. She heard it only vaguely; couldn’t even be sure of the exact wording. But whatever it was, it meant yes. In a dream, to the surreal accompaniment of clashing metal and the sizzle of meat, she was saying yes to him.
He turned, his lithe body flowing away. She followed him, out of Hilis’s kitchen, towards the lift.
Several men were gathered in the dining hall by now, loitering, murmuring, chewing; watching Isserley and Amlis Vess pass among them.
No-one made a move to intervene.
No-one threatened Amlis with death if he dared take another step.
Alarms failed to scream into action when the lift opened for them, nor did the lift’s doors refuse to close when they stepped inside together.
All in all, the universe seemed not to appreciate that anything was amiss.
Utterly bewildered, Isserley stood next to Amlis in the featureless confines of the lift, facing front, but aware of his long dark neck and head somewhere near her shoulder, his smooth flank breathing inches from her hip. The cabin descended noiselessly, arrived with a hiss.
The door slid open, and Isserley moaned softly in claustrophobic distress. Everything out there was steeped in almost complete darkness, as if they had been dropped into a narrow fissure between two strata of compacted rock with only a child’s faltering flashlight to guide them. There was a stench of fermenting urine and faeces, a few spidery contours of wire mesh sketched in by feeble infra-red bulbs, and, swaying everywhere before them, the firefly glints of a swarm of eyes.
‘Do you know where the light is?’ said Amlis politely.
8
ISSERLEY FUMBLED, AND found the switch. A flood of harsh light rushed to fill the compound from floor to ceiling, like a tide of seawater into a crevice.
‘Ugh,’ she groaned squeamishly. To be so far inside the earth was a nightmare come true.
‘A nightmare, yes?’ said Amlis Vess.
Isserley looked to him, scared and in need of comfort, but he meant the livestock, of course, not the claustrophobia – she could tell from that infuriating grimace of pity on his face. Typical man: so obsessed with his own idealism he was incapable of feeling empathy for a human being suffering right under his nose.
Isserley stepped clear of the lift, determined not to humiliate herself in front of him. A few moments ago, she’d felt like burying her face in the soft black fur of his neck, clinging to his perfectly balanced body; now she felt like killing him.
‘It’s just the stink of animals,’ she sniffed, eyes averted from him as he padded up to her side. The lift hissed shut behind them and disappeared.
In excavating this deepest of the levels, the men had burrowed out no more of the solid Triassic rock than they absolutely had to. The ceiling was less than seven feet high, and the accumulated steam of cattle breath hung in a haze around the fluorescent strips. The vodsel enclosures, a corona of linked pens all along the walls, took up almost the entire floor space; there was just enough room left down the middle for a walkway. In the cages to the left, the monthlings; to the right, the transitionals; at the deep end, against the far wall facing the lift, the new arrivals.
‘This is your first time, isn’t it?’ came Amlis’s voice.
‘No,’ she retorted irritably, unnerved by how closely he must be watching her body language.
She had, in point of fact, been here just once before, at the very beginning before there were any animals. The men had wanted to show her what they’d constructed in honour of her coming to the farm, all ready and waiting for her vital contribution.
‘Very impressive,’ she’d said, or words to that effect, and fled.
Now, years later, she had returned, with one of the world’s wealthiest young men at her side, because he wanted to ask her a question. ‘Surreal’ did not begin to describe the situation.
The cages were grimier and more cramped than she remembered; the wooden beams pitted and discoloured, the wire mesh soiled, masked in places with the dark putty of faeces and other unidentifiable matter. And of course, the livestock added stench and the looming density of flesh, the humid ambience of recycled breath. In all, there were more than thirty vodsels impounded here, which came as rather
a shock to Isserley: she hadn’t realized how hard she must constantly be working.
The few remaining monthlings were huddled together in a mound of fast-panting flesh, the divisions between one muscle-bound body and the next difficult to distinguish, the limbs confused. Hands and feet spasmed at random, as if a co-ordinated response was struggling vainly to emerge from a befuddled collective organism. Their fat little heads were identical, swaying in a cluster like polyps of an anemone, blinking stupidly in the sudden light. You would never guess they’d have the cunning to run if released.
All around the monthlings, their thick spiky carpet of straw glistened with the dark diarrhoea of ripeness. Nothing which might cause the slightest harm to human digestion survived in their massive guts; every foreign microbe had been purged and replaced with only the best and most well-trusted bacteria. They clung to each other, as if to keep their number undiminished. There were four of them left; yesterday there had been five, the day before, six.
Across the neatly swept division, the transitionals in the cages opposite squatted torpidly, each on his own little patch of straw. By dividing the available floor space according to an unspoken, instinctual arithmetic, they managed to keep themselves to themselves, if only by inches. They glowered at Isserley and Amlis, some chewing warily on their unfamiliar new feed, others scratching at hair that was growing sparse and mossy, others clenching their fists in their castrated laps. Though still vaguely differentiated in physique and colouring, they saw their own future constantly before them. They were slowly maturing towards their destiny, towards a natural mean.
At the end of the walkway, the three most recent arrivals were on their feet, leaning against the wire mesh, waving and gesticulating.
‘Ng! Ng! Ng!’ they cried.
Amlis Vess hastened to respond, his luxuriant tail swinging between his powerful silky buttocks as he ran. Isserley followed, advancing slowly and cautiously. She hoped all the vodsels’ tongues had been thoroughly seen to. What Amlis didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.
